The Reluctant Spiritualist

by Rubin Stuart, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9780151010134
• ISBN10: 0151010137
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-02-15
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

* Nominated for a New York Historical Society Book Prize in American History* Honorable Mention in General Nonfiction from the American Society of Journalists and Authors Here is the first authoritative biography of Margaret Fox, the world-famous medium and cofounder of the Spiritualism movement that swept America in the mid-1800s. In 1848, fifteen-year-old Maggie and her sister Katy created rapping sounds by manipulating their toe joints, practicing until they convinced their parents that their farmhouse was haunted. What started as a prank soon transformed into a movement: By 1853 more than thirty thousand mediums were at work, with Maggie among the most famous. But when she denounced the faith in 1888-appearing before a packed auditorium in her stocking feet to demonstrate-Spiritualism withered almost as quickly as it had bloomed. Through the memoirs of the Fox sisters, the letters of Maggie's Arctic explorer husband, contemporary newspaper accounts, and other primary sources, Nancy Rubin Stuart creates a vibrant portrait of a Victorian-era woman at the heart of the tumults of her time.

Author Biography

Nancy Rubin Stuart is the author of several books, including American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post and Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Humble Beginnings	1	(18)
The Spirit of a Dream	19	(23)
``A Mere Fraud Could Not Live So Long''	42	(18)
``So Continuously in the Public Eye''	60	(19)
``Justice is sure, though sometimes very slow''	79	(16)
``Remember then, as a sort of dream''	95	(24)
``But for the Polar Ices''	119	(26)
Hope Deferred	145	(26)
``A Sort of Sanctuary''	171	(27)
``That You May Know the Sacred Love''	198	(21)
``A Cloud of Reproach''	219	(23)
The Highest Right	242	(26)
Great Magnetism and Remorse	268	(18)
``A Clean Breast of All Her Miracles and Wonders''	286	(21)
``An Unmistakable Individual Intelligence''	307	(8)
Epilogue	315	(8)
Acknowledgments	323	(4)
End Notes	327	(36)
Bibliography	363	(14)
Index	377

Excerpts

Humble BeginningsThere is no death! What seems so is transition;This life of mortal breathIs but a suburb to the life elysian.-HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOWAMERICAN SPIRITUALISM-a movement that at its peak claimed more than a million followers-was born of out of the basic human longing for contact with a loved one lost to death. But to literalists, spiritualism's true spark came in 1848 from something no more or less powerful than a bored teenage girl.Her discontent, Maggie Fox would explain in interviews with the New York press some forty years later, had been stirred by the relocation of her parents, John and Margaret Fox, from Rochester, a cosmopolitan city of thirty thousand, to a rented farmhouse in the rural hamlet of Hydesville in Wayne County, New York-a day's boat ride away.For months the elder Foxes had toyed with the idea of moving. Maggie's older sister Maria and her husband already resided in Wayne County, while her brother, David, had married and purchased a farm nearby in the township of Arcadia. There was, after all, as David and his young wife, Elizabeth, reminded their elders, plenty of space down the hill from their home for a second farmhouse. Peppermint, then a lucrative cash crop, already grew on David's land and there was room for John to plant his own fields. When John and Margaret Fox learned that the Hyde family, the area's major landowners, needed a new blacksmith, they seized the opportunity. On December 11, 1847, the elder Foxes, accompanied by the last of their brood, the petulant Maggie and her little sister, Katy, loaded their possessions into a wagon, hitched it to a strong horse, made the long, chill drive east into Wayne County, and finally arrived at the farmhouse at the corner of Parker and Hydesville Road.From earlier visits to her relatives in Wayne County, the pretty, dark-eyed teenager considered the woodlands, high rolling pastures, and wide fields of Wayne County dull. Within a few weeks of moving into the Hydesville farmhouse, Maggie's initial impression was reconfirmed when she and Katy were forced to remain inside their parents' new saltbox home out of the desolate countryside's icy winds and drifting snows.That is not to say that Maggie and her family were completely isolated from others. Nearby lived several friendly farm families, among them the Redfields and Dueslers and, most important of all, Dr. Henry Hyde and his son, Artemus. The Hydes, for whom the hamlet was named, seemed to own nearly everything in sight: large tracts of farmland, their nearby mansion, the farmhouse where the Foxes lived, and the forge where John was employed as a blacksmith. As democratic as they were prosperous, the Hydes also became good friends of Maggie's parents and they took "a great fancy," in Maggie's words, to her and eleven-year-old Katy, who was still in braids and pinafores.The benevolence of the Hydes, combined with the proximity of other Fox relatives, undoubtedly had much to do with the famil

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Excerpted from The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox by Nancy Rubin Stuart
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