James Curtis and Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century Ballarat

James Curtis and Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century Ballarat Greg Young This thesis is submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Faculty of Education and Arts Federation University University Drive, Mount Helen Ballarat 3353 Victoria, Australia STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP Except where explicit reference is made in the text this thesis contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole or in part from a thesis by which I have qualified for or been awarded another degree of diploma. No other person’s work has been relied upon or used without due acknowledgement in the main text and bibliography. Signed (Applicant): Date: Signed (Supervisor): Date: When the intellectual and spiritual history of the nineteenth century comes to be written, a highly interesting chapter in it will be that which records the origin, growth, decline, and disappearance of the delusion of spiritualism. —Australasian Saturday 25 October 1879 Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to my University of Ballarat (now Federation University) supervisors Dr Anne Beggs Sunter, Dr Jill Blee, and Dr David Waldron for their encouragement, advice, and criticism. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge a large debt of gratitude to Professor Tony Milner and Professor John Powers, both of the Australian National University, for their generous support. This project began in the Heritage Library of the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute; I am grateful to the BMI for its friendly help. Dedication To Anne, Peter, Charlotte, and my teacher Dr Rafe de Crespigny. Abstract This thesis is about the origins, growth, and decline of spiritualism in nineteenth-century Ballarat. It gives special attention to Rustlings in the Golden City, the religious confessions of James Curtis, a notable Ballarat pioneer and the city’s most active and prominent spiritualist believer and evangelist. In Ballarat, spiritualism was commonly regarded as little more than entertaining humbug, usually derided by the press as delusive nonsense. Though clerics occasionally condemned it as heretical and dangerous, few people took spiritualist ideas and practice seriously. Even so, Ballarat had its small core of devout believers. For these, spiritualism provided a route to direct, intuitive, knowledge of the destiny of the spiritual self, comparable to gnostic liberating self-discovery. Rustlings in the Golden City stands as a classic statement of Victorian-era spiritualism and James Curtis has claim to be regarded as Australia’s greatest nineteenth-century spiritualist. While the commitment of many prominent Australian spiritualists of the period was compromised by credulity, bad faith, and self-interest, James Curtis was guileless and sincere. His writings open a window on a neglected area of nineteenth-century Australian social and religious history. The historiography of the thesis is realist and empiricist, with the pre- dominant methodology critical text-analysis. Its chief source is contemporary newspapers and journals and the publications of spiritualists and their oppo- nents and critics. Overview: findings and argument This overview recapitulates and extends each chapter’s concluding section. Chapter 1, James Curtis’s Message, introduces nineteenth-century Ballarat’s most notable spiritualist, James Curtis (also an important figure in the commercial and civic history of the city), who burned to communicate a mighty truth, the stupendous discovery that we do not die: the dead are not dead and can communicate with us, and beyond the grave we progress to higher realms. This chapter draws attention to the fantastic variety and huge volume of news, debate, stories, analysis, reflection, and argument about what was called ‘spiritualism’ and ‘spiritism’ in print at the time, particularly in newspaper coverage, which ranged from absurd nonsense, which has its proper place in the history of popular credulity, to expositions of the profound truths which spiritualists believed their discoveries had revealed. It is suggested—a proposal to be elaborated in later chapters—that spiritualism of the kind espoused, advocated, and defended by James Curtis had a gnostic tendency: it valued inner knowledge above all else as the key to spiritual progress. This chapter explores several methodological assumptions and issues di- rectly relevant to these claims. It is argued that understanding spiritualism as a social, political, and economic phenomenon must begin with a full appre- ciation of what their spiritualist beliefs really meant to individual spiritualists. It is suggested that to treat spiritualism as simply another religion misses the point: to its thoughtful adherents, spiritualism was essentially a constellation