Laurence Oliphant (author)

Laurence Oliphant (1829 – 23 December 1888) was a British author, traveller, diplomat, and mystic. Best known for his 1870 satirical novel Piccadilly, he spent a decade in later life under the influence of the spiritualist prophet Thomas Lake Harris. Oliphant was Member of Parliament for Stirling Burghs.

Early life

Laurence Oliphant was the only child of Sir Anthony Oliphant (1793–1859). At the time of his son's birth, Sir Anthony was attorney-general in Cape Colony, but was soon transferred as Chief Justice to Ceylon. Laurence's father was a younger son of a Scottish landed family. He spent his early childhood in Colombo, where his father purchased a home called Alcove in Captains Gardens, subsequently known as Maha Nuge Gardens. Sir Anthony and his son Laurence have been credited with bringing tea to Ceylon and growing 30 tea plants brought over from China - the tea was grown on the Oliphant Estate in Nuwara Eliya. The boy's education was of the most desultory kind, the most successful part belonging to the years 1848 and 1849, when he and his parents toured Europe. In 1851, he accompanied Jung Bahadur from Colombo to Nepal. He passed an agreeable time there, and saw enough that was new to enable him to write his first book, A Journey to Katmandu (1852).

In "The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914-1918 By Isaiah Friedman", Laurence Oliphant's involvement with the Sultanate of the Ottoman Empire clearly extends beyond 1888. The differing accounts are difficult to reconcile.

The bar

From Nepal Oliphant returned to Ceylon and thence to England, dallied a little with the English bar, so far at least as to eat dinners at Lincoln's Inn, and then with the Scottish bar, so far at least as to pass an examination in Roman law.

Travels (1853-88)

Russia, Canada, Circassia

Oliphant was more happily inspired when he threw over his legal studies and went to travel in Russia. The outcome of that tour was his book, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea (1853).

Between 1853 and 1861, Oliphant was successively secretary to Lord Elgin during the negotiation of the Canada Reciprocity Treaty in Washington, and the companion of the Duke of Newcastle on a visit to the Circassian coast during the Crimean War.

China and Japan

Attack of the British legation in Tōzen-ji, Edo, in 1861. Oliphant fought back with a hunting-whip.

Oliphant was Lord Elgin's private secretary on his expedition to China and Japan. In 1861, he was appointed First Secretary of the British Legation in Japan under Minister Plenipotentiary (later Sir) Rutherford Alcock, and might have made a successful diplomatic career if it had not been interrupted, almost at the outset, by a nighttime attack on the legation, in which he nearly lost his life. He permanently lost the full use of his hand. It seems probable that he never properly recovered from this episode.

Oliphant arrived at Edo at the end of June 1861. On the evening of 5 July, a nighttime attack was made on the legation by xenophobic ronin. His pistols having been in their locked travelling box, Oliphant rushed out with a hunting-whip, and was attacked by a Japanese with a heavy two-handed sword. A beam, invisible in the darkness, interfered with the blows, but Oliphant was severely wounded, and sent on board ship to recover. He had to return to England after a visit to Korea, where he discovered a Russian force occupying a secluded bay, and obtained their withdrawal.

See Lawrence Oliphant's Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's mission to China and Japan, 1857-8-9 (2 volumes), 1859 (reprinted by Oxford University Press, 1970) {ISBN 978-0196410043}

England

Oliphant returned to England, resigned the service, and was elected to Parliament in 1865 for Stirling Burghs. While he did not show any conspicuous parliamentary ability, he was made a great success by his vivacious and witty novel, Piccadilly (1870). He fell, however, under the influence of the spiritualist prophet Thomas Lake Harris, who about 1861 had organized a small community, the Brotherhood of the New Life, which was settled in Brocton on Lake Erie, and subsequently moved to Santa Rosa, California.

Brocton, Paris, Brocton

Harris obtained so strange an ascendancy over Oliphant that the latter left Parliament in 1868, followed Harris to Brocton, and lived there the life of a farm labourer, in obedience to the imperious will of his spiritual guide. It was part of the Brocton régime that members of the community be allowed to return to the outside world from time to time, to earn money for the community.

