The name James John Garth Wilkinson may not be one which,
even among members of the Swedenborg Society, rings immediate bells. Yet, not
only was he a most distinguished member of this Society for over sixty years and
certainly the best known Swedenborgian in Victorian England, but he was also
famous as a homoeopathic physician at a time when that branch of medicine was
treated with far more suspicion than it is today, was known as a pamphleteer and
social reformer in a number of fields and was a friend or acquaintance of very
many literary people. He was a translator of Swedenborg’s scientific works and
of some of his religious writings, but also wrote many books of his own on
medical, social and religious topics. Although a staunch Swedenborgian, he never
joined the New Church but remained a member of the Church of England.
Early Days
He was born in London, in Acton Street off Gray’s Inn Lane,
on 3 June 1812 and died in London on 18 October 1899 aged eighty seven, just a
few weeks after the publication of his last book. His father was a barrister who
became the Judge of the Court of the County Palatine of Durham. His mother
Harriet, née Robinson, came from Sunderland, while the Wilkinsons were natives
of Durham city. Garth was the eldest of eight children. He spent his early years
in London, but his mother died when he was thirteen and he was sent to
Sunderland to be cared for by his grandmother and an aunt. Coming south again,
he completed his education at schools in Mill Hill and Totteridge, before being
apprenticed by his father at the age of sixteen to the senior surgeon at the
Royal Infirmary at Newcastle upon Tyne. This was against the boy’s own wishes.
He wanted to follow his father into the law, but James senior had other ideas.
Garth Wilkinson left Totteridge with an excellent report. His master’s parting
words (prophetic for the future translator of Swedenborg) were: "Now mind you,
you keep up your Latin, you’ll want it".
At the Newcastle Infirmary he acted as "dresser" for his
master, also helping with the compounding of drugs and the bleeding of patients.
Surgery, in the days before anaesthetics and antiseptics, was a crude and rather
horrible business. Garth Wilkinson hated it. It was only when he discovered
homoeopathy many years later that he came to love his profession. In 1832 he
returned to London and spent two years "walking" the wards of Guy’s Hospital
before becoming a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a Licentiate of
the Society of Apothecaries in 1834. By November 1835, with the help of
relatives, he was able to establish himself as an independent medical
practitioner at 13 Store Street, Bedford Square. The position of a general
practitioner in those days was more that of a pharmacist than that of a
physician. The bulk of his income was derived from dispensing his own
prescriptions and selling drugs over the counter of his "front shop". Garth
Wilkinson, as he was to tell his great friend Henry James years later, "never
believed in the good or truth of promiscuous drugging", and his early practice
did not prosper, but his lack of patients did give him time to pursue his
scholarly interests and he was able to spend many hours in the British Museum
Reading Room.
Introduction to Swedenborg
Wilkinson first came into contact with Swedenborg’s writings
through a maternal uncle, George Robinson, who was one of the trustees of the
Swedenborg Society’s property and himself a devoted reader of the Writings. The
young man soon became an enthusiastic reader too and he joined the Society,
becoming an active member and a member of the Committee. At his uncle’s house in
Woodford, Essex he met his future wife, Emma Marsh, who was the family
governess. They became engaged in December 1835, but did not marry until January
1840. The marriage was a long and happy one and Emma bore him three daughters
and a son. It was Emma who, above all, encouraged him in the practice of
homoeopathy. Wilkinson later wrote movingly of an incident early in their
marriage when their eldest daughter, still an infant, had an attack of
bronchitis during the night. Garth fetched some ipecacuanha wine as an emetic
and husband and wife sat anxiously at the end of the bed arguing about who was
to administer the medicine. At last Emma gave the child a piece of ipecacuanha,
"such as would pass through the eye of a needle,…and a good and homoeopathic
remedy it was;....". After that the child recovered rapidly. This incident left
a huge impression on Wilkinson and was one of the factors that persuaded him in
the direction of homoeopathy.
Early Publisher of William Blake
Wilkinson’s arrival at the Swedenborg Society in the late
1830’s was to lead to his undertaking many translations of Swedenborg, but his
first published work was the first ever letter-press edition of William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, published in 1839. He had become
friendly with that doyen of the Swedenborg Society, Charles Augustus Tulk, who
had been a patron of Blake and owned one of the rare prints of the Songs
struck off by Blake from the copper upon which he had engraved it. Alexander
Gilchrist, in his biography of Blake published in 1863, wrote of this edition
that Dr Wilkinson had printed the poems in an order of his own, "and too often
with words of his own; alterations which were by no means improvements always".
Nevertheless, it is important to note the part played by Wilkinson in keeping
Blake before the public eye in the thirty odd years between his death and the
revival of his reputation at the hands of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (himself an
admirer of Wilkinson’s own poetry and prose) and Algernon Charles Swinburne
following the publication of Gilchrist’s biography.
