Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930 9780748650668

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Determined Spirits

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres Saverio Tomaiuolo 978 0 7486 4115 4 Hbk Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Deaglán Ó Donghaile 978 0 7486 4067 6 Hbk William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 Anna Vaninskaya 978 0 7486 4149 9 Hbk 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain Nicholas Freeman 978 0 7486 4056 0 Hbk Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 Christine Ferguson 978 0 7486 3965 6 Hbk Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban Multiplicity Julian Wolfreys 978 0 7486 4040 9 Hbk Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecve Also available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys ISSN: 2044–2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

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Determined Spirits Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930

Christine Ferguson

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For John Guliak

© Christine Ferguson, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3965 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5066 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5068 2 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5067 5 (Amazon ebook) The right of Christine Ferguson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Illustrations

vi

Series Editor’s Preface

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1. Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium

21

2. Spirits in Mind: Madness, Idiocy and the Cultural Capital of Ignorance

58

3. Eugenic Summerlands: Sexual Reproduction and Family Engineering in the Spheres

86

4. Blended Souls: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Occult Miscegenation

114

5. Criminal Man and Recidivist Spirit: Spiritualism, Criminal Anthropology and Thanato-Rehabilitationism

142

6. Dead Letters: Bioaesthetics and the New Realism in Fin-deSiècle Spiritualism

172

Conclusion

199

Bibliography

204

Index

220

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Illustrations

1. S.C. Hall in The Medium and Daybreak (1883). © The British Library Board 2. Henry Slade in The Medium and Daybreak (1876). © The British Library Board 3. William Oxley in The Medium and Daybreak (1885). © The British Library Board

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Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and, simultaneously, an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually openminded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from

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convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

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Acknowledgements

Like the movement it traces, this project has been a transatlantic enterprise, its research taking place over ten years in institutions across Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Along the way, I have accrued many debts of gratitude to the individuals, organisations and funding agencies without whom the work would have been impossible. A 2002–4 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia gave me the invaluable time and resources to start exploring the verbal and writing practices associated with Victorian Spiritualism. Here I benefited immensely from the encouragement and inspirational early career mentorship provided by Pamela Dalziel and Joy Dixon. By the end of the fellowship period, I had redirected my focus onto the fascinating and curiously persistent obsession with reproduction and heredity that I had started to observe in the Spiritualist archive. This shift coincided with a geographic move to the University of Alberta, where I took up a position in the Department of English and Film Studies. Here Peter Sinnema and Susan Hamilton, wonderful friends and intensely supportive colleagues, gave me invaluable feedback on early project-related grant applications and articles and helped me with the tricky logistics of overseas research trip planning. Their assistance was crucial to the success of my 2007 SSHRC New Scholars Standard Grant bid, a major award for which I remain deeply thankful despite having to turn it down in light of my departure from Canada to a post at the University of Glasgow. A 2008 British Academy Small Research Award and a 2009 C.P. Snow Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin allowed me to extend and deepen my researches into the rich eugenic imagination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century AngloAmerican Spiritualism. Special thanks are due to the excellent reading room staff at the Ransom Center for their helpfulness in pointing out relevant and rare archival sources well beyond the ones I had initially

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identified. At Glasgow, my wonderful colleagues Adrienne Scullion, John Caughie and Jane Goldman helped me navigate the new UK grant culture and gave me valuable and keen-sighted guidance as I prepared an application to the 2010 Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship scheme. The resulting award, which I took up in conjunction with a term of departmental leave, gave me with a vital year of uninterrupted research leave in which to complete my manuscript. Great thanks are due to my editor, Julian Wolfreys, for encouraging and contracting the project while it was still in its relatively early stages, and to Jackie Jones and Jenny Daly at EUP for steering it to its completion. For their friendship, intellectual support and guidance, I am also grateful to Geraldine Brennan, Neil Litmann, Patricia Pulham, Rob Wilson, Sarah Wilburn, Tatiana Kontou, James Eli Adams, David Amigoni and Martin Willis. I thank the Journal of Victorian Culture and SEL Studies in English Literature for permission to reproduce parts of the research previously published in article form (‘Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist Purification of the Race’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 12.1 (2007): 64–85; ‘Zola in Ghostland: Spiritualist Literary Criticism and Naturalist Supernaturalism’, SEL Studies in English Literature, 50.4 (Autumn 2010): 877–94). Finally, my deepest thanks go to my partner John Guliak, whose passionate commitment to disability rights and social inclusion has continually inspired this project just as his love and encouragement kept me going through many a long cold Prairie and then Glaswegian winter. This book is for him.

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Introduction

Modern Spiritualism has experienced a remarkable revival in its academic and counter-cultural capital since the 1970s. This scholarly renaissance represents a considerable turnabout for the heterodox movement inaugurated in a humble upstate New York farmhouse in 1848, and once derided as a pathetic, trivial and best-forgotten freak of the West’s vexed and still incomplete transit towards secular modernity. Even if its constituents never succeeded in widely disseminating their belief in a vocal and interventionist spirit world, their faith is now regularly tapped as an index to shifting religious and social attitudes in its two most fertile early sites: Great Britain and the United States. Few scholars today would disagree with Janet Oppenheim’s characterisation of nineteenth-century Spiritualists as individuals whose ‘concerns and aspirations placed them – far from the lunatic fringe of their society – squarely amidst the cultural, intellectual, and emotional moods of the era’ (Oppenheim 1985: 4). Yet the critical reappraisal of modern Spiritualism pioneered by the likes of Oppenheim and Alex Owen, and continued in the work of Daniel Cottom, Helen Sword and others, has done more than simply render it a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry; it has also worked to reconfigure the social, aesthetic and political dimensions of the movement in a way that insists on their compatibility with, and indeed anticipation of, the ideological tendencies of modernity and postmodernity. Thus seance transcription techniques have been lauded for their precocious experimentation with the radical narrative practices later adopted by the modernist avant-garde (Cottom 1991; Sword 2002), while the movement’s leading nineteenth-century proselytes and mediums are celebrated for their participation in the progressive political movements – feminism, socialism and anti-imperialism – that gained wider constituencies if never full realisation in the West’s subsequent cultural life.1 Particularly striking is the au courant if somewhat anachronistic

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lexicon through which Spiritualism’s new face is increasingly asserted – that is, through reference to the movement’s alleged early investment in the paradigms and tropes now valorised in postmodern textual analysis and contemporary radical politics: anti-essentialism, liminality, subversion and indeterminacy. Exemplifying this rhetorical turn in her recent account of English medium Annie Fairlamb Mellon’s materialisation seances, Marlene Tromp observes that: the radical descriptions of identity that consistently occurred in her séances – at the level of gender, race, and class – made the medium difficult to ‘pin down’ and they betokened a larger, and increasingly self-conscious political concern about the effectiveness of what we might term a ‘postmodern,’ fluid and mobile identity. (Tromp 2006: 128)

Thus the version of transatlantic Spiritualism lately recuperated by the academy is one that looks more and more, perhaps suspiciously, familiar, an eccentric manifestation of subversive praxis and belief always already in line with contemporary paradigms of radicalism. Even if scholars pause at giving credence to modern Spiritualism’s alleged spiritual phenomena – those awkward toe raps and embarrassing cheesecloth phantoms – they have come to celebrate its ways of thinking about identity, gender and the aesthetic, recognising them as canny and precipitous reflections of safely secularised commitments. While not seeking to wholly dismiss these important recuperative interventions, Determined Spirits seeks to balance them by documenting the crucial part of the transatlantic Spiritualist movement’s story that they leave untold – that is, its largely neglected role in formulating and disseminating hard hereditarian thought, eugenic doctrines of sexual reproduction, and occult raciology in the decades prior to and after the advent of Galtonism. Covering a period that runs from the movement’s mid-nineteenth-century American origins through to the post-World War I prophetic writing of the movement’s most ardent proselyte, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this book investigates a Spiritualist ethos dedicated, not to indeterminacy, but to bioessentialism, racial and hereditary determinism, and the prenatal fixity of character. As such, the movement formed a vital, dynamic and eccentric site of nineteenth-century eugenic utopianism, one which sought to appropriate the findings and speculations of the new evolutionary and hereditary sciences for its own otherworldly, but never anti-materialist, cause. Through careful readings of rare nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of Spiritualist fiction, journalism, life writing, sex manuals, healing texts and channelled accounts of the afterlife, I demonstrate transatlantic Spiritualism’s production – and simultaneous critique – of a series of overlapping

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bioknowledges which fed into and fuelled the radical popular audience for fin-de-siècle degeneration theory, criminal anthropology, rational reproduction and Galtonian eugenics. In reading modern Spiritualist writing through the lens of its hereditarian and racially essentialist vision of the cosmos, Determined Spirits aims to reconstitute the movement in terms that would be more recognisable to its early adherents than those offered by its recent postmodern interpreters. Many of Spiritualism’s early converts came to the movement after prior apprenticeships in the rich deterministic reform programmes circulating in the radical culture of the early nineteenth century, including phrenology and Owenism, and their public declarations of conversion rested more frequently on stalwart if naïve appeals to empirical proof – spirits existed because they could be seen and touched – than on rejections of the physical world and its chief phenomenological unit, the body. These believers would no doubt have been appalled by the suggestion that their seances aimed to destabilise personal identity rather than to confirm it; on the contrary, they hoped to prove beyond doubt that the shadowy contours and gnomic utterances produced by mediums belonged to their beloved dead. The production of ontological uncertainty, far from being the desired outcome of the early Spiritualist seance, stood as its antithesis. Why, after all, would a heterodox movement whose conversion tactics rested not on the simple advocacy of faith, but on empirical demonstration of personal survival, possibly seek to advertise and revel in the indeterminacy of selfhood? The failure to account for this glaring contradiction between the documented ambitions and retrospective theoretical suggestiveness of modern Spiritualism represents, as Elana Gomel has recently pointed out, the biggest weakness of postmodernist accounts of the movement: ‘postmodernism [. . .] sidesteps the problems of representational veracity, focusing on the textual construction of reality. But for Spiritualism, the question of veracity – were the spirits real or not – was absolutely crucial’ (Gomel 2007a: 751). In recognising the profound differences between the mandates of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spiritualist writers and those of their recent critical interpreters, I do not seek to champion a crude intentional fallacy which insists that the only valid explications of Spiritualist literature come from its producers. I simply suggest that modern Spiritualism’s overt commitment to bioessentialism and eugenics, one riven through its prolific literature, demands more scholarly reckoning than it has previously received, particularly if we are to understand its relationship with surrounding nonSpiritualist forms of supernatural writing and its legacy for subsequent versions of New Age Spiritualist belief and practice.

