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The Siblys of London
Susan Mitchell Sommers
其他書名
A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England
出版Oxford University Press, 2018
主題Biography & Autobiography / GeneralHistory / Europe / Great Britain / GeneralHistory / Modern / GeneralBody, Mind & Spirit / Astrology / GeneralBody, Mind & Spirit / OccultismReligion / GeneralReligion / Christianity / HistoryReligion / HistoryReligion / Christianity / GeneralSocial Science / Sociology / Urban
ISBN01906873209780190687328
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=dU5WDwAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBookSAMPLE
註釋Ebenezer Sibly M.D. was the inventor of Dr. Sibly's Reanimating Solar Tincture- - a panacea advertised for its many applications, including restoring the newly dead to life if applied promptly and according to the doctor's specifications. It was therefore difficult to explain why the doctor himself died before he turned fifty, surrounded by dozens of bottles of the stuff. Ebenezer's brother Manoah was asked to execute his will, which urged the executors to find the funds to continue manufacture of Solar Tincture, and left legacies for multiple and concurrent wives as well as an illegitimate son whose name Ebenezer could not recall. Manoah Sibly, a minister responsible for shepherding the recently established New Church into solid bourgeois respectability, found his brother's record of financial and moral indiscretions so upsetting that he immediately resigned his executorship. Ebenezer's death in 1799 brought a premature conclusion to a colorfully chaotic life; one lived on the fringes of various fascinating and interconnected esoteric subcultures meandering through late-eighteenth century London. The Siblys were neither rich nor famous, nor were they desperate criminals, and thus it is their ordinariness that makes them such valuable filters through which to view the era in which they lived. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to existing scholarly accounts of brothers Ebenezer and Manoah, while placing the entire Sibly family firmly in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their myriad personal connections and professional activities provide a singular insight into how various esoteric trends in late-eighteenth century fascination and belief affected the lives of people who lived just outside our usual historical range of vision.