Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Knowing Ida would not assent to institutionalization of her own accord, Lizzie determined to commit her involuntarily. When Craddock discovered her mother’s plot of abduction, she quickly arranged to flee the country for London. In making that escape, Craddock was introduced to a much wider world of occult inquiry. It was the beginning of the next stage of her spiritual education.

  Craddock eluded capture through a stroke of good fortune and uncanny connection. Namely, she met an important benefactor in the famed British social reformer William T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and the Review of Reviews. Stead had come to Chicago in late 1893 just as the World’s Fair was closing and had quickly seen through the city’s utopian civic fantasies. Turning his sights upon the nightmarish underside of this urban dream, he had analyzed the city’s poverty, vice, and corruption in painstaking detail in If Christ Came to Chicago! (1894), a prophetic exposé that helped energize American progressives. Reimagining the Christian church as “the Union of all who Love in the Service of all who Suffer,” Stead’s hot-selling critique had anticipated the popularity of Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1897), a work that carried the enduring refrain of “What would Jesus do?” (should he happen to arrive in Topeka, Kansas, and confront its social ills). Stead’s scathing reproof of Chicago was clearly the headline of his trip, but, on his return to New York to catch a steamer back to England in early March 1894, he stopped in Philadelphia and offered his “snap-shot” commentary on that city as well to obliging reporters.31

  William T. Stead, the British editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and Borderland, became Craddock’s chief patron and protector. He offered her a job in London in 1894, provided funds to support her research, and backed her legal defense at various points in her battles with obscenity charges. Borderland 1 (1893- 1894): frontispiece.

  During this short stay in Philadelphia, Stead somehow met Craddock through a fellow editor who had once employed her as a secretary, and the two quickly fell into league with one another. Feeling the heat from both the postal inspectors and her mother’s own “detectives,” Craddock hoped Stead would take an interest in her case and “enable me to fight for my liberty.” The ever-crusading Stead, a minister’s son who relished lending his support to offbeat religious inquirers and forlorn political radicals, embraced the opportunity. A long-time champion of Annie Besant, the pastor’s wife turned freethinking socialist turned leading Theosophist, Stead had just added a new journal to his editorial range, Borderland, a popular periodical devoted entirely to spiritualist and occult matters. Craddock was precisely the kind of religious wayfarer Stead had come to favor through his own experiments with automatic writing; in 1892, he had actually begun receiving epistolary messages from the ghost of an American journalist, Julia Ames, and happily advertised his new-found spiritual contact—along with his day-to-day telepathic connection to his coeditor at Borderland. Clearly, this was a fortuitous crossing of paths, and it turned out to be of lasting consequence for her and to him. Not a woman who ever caught many breaks in career development, Craddock had suddenly found a very influential new patron.32

  Stead quickly determined that he did not want to help fight Craddock’s battle on the ground in Philadelphia. He had neither the time nor the inclination for that; he already had a full plate of social causes and knew too that Craddock had backed herself into a corner on this one. He told her that she “must get out of the whole thing”:He offered to take me over to England for a year, and give me work as his amanuensis, on a certain salary—small, but sufficient to live decently on. He said that I should have a year’s breathing-time, and opportunity to study at the British Museum to see what could be said for or against my theories. But I must promise him not to say anything about [the Danse du Ventre]. . . . And I must change my name, for I had become too well known as the writer of that essay, and he could not afford to be mixed up with me.

  Taking up work for a journalistic crusader who was wary of being openly associated with her rightly raised some apprehensions, and Craddock specifically bristled at the idea of adopting an alias and becoming a clandestine operator in one of Stead’s London offices. He insisted, however, and her desire to escape confinement in an insane asylum was at this moment paramount. So, Craddock sailed for England as Mrs. Irene Sophia Roberts with her books, desk, and typewriter as freight, under contract to be a free-floating researcher for Stead, a highly acclaimed editor with a mixed reputation for both radical daring and spiritualist credulity.33

