From Pat Deveney's database:

Spiritualist at Work, The.
Devoted to the Best Interests of Humanity. Progression Here and Hereafter.
1874--1876 Semimonthly, weekly, then monthly
New York, NY, then Chicago, then Lonbard, IL.
Editor: D.M. Bennett and E.V. Wilson, then Wilson alone.
Publisher: D.M. Bennett, then E.V. Wilson; Hazlitt & Reed, Printers.
1/1, July 1, 1874-2/43, July 1, 1876
8-16 pp., 11 1/2 x 16.
$1.10-1.75 a year.

Initially published in New York alternately with D.M. Bennett's The Truth Seeker; beginning October 1874 it was published from Chicago with Wilson listed as editor and proprietor. Bennett who had been hired by Wilson to publish the journal announced his withdrawal after four issues, citing "good and sufficient reasons," probably financial. The journal was originally started as a radical ("free love") counter to the Religio-Philosophical Journal, using a stolen copy of the RPJ's subscription list to send out sample copies. A large part of the content was devoted to Wilson's disputes with S.S. Jones over free love and claims of unpaid money. (Wilson finally sued Jones, to no avail, for having destroyed his lecturing business with his slanders.) The character of Ebenezer Vespasian Wilson (1818-1880) and his faction in spiritualism (Victoria C. Woodhull, Moses Hull, W.F. Jamieson, Warren Chase, et al.) is colorfully indicated by Col. Bundy's description of a spiritualist/free love conference organized by Wilson in Chicago in 1874 as "Bummers and Bawds," and by S.S. Jones's "A Sickening Spectacle," Religio-Philosophical Journal 16/2 (March 28, 1874): 1. In its final issues, the journal was still staunchly supporting Victoria C. Woodhull. H.P. Blavatsky declared (one of many contradictory statements on the subject) that a seance she attended with Wilson in 1873 or 1874 (he was a seer, psychometrician and reader of sealed letters) was the first she had ever seen. Hannah M. Wolff letter, The Better Way (November 7, 1891): 2. For Wilson's biography, see Mrs. Pauline Wilson Stevens, "The Early Days of E.V. Wilson," Banner of Light 48/10 (November 27, 1880): 2. NY Historical Society; University of Rochester; Wisconsin Historical Society; NSAC Lily Dale.

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