Edward Maitland
| Edward Maitland | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
27 October 1824 Ipswich, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland |
| Died | 2 October 1897 (aged 72) |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | Caius College, Cambridge |
| Literary movement | Theosophy |
Edward Maitland (27 October 1824 – 2 October 1897) was an English humanitarian writer and occultist.
He was born at Ipswich on 27 October 1824, was the son of Charles David Maitland, perpetual curate of St. James's Chapel, Brighton; he was the nephew of General Sir Peregrine Maitland, and brother of Brownlow Maitland and of Charles Maitland (1815–1866). His father was a noted preacher, and Edward Maitland was brought up among strict evangelical ideas, and rigorous theories about original sin and atonement.
After education at a large private school in Brighton, he was admitted as a pensioner at Caius College, Cambridge, on 19 April 1843, and graduated B.A. in 1847. He was destined by his family for the pulpit, but was diverted from taking orders by doubts as to faith and vocation, and by the feeling that the church was rather 'a tomb for the preservation of embalmed doctrines' than a living organism. In his perplexity, he got leave of absence from his home for a year, and left England. He went in 1849 to California, became one of the band of 'forty-niners,' and remained abroad, on the shores of the Pacific, mainly in America and Australia, where he became a commissioner of crown lands, until the one year of absence had grown into nine. He married in Australia, but was left a widower with one son, after a year of wedlock.
Returning to England at the end of 1857, he devoted himself to literature, with the dominant aim of
so developing the intuitional faculty as to find the solution of all problems having their basis in man's spiritual nature, with a view to the formulation of a perfect system of thought and rule of life.
Many of the vicissitudes of his life, both physical and mental, were recorded with but little distortion in his romance called The Pilgrim and the Shrine. From the Life and Correspondence of Herbert Ainslie, B.A. Cantab., which was published in 1867, and warmly acclaimed by thoughtful critics. It was followed by a romance called The Higher Law (1869), which represents the escape of a youth from the trammels, no longer of orthodox religion, but of traditional morals. Maitland became a figure in society, and was appreciated highly by Lord Houghton and Sir Francis Hastings Doyle. He began to write in the Spectator and Examiner, and did some reviewing for the 'Athenæum' from 1870 onwards. His book By and By: an Historical Romance of the Future (1873) led to his making the acquaintance of Anna Kingsford, whom he visited at her husband's vicarage of Atcham, in Shropshire, in February 1874. In conjunction with her he produced anonymously, in 1875, The Keys of the Creeds. At the close of 1874 his mother died at Brighton, and Maitland accompanied Mrs. Kingsford to Paris. He joined her crusade against materialism, animal food, and vivisection, upon which subject he wrote a forcible letter in the Examiner in June 1876, which attracted the most widespread attention to the subject. In this same year, he first saw the apparition of his father, who had then been ten years dead, and he soon afterwards recognised that he 'belonged to the order of the mystics.'
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