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Not all contemporary studies of the movement have entirely sidelined its persistent attraction to deterministic models of subjectivity, and resulting production of sometimes highly reactionary paradigms of race, class, disability and gender. Alex Owen’s landmark The Darkened Room (1989) provides a particularly deft and influential account of the double bind that modern Spiritualism presented to its female believers, offering to liberate them from the behaviours and space of bourgeois femininity while nonetheless relying on essentialist accounts of women’s innate submissiveness and sympathy to explain their mediumistic prowess (A. Owen 1989: 240). Admirably resisting any premature celebration of mediumship as an act of feminist resistance, Owen concludes that: a claim to power which rests upon innate feminine characteristics is vulnerable to appropriation. The qualities of receptivity and passivity can be advanced as potential spiritual allies, but they can also bind women into a paradigm of weakness, instability inferiority, and social powerlessness [. . .] Nineteenth-century female Spiritualist mediumship might have been subversive, even empowering, but it was also ensnaring. (A. Owen 1989: 242)

Owen’s compelling recognition of the symbiosis between subversion and reaction in Spiritualist identity politics has not, unfortunately, been taken up by all of its subsequent critics, many of whom either ignore modern Spiritualism’s pervasive recourse to bioessentialism – not just, as Determined Spirits will importantly argue, in the case of women, but in regards to all humans – or downplay its significance in favour of the movement’s more democratic aspects. Helen Sword, for example, in her otherwise excellent investigation of the movement’s aesthetic influence on high modernism, remarks: Although it is certainly true that nineteenth-century Spiritualism replicated problematic imperialist attitudes [. . .] class structures [. . .] and gender paradigms [. . .] its widespread appeal seems to have depended, above all, on its elastic capacity to offer something for everyone, the empowered as well as the disempowered. (Sword 2002: 3)

Determined Spirits will not so much dispute this statement as reverse the priority of its clauses. Although it is certainly true, I argue, that modern Spiritualism offered something for the powerful and the disenfranchised alike, the movement’s popularity cannot have been entirely independent of its incorporation of traditional and emergent paradigms of biological determinism, hereditary fatalism and racial destiny that often worked to naturalise rather than dissolve the oppression of minorities. This ideological presence is too significant and persistent within the movement’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature to be brushed aside with no more than a brief concession.

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Determined Spirits draws its evidence from the generically rich range of literature – trance speeches, seance transcriptions, afterlife novels, educational tracts, sex and parentage guides, autobiography, serialised fiction, journalism and literary criticism – produced by, rather than simply about, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spiritualist believers. I was impelled in this selection by what struck me as a curious imbalance in the scholarship of Spiritualism’s literary traces: the movement’s self-produced and published writing has consistently attracted less attention from literary scholars than the representations of mediumship and psychical phenomena written by more sceptical members of the established canon, such as Charles Dickens, Henry James, Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling.2 In some sense, this neglect is understandable; given that so much Spiritualist literature was produced under trance conditions and/or by novice writers with little literary experience or aspiration, it neither reached the audiences, nor regularly exhibited the aesthetic standards, of the period’s major authors. Nonetheless, these limitations should not exclude this fascinating literary corpus from scholarly attention, and certainly do not validate the level of contempt demonstrated by some chroniclers – Daniel Cottom, for example, claiming in his 1991 study Abyss of Reason that ‘What this movement had to say about spirits was practically insignificant in comparison to the practices that composed its sayings’ (Cottom 1991: 109). Such a dismissal perpetuates the Victorian anti-Spiritualist prejudice which held the content and aesthetic expression of Spiritualist belief to be meaningless and trivial; worse, it promotes a necessarily impoverished appreciation of the movement’s political, social and aesthetic philosophies by inviting us to ignore its most vivid and compelling sources. It is, I argue, precisely in what the transatlantic movement had to say about spirits that we find its most potent, impassioned and often deeply troubling articulations of biodeterministic selfhood and eugenic utopianism. We neglect the socalled ‘minor’ literature of modern Spiritualism at the peril of losing a fuller understanding of the movement’s profound aesthetic, sociological and political ambitions.

Myths of Origin: The Birth of the Transatlantic Spiritualist Movement Then, as God himself does not write history, any more than He dictates works on science or treatises on art, all history, sacred or profane, must come to us written by man; in other words, it must come to us transmitted through a fallible medium. We cannot change this, and we ought not to forget it. (R. D. Owen 1871: 143)

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Modern Spiritualism’s myth of origination in the rural backwaters of New York State is one on whose importance (if not veracity) both nineteenth-century believers and contemporary critics would be likely to agree.3 Most Victorian and indeed twenty-first-century accounts of the movement open with the story of the prepubescent Fox sisters’ first contacts with the spirit world through a series of humble raps in the great revolutionary year of 1848. The girls’ fame rapidly spread through the Northeastern United States, their movement and mediumistic techniques soon adopted by legions of followers and exported to Great Britain in 1852 by Mrs Hayden, the enterprising medium who converted communitarian Robert Owen. Here, so the oft-told story runs, it enjoyed a fleeting, if dramatic, mainstream popularity before falling into slow decline in the 1870s as a result of the repeated exposures of fraud made possible by the new fad for materialisation – after all, it was far easier to prove a medium false when she was caught with inflatable rubber ‘spirit’ hands in her pockets than when she was merely claiming to be vocalising the sentiments of an unnamed supernatural intelligence. During and even after its late-century wane, modern Spiritualism captivated the imagination and inspired the faith of a wide cross-section of the population, including such literary luminaries as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Conan Doyle and pre-eminent scientists such as William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and Alfred Russel Wallace. Once converted (typically through apparent contact with their own dead loved ones), believers were unlikely to abandon their convictions despite repeated condemnation and mockery from the antiSpiritualist mainstream. Even the Fox sisters’ dramatic 1888 confession that they had been making the disembodied rap sounds with their feet all along failed to dissuade stalwart believers, who insisted that the fallen heroines, now alcoholic and impoverished casualties of their own childhood fame, had been coerced into making a false statement. Spiritualism in its Victorian form declined after this so-called ‘death-blow’,4 experiencing a brief revival in the wake of the devastating losses of World War I before dissipating into the New Age movement and being converted into fodder for syndicated television programmes and blockbuster films in our own age. This brief summary encapsulates the popular script of modern Spiritualism’s rise and fall over the last century and a half. Like most myths of origin and decline, it is misleading and has been challenged on a number of counts in recent years. Jenny Hazelgrove and Steven J. Sutcliffe, for example, have argued for an expansion of the usual historical parameters of the movement’s ascendency, demonstrating Spiritualism’s survival, in Britain at least, as a form of private consolation

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and millenarianism well into the interwar years in which it experienced a new ‘boom time’ (Hazelgrove 2000: 2). Others, including Bridget Bennett, have argued that the geographical transmission trajectory habitually assigned to modern Spiritualism – as a movement which appeared sui generis in America before moving to Great Britain and beyond – is deeply inadequate, failing to encompass Spiritualism’s complex transatlantic diffusion process and the mutual commerce between its many cultural locations. To imagine Spiritualism’s spread as a form of unidirectional transmission, or more misleading yet, to present its origins as mono-cultural or mono-national, is to ignore ‘the heterogeneity of a movement that draws from both sides of the Atlantic, from European traditions of magic, the occult, and religious beliefs and practices as well as the presence, impact, practices, and importance of Indians and Africans’ (Bennett 2007: 31). Modern Spiritualism, Bennett importantly reminds us, is best approached through an analysis of its multiple and diverse locations rather than through a narrowly nationalist perspective. Inspired by such revisionary work, Determined Spirits embraces a deliberately broad swathe of Spiritualist history, refusing to cut off the narrative of the movement’s enduring eugenic romance at the World War I period when, as we will see in Chapter 3, some of its most fantastical and explicit expressions were beginning to proliferate in the form of afterlife narratives. I do not share with some commentators, including Helen Sword and Jill Galvan, the conviction that Victorian and Modernist-era Spiritualist discourses differ markedly in the degree to which they embrace serious social, philosophical and aesthetic issues; indeed, the movement’s long-standing preoccupation with race improvement, present from the 1850s to the 1920s and beyond provides compelling evidence of deep continuity if not absolute identity between the transcendental ambitions of supposedly discrete areas of modern Spiritualist thought. Similarly, my study eschews a mono-cultural framework in favour of a transatlantic one, focusing specifically on the writing of those peripatetic Anglo-American mediums and believers who travelled back and forth across the ocean, importing and synthesising new texts and beliefs as they did so. This cross-cultural purview was necessitated by the extraordinary mobility and unique spatial transmission modes of Spiritualist writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modern Spiritualism represents a fascinating form of cultural and literary globalisation, its advent coinciding, as Bridget Bennett has shown, with the birth of new transportation, publishing and communication technologies which allowed its revelation to spread at hitherto unprecedented rates. This rapidity and multiplicity of dissemination worked largely to render the question of textual origination moot, as did

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Spiritualist phenomena themselves. Although the writings examined in this study were produced within particular national and cultural locations, they were rarely defined exclusively through these contexts by their (often allegedly entranced) composers who insisted that their words and inspiration were coming from elsewhere. Poughkeepsie seer Andrew Jackson Davis, for example, claimed that his opus The Great Harmonia ([1850] 1851), although written by an (his own) American hand, actually represented the thought of departed geniuses from Northern Europe and Ancient Rome (Emanuel Swedenborg and Galen, respectively). Doubting readers attributed Davis’s words to a more profoundly mundane source, namely the cheap editions of Robert Chamber’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Swedenborg’s mystical writing that he was accused of secretly reading and plagiarising. Virtually impossible to prove or falsify – after all, what better defence against plagiarism than to claim actual possession by the original author? – these allegations pose a methodological problem that can only be solved by embracing a crosscultural purview. It makes little sense to assign The Great Harmonia, as for so many other Spiritualist texts of the era, a singular national provenance; the book, partially plagiarised from a Scot and a Swede, attributed largely to a Classical physician, composed by an American, and circulated widely in nineteenth-century anglophone Spiritualist communities, had decidedly multiple sources, audiences, affiliations and influences. If we want to understand the scope of modern Spiritualism’s eclectic hereditarianism and transnational eugenicism – its incorporation of influences from Owenism, polygenetic ethnology, Lombrosan criminal anthropology and French literary naturalism, to name but a few – we simply cannot afford to read its American and British expressions in rarefied isolation from each other. This broadness of approach is responsible for Determined Spirits’ arguably contrarian stance towards Spiritualist identity politics. As I read widely across the Anglo-American Spiritualist archive, I was struck by the endemic tension between the movement’s well-established public face as a vanguard for feminism, abolition and socialism and its frequent deference to biofatalism in its discussion of both genders and all races. I sought to understand how Spiritualism’s long-acknowledged championship of the rights of the working classes and women, for example, was able to coexist with its recurrent fetishisation of the physically fit body as a supreme manifestation of moral value. How are we to make sense of American medium Cora Tappan’s astonishing appropriation of sociologist Richard Dugdale’s degenerate family study of the Jukes clan while speaking under (alleged) trance at an 1875 gathering at the London Spiritualist Alliance (Tappan 1875: 43)? What of eminent British

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Spiritualist Sophia De Morgan’s claim in her 1863 work From Matter to Spirit that spectral dogs were really the ghosts of human ‘imbeciles’ whose low mental organisation had prevented them from acquiring a recognisably human spirit (De Morgan 1863: 245)? Where is the evidence of Spiritualism’s much-vaunted egalitarianism in this jarring piece of otherworldly negative eugenic advice channelled by Scottish-American medium Daniel Dunglas Home (purportedly under the spirit guidance of mesmeric-physician John Elliotson) during an 1868 seance with prominent members of the British aristocracy? It’s very wrong to allow persons to marry who are not properly fitted to perpetuate their race [. . .] Angels standing by a very many weddings, where all is rejoicing, weep and mourn – for they see the poor form that must go out and suffer, – the outcast, the criminal, and the murderer. (Adare 1870: 89)5

If we are to account for the significance and prevalence of such sentiments in transatlantic Spiritualist writing, we need to trace the movement’s co-emergence and alliance with a much wider set of Victorian and Edwardian cultural and political formations than those of feminism, socialism and abolitionism alone. Namely, we must address modern Spiritualism’s abiding love–hate relationship with individualism, free will, materialist theories of mind, degenerationism and the eugenics ideology popularised if not originated by Francis Galton.

