Laurence Oliphant is one of the great unknown personalities of the nineteenth century, and indeed of recent cultural history at large. He was born at Cape Town in 1829 and died near London in 1888. He left behind some twenty books, including novels, travel accounts, and mystical spiritual writings. He was diplomat, traveler, adventurer, writer, and mystic.
At the beginning of the 1860s, the period of Oliphant's great spiritual transition began when he met the Swedenborgian Thomas Lake Harris. It was Oliphant's last works, Sympneumata and Scientific Religion, that prompted...
Laurence Oliphant is one of the great unknown personalities of the nineteenth century, and indeed of recent cultural history at large. He was born at ...
Laurence Oliphant (1829 88) was a much-travelled British diplomat and writer. In the mid-nineteenth century, between two stints in the Caucasus, he spent several years in North America, helped Lord Elgin negotiate a trade treaty between Canada and the US, and was for a time Superintendent-General for Indian Affairs in Canada. In this book, first published in 1855, Oliphant expresses his enthusiasm for the rapid development in the American West that was being driven by industry and commerce. He documents a fact-finding journey around the Great Lakes region, travelling on the new railway and...
Laurence Oliphant (1829 88) was a much-travelled British diplomat and writer. In the mid-nineteenth century, between two stints in the Caucasus, he sp...
In 1857 Laurence Oliphant (1829 88), lawyer, journalist, diplomat and sometime spy, later Liberal MP, satirical novelist, and, for a time, adherent of the religious mystic Thomas Harris, became private secretary to Lord Elgin (1811 63), accompanying him to China, and thence to Japan, on a mission to protect and extend British trading interests in the region. Oliphant's 1859 account of the trip was published in two volumes. Volume 2 deals with the negotiation of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Yedo, the legalisation of the Chinese opium trade and combat with Chinese insurgents at Nankin. The work...
In 1857 Laurence Oliphant (1829 88), lawyer, journalist, diplomat and sometime spy, later Liberal MP, satirical novelist, and, for a time, adherent of...
In 1857 Laurence Oliphant (1829 88), lawyer, journalist, diplomat, and sometime spy, later Liberal MP, satirical novelist, and, for a time, adherent of the religious mystic Thomas Harris, became private secretary to Lord Elgin (1811 63), accompanying him to China, and thence to Japan, on a mission to protect and extend British trading interests in the region. Oliphant's 1859 account of the trip was published in two volumes. Volume 1 deals with the events of the Second Opium War, from the 'Arrow Incident', discussed in retrospect, to the Treaty of Tientsin, as well as an early diversion to...
In 1857 Laurence Oliphant (1829 88), lawyer, journalist, diplomat, and sometime spy, later Liberal MP, satirical novelist, and, for a time, adherent o...
