Ministry and the cultivation of character
Haddock was born in Watertown, New York, in 1853, the son of Methodist minister George C. Haddock and Cornelia Herrick. His early career included law and ministry. His father’s killing in Sioux City during the temperance conflict of 1886 became the subject of the biography Frank published the following year.
He later devoted himself to writing and lecturing on will, courage, personal influence and success. The Power-Book Library offered readers a connected course of study across these subjects, with Albert Lewis Pelton publishing and promoting the books. Haddock treated self-command as a capacity to develop through sustained effort rather than a fixed endowment. He died in 1915, and his work continued to circulate in subsequent editions.
Poise, influence and a spiritual self
The held 1918 edition of The Personal Atmosphere: Ten Studies in Poise and Power was published by Pelton in Meriden, Connecticut. Haddock explains that it grew from a chapter removed from a later edition of Power of Will, then revised and expanded into a separate book. He dedicates it to Albert Lewis Pelton.
The studies begin with the relation between body, mind and a deeper self. Haddock draws on contemporary discussions of ether, vibration and the subconscious to explain personal influence, before moving toward confidence and an enlarged spiritual consciousness. He also recounts an experience in Boston that he understood as a sudden expansion of awareness. These passages connect the book’s practical ambition to its metaphysical convictions. His account of a personal atmosphere is a metaphysical theory expressed in the scientific vocabulary of his time.
