Theos-Talk Archives (November 2006 Message tt00881)

Clearing some old volumes of Theosophical journals today, I came across
?Theosophy in Australasia? for February 1, 1920, which I had not
previously examined in detail. In this volume Mrs Besant writes ?February
17th (1920) is Mr Leadbeater?s seventy-third birthday?? (which, of course,
it wasn?t) and goes on to add to the myth of his distinguished past by
declaring that he was a ?great English gentleman? and that ?one is not at
all surprised to learn of his association in earlier years with Lytton,
Tennyson, Ruskin, Charles Kinglsey, Sir William Crookes, Sinnett and
others of equal calibre.? (p. 451) I was not surprised to learn of
Leadbeater?s association with Crookes (they had joined the TS at the same
meeting but there is no evidence any other ?association?) or Sinnett
(although by 1920 one might have thought Mrs Besant would have avoided his
name, given his views over the 1906 dramas about Leadbeater). Edward
Bulwer, Lord Lytton, was not a surprise: Leadbeater had claimed to have
been present at a lavish formal dinner given by his father (a railway
clerk at the time) at which Lytton was a guest. To say the dinner was
unlikely, given the circumstance of the Leadbeater family at the time, is
an understatement, but there certainly is no evidence of any subsequent
association between Leadbeater and Lytton. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Baron
Tennyson of Aldworth in the County of Sussex and of Freshwater in the Isle
of Wight, poet, and Poet Laureate from 1850, likewise doesn?t fit into the
Victorian world?s class system as a likely candidate for associating with
the son of a railway clerk or a curate in an obscure rural village: he
died in 1892. Charles Kinglsey, novelist, and Regius Professor of Modern
History at the University of Cambridge from 1860, died in 1875, and so
must have ?associated? with Leadbeater before the latter was 21. But where
and how? John Ruskin, artist, poet, author, philosopher, the first Slade
Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, lived until 1900 but, once again, where
and how could he have associated with Leadbeater? Lytton, Tennyson,
Kinglsey, and Ruskin were pre-eminent figures ? even icons - of the
cultural world of their time. Just how the son of an impoverished railway
clerk who became a curate in an ecclesiastical backwater, could have been
associated with them in his ?earlier years? is a mystery. Had Leadbeater
been born in 1947 (rather than 1854) in Lea Green Hall (rather than in a
working class street in Stockport), had his father been the chairman of a
railway company (rather than a clerk or cashier), had he gone to Oxford
(rather than going to work as a clerk after minimal schooling), had there
been a family fortune to be lost in a famous bank crash (rather than
living in a lodging house) it might just have been possible.
Perhaps Mrs Besant had been a little gullible in believing what she had
been told?

Dr Gregory Tillett