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| Title |
VARIA: Readings From Rare Books
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| Author | J Hain Friswell | |
| Year of Publication | 1866 | |
| Links | This essay may be found here | |
This collection of "Bibliographic Essays" includes a rather bizarre chapter on Lodowick Muggleton.
The author appears to only have had access to a very limited selection of references, most of which were hostile to Muggletonianism. the author seldom gets a fact correct when he is commenting on the works of Muggleton and Reeve and feels that seldom has there been " a madder pair", quite remarkably he feels that Muggleton and Reeve were "at the time more successful than their opponents, George Fox and William Penn"
Despite dismissing the two as mad he then goes on to say that many of their ideas were highly logical and even verge on the side of orthodoxy. He knows that the collected works were published in 1832, which is strange given that my copies of "The Works" were published in 1831 and confidently asserts that by 1851 "faith in the prophet Muggleton was not found on the earth", which would have been quite a shock to Joseph and Isaac Frost who lived on until 1857 and 1858 respectively, let alone the many Muggletonians who survived well into the following century.
This essay is very poor, and only of use in order to exhibit the willingness on the part of the literary classes to assume the worst without any further research as soon as Muggletonianism is mentioned.