  Philadelphia was a city with a rich history of religious innovators, but the spiritual possibilities that Craddock found in London were on another order of magnitude. Settling into office work for Stead’s magazine Borderland in April 1894, Craddock moved back and forth between her various scholarly projects and her occult training. She did not forget her plea for sex reform—her mission to preach “the gospel of the artistic and the divine in sex”—but she kept her word with Stead to maintain a low profile.34

  Craddock redefined herself as soon as she reached the shores of England—both to appease her newfound protector and to safeguard her own identity in case her mother came looking for her. She decided, for example, “to haul down my flag of dress reform,” a cause that she had long supported and upon which she had editorialized in the Philadelphia press as materially important to women’s freedom. With reluctance, but for the sake of her disguise, she put aside “my beloved short dresses” and appeared only “in conventional English attire, quiet and inconspicuous.” She continued to work in private on her mediumistic abilities through crystal gazing, automatic writing, and meditative visualization. She even adopted a home-based gymnastics regimen in service of her own fantasy of levitation—a feat that the celebrated British medium and one-time Anglican minister, William Stainton Moses, had reported achieving some years earlier. Craddock invoked Moses, a canonized figure in psychical-research circles, as an inspiration for her own efforts to levitate.35

  Craddock’s exile was a boon as well for her scholarly pursuits. Even as she was slinking about in hiding, she secured Stead’s endorsement to apply—under the alias of Irene Sophia Roberts—for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum and began studying, among other things, the history of witchcraft. Comparing the persecution of witches to her own recent brush with an insane asylum, she concluded: “The punishment of witchcraft has not yet died out, only that now, instead of burning witches at the stake, they point at them as ‘mad.’” What relief the British Library’s grand rotunda must have offered Craddock, the brisk air of intellectual liberty after having been almost suffocated in a mental ward in Philadelphia.36

  Just as important as the British Library for Craddock’s studies was the editorial headquarters of Stead’s Borderland, an esoteric laboratory in its own right. Another of Stead’s protégés, Ada Goodrich Freer, presided over that office, and Craddock became, for a time at least, her private secretary, once again putting her typing and shorthand skills to work for a cause in which she believed. Born in the same year as Craddock, Freer was also a highly inventive inquirer, an amateur folklorist of the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides, and a captivating seer who had been a significant contributor to the Society for Psychical Research before moving on to Stead’s new journal. Craddock, not surprisingly, immediately connected with Freer, who, in a fine bit of symmetry, was also working for Stead under a pseudonym, Miss X.

  Through Freer (a.k.a. Miss X), Craddock (a.k.a. Mrs. Roberts) had a good entry into London’s vibrant occultist subculture. The Borderland workplace also sported its own extensive library with everything from the Astrologers’ Magazine to Zoë’s Lessons on Scientific Palmistry, and Craddock, ever the bibliophile, sunk herself into those holdings. As she summed up her first six months abroad, “I have learned more from [the] Borderland library . . . and from Miss X and the various books of the S.P.R. and other occult works while in London, than I could have learned in five years at home. I have dipped into Theosophy, Mysticism, Faith Cure, Christian Science, Hypnotism, Crys
tal Gazing, Telepathy, et al., and I have learned to recognize The Power of Thought which is their underlying great principle. It has been a wonderful training. . . . I could not have chosen one spot in the world where I could have been so helped in my studies.” All too clearly Craddock’s spiritual tramping had hit its stride in London.37

  What exactly Craddock was training for in her studies still remained unclear. She sampled London’s Theosophical Society, an archetypal circle of religious eclectics and seekers, but she never had much faith in that group’s founding seer, Madame Blavatsky. Finding the Theosophical Society to be too hierarchical and authoritarian—“the Roman Catholic Church of Occultism,” Craddock called it—she quickly got her back up: “I don’t propose to be led by the nose, even by a Mahatma.” Instead, she held close to the first principle of her liberal Unitarianism, “the soul’s right to individuality,” and imagined life beyond the grave as wholly consonant with her idealized vision of creativity, freedom, and opportunity. In the spirit world, Craddock observed, “originality and independence of life are honored and esteemed,” and “all of us eccentric folks” are spared the ostracism of “a world set in ancient grooves.” In that realm women earned their own livings, wore what they wanted without being counted immodest, and did not “have to bother about cooking.” In her day-to-day explorations of these spiritual borderlands, Craddock found transcendent support for her nonconformity as well as mundane reassurances about a fairer and easier world to come.38