Friends and acquaintances of his early manhood were Robert
Browning (an exact contemporary), Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, all of
whom he encouraged to read Swedenborg. It was through Carlyle, as well as
through his own published articles, that Wilkinson began to attract the
attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the early 1840’s. In his famous essay
Swedenborg, or the Mystic, in Representative Men Emerson praised
Wilkinson as a translator of Swedenborg’s scientific works. He described him as
a philosophic critic with a vigour of understanding and imagination equal to
that of Lord Bacon. "This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred
years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history". In his
later work, English Traits, he gave him further praise and gave him
almost as much space as he gave to Coleridge and Carlyle. Wilkinson’s
translations included The Doctrine of Charity and The Last Judgment
in 1839, The Animal Kingdom in 1843 and The Economy of the Animal
Kingdom in the following year. His translation of Divine Love and Wisdom
published in 1885 he considered the most important work of any kind he had
ever done.
Friendship with Henry James Senior
It was in London in the early 1840’s that Wilkinson met the
man who was to be his life-long friend, Henry James the elder, father of William
James the philosopher and Henry James the novelist. James, only a year older and
also a married man with two young children, was in England seeking a cure for a
disease that was probably psychosomatic. He had been recommended to read
Swedenborg and became an instant convert and life-long devotee, writing many
books of which the most famous is The Secret of Swedenborg. The two men
seemed to be friends made for each other. Wilkinson was to recall later the
early days of their friendship:
"They were sunny evenings on which your faces graced our
humble abode, and there was something of delicious youth in them from many
circumstances. For you were new to us in country, in time of acquaintance, in
sentiment, & in your acquaintance with our valued Truths".
While Wilkinson acted as something of a spiritual counsellor
to James, the latter assisted his new friend financially and helped to get him
published in North American periodicals. He also encouraged him in the practice
of homoeopathy and it should be noted that the honorary degree of M.D. awarded
to him later was from the University of Pennsylvania. Henry James’ third son was
named Garth Wilkinson (usually abbreviated to "Wilky" in the family), while the
Wilkinsons named their youngest daughter Mary James in honour of Henry’s wife.
Homoeopathic Practice
It was after he adopted the practice of homoeopathy that
Wilkinson’s medical practice began to take off. In 1852 he told his father that
he now really loved his profession. "It brings down not only riches, but, what
is far more, blessings upon him that exercises it aright;…". What convinced
Wilkinson was, above all, the similarity he saw between the homoeopathy and the
doctrine of correspondences.
"The doctrine of a correspondence is the working key of the
New Church attitude towards God and conduct. In medical matters the
correspondence of drug effects and disease effects is the whole of
homoeopathic practice".
What he found in Hahnemann’s system was a scientific
statement of the doctrine of correspondences, expressed in terms of medicine.
His lectures up and down the country led to his important book, The Human
Body and its Relation to Man, which was very widely read.
Early Exponent of Nature Conservation
Like many Victorians (the poet Robert Browning among them)
Wilkinson was very strongly opposed to the practice of vivisection. More
surprisingly for a medical man, but perhaps not for a homoeopath, he was also
passionately opposed to the practice of vaccination. A major portion of an
important work, Human Science and Divine Revelation, published in 1876,
is devoted to his arguments against vivisection, which he saw as an unnecessary
cruelty inflicted on animals. In the same book he goes on to condemn the hunting
of animals purely for sport. Recognising that the killing of animals for food or
to protect from danger may be necessary ("the guarding of the sheepfold involves
the killing of the wolf"), he continues:
"But destruction for the pleasure of it would not stand its
ground. And especially the raid of travellers upon the great lives of the
hippopotamus, the giraffe, the ostrich, the elephant, and other such
creatures, would be forbidden, unless real reasons, and not wantonness,
prompted it; forbidden as a brigandage of man upon the domains of nature; as
an extermination of the generous joys of lake and plain and forest; as a
desolation of the world of forms, and an extinction of most pregnant symbolic
organism which exists not without a divine reason in the balance of things".
These are eloquent and prophetic words. How astonishing that
Garth Wilkinson should have been about a hundred years ahead of his time in his
advocacy of the conservationist cause.
Women’s Rights
In human affairs he opposed the oppressive laws of his own
day that kept women in an inferior position to men. A woman should be free to
vote, to propose marriage, administer property and the like. Only then would her
quality assert itself. Did Wilkinson foresee the academic superiority of girls
over boys which is such a notable feature of our secondary schools today? In
1852 he had translated Swedenborg’s work on The Generative Organs. This
work, he told Henry James, he regarded as one small step on the way to a greater
liberty of thought and knowledge on sexual subjects.
He pointed out that "there is no God like that which the
Atheists deny; that there is no Lord like Him whom the current Christian beliefs
affirm". That is something that remains true today. Wilkinson believed strongly
in the continuation of life after the death of the physical body. He saw the
brain as an instrument that incarnates the mind. Even when "the ruined cerebrum
is either cured or discarded" the mind is still there and, "…being still itself
the essential brain on which the other [i.e. the physical brain] was but the
mortal plating, its capacities are unaffected and will recur in a second life in
higher forms".
That is an upbeat note on which to take our leave of James
John Garth Wilkinson. His final years were lonely ones. Emma had died in 1886
and for some time his eldest daughter Emma, who was now a widow, kept house for
him. But she died in 1893 and in his last years he enjoyed the company of his
two adult granddaughters and he continued to write. When he died an obituarist
wrote of him that personally he was a man of the sweetest and most winning
nature and the gentlest disposition. Like Swedenborg, he saw in every external
fact only an inner spiritual significance. He was a man born to believe.