After three years, this was permitted to Oliphant, who, once more in Europe, worked as correspondent for The Times during the Franco-German War, and afterwards spent several years in Paris in the service thereof. There he met, through his mother, his future wife: Alice le Strange, daughter of the late Henry Styleman le Strange of Hunstanton, Norfolk. Oliphant married Alice at St. George's, Hanover Square, London on 8 June 1872.

In 1873 he went back to Brocton, taking with him his wife and mother. During the years that followed he continued to be employed in the service of the community and its head, yet in work very different from that with which he had been occupied on his first sojourn. His new work was chiefly financial, and took him much to New York and a good deal to England. As late as December 1878, he continued to believe that Harris was an incarnation of the Deity.

Palestine, England, America

By that time, however, his mind was occupied with a large project of colonization in Palestine, and in 1879 he made an extensive journey in that country, going also to Constantinople, in the vain hope of obtaining a lease on the northern half of the Holy Land with a view to settling large numbers of Jews there (this was before the first wave of Jewish settlement of the Zionists in 1882). This he conceived would be an easy task from a financial point of view, as there were so many in England and America anxious to fulfill the prophecies, and bring about the End of Days. In this period, with financial support from Christadelphians and other Christian and Jewish individuals in Britain, Olipant collected funds to purchase land and settle Jewish refugees in the Galilee. In 1882, he took Naftali Herz Imber (later known as the author of the Hatikvah lyrics) as his secretary.

Oliphant landed once more in England without having accomplished anything definite; but his wife, who had been banished from him for years and had been living in California, was allowed to rejoin him, and they went to Egypt together. In 1881, he crossed again to America. It was on that visit that he became utterly disgusted with Harris, and finally split from him.

Haifa

Oliphant House in Haifa

While Oliphant at first feared that his wife would not follow him in his renunciation of the prophet, this was not the case, and they settled themselves very agreeably, with one house in the midst of the Templers' German Colony in Haifa, and another about twelve miles off at Dalieh on Mount Carmel.

It was in Haifa in 1884 that they wrote together the strange book Sympneumata: Evolutionary Forces Now Active in Man, and in the next year Oliphant produced his novel Masollam, which may be taken to contain its author's latest views with regard to the personage whom he long considered a new Avatar. One of his cleverest works, Altiora Peto had been published in 1883.

In December 1885 an attack of fever, caught on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, resulted in the death of his wife on 2 January 1886, whose constitution had been undermined by the hardships of her American life. Oliphant was too unsteady with fever to attend her funeral, and was unable to comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen him. He was persuaded that after death he was in much closer contact with her than when she was still alive, and conceived that it was under her influence that he wrote the book to which he gave the title Scientific Religion.

England again

In November 1887, he went to England to publish that book. By the Whitsuntide of 1888, he had completed it and started for America. There he determined to marry again, his second wife being Rosamond, a granddaughter of Robert Owen the Socialist. They were married in Malvern, and meant to go to Haifa, but Oliphant took very ill at York House, Twickenham, and died there on 23 December 1888. His obituary in the Times said of him, "Seldom has there been a more romantic or amply filled career; never, perhaps, a stranger or more apparently contradictory personality".

In fiction

The Difference Engine, a steampunk novel by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, presents Oliphant as an agent of British intelligence operating in London.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, a steampunk novel by Mark Hodder, presents Oliphant as a mysterious meddler and agent inimical to the book's protagonist, Sir Richard Francis Burton.

See also

• Anglo-Japanese relations
• Anthony Oliphant

References

• Mrs (Margaret) Oliphant (his cousin), Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant his Wife (1892).
• Philip Henderson, The Life of Laurence Oliphant Robert Hale Ltd, London, 1956.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Burke's Peerage, Oliphant of that Ilk
• Burke's Landed Gentry, Oliphant of Condie

External links

• Works by Laurence Oliphant at Project Gutenberg
• Laurence Oliphant

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Laurence Oliphant

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by James Caird	Member of Parliament for Stirling Burghs 1865 – 1868	Succeeded by John Ramsay