  Having turned aside from the Theosophical Society a few months into her London studies, Craddock also began to question her goal of becoming an all-around medium. Given her overriding desire for self-determination in matters religious as much as social, she increasingly suspected that this role was too passive for her to assume: Was not the medium little more than a mouthpiece “blindly obeying the behests of the spirits”? Prevailing notions of selflessness, whether as an ideal of Christian devotion or of Victorian womanhood, were anathema to her. The vice of degrading submission, Craddock insisted, all too frequently masqueraded as the virtue of humble self-denial: “I have always hated the very idea of unselfishness and self-sacrifice. I think they are sinful.” So it was that she began to depict her training in terms of becoming a “self-controlled psychic” or “an active, willing occultist ” rather than a compliant channel. Spirit possession—being the recording secretary for wiser angelic controls—continued to entice her, but self-possession—embodied through the disciplined power of her own mind—now balanced that attraction.39

  The hinge for Craddock’s swing in religious perspective was the New Thought movement, the mind-over-matter fount out of which emerged a vast array of mental healers from Mary Baker Eddy, leader of Christian Science, to Ralph Waldo Trine, best-selling author of In Tune with the Infinite. Whether in Boston, Chicago, or Denver, the movement was a wellspring of religious innovation, especially providing the occasion and opportunity for a host of late nineteenth-century women to create independent ministries. As such enterprises proliferated, the techniques of mental healing, calm repose, and abundant self-fulfillment became an almost fad-like vogue.

  Craddock spent significant time with a New Thought teacher for the first time during her sojourn in London: Alma Gillen, an expositor of an offshoot called Divine Science and editor of Expression: A Journal of Mind and Thought. Like her more famous contemporary Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Gillen was a poet of the new gospel of mental affirmations and triumphant healings. Her enterprise was a British outpost of a ministry with predominantly American roots; almost all of the teachers with whom she allied herself were across the pond, including Malinda Cramer, a founder of Divine Science in San Francisco and editor of Harmony, and Helen Wilmans, a mental-science healer with the ambition to build a metaphysical university in Sea Breeze, Florida. Connecting with Gillen by midway in her fifteen-month stay in London, Craddock frequently met with her to discuss New Thought metaphysics. She explored the possibility of building up “my teaching of marital reform on her foundation principles” and experimented with mantra-like affirmations. “I am love, wisdom and power,” Craddock dutifully intoned over and over again after one meeting. “I am spirit; the physical is under my control. I am part of God.”40

  New Thought teachers were created from New Thought students, and, not surprisingly, Gillen soon saw in Craddock the makings of a minister of Divine Science. Predictably, though, her American pupil did not stay on course for long. “You know I don’t accept all your teachings at present,” Craddock wrote Gillen in May 1895 as her time working for Stead was beginning to wind down, “but those which I do accept are opening up truth to me.” If Craddock really was going to become a self-willing occultist rather than a passive medium, she could hardly turn around and become a satellite expounder of someone else’s system.41

  More interested in starting with “the world of sense” than with “the plane of the spirit,” Craddock remained leery of much of “Mrs. Gillen’s mysticism.” On the one hand, the power of the concentrated mind to help the individual transcend everyday frustrations and rise above limiting social circumstances—that Divine Science affirmation exercised an obvious appeal to Craddock. On the other hand, recited refrains that thoroughly subordinated the body to the mind seemed perfectly designed to leave her cold. (Not that Gillen was without a sensual side—that certainly came out in her poetry. Gillen’s verses positively dripped with images of soulful wooing, ardent longing, and blissful kisses. Perhaps it was there that Craddock and Gillen discovered their mutual affinity, their shared passion for passion. As Gillen put it in one of her poems, she was “in love with Love,” and surely Craddock was too.) The New Thought movement was another important wayside for Craddock, but the mind-over-body core of it—the very focus on mental healing—never quite gripped her. Even after months of inquiry in London, Craddock remained a seeker on her way to somewhere else.42

