The spiritualist communication that John Edmonds and others championed gained extensive popularity in mid-nineteenth century America. According to Edmonds, by 1853 several hundred thousand mediums for spiritual communication served the U.S. He also stated that 10-12 newspapers were devoted primarily to reporting about spiritualism. Moreover, about 100 books, some with circulation exceeding 10,000 copies, provided readers with information about spiritualism.^ By 1860, the number of persons in the U.S. who practiced spiritualism was probably at least four million. The number of spiritualists plausibly amounted to more than one third the number of Christians.

Spiritualism had broad social reach. An elite journal in London about this time lamented the mass market for spiritualist communication:

Among the distinguishing differences of classes, none are more characteristic than their pleasures; but now great and little, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, professional and non-professional, cleric and laic, peer and proletaire, were brought to the same level of enjoyment, — all absorbed in one universal pastime.^

A prominent New York City lawyer recorded in 1855 his astonishment at this development:

What would I have said six years ago to anybody who predicted that before the enlightened nineteenth century was ended hundreds of thousands of people in this country would believe themselves able to communicate daily with the ghosts of their grandfathers? – that ex-judges of the Supreme Court, senators, clergymen, professors of physical sciences, should be lecturing and writing books on the new treasures of all this^

John Edmonds similarly described the social scope of spiritualism:

Besides the undistinguished multitude, there are many men of high standing and talent ranked among them—doctors, lawyers and clergymen in great numbers, a Protestant bishop, the learned and reverend president of a college, judges of our higher courts, members of Congress, foreign embassadors, and ex-members of the National Senate.^

Extensive demand for communication with dead ancestors is not surprising. That new media would seek to serve these demands also is not surprising. The surprising feature of nineteenth-century American spiritualism is that it modeled itself as science and made claims to public knowledge.