Channelling the New Race: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist and Eugenic Affinities The early histories of the modern Spiritualist and eugenics movements seem at first to have little in common, except perhaps from a shared tangential connection to New York State. Here was the home of mediums Kate and Margaret Fox and legendary seer Andrew Jackson Davis; here too, just over thirty miles from Davis’s birthplace, lived the infamous Jukes clan whose imputed degeneracy would, despite the environmentalist intentions of their chronicler Richard Dugdale, do so much to fuel public support for state intervention in the reproductive rights of the so-called unfit.6 Yet other connections exist: Davis and the Foxes had themselves fuelled a milder version of degeneration panic earlier in the century when, as S.E.D. Shortt has documented, anti-Spiritualist alienists had presented the movement they helped to found as evidence of a dangerous and escalating epidemic of congenital insanity. Describing English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley’s version of this argument, Alex Owen writes:

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Spiritualism not only caused derangement but also actually attracted the incipiently insane. The menacing forces of heredity were at work amongst ‘the lame, the halt, the blind, the warped in intellect, who follow eagerly dark by-paths of belief’: this was the stuff of which Spiritualists were made. (A. Owen 1989: 20)7

In such anxious diagnoses of Spiritualism as both cause and effect of degeneracy, the mainstream medical establishment positioned families likes the Foxes in the same biological category as the Jukes, arguing for them as the joint products of a hereditary and environmental determinism that could be cured only by drastic measures, which could potentially include eugenic legislation. Modern Spiritualists rarely responded to the medical attacks on their faith by simply undermining their materialist and degenerationist bases; on the contrary, they more frequently wove these tenets into their own philosophy and used them to buttress their counter-strikes. As a result, when one reads Victorian and Edwardian Spiritualist and eugenics writing side by side, their rhetorical similarities often seem far more immediate and arresting than their obvious points of contention. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the movements’ shared ambitions; both were particularly potent and controversial forms of popular utopianism whose followers respectively maintained that natural selection alone was no longer a sufficient mechanism for bringing the human race to its optimal stage.8 Each also, while paying lip service to the importance of individual exceptionalism and genius, suggested that human behaviour, far from being independent and self-chosen, was largely directed by unseen and as yet poorly understood influences. For eugenicists, this force was heredity, a process whose workings would remain esoteric until the rediscovery of Mendel’s theories in 1900;9 for Spiritualists, it was the spirits of the dead who worked through the living to improve the species and enable its biological perfection. Adherents of both belief systems embraced a worldview in which the dead, whether for good or evil, and whether through the bioplasm or the disembodied will, controlled the deeds of the living. It is as a result of these deep affinities between Spiritualism and eugenic utopianism that one can sometimes struggle to differentiate their written expressions. Here, for example, is a passage from the final page of foundational eugenicist Francis Galton’s 1908 autobiography, Memories of My Life: Individuals appear to me as partial detachments from the infinite ocean of Being, and the world is a stage in which Evolution takes place, principally hitherto by means of Natural Selection, which achieves the good of the whole with scant regard to that of the individual. (Galton 1908: 323)

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Now compare it with this excerpt from poet, Chartist and Spiritualist Gerald Massey’s 1888 ‘Lecture on the Coming Religion’, printed in The Medium and Daybreak as ‘Parentage and Social Reconstruction’: Instead of the ancient damnation of the flesh we need a religion of the body as well as of the soul, and gospel of human physics. Hitherto the utmost that has been aimed at scientifically has been a better breed of horses or cattle; we ought to be at least as careful in the bringing forth of human beings. (Massey 1888)

In these passages, the evolutionary interventionist and the radical metaphysician trade places, the first imagining the world simply as a (intriguingly, not the) platform for cosmic evolution towards species perfection, the second echoing both Charles Darwin’s call for a practical application of stockbreeding techniques to human reproduction and Francis Galton’s for a religion of eugenics.10 While at least one of the two writers would have grudged the comparison11 – Galton, after attending seances with William Crookes, Serjeant Cox and D.D. Home in 1872, became in the words of disciple Karl Pearson ‘a despiser of “Spiritualistic” séances’ (Pearson 1924: II, 67)12 – their sentiments nonetheless represent a shared intellectual dedication to the consilience of evolution, mysticism and human heredity. Then as now, bio-utopianism creates strange bedfellows. The philosophical, aesthetic and rhetorical continuities that this study traces between modern Spiritualism and popular eugenics emerged in a period of unprecedented population growth, migration and dispersion in the United States and Great Britain, characterised by the increasing enfranchisement and political agitation of the working classes and the hardening of science’s cultural authority as a solution to social problems. By imagining paupers, criminals and the mentally defective as instances of congenital deviance as well as subjects of social injustice and moral weakness, the contemporary eugenic Spiritualists we will encounter made the outcast classes both more sympathetic – pitiable victims of their own biology – and potentially more easy to eradicate. If the hotchpotch of Lamarckist, Darwinian and folk beliefs they held about the ineluctability of hereditary transmission were true, then humanity would no longer have to submit to the biblical edict that ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (Matthew 26: 11);13 abnormality, even if spiritual in origin, might be bred out of the bone through rational reproduction techniques. By advocating practices of selective human breeding and, occasionally, negative eugenic intervention, many Spiritualist believers felt themselves, like their secular eugenicist counterparts, to be offering expedient and compassionate solutions to the problems of

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social inequity. With few exceptions, neither camp believed that environmental improvement could have no ameliorative effect on the lives of those supposed to be hereditarily unfit;14 rather, they held that the bioengineering of the species might simply prove a simpler, quicker and more permanent means of achieving equality than the provision of better education and housing for the dysgenic classes alone. It is impossible to understand the appeal of eugenics to progressive groups in this period if we lose sight of these ostensibly benevolent if retrospectively misguided intentions. In their cosmic rationalisation of proscribed breeding, Victorian Spiritualist eugenicists regularly anticipated the specious quality of life (and afterlife) arguments made by later scientific eugenicists such as Leonard Darwin,15 who speculated in his 1928 book What is Eugenics?, ‘As to actual idiots, after visiting an institution where numbers of these creatures are being dragged through a useless and senseless existence, everyone must wish that something might be done to prevent all such as these from entering the world’ (L. Darwin 1928: 44). Most striking about this comment, apart from its dismaying callousness, is its acknowledgement and then immediate suppression of the social origin of the suffering it documents. The alleged misery of the mentally disabled may be best evidenced in the dehumanising environmental conditions of the asylum, but it is not, Darwin suggests in a flash of astonishing myopia, produced by them. As such, it seems kinder to remove asylum inmates from the gene pool than to fix or destroy the institutions that hold them. Darwin’s rhetorical move here is one we will see prefigured in modern Spiritualist writings on disability and criminality from the 1850s onwards. The spectre of biological determinism – one that often intensifies into biofatalism – repeatedly haunts and thwarts the transatlantic movement’s better-advertised support for a multiplicity of reform causes that spanned to include feminism, socialism, abolition, dress reform, abolition, vegetarianism, animal rights and sanitary reform. As is now well known, many if not all believers held a belief in post-life survival to be concomitant with a dedication to ameliorating the lot of the living, at least to the extent that such mundane improvement was possible. Famous evolutionist convert Alfred Russel Wallace urged this case in his 1898 address to the International Congress of Spiritualists in London: If the accounts we get of the spirit world have any truth in them, the reclamation and education of the millions of undeveloped and degraded spirits which annually quit this earth, is a sore burden, a source of trouble and sorrow to those more advanced spirits who have a charge of them. This burden must, for a long time to come at all events, necessarily be great, on account of the

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numbers of less advanced races and peoples still on this earth; but that we who call ourselves civilized [. . .] should send to the spirit world, day by day and year by year, millions of men and women, of children, and of infants, all sent there before their time through want of the necessary means of a healthy life, or by the various diseases and accidents forced upon them by the vile conditions under which alone we give them the opportunity of living at all – this is a disgrace and a crime! (Wallace 1898: 335)

Wallace’s conviction leads him to call on Spiritualists around the world to fight for equality of opportunity on earth and to demand ‘not charity only but justice’ for the poor (Wallace 1898: 336). Yet Wallace’s notion of the afterlife as a space of inevitable amelioration threatens to undermine his argument’s socialist logic. Like most of his co-believers, he held that all spirits, no matter how physically damaged, reprobate or feeble-minded (and these conditions are not always or even often imagined as unrelated in Victorian occult thought), were ultimately if not immediately bound to predestined improvement in the next life; unlike in traditional Christian eschatology, there was to be no final judgement and damnation. This fundamental meliorism formed a stark contrast with the restricted political potential for reform in the material world. However passionately and insistently Spiritualist reformers might argue for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised on earth, their utopian vision of the afterlife implied that no mundane system of social improvement could ever come close to the impending perfection of the glorious Summerland. This disjuncture between the real and the ideal unsurprisingly led some, as we shall see, to view the next world as a better reformatory for the inveterate criminal or the congenital ‘idiot’ than the asylum or the jail. If one could not fix the social structures or hereditary abnormalities that consigned the residuum to an apparently wretched, violent existence, one might wait for or even encourage their passage to the great sanatorium in the sky. Chapter 1, ‘Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium’, traces the origins of modern Spiritualism’s deterministic and hereditarian ethos through its genealogical connections to phrenology and Owenism. Both movements had a massive influence on Spiritualist concepts of human identity, and helped in the nineteenth century to create a receptivity to the ideas of non-agential subjectivity, hard hereditarianism and programmes of socialist bioengineering within the radical community which Spiritualism would later exploit. The latter part of the chapter focuses on the emergence of eugenic rhetoric in the memoirs and biographical writings of some of the movement’s most prominent advocates and mediums, specifically Andrew Jackson Davis and Paschal Beverly Randolph. Through a consideration of Davis’s

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two autobiographies, The Magic Staff (1857) and Beyond the Valley (1885), and Randolph’s pseudonymously published biography of the mediumistic Davenport Brothers, The Davenport Brothers: The WorldRenowned Spirit Mediums (1869a), we will see how Spiritualist life writing from the mid-century onwards came to serve as a platform not only, or even primarily, for its authors’ beliefs in the communicatory powers of the dead, but also for their increasing reservations about the existence or virtue of free will in light of their highly fatalistic view of human heredity. Far from acknowledging the indeterminacy and fluidity of the self, these writers insisted on a bioessentialist conception of identity, presenting their own mediumistic capabilities as the product, not of revelation, piety or rigorous practice, but rather of evolutionary destiny and inherited capacity. After this demonstration of the early movement’s biographical preoccupation with hereditary fatalism and spirit-body identity, Chapter 2 examines how these concerns shaped Spiritualism’s response to the medico-cultural phenomenon it was frequently accused of escalating: namely, the supposed spread of mental defect and disease. These accusations, levied by the likes of esteemed British medical professionals Henry Maudsley and William Carpenter, required and elicited urgent response from the nineteenth-century Spiritualist believers who knew all too well that their beliefs might cause them to run afoul of contemporary lunacy legislation.16 Instead of focusing on the well-documented medical attacks on Anglo-American Spiritualism, this chapter addresses believers’ creative, appropriative and, fascinatingly, eugenic reactions to them. We will meet the Spiritualists who countered by establishing and championing their own radical theories of mental ability and genius, ones in which intelligence became a disembodied force that was best exercised and evidenced through a mind constitutionally unequipped for higher thought. The more ignorant, or even mentally defective, the medium, they reasoned, the more convincing his or her display of learning under trance; intelligence, far from being idiocy’s opposite, was in fact its co-dependent. Focusing on the extensive discussions of mental impairment, feeble-mindedness and insanity that appeared in the late Victorian Spiritualist press, the chapter traces the tension between the movement’s desire to establish Spiritualist belief as a form of ‘higher thought’ while simultaneously elevating the cultural capital of ignorance and mental deficiency. Modern Spiritualism’s deeply paradoxical championship of eugenically engineered physical perfection and the practical value of subnormality and defect produced a series of startling ontological and political contradictions which could not easily be resolved within the strictures of