  After a little more than a year abroad, Craddock returned to the United States, well prepared, as she saw it, for “much more satisfactory occult work.” Having had the opportunity to drink “unlimited draughts” from Britain’s “fountains of occult wisdom,” she had come to see her vocation in broadened religious terms. “It does really seem to me as tho’ I must be intended for important work in occultism,” she remarked while still in London. “I do earnestly hope and pray that the time may come when I shall be allowed to squeeze out this ingathered wisdom over the parched Materialistic life in my own country.” If given that chance, what role would she choose to play—spiritualist medium, self-willing magus, minister of Divine Science, or some new part altogether? When she got back to Philadelphia in the summer of 1895, the path she would take as both sex radical and religious innovator remained unpredictable, but that the two roles would be inextricably combined had become increasingly evident. She would not be able to peddle her ideas about sexuality without promoting her ideas about religion as well.43

  CRADDOCK’S YEAR-PLUS ABSENCE from the United States removed none of the problems that had driven her away in the first place. For the time being her mother had stopped trying to get her institutionalized, but Lizzie remained dead set against her daughter’s marriage-reform work and stood ready to obstruct it. And as long as Craddock kept her old Danse du Ventre essay under wraps, the postal authorities would leave her alone—but then when she proceeded to produce a couple of new pamphlets offering advice to newlyweds, that truce was immediately called off. On the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1896, Philadelphia’s Post Office Inspector, General Warren P. Edgerton, put her on renewed legal notice, warning her that “no pamphlet which describes the sexual act, no matter how refined the language, nor how high the motives from which it is written, can lawfully go through the mails.” In order to maintain some financial viability as she contemplated her next steps as a sex reformer, Craddock had tried hard to settle into a conventional secretarial job in the Bureau of Highways at City Hall. That position, however, fell apart in November 1897 when a coworker discovered a fragment fro
m one of her typescripts about improving marital relations and handed the sheet over to her boss. Professing shock, anger, and disgust, he canned her after eighteen months of otherwise competent labor.44

  Just as Craddock had hoped to serve unobtrusively as a stenographer at City Hall, she had also continued, tactfully enough, to cultivate some of her more judicious religious associations. She maintained her old ties to the Spring Garden Unitarian Society and followed up on her connection with Alma Gillen’s Divine Science by joining a local group of women who had formed “a little society of ‘Truth Students’” to explore New Thought teachings. She attempted as well a more respectable piece of religious writing, publishing a small book on The Heaven of the Bible with J. B. Lippincott in 1897. The book appeared a tame effort for a woman of Craddock’s broader religious interests. It strung together scriptural passages in order to deduce what heaven was really like, the very substantiality of it—from the topography, architecture, and clothing to the industrial and municipal arrangements. In many ways The Heaven of the Bible looked comfortably apiece with wider Victorian efforts to domesticate heaven, to decorate the celestial parlor with lacework and flowers. For a moment at least Craddock seemed like she might be ready to curb her appetite for controversy.45

  If her little book on heaven had a subversive streak, it was the way that Craddock used the concreteness of biblical testimony to advance her own ideas about the physicality of the spiritual world. Operating within the confines of scriptural literalism—clearly, a ploy for someone with a freethinking curriculum up her sleeve—she could then slip in her views on marriage and sexuality under the cloak of biblical allusion. She suggested, for example, that the angels of God “are by no means sexless” and are “as desirous as earthly men” to enter into marital relations. She proceeded to cite passages from the sixth chapter of Genesis and one of Paul’s epistles to make her point. Perhaps Craddock thought she could housebreak her spiritual curiosities—or, at least remove some of their threat—by simply reminding Christians that the Bible’s heaven was anything but purely ethereal. If the very literalism of her book was a cover, that ruse was lost on most reviewers. The book fell flat, not attracting enough notice to affect public perception of her work as a marriage reformer one way or another. Deemed a mere “curiosity” by the Literary World and receiving bare mention in Outlook as “an interesting little volume,” it received full and favorable treatment only in Stead’s Borderland. The consolation of this literary letdown: At least, The Heaven of the Bible did not add to Craddock’s legal troubles. The book was never banned from the mails.46