- James John Garth Wilkinson
James John Garth Wilkinson (
June 3 ,1812 -October 18 ,1899 ), was a Swedenborgian writer.The son of James John Wilkinson (died 1845), a writer on mercantile
law and judge of the County Palatine ofDurham , he was born inLondon . He studiedmedicine , and set up as a homoeopathic doctor in Wimpole Street in 1834. Attracted by the works ofWilliam Blake , he studied the "Songs of Experience". He was also inspired byEmanuel Swedenborg , to the elucidation of whose writings he devoted much of his life. Between 1840 and 1850 he edited Swedenborg's treatises on "The Doctrine of Charity", "The Animal Kingdom", "Outlines of a Philosophic Argument on the Infinite", and "Hieroglyphic Key to Natural and Spiritual Mysteries".Wilkinson's preliminary discourses to these translations and his criticisms of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's comments on Swedenborg displayed an aptitude not only for mystical research, but also for original philosophic debate. The vigour of his thought won admiration fromHenry James, Sr. (father of the novelist) and fromRalph Waldo Emerson , through whom he metThomas Carlyle andJames Anthony Froude ; and his speculation further attractedAlfred Tennyson , the Oliphants andEdward Maitland .He wrote an able sketch of Swedenborg for the "Penny Cyclopaedia", and a standard biography, "Emanuel Swedenborg" (1849); but these were not his only interests. He was a traveller, a linguist, well versed in
Scandinavian literature andphilology , the author of mystical poems entitled "Improvisations from the Spirit" (1857), a social and medical reformer, a convinced opponent ofvivisection and also ofvaccination . He died at Finchley Road, SouthHampstead , where he had lived for nearly fifty years. He is commemorated by a bust and portrait in the rooms of the Swedenborgian Society inBloomsbury Street, London.
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