ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on plebeian spiritualism's politics and on some of its religious dimensions during the whole of author period. It was a mixture in many senses and, in the final analysis, a predominantly non-plebeian one. So far, author has described the main cleavage among spiritualists as simply over Christianity. Not those respectable spiritualists were necessarily rigid about theological detail; their main organ, the Spiritual Magazine yawned at the Church of England's hottest controversy over Essays and Reviews that this collection 'contained nothing new or extraordinary'. The broad ethos of both these institutions was close to that of plebeian spiritualism, and people will also note some overlaps in personnel. Secularism's career is the better known: it turned out to be the sole nationally organised plebeian current of opinion to prosper through the mid-Victorian decades (1850-87), though no longer.