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the material world. Many believers and trance writers were compelled to create an alternate space in which such a synthesis might be achievable. This was the Summerland, the name devised for the Spiritualist post-life state by Andrew Jackson Davis, and Chapter 3 examines how its developing iconography and aesthetics aimed, albeit often unsuccessfully, to reconcile the competing dimensions of the movement’s utopian thought through a tactics of supernatural reification. Part of the extremely popular subgenre of Spiritualist writing which I describe as the anthropology of the afterlife, publications such as Hudson Tuttle’s Scenes in the Spirit World (1855), Carlyle Petersilea’s The Discovered Country (1889) and Florence Marryat’s The Dead Man’s Message (1894a) act as remarkable eugenic thought-experiments, imagining post-life existence as an opportunity for the re-engineering of both the traditional family unit and the human species through a form of numinous sexual reproduction. In them, we catch glimpses of a phenotypically regulated world in which the inconvenient mismatch between body, mind and soul which characterises the living has been replaced with absolute synchronicity via an often pseudo-incestuous form of breeding. The racially ameliorative potential of controlled human sexual reproduction was also a central concern for the subject of Chapter 4, African-American mystic, sex magician and healer Paschal Beverly Randolph. An early disciple of Andrew Jackson Davis and John Murray Spear, Randolph publicly renounced Spiritualism in favour of his own eccentric brand of Rosicrucianism in the late 1850s, but he repeatedly returned to the movement and its shifting tenets through the remainder of his remarkable occultist career. His writings on race, polygenesis and miscegenation provide a fascinating flashpoint into the obdurate racial essentialism that underlay modern Spiritualism’s well-documented public opposition to slavery. This tendency provides a counter to the emancipatory cross-racial communion that some commentators, such as Marlene Tromp, see in the nineteenth-century seance’s frequent invocation of non-white spirits. Certainly, the performances of identity enacted in the Victorian seance room – where uneducated working-class white girls could temporarily take on the personae of dead slave girls or Indian braves – may have seemed to replace racial abjection with sympathy, but they could also, as Randolph well knew, produce damaging hierarchies of their own. Routinely disgusted by the automatic attribution of his own statements under trance to the elevating influence of white spirits, Randolph turned in his later life to an occultised version of practical eugenics as a means – albeit a deeply problematic one – of combating the racism he had encountered during his Spiritualist apprenticeship. I demonstrate how he used his novels, healing texts and occult sex manuals

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to advocate cosmic ‘blending’ and erotic miscegenation as the keys to transcendental cross-racial equality and empowerment. A fellow, albeit unlikely, champion of the ameliorative power of miscegenation,17 Cesare Lombroso is today more frequently, and unfairly, associated with a grim, reactionary strain of fin-de-siècle racism by virtue of his role as the founding father of criminal anthropology, the influential and controversial biodeterminist school of criminology which held that a certain percentage of the offender population was doomed to recidivism as a result of physiological atavism. It is due to this reputation that his late-life Spiritualist conversion confounded so many of his contemporaries, and indeed, subsequent scholarly critics, who generally make little mention of it in their work; for them, Lombroso’s Spiritualist turn seemed to represent an utter renunciation of the materialist evolutionary psychology on which he had built his career. Chapter 5 contextualises Lombroso’s post-conversion writings alongside a variety of late nineteenth-century Spiritualist writings on crime to revise both the crude characterisation of Lombroso as a pessimistic reactionary whose findings implicitly fuelled a negative eugenics approach to crime, and the tacit assumption that made his conversion so surprising: namely, that Spiritualist and biodeterminist theories of criminal deviance are necessarily incompatible. On the contrary, I demonstrate that the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American Spiritualist community was highly receptive and ideologically sympathetic to the new criminological positivism, an attitude evident in both the Spiritualist press’s impassioned debates about the criminal brain and occasionally explicit endorsements of Lombroso’s work at a time when it remained massively controversial. Indeed, it is via this rapport that we can best understand Lombroso’s embrace of the new faith, one which, far from opposing his earlier ideas about atavism and behaviour, supernaturalised them, and, perhaps most importantly of all, transformed the born deviant from a figure of abjection into the potential redeemer of the human race. Finally, I conclude by considering the implications of Spiritualist biodeterminism for the movement’s conceptualisations of the aesthetic. Spiritualist literary criticism, a staple feature of the movement’s press, was both indebted to and fundamentally inimical to romantic theories of creativity, revelling in the redemptive powers of the imagination but hostile to the confinement of supernatural fiction to self-consciously aesthetic and anti-realist genres such as the gothic and romance. For some of the faithful, the only way to reify the literary supernatural was to embrace an aesthetic that was modern, realist and conducive to scientific determinism – one which they found in the new literary naturalism emanating from France. Drawing upon a cross-section of

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literary criticism and fiction produced within the late nineteenth-century Spiritualist community, Chapter 6 traces the attempts of some believers to emulate the new naturalism by replotting the ghost story in accordance with the pseudo-scientific laws of hereditary determinism that went hand in hand with their interest in population control and their desire to have spirit existence recognised as an empirically verifiable fact. The Spiritualist fiction writers which this chapter considers sought to render the ghost not just real, but generically realist, a campaign which, I argue, complicates the long-standing critical equation of Spiritualist aesthetics with those of anti-realist modernism alone. It also, I suggest, provides us with a new and unexpected picture of naturalism’s resonance and influence in late Victorian Britain. In its entirety, Determined Spirits was catalysed, and remains animated by, two conflicting impulses. The first is a deep respect for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of men and women who found in the Hydesville rappings reason to defy the threats of eternal damnation that they felt had prohibited their ancestors from questioning social injustices seemingly tolerated by the Church, particularly those which targeted women, the poor and the incarcerated. Modern Spiritualists saw themselves first and foremost as radical optimists who insisted on the eternal law of progress and the supremacy of the individual, even if their own theories of spiritual influence and hard hereditary determinism sometimes nullified the concept of independent agency. Their recalcitrant hopefulness in the face of continual persecution is often moving, as is the sincerity and profundity of the very real grief that drove their performative mode of consolation. Yet undercutting this respect for the affective value, optimism and creativity of modern Spiritualism is my countervailing suspicion of the ideological work that it enlisted the dead to perform. There are, as I hope will be clear by the book’s conclusion, dangerous ethical and, indeed, aesthetic consequences in erasing the distinction between the living and the dead, and in insisting that physical and mental fitness are closely calibrated signifiers of spiritual worth. To make life no different than death – to insist that it is only the inferior prelude to the real development that happens after our spirits leave our bodies – is to risk devaluing life altogether. Modern Spiritualist believers insisted that the fact of post-life survival was the necessary cornerstone for all social progress; if there was no afterlife, they claimed, there would be no reason to live, never mind to seek a better society. Yet the opposite possibility always lurks in their writing, sometimes as a shadowy suggestion, sometimes in explicit manifestation. If progress is not an unrealisable ideal but an inescapable destination in the next world, then what is to prevent humans from sitting patiently, or even speeding through,

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their allotted earth years without engaging in the arduous and generally disappointing projects of self-transformation and world improvement? Where is the urgency to create a heaven on earth if all are guaranteed infinite, although not instantaneous, enhancement at the end of their mortal existences? If few Anglo-American Spiritualists throughout the period of this study ever nakedly claimed this calculatedly laissez-faire position, their theories and fantasies nonetheless created the conditions for its emergence. The chapters which follow will demonstrate the ease with the modern Spiritualist quest for self-liberation was able to convert into its opposite: a theory of absolute determination by supernatural, anatomical and hereditary forces that so-called ‘individuals’ had little power to resist.

Notes 1. For scholarship on modern Spiritualism’s involvement in feminist, working-class and racial emancipation, see Logie Barrow’s Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 (1986), Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (1989), Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (1989), Robert S. Cox’s Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (2003) and Marlene Tromp’s Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (2006). Studies of the movement’s anticipation of surrealist and modernist aesthetics include Daniel Cottom’s Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals (1991), Lawrence Rainey’s ‘Taking Dictation: Collage Poetics, Pathology, and Politics’ (1998) and Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism (2002). 2. Examples of scholarship on Spiritualism’s canonical imprint include Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Pamela Thurschwell’s Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (2001), Howard Kerr’s Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900 (1973) and Katherine H. Porter’s Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle (1958). 3. The phenomena and beliefs associated with modern Spiritualism did not, of course, spring sui generis into the world with the Hydesville rappings in 1848; on the contrary, they drew upon and combined with a host of indigenous American, African, European and classical magical practices and supernatural traditions. While cognisant of and often willing to acknowledge these antecedents, nineteenth-century believers nonetheless returned with regularity to the 1848 incidents as inaugural touchstone, perhaps to emphasise the modernity of their movement and its subsequent compatibility with Enlightenment rationality. For more on the syncretic and pre-nineteenth-century origins of modern Spiritualism, see John Kucich’s Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

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Century American Literature (2004), Bridget Bennett’s Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007) and Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (2009). This mode of describing the Fox sisters’ confession became common after the publication of Reuben Briggs Davenport’s account of the scandal, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism: Being the True Story of the Fox Sisters, as Revealed by the Authority of Margaret Fox Kane and Catherine Fox Jencken (1888). This message was recorded during one of Home’s 1868 seances with the Viscount Adare (Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin) and later written up in Adare’s privately published Experiences in Spiritualism (1870). Dugdale’s study differed from later eugenic discussions of criminality and pauperism in the greater role it attributes to environmental factors. A Lamarckist eugenicist, Dugdale concluded that ‘environment tends to produce habits which may become hereditary, so in pauperism and licentiousness, if it should be sufficiently constant to produce modification of cerebral tissue’ (Dugdale [1874] 1891: 66). His solution for families like the Jukes was not sterilisation or incarceration, but rather sanitary housing and education. As Elof Carlson points out, however, this aspect of the study was largely ignored in the sociological circles in which it circulated after Dugdale’s death in 1883. Rejecting Dugdale’s stipulations, subsequent sociological interpreters perpetuated the myth of the Jukes as ‘condemned, unredeemable kindred’ and used their case to lobby for immediate eugenic reform (Carlson 2001: 172). The pathological aetiology of Spiritualism propounded by Maudsley, L.S. Forbes Winslow, William Carpenter and others gained increasing authority throughout the 1870s and was used as the rationale for the forcible confinement of several prominent female English Spiritualists, including Louisa Lowe and Georgina Weldon. See Henry Maudsley’s Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings ([1886] 1897), William Carpenter’s Mesmerism, Spiritualism, etc. Historically and Scientifically Considered (1877), L.S. Forbes Winslow’s Spiritualistic Madness (1877) and Roy Porter et al.’s Women, Madness, and Spiritualism (2003). Eugenicist Karl Pearson’s 1912 lecture Social Problems: Their Treatment, Past, Present, and Future encapsulates the eugenic conviction that natural selection was no longer serving human interests and required aggressive supplementation: ‘We have now consciously to undertake the work of natural selection ourselves, for we have suspended Nature’s effective but oft-times harsh methods of raising our stock. We have to check the fertility of the unfit, and encourage that of the fit’ (Pearson 1912: 38). Others, such as Francis Galton, had argued that the problem was not with natural selection per se but rather with its effacement by the artificial selection processes produced by modern civilisation (Galton 1865: 326). For a discussion of the spectrum of eugenicist attitudes towards natural selection, see Daniel Jo Kevles’s In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985). For more on the status and theories of biological hereditarianism in Europe prior to the advent of Mendelism, see Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg

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10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

Determined Spirits Rheinberger’s introduction to Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 (2007). Darwin advanced this proposition in the conclusion to The Descent of Man ([1871] 2001), while Galton appealed for a religion of eugenics in his 1904 essay, ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims’. Essays by Paul White and Roger Wood in Müller-Wille and Rheinberger’s Heredity Produced (2007) discuss the origins and development of stockbreeding metaphors in European hereditarian thought. Massey, like thousands if not millions of his fellow British and American Spiritualists, saw no incompatibility whatsoever between his beliefs and the tenets of evolution, even if he never seems to have fully understood the latter. ‘Spiritualism’, he wrote in Concerning Spiritualism (1871), ‘will accept Darwinism, and complete it and clinch it on the other side’ (Massey 1871: 61). Pearson’s conclusion warrants some suspicion. As Galton’s hagiographer and the British eugenics movement’s most ardent early exponent, Pearson had a vested interested in presenting its so-called founding father in as rational a light as possible. In his biography of Galton, Pearson admitted that he had no record of the timing or reasons for the thinker’s disavowal of Spiritualism, although he insists that the rejection was final. Pearson claimed that, by 1908: ‘Galton must long and definitely have been convinced of the futility of any light reaching human affairs from that strange medley of self-deception, chicanery, and credulity which passes under the name of Spiritualism’ (Pearson 1924: II, 67). For more on the social, political, economic and scientific origins of British and American eugenics, see Kevles (1985), Soloway (1990), Mazumdar (1992), Waller (2001) and Richardson (2003). Consider, for example, Galton’s 1873 essay ‘Hereditary Improvement’ which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. Here he insists: ‘There is nothing in what I am about to say that shall underrate the sterling value of nurture, including all kinds of sanitary improvements; nay, I wish to claim them as powerful auxiliaries to my cause; nevertheless, I look upon race as far more important than nurture. Race has a double effect; it creates better and more intelligent individuals, and these become more competent than their predecessors to make laws and customs, whose effects shall favourably react on their own health, and on the nurture of their children’s’ (Galton 1873: 116). See also Leonard Darwin’s What is Eugenics? (1928) for a similar argument about the merit but comparative ineffectiveness of social reform. Son of Charles Darwin and President of the Eugenics Society from 1911– 28. For more on the forcible institutionalisation of (particularly female) Spiritualists in the nineteenth century, see Roy Porter et al.’s Women, Madness, and Spiritualism (2003). Lombroso declared in the fifth edition of his landmark Criminal Man that ‘when grafted together, races become more progressive and revolutionary’ (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 328).

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Chapter 1

Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium

In what has become one of the best-known articulations of eugenic yearning in Victorian scientific thought, Charles Darwin uses the conclusion to The Descent of Man ([1871] 2001) to identify and critique the popular resistance to his proposed exploration of managed human breeding. He writes: Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. Yet he might by his own selection do something not only for the bodily constitution of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. (C. Darwin [1871] 2001: 253)

Darwin’s regret here echoes the anti-populist frustration of his cousin Francis Galton who, only a few years previously in his early eugenic essay, ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’ (1865), lamented the feckless refusal of the masses to apply the same care to their own procreative habits as to those of their livestock: If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization in to the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties. (Galton 1865: 166)

Despite Darwin’s and Galton’s iconoclastic self-positioning, eugenics advocacy was neither new nor confined to the scientific elite by the midnineteenth century. As Daylanne English and Martin Halliwell point out, there had been a rich and widely documented interest in hereditarily fit parentage, managed population enhancement and the dangers of consanguineous marriage in Britain since at least the eighteenth century

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(English 2004: 7; Halliwell 2004: 47), one which continued through rather than originated in Galton’s 1883 coining of the term ‘eugenics’ to describe a proactive approach to human reproduction.1 Indeed, as John C. Waller has observed, perhaps the most extraordinary feature of Galton’s scientific eugenic thought was this ability to imagine himself as an isolated prophet of radical innovation in what was actually a cultural climate of burgeoning popular assent to the conviction that, in human as well as in animal reproduction, like produces like. Waller notes: the assumption that parents’ mental and moral qualities are somehow recapitulated in their offspring was virtually ubiquitous in nineteenth century popular culture [. . .] the vast majority of those who read ‘Hereditary Talent’ and Hereditary Genius seem to have considered the central thesis overstated but the idea of mental heredity entirely credible, if not platitudinous. (Waller 2001: 146)

In light of the important reception recovery work of Waller and others, Galton’s once ironclad reputation as the so-called ‘Founder of the Faith’ (Kevles 1985: 7) seems increasingly implausible, with his actual contributions to modern eugenics lying less in paradigm innovation than in the statistical consolidation and professional authorisation of a set of folk beliefs that were already endemic in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination, manifesting in a number of its most eccentric, controversial and unexpected sites. As I proposed in the Introduction, Anglo-American Spiritualism is a crucial yet still ignored part of eugenics history, and must be reckoned with if we are to understand the extent and diffusion of popular eugenics in the period of our study. This chapter examines some of the early sources and stimuli for Spiritualism’s eugenic and bioessentialist vision of human identity, asking how and why the movement’s version of the numinous came, as we shall see, to be so fatalistically hereditarian, so convinced of the priority of the somatic body to determine character and spirit. Crucial here is modern Spiritualism’s mixed philosophical inheritance from a series of classical, utopian and radical forms of determinist thought – including the Neo-Platonism whose shaping presence on Spiritualist thought has been brilliantly explicated by Cathy Gutierrez, and, more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, the dual forces of influential early convert Robert Owen’s idealist necessitarianism and the early nineteenth-century phrenology movement from which so many of Spiritualism’s British and American adherents were drawn. Long before the foundational 1848 Hydesville rappings, phrenology and Owenism worked to create an audience within lower-middle- and working-class radical communities in Britain and the United States for deterministic

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and non-agential models of human subjectivity. Spiritualism’s seemingly unlimited, and arguably disastrous, ability to absorb eclectic beliefs allowed it to assimilate these differing forms of deterministic thought and use them to authorise a compelling model of passive and strangely evacuated subjectivity, one conducive but not restricted to mediumistic identity. The latter part of the chapter focuses on the production of this subjectivity in one of the most popular genres of Victorian Spiritualist writing, mediumistic life writing. Continually overlooked in the scholarship on Victorian auto/biography, nineteenth-century medium memoirs and biographies arguably come closer than any other branch of nineteenthcentury life writing to fulfilling Havelock Ellis’s 1904 call to biologise and eugenicise biography.2 These texts serve as vehicles not only (or even most importantly) for their writers’ beliefs in the communicatory powers of the dead, but also for their increasing scepticism about the existence or virtue of free will in light of their highly fatalistic view of human heredity. If Anglo-American believers regularly argued that mediumship was a skill open to everyone who took the time to develop the gift, their biographies and memoirs nonetheless routinely described spiritual sensitivity as a form of biological election, one most concentrated in individuals constitutionally equipped to be as receptive to the dead as they were to the imperatives of their own heredity. I want to suggest that Spiritualism’s idealisation of mediumistic passivity was an outgrowth not just, as feminist critics have argued, of its (partial) endorsement of normative femininity,3 but also of its escalating commitment to a proto-eugenic philosophy that presented all individuals, irrespective of their anatomical gender, as subject to the dead hands of heredity and spirit influence alike.

Radical Determinism in the Early Nineteenth Century: Phrenology and Owenism When communitarian and social reformer Robert Owen announced his conversion to Spiritualism in 1853, many of his former supporters reacted with dismay.4 Here seemed the final proof that the now eightytwo-year-old reformer had descended into total senility, embracing a folly even greater than the disastrous New Harmony scheme which had ended in breakdown in 1829. Fabian, psychical investigator and early Owen biographer Frank Podmore chose to describe the great man as the victim of calculating imposters who exploited the very faculty which had made him such an ardent radical in the first place: a willingness to

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give people the benefit of the doubt (Podmore 1906: 614).5 More recent commentators have started to signal that Owen’s early communitarianism and late-life Spiritualism have more in common than just a shared basis in benevolent gullibility; for them, his conversion to the new dispensation was less a deviation from but a fulfilment of his dedication to the progressive improvement of mankind. Thus, writes Anne Taylor, Owen’s Spiritualism can be seen as ‘the natural consequence of everything that went before, and puts beyond doubt Owen’s sincerity; his earnest belief that he was a special instrument to bring about the millennium’ (Taylor 1987: 208). Central to Owen’s millenarian conviction, I suggest, was his enduring belief that most human lives were determined entirely by their environmental circumstances, and that their possessors were largely powerless to change their character through acts of will alone. Even though, as Amanda Anderson has pointed out, Owen’s determinism was never as total or absolute in practice as in his political pronouncements – in fact, she points out, Owen’s communities relied upon ‘the workers’ own rational participation in the project of character transformation’ (Anderson 1993: 29) – the potential of individual agency was routinely suppressed in the reformist rhetoric around the New Lanark project, most notably in Owen’s pithy catchphrase that man’s character was formed, not by but for him. This credo was to have massive philosophical influence on and resonance within AngloAmerican Spiritualism’s emergent biopolitics of man-making. Owen first laid out his ultra-mechanistic and fervently anti-individualistic view of human nature in A New View of Society, the series of essays he published between 1813 and 1816 in the wake of the success of his New Lanark settlement. Here he doggedly espoused the position to which he clung unwaveringly for the rest of his life: namely, that working people had no individual power over their own character and thus must turn to an outside force – specifically, Owen himself (Thompson 2004: 96) – for help in shaping themselves into better subjects. All of the world’s problems, Owen insisted, derived from humanity’s denial of the basic truth of individual powerlessness, one so important that he continually italicises it for emphasis: [T]he character of man is, without a single exception, always formed for him; that it may be, and is chiefly created by his predecessors; that they give him, or may give him, his ideas and habits, which are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man, therefore, never did, nor is it possible he ever can, form his own character. (R. Owen [1813–16] 1991: 143)

What might have seemed like a gloomy prognostication of our utter inability to help ourselves became for Owen a source of great hope;