of facts which now stood revealed, facts neither necessarily clashing with viii Christian belief nor constituting an alternative to Christianity and refuge for apostatising believers. It is noted that academic writing on spiritualism in Australia is thin and problematic, with foundational research, such as it is, largely pre-dating the availability of digitised searchable corpuses of archival material. Chapter 2, James Curtis, Pioneer & Spiritualist looks more closely at the life of James Curtis. It is argued that the usual public biographical facts available to us about Curtis offer no obvious clue to his reasons for adopting and promoting the unusual philosophy of spiritualism, and that although he objected strongly to one element of conventional Christian belief, the doctrine of Hell and eternal torment, this in itself does not explain his spiritualism. At most it gives colour to one of spiritualism’s larger claims, that damnation and the lake of fire cannot be part of the design of a just and beneficent God and does not form part of our destiny beyond death. It is suggested that Curtis’s spiritualist beliefs ultimately derive in large part from his response to the death of his lover Annie, who passed away soon after he left England for Australia. It is noted that although Curtis’s legacy and place in the history of spiritualism have been neglected, his rôle in the story is not insignificant. His achievements have been judged by some spiritualists to surpass those of the prominent Melbourne Circle of the group around James Motherwell, Thomas Welton Stanford, and W.H. Terry. The next three chapters review the historiography of Australian spiritualism (Chapter 3), consider the part played by W.H. Terry, for many years Melbourne’s most energetic and well-connected spiritualist (Chapter 4), and sketch the origins of ‘modern’ spiritualism and its first appearance in Australia (Chapter 5). Chapter 3, Historiography looks at the historiographical setting and direction of previous studies of Australian spiritualism, noting that the field is dominated by a single book, Al Gabay’s 2001 Messages from Beyond.1 It is argued that if we may reasonably employ the methods of academic historical 1Alfred J. Gabay: Messages from Beyond: Spiritualism and Spiritualists in Melbourne’s Golden Age, 1870–1890. Carlton Sth, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2001. ix research to examine not only the writings of spiritualists but also writing about spiritualists by academic authors, we have an especially good reason to consider the historiographical tendencies of Gabay’s writings for, although he omits to acknowledge this in Messages from Beyond, Gabay was himself a spiritualist, in fact a leading figure in late twentieth-century Melbourne spiritualism. Gabay played an especially important rôle in bringing what may be described as spiritualism’s counter-intuitive theories and unusual practices to an academic setting and, while he makes no mention of it in his later work, his 1980 Proceedings of the Psychic Orientation Conference, held at La Trobe University is a vitally important document for researchers attempting to assess the colour and texture of his treatment of nineteenth-century spiritualism. This chapter describes the Psychic Orientation Conference without com- ment; it is noted that Gabay later exchanged spiritualism, with its apparitions, occult forces, and mysterious occurrences, for Tibetan Buddhism, with its apparitions, occult forces, and mysterious occurrences. Both systems of belief, according to Gabay, show that ‘human life must make more sense than the surface appearances would suggest’;2 if this means anything at all, it is arguably a very dangerous assumption for an historian to bring to his work. It is noted that Messages from Beyond is fundamentally an institutional history of the ‘movement’ in its incarnation as the Victorian Association of (Progressive) Spiritualists. It invites us to treat nineteenth-century Melbourne spiritualism with deference and respect, Gabay’s attempt at this owing its main lines of argument, its general tenor, and indeed not a little of its wording to the work of F.B. Smith, written some forty years previously.3 It is suggested that Smith’s (and Gabay’s) hypotheses rest on assumptions of doubtful viability. For example, one of their theoretical constructs is ‘honest doubters’ of the late nineteenth century, who supposedly turned to spiritualism as refugees from conventional Christianity. But if these ‘doubters’ existed at all they were most certainly accompanied in their flight by dishonest 2See below, p. 35. 3Francis Barrymore Smith: “Religion and Freethought in Melbourne, 1870 to 1890”. MA thesis. Melbourne, Vic.: University of Melbourne, 1960, and Francis Barrymore Smith: “Spiritualism in Victoria in the Nineteenth Century”. In:

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