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if people were unable to form their own character, then it would be impossible for them to resist the beneficial effects of the new society. Good citizenship would become compulsive rather than compulsory, a quality that could be readily implanted within all children or, as Owen referred to them, ‘passive and wonderfully contrived compounds’ (R. Owen [1813–16] 1991: 10). Passive anti-individualism was the key to Owen’s new Utopia. In later life, Owen’s position necessarily put him in conflict with surrounding theories of liberal individualism and Smilesian self-help. His impatience with the concept of individual sovereignty is particularly evident in the pages of Robert Owen’s Millennial Gazette (1856–8), the Spiritualist and reformist journal he established after his 1853 conversion and for which he acted as exclusive contributor. Here Owen demonstrates an intriguing receptivity to theories of hereditary as well as environmental determinism, no longer insisting that social organisation was the main moulding force in human destiny. He was receiving proof of the extent of hereditary determination from the very highest of possible sources: the exalted spirits of the Swedenborgian seventh sphere whom the American medium Mrs Hayden was helping him to contact. The Gazette’s very first issue contains a spiritual communiqué which seems to directly contradict the socialist principles he had so ardently championed for most of his life. According to Owen’s otherworldly interlocutor, ‘equality is forever an impossible thing. Men are not equal in any of the gifts of Nature, and God himself makes distinctions’ (R. Owen 1856a: 19). Most striking about these remarks, channelled by an unspecified medium ‘living at some distance’ (19) from Owen, is that he allows them to stand relatively unchallenged, adding only that training and education might help to level if never wholly erase the inborn variation in the race. References to innateness continued to pervade the periodical throughout its brief history, appearing in frequent contentions that intellectual and physical abilities are formed wholly in the womb, and that only the ‘human-made part of the character’ (R. Owen 1857: 84) – a typically slippery Owenite designation – was subject to postbirth manipulation. Owen also used the Millennial Gazette to dispense advice on the optimal techniques for producing mentally and morally superior children and to argue for the symbiosis of physical and spiritual fitness.6 In Spiritualism, Owen had found a means of projecting his longheld belief in environmental determinism backwards into the womb and forwards into our post-death existences. This commitment to an increasingly hereditarian form of determinism connects Owen’s Spiritualism to the intellectual tradition of British phrenology, the early nineteenth-century science of mind from whose

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ranks, like those of Owenite communitarianism, issued large numbers of Spiritualist converts in the 1850s and 1860s.7 Founded by Viennese doctor Franz Joseph Gall in the late eighteenth century and brought to Britain by his protégé Johann Gaspar Spurzheim in 1814, phrenology was a popular and precocious materialist pseudo-science that correlated human mental capacity with skull shape. While it by no means represented the first attempt to chart character upon the cranium, it was, as David De Guistano points out, novel in its attempt to lend folk techniques of face and head reading a rational and empirical basis (De Guistano 1975: 13). Despite this somatic basis, however, phrenology was not as initially or aggressively deterministic as some of its later Victorian critics proposed.8 Instead, it presented itself as a programme of personal empowerment that allowed its adherents first to know and then to transform their mental and moral abilities. This focus on selfdirected improvement helps to explain its popularity in early nineteenthcentury working-class and radical communities: as Roger Cooter writes: to working people, conscious that help was to come from no other quarter than themselves, phrenologists appeared as offering [. . .] a means to purposeful intervention in their own destinies. The alternative was to remain passively victimized by circumstances that, individually considered, were otherwise quite beyond one’s control. (Cooter 1984: 180)

Individuals born with an over-developed faculty of amativeness or a deficient organ of judgement need not despair, but could rather deploy phrenological education techniques to reshape their propensities and cerebral contours alike. Yet underlying phrenology’s gospel of rational self-improvement lay a paradoxical fatalism, one that intensified as the century progressed and the social improvements which some early practitioners had sought through the science failed to materialise. Phrenology, as its recent historians have demonstrated, had always been an ideologically ambivalent programme, one that offered to liberate workers from the tyranny of their misunderstood natures while simultaneously lauding those characteristics and traits most conducive to the smooth functioning of industrial capitalism. Just as there were distinct limits to phrenology’s potential as a form of political radicalism – evident most vividly in its appeal to individuals to fit themselves to natural law rather than to smash the system – so too was its promise of endless organic transformation similarly restricted. These checks are suggested in its function as an exculpatory doctrine, one that could console those on the lowest margins of the social order – the mentally infirm, the chronically unemployed or the permanently delinquent – by assuring them that their sufferings were

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the fault of defective constitutions rather than personal failings (De Guistano 1975: 62; Cooter 1984: 180). In attempting to produce a more humane and sympathetic attitude to the outcast and excluded, this form of phrenological fatalism also had the effect of foreclosing discussion of the social and economic causes of human inequality. From some phrenological points of view, the inveterate thief or prostitute may no longer have been seen as morally evil, but neither was he or she to be regarded as a rational or normal citizen whose actions represented a pragmatic adaptation to a particular set of circumstances. It could thus be claimed that inequality was ‘all in the head’ of its victims. Further evidence of phrenological fatalism manifests in the movement’s discourses on race and on procreation. As David De Guistano reminds us, the self-improving aspects of phrenology were widely seen as applicable only to Anglo-Saxon people who were apparently constitutionally equipped for upward mental mobility; ‘Africans and Asians’, by contrast, ‘were not considered likely to proceed beyond their present attainments, and the Arabs were hampered by their propensity to steal, cheat, and destroy’ (De Guistano 1975: 71). It was for this reason that a number of phrenologists opposed imperial expansion, feeling that it would only miscegenate the Anglo-Saxon race and accordingly weaken its intellectual stock. David De Guistano rightly concludes that this racism was neither out of the ordinary nor particularly vicious for its time (71), yet his contention that ‘the optimism of phrenology [. . .] far outweighed its fatalism’ (64) seems harder to accept, especially given the extent of the global population for whom improvement was ruled out. And even neurotypical whites were not always resilient in the face of prenatal determination. The spectre – and promise – of biological doom haunts Anglo-American phrenology’s extensive literature on middle-class parentage and marriage. In his landmark The Constitution of Man ([1828] 1860), Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe, like Robert Owen, suggested that the most effective way to form a productive, able and mentally fit subject was to start in the womb with a good seed. Indeed, this credo constitutes the first of the many organic laws propounded throughout The Constitution: To render an organized being perfect in its kind, the germ from which it springs must be complete in its parts, and sound in its whole constitution. This is the first organic law. If we sow an acorn in which some vital part has been destroyed, the seedling plant, and the full-grown oak, if it ever attain to maturity, will be deficient in the elements which are wanting in the germ; if we sow an acorn entire in its parts, but only half-ripened, or damaged in its texture by damp or other causes, the seedling will be feeble and liable to premature decay. A similar law holds good for man. (Combe [1828] 1860: 48–9)

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The best way to avoid this sickly blooming was to prevent marriage between ‘the feeble, the sickly, the incompletely developed through extreme youth, and the exhausted with age’ (Combe [1828] 1860: 122) who might produce offspring as imperfect as themselves. If, later in the century, Francis Galton ridiculed phrenology for what he rightly viewed as its flawed cognitive map and incipient Lamarckism, he surely nonetheless would have been pleased with this proposed social application of Combe’s admittedly eccentric understanding of inheritance.9 Although Combe later in The Constitution manages to sidestep the bleak fatalism of fin-de-siècle eugenic thinking via a last-minute appeal to Lamarck’s theory of acquired inheritance, his stance on the reproductive rights of the so-called ‘feeble’ remains consistently ambivalent. He concedes that self-management and responsibility may do much good, saying of the victim of hereditary illness that ‘every step which he makes in his own person towards exact obedience will remove, by so much, the organic evil transmitted through his parent’s transgressions; and his posterity will reap the full benefits of his more dutiful observance’ (Combe [1828] 1860: 185). But this reassuring vision of a degenerate line healed through a vaguely defined obedience to natural law nonetheless sits uneasily with Combe’s extensive and uncritical citation of American physician Charles Caldwell’s negative eugenic philosophy, one which declares marriages between congenitally diseased or disabled partners to be ‘little short of crime’ (qtd in Combe [1828] 1860: 178). In The Constitution, Combe’s call for organic regeneration through selfimprovement – redemption by works rather than election, if we are to translate it into theological terms – is consistently shadowed by a hardline impulse towards state-enforced celibacy for the unfit. Combe’s insistence that human improvement might be accomplished, not simply on an individual level through acts of will, but on a species level through a morally, culturally or perhaps even legally mandated programme of rational reproduction, was to have a huge impact on the routinely interlinked Anglo-American phrenological and Spiritualist communities in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Conduits between the two movements, American phrenologists Lorenzo and Orson Fowler embraced Combe’s eugenic interests with particular gusto and helped to proliferate them widely through their thriving publishing and educational empire which flourished from the 1840s until the 1890s.10 Lorenzo, best known as the designer of the famous phrenological bust whose trademarked copies sold widely on both sides of the Atlantic, was also mentor and friend to the young James Burns whom he met during an 1863 tour of England and who was later to be a major player in the late Victorian Spiritualist scene.11 Lorenzo’s brother Orson

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gained an equal fame and notoriety as author of a series of health and marriage manuals that combined unusually frank descriptions of intercourse (including an avowal of the importance of the mutual orgasm, also advocated by African American Spiritualist and occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph)12 with what Madeleine B. Stern describes as ‘a primitive form of eugenics’ (Stern 1971: 45). Like George Combe, Orson Fowler also struggled, with only varying degrees of success, to reconcile phrenology’s optimistic assurance of improvement with the fatalism entailed by eugenics. His most famous work, Hereditary Descent (1847), opens with a call for prospective parents to recognise and embrace their agency, no longer seeing themselves as the powerless victims of sexual fate, but as the manufacturers of the new super race: ‘[H]as not the time come’, he asks like Darwin and Galton after him, ‘for collecting and disseminating the knowledge on this vitally important subject, which shall enable parents to bestow on offspring personal beauty, physical stamina, muscular strength, and, above all, high intellectual and moral endowments?’ (Fowler 1847: 5).13 The mind–character–body synchronicity idealised here would soon become a mainstay of Spiritualist eugenic writing and accounts of the afterlife. The Spiritualist new age, like Fowler’s phrenological one, initially seemed to be one of absolute emancipation and endless individual choice, in which parents could become species engineers and, through an almost mathematical form of mate selection and a stage-managed system of maternal impressions, produce any kind of offspring they wished. Yet this fantasy of total procreative agency was quickly deflated. The plasticity of the fetus, warns Fowler in the second half of Hereditary Descent, is not unlimited. Indeed, much of the book’s later chapters seem animated by a dread that the opening pronouncements may be misinterpreted as a carte blanche invitation for defective parents to propagate freely. The results of such unions, Fowler stipulates, can only prove tragic, no matter how phrenologically aware the couple: [F]ar be it from me to encourage the marriage of the diseased in the present state of physiological knowledge and practice. For those who are afflicted with maladies to be deprived of marriage and its joys is indeed a bitter pill, but far more bitter the loss of children. Diseased subjects can endure celibacy with much less pain than they can bury children or a companion. Better bear thine own bitter lot alone than still further embitter the lives of companions and children, and those to whom they may have become attached. (Fowler 1847: 98–9)

Although devoid of the sinister rhetoric of national degeneration that characterises later Victorian and Edwardian eugenic treatises, Fowler’s statements retain the ableist assumptions that these share: namely,

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that a short life marked by disability is infinitely worse than no life at all, and that the sufferings of a parent in losing a hereditarily diseased child always outweigh the potential benefits and pleasures of that life, however brief, to its possessor. For the most defective, he argues, the only choice is deliberate withdrawal from the world, a sentiment that is eerily literalised in later Spiritualist writing on the profound recuperative benefits of the afterlife to the severely disabled. Biofatalism also pervades Hereditary Descent’s treatment of education. Scholastic training, for Fowler, does not, cannot render one a natural painter, another a poet, another a mechanical genius [. . .] because they appear prior to and often in the teeth of education [. . .] all our primary mental powers, must be created before education can have any data on which to operate. (Fowler 1847: 129)

To retain the right variety of capacities and abilities required by industrialised society, parents are urged to sidestep the school and focus on the womb. Fowler was not an anti-educationalist per se – on the contrary, like most Anglo-American phrenologists, he championed pedagogical reform and believed that his new science of the cranium could work wonders in the classroom – but in Hereditary Descent at least, he presents scholastic training as only a secondary shaping power at best. Fowler then closes the volume with a poignantly personal and strongly millenarian call for the dawning of a new eugenic age in which diseases of the body and of the moral faculty – the two now synchronous – will be thoroughly eradicated: Would to God I could live to see the glorious day when these perfecting principles shall be diversified and put in practice. I should then see my race regenerated – delivered from those physical and moral maladies which now crush it into the mire of depravity, and torture it with suffering. But since I cannot, let it be my humble, happy lot, to lay the axe of reform at the ROOT of the trees of vice and misery, and plant in their stead those of human perfection and happiness, by lecturing and writing on the means of improving the STOCK of humanity – of sowing the SEEDS of virtue instead of depravity in the PRIMITIVE CONSTITUTION of mankind. (Fowler 1847: 279–80)

This eugenic utopianism found receptive audiences in the British and American Spiritualist communities in which the Fowler brothers’ work was widely read at the mid-century, and combined with the deterministic legacy of Owenism to direct the movement’s attention from questions of the afterlife to include those surrounding conception and gestation. It is no surprise then that post-‘origin’ (1848) discourses of mediumship and Spiritualist social reform would venerate prenatal conditions and heredity as the foundations of post-life advancement.

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Crossing Over: Spiritualist Writing and the Legacy of Biodeterminism We can trace the imprint of these Owenite and phrenological forms of radical determinism in many of the key fixations within nineteenthcentury Spiritualist writing, including the pronounced if never wholly consistent scepticism about free will, the fondness for phrenological programmes of social and educational reform, the appeals for eugenically fit marriages, the ardent promotion of health culture, and, finally, the increasingly hereditarian approach to auto/biography. And far from manifesting only in the late-century period when hard hereditarianism and evolutionary fatalism were increasingly culturally ubiquitous, these tendencies are present in the movement’s literature since its very inception. Indeed, they feature centrally in the seminal Spiritualist text which, of all the movement’s early publications, comes closest to approaching the status of doctrinal urscript: Andrew Jackson Davis’s The Great Harmonia, Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe ([1850] 1851). Published when its young author – or alleged amanuensis – was only twenty-four years old, and apparently dictated by Davis’s presiding spirits, The Great Harmonia is a pseudo-Swedenborgian treatise on the original state and impending spiritual destiny of mankind, one which offers to interpret the workings of the natural world in light of the new spiritual revelation. It was, despite Davis’s controversial reputation as an exponent of the free love practices that many of the more conservative members of the faithful found repellent, widely read in both British and American Spiritualist communities and debatably gained an almost canonical authority amongst the believers for whom Davis, as Cathy Gutierrez suggests, was ‘arguably Spiritualism’s primary theologian’ (Gutierrez 2009: 10). Ann Braude confirms this assessment: Hundreds of sometime metaphysicians added their visions to Spiritualist literature, but Davis’s writing retained a special role. Spiritualists recoiled from giving anything authority over individual conscience or inspiration, and therefore refrained from according the status of scripture to Davis’s writing [. . .] However, if Davis’s work was not viewed as authoritative, it commanded sufficient respect and popularity to earn its author a central leadership role in the movement. (Braude 1989: 35)

Given Davis’s unique prominence in the early history of Anglo-American Spiritualism, therefore, he was exceptionally well placed to influence the tenor of its later philosophical, political and imaginative mandates. And time and time again throughout The Great Harmonia, perhaps the most popular of all his publications, Davis uses his prophetic voice to lecture

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his readers, supposedly newly liberated by Spiritualism from the manacles of Calvinism, on the futility of self-determination. ‘It is proper’, announces Davis early in the book, ‘to consider Nature a mighty and Magnificent MACHINE, and the Divine Mind as the omnipotent and omniscient ARTISAN’ (Davis [1850] 1851: 20). The highest outputs of this metaphysical machine were human beings, their fitness all the more important because of their immortality. He reminds his readers: We should not forget that we live now to live again [. . .] for the correct cultivation and spiritual direction which our faculties receive while in a twig state, will be conspicuously represented in their manifestations here, and in the position, we occupy when introduced to the Spiritual world. (Davis [1850] 1851: 39)

Prospective parents were thus responsible for the fate of their offspring not just in this world, but, more vitally, in the subsequent spheres, where the standards of success were apparently, and dauntingly, much higher: It is greatly to be desired that we should impart to the unborn generation a sound and harmonious constitution; that we should learn to situate and circumstance, and educate it so well, that it shall be as difficult for that generation to violate the physiological and psychological laws as it is for us to obey them. It is necessary for happiness that the human head should be glorious as the sun, bright with the halo of righteousness; and that the entire structure should faithfully represent the undisturbed harmony which pervades the universe. (Davis [1850] 1851: 98, original emphasis)

The end goal of Spiritual Harmonialism here is thus the production of docile subjects who are obedient to natural law because somatically and psychologically unable to be otherwise. Anticipating Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy (1858) in both its Lamarckism and impulse towards synthetic equilibrium, Davis imagines a time when the harmony of the universe might be reproduced in miniature within a physically perfect human body rendered incapable of dissent; its nature both manifest in and determined by, as the phrenologists would agree, its head. Yet going even further than the phrenologists and abandoning the sentimental attachment to free will retained in even their most fatalistic writings, Davis suggests that human agency is nothing more than a deluded and potentially dangerous fantasy, a fact no better proven than in the persistence of racial blackness and disability. These are identity coordinates, he problematically proposes, which no sane individuals would possibly choose if they were truly free:14 If man is physically in a state of freedom, it would be absurd for any individual to remain with a black skin, with a defective cranium, with a weak

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physiological structure; because he could, and probably would, change and improve these peculiarities of his organization, when and as he desired; and he would not supposing him to be in a state of physical freedom, be under the necessity of breathing air to sustain life, of eating material substances to preserve bodily strength, by reposing to refresh and restore organic and muscular vigour; but he could, by simply willing to do so, exist without breathing, eating, or sleeping. (Davis [1850] 1851: 213)

This passage is important for a number of reasons, not least for its demonstration of the point – one often suppressed in celebratory postmodernist readings of Victorian Spiritualism – that Spiritualist support for abolitionism was by no means coextensive with a rejection of racial essentialism. Davis may have passionately opposed slavery, using his New York-based Spiritualist newspaper, the Herald of Progress (1860– 4), as a platform for the abolitionist cause (Braude 1989: 76), but this investment did not interfere with The Great Harmonia’s conception of blackness as an fixed, essential and benighted identity category whose pitiable subjects, like the mentally defective or physically disabled, would readily change their condition if only they could. As they cannot, they are worthy of sympathy rather than persecution. Davis’s somatic determinism seems extraordinary not only for its very existence in one of the most influential texts of an allegedly anti-materialist and individualist movement, but also for its gleeful exuberance. The determinative autocracy of the body is, in The Great Harmonia, a cause for celebration and optimism; it is what ensures the inevitability of progress. We can see this buoyancy in the following, characteristically equivocal, passage, in which what seems to start out as an affirmation of human agency morphs quickly into its opposite: If it be conceded that man is the highest organization in the stupendous system of nature – [. . .] can he be a passive creature when first introduced upon earth? Can he be born without a spring of action – without an impulse – without an attraction? Is man, when first created, an empty vessel – a mere shell – into which flows the spirit of wickedness and holiness, as his uneducated and unexperienced ‘will’ determines? [. . .] surely, all nature and pure reason contradict this theological position; because every intelligent individual knows, by the mysterious workings of the elements of his own interior soul, that wants – desires – attractions – and impulses, are born with him, and he knows that internally he is a living Whole. (Davis [1850] 1851: 222, original emphasis)

What saves mankind from passivity, in other words, is pre-life determination. Even the very concept of a ‘free agent’, as Davis had earlier claimed, is an oxymoronic one, given that an agent, in the term’s contemporary usage, indicates a person who acts on behalf of someone

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else (Davis [1850] 1851: 218). To be active, by contrast, is in Davis’s formulation to embrace and obey the intuitions and impulses implanted in our bodies both by our earthly parents and, more significantly, by God: ‘In truth, man inherits inclinations from his birth. Those which proceed from his immediate progenitors are temporal, but those which he receives from his Heavenly Father are eternal!’ (Davis [1850] 1851: 222, original emphasis). Davis’s antipathy to the theory of free agency was, like Combe’s, motivated in large part by its potential misuse to condemn or vilify those whose environmental, psychological or somatic circumstances made it impossible for them to be labouring, productive or lawful citizens. Determinism seemed the more humane explanation, capable even, as he contends with rich irony, of absolving his own greatest enemy: the traditional Christian establishment. He writes: The wild savage is not to be damned for not believing in the existence, life, and miracles of Jesus; nor is the Christian to be blessed for believing them; because neither can manufacture his own convictions – can not have absolute control over the promptings and inclinations of his own mind. (Davis [1850] 1851: 225)

Calvinist predestination is not so much rejected here as hoisted by its own petard. Free will was now to be abandoned once and for all, as a painful charade whose day was done. ‘The comparative freedom which man seemingly inherits’, Davis sneers, ‘coevally with his individuality, is exactly illustrated by the independence which a gold fish is perceived to enjoy in the globe of water’ (Davis [1850] 1851: 231, original emphasis). To modern readers, this scenario of human life as a few quick turns around the goldfish bowl might seem incredibly bleak, but neither Davis nor the phrenologically minded Spiritualists who followed in his wake felt it had to be. Instead, they found ways of embracing and redeeming restrictive innatism by emphasising the promising modifiability, if not of man, then of his environment. This sentiment drives the extensive writing on education that appeared in the late Victorian radical Spiritualist press, particularly and most predictably in The Medium and Daybreak, edited by former Fowler protégé James Burns. A tireless campaigner for both phrenology and Spiritualism, Burns regularly published articles on the movements’ mutual compatibility and value as tools of educational reform. One of these, a March 1875 article entitled ‘Phrenology in the Schoolroom’ by John Markley, argues: The estimable outline teachings of phrenology waits [sic] to help the schoolmaster to a better understanding of the capacities of the youthful brain [. . .] To be successful, all educational efforts must refer back to the form and

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pre-dispositions of the subject it [sic] seeks to develop otherwise its triumphs will be merely partial, and the failures will indirectly suggest the sculptor labouring in vain to produce entrancing statuary from misunderstood, obstinate blocks of sea-washed stone from some uncongenial coast. (Markley 1875: 202)

Markley concludes by pitting his bioessentialist pedagogy against the sensational Christian conversions performed by American evangelists Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey during their recent revivalist tour of Britain. He writes: Against these gentlemen personally, I venture no opinion, but I would ask, in all seriousness, whether they expect to civilize the back-street criminal classes of Liverpool by instantaneous circus-like methods of large-crowd sensationalism, irrespective of previous educational influences and the unmistakeable laws of criminal development? Will the much-to-be-desired results be permanent? Will music and oratorical pathos [. . .] modify the hereditary low organisms of dissolute characters, dirty and unlettered, with beastly homes, and no single refined charm in life? (Markley 1875: 203)

The implied answer to this surprisingly anti-theatrical question – after all, Spiritualism could hardly claim to be free of sensational conversiongeared spectacles itself – is obviously no. Only a customised education that addresses, without naïvely hoping to wholly eliminate, its pupils’ essential and embodied mental limitations might hope to bring out the good already existing within them. Markley’s example here nicely clarifies a central disjuncture between evangelical and phrenological Spiritualist rhetorics of redemption: while the former promised salvation to everyone who wilfully opened him- or herself to the spirit of the Lord, the latter, despite its strenuously egalitarian tone, abandons the will in favour of an innative explanation of spiritual, moral and social salvation. Before moving on to consider the impact of such biodeterministic ideas on the movement’s life writing, I want to address one further, and for the genre of autobiography hugely relevant, site of their manifestation in Spiritualist reform literature: in the movement’s extensive body of texts on marriage, parentage and health culture. These can be understood in part as a strategic response to the relentless anti-Spiritualist attacks on the accretive, allegedly useless and often monotonous nature of the movement’s testimonial literature, composed largely of benign and banal spirit descriptions of the beauties of the next life. In their writings on matrimony and reproduction, Spiritualists did exactly what their detractors claimed they were incapable of: they abstracted from often-tedious experiential data towards larger, more practical, generalisations. The faithful knew that seance record compendiums

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and individual conversion narratives would, on their own, likely prove inadequate for proselytisation purposes; if their cause was to succeed, they had to ground the huge, and often hackneyed, body of reported phenomena and spirit sayings within a set of captivating and inventive social applications. Perhaps the most provocative of these lay in the proposed project of spirit-assisted eugenic matchmaking. Spiritualism had from its beginning functioned as a mechanism for family reunion, bringing together kin from across the divide of the grave; why, asked some of its adherents, could it not also form new family alliances and couplings between hereditarily compatible couples whose paths might not otherwise cross? Just as, early in the nineteenth century, affianced couples could consult their local phrenologist for advice on their somatic and temperamental suitability, so, in the 1870s and 1880s, were some Spiritualists promoting the matchmaking services of the dead. Could not mediums, asks an 1872 correspondent to The Medium and Daybreak, set up as marriage brokers, consulting with the other world about suitable mates for the living? If so, ‘Spiritualism would confer inestimable benefits on society, and tend enormously to the physical and spiritual improvement of the race’ (‘Spiritualism and Matrimony’ 1872). Although in this instance editor James Burns balked at the suggestion, printing a brief reply that dismissed it as lazy and foolish, The Medium and Daybreak would later become more welcoming to such enterprises. An article from 1886 argues: When a good man or woman has to be born for the elevation of mankind, a man and woman are influenced by the spirit world to become husband and wife. Other pairs are similarly influenced. The ‘breed’ improves under this spirit of selection. The selected couples will be made to travel over seas and continents to meet one another. In this way, the ‘saviours’ of the world are produced, and not by the incarnation of ‘gods’. (‘The Word Made Flesh’ 1886: 693)

Far more than simply a source of personal consolation, Spiritualism functioned, here and elsewhere in the periodical press, to drive a process of metaphysical sexual selection ultimately superior to, because more meliorist and anthropocentric than, natural selection.15 Yet if the mechanism behind Spiritualist sexual selection was humanist, progressive and numinous rather than material and random, how then were believers to account for the persistence of maladaptive variation? While it was gratifying to recognise intellectual and physical paragons as the products of spirit intervention, there remained the problem of accounting for the damaging or, even more puzzlingly, evolutionarily neutral traits which neither clearly hindered nor improved the fitness

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of the organism.16 One Spiritualist response to this problem, evidenced most clearly in the revised theory of human evolution mooted by Alfred Russel Wallace after his 1865 Spiritualist conversion, was to deny the nihilistic possibility of somatic neutrality entirely and to insist that even those human characteristics that seemed clearly useless were harbingers of future glory. Wallace’s example was primitive man who, as he argued in ‘The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’ ([1870] 2002), could have had no immediate need or application for his advanced mental endowments in the primeval environment. Indeed, Wallace argued, at this subsistence level of life such capacities might even have been potentially dangerous to their possessor. The only explanation for their existence, then, was the presence of a supernatural ‘mind, foreseeing the future and preparing for it, just as surely as we do, when we see the breeder set himself to work with the determination to produce a definite improvement in some cultivated plant or domestic animal’ (Wallace [1870] 2002: 193). Wallace’s crude functionalism exploits the advantage of retrospection to triumph in an evolutionary contest whose results were already in. But did the fact of human survival authorise and give value to every variation on the human spectrum? In the staunchly imperialist and increasingly ableist context of late Victorian Britain, the answer was clearly no. Another explanation entirely would be needed to account for those bodies and intellects that seemed irredeemably degenerate and incapable of ever conferring an evolutionary benefit on the species. One route was to resurrect, if only cursorily, the very theories of selfdetermination and free agency on which Spiritualism’s early texts had cast so much suspicion. We see this strategy most clearly in the movement’s late-century advocacy of health culture and its pseudo-Lamarckist endorsement of maternal impressions, an anachronistic gestational theory that, as Brenda Mann Hammack points out, remained a subject of Anglo-American medical speculation through the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century (Hammack 2008: 888). The theory of maternal impressions allowed Spiritualists to transfer the blame for poor character from spiritual sexual selection (which only worked for the good) to careless mothers who neglected their duty of telepathically transferring positive thoughts to their in utero offspring. Thus in an 1899 article in the socialist Spiritualist journal The Two Worlds, written in praise of legislative attempts to prevent the reproduction of the feebleminded, H.G. Allen names prenatal impressions as the leading cause of disease in the young. Mothers, he concludes, ought to be taught to better direct their behaviours and thoughts during the gestational process. This argument, by no means unique in fin-de-siècle Spiritualist communities,

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both adopts and undermines a hard hereditarian position, suggesting that one might interrupt or reverse hereditary predestination through an effort of will.17 Spiritualist theories of maternal impressions had an equally paradoxical relationship with contemporary feminism as well, empowering women on the one hand by recognising their importance in shaping every aspect of their offspring and prioritising their comfort during pregnancy, and demonising them on the other as dangerous incubators whose capricious thoughts and readiness to start at the least fright could permanently sabotage their offspring. These scenarios play out in the 1886 American phrenological Spiritualist novel Foreordained: A Story of Heredity and of Special Parental Influences, pseudonymously authored by ‘An Observer’. In it the aristocratic Mrs Hopelands gives birth to two professionally successful yet unaffectionate and emotionally sterile sons as a result of spending too much time in art galleries during her pregnancy. By contrast, her poorer but more maternally accomplished friend Annie MacDonald manages to produce a pair of extremely loving Christian sons by rejecting exciting novels in favour of the works of George and Andrew Combe in the months leading up to her delivery. The novel’s closing epitaph enjoins female readers to follow Annie’s lead and tacitly reminds them where the blame will lie if their children are in any way deficient, asking ‘What will you leave to your descendants?’ (‘An Observer’ 1886: 78). In their advocacy of maternal impressions and earnest promotion of health culture, late nineteenth-century Spiritualists adopted an increasingly logically unsustainable rhetoric of blame as they ventured down the slippery slope that equated bodily health with moral rectitude. Writing in The Two Worlds in 1892, for example, F.A. Atkins declared that: hundreds are disabled by careless and unhealthy habits. Some of us have thought that we were doing the world a service by sitting up and writing into the small hours of the morning, and we have to pay the penalty, like all other fools, who break nature’s wise and beneficent laws and then expect she will overlook the offence and forget to take her righteous revenge. (Atkins 1892: 124)

While Atkins’s sentiment may seem ideologically banal from a contemporary vantage point – few would dispute that an entirely sedentary lifestyle can cause health problems – his language is startlingly vicious and excoriating, imagining disability as a gleeful and triumphant retribution enacted by nature. In this Spiritualist worldview, the flesh, far from being mortified, was to be cultivated, strengthened, perfected and idolised; where it was diseased, it signified not simply fecklessness but a

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potentially criminal violation of an all-encompassing natural law. Thus spoke American trance medium Cora Tappan during an 1874 performance in Manchester: We believe that the time will come when you will be just as much ashamed to have a headache as to tell a lie; when it will be just as important that you should know how to avoid taking a cold as to avoid stealing; when the importance that is attached to physical health and well-being will be as much a part of your religion as saying your morning prayers. (Tappan 1874c: 544)

In this remarkable instantiation of Spiritualism’s impossible identity politics, an apparently possessed woman, animated by a collective of undead spirits, testifies to the importance of individual responsibility. But what self, Tappan’s contemporary listeners might have wondered, was there left to bear the weight of moral choice when the monadic subject had been exposed as an extravagant fiction? If, as Andrew Jackson Davis had argued in The Great Harmonia, human beings could neither manufacture their own convictions nor wholly resist a dominant influence, if indeed their susceptibility to possession was to be celebrated as the glorious precondition to mediumship, then how could they possibly manifest the rational self-determination necessary to ensure the fitness of both their own bodies and those of their descendants? Where in the long chain of evolutionary descent that led the species from the primal cave to the stately homes of Park Avenue or Mayfair was to be found even a single pair of progenitors who had not always already been robbed of the possibility of free agency by the combined forces of hereditary and spiritual determination? The edifice of Victorian Spiritualist eugenics seemed predicated on the conditions of its own impossibility.

Life Histories of the Living Dead: The Medium and Daybreak, Paschal Beverly Randolph and Andrew Jackson Davis Spiritualism’s simultaneously iconoclastic and idolatrous attitude to the sovereign self had profound implications for its believers’ conception and practice of the contemporary literary genre traditionally associated with the monumentalisation of the bourgeois self: the auto/biography. How does one the script the life history of a predetermined and disestablished self? Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) and Record of Family Faculties (1884) had offered one possible solution: in place of the mediated experience and introspection of the spiritual confession, the eugenicist life writer could substitute a tabular record of ancestral

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achievements and biometric statistics. Such a mathematical dissection of self would have no doubt repulsed the many Spiritualists who paid strenuous lip service to anti-materialism and individualism alike, yet, nonetheless, many nineteenth-century medium autobiographies are marked by the same depthlessness as the Galtonian model.18 The selves presented in works such as D.D. Home’s Incidents in My Life (1863), Paschal Beverly Randolph’s P.B. Randolph, the ‘Learned Pundit,’ and ‘Man with Two Souls’ (1872a) and J.J. Morse’s Leaves from My Life (1877) seem curiously, even suspiciously, thin. Perhaps this is hardly a surprising feature of autobiographies written by subjects who spent most of their professional careers in a state of mesmeric unconsciousness. Home’s 1863 Incidents in My Life, for instance, is remarkable for the sheer volume of space – at least 50 per cent – it devotes to the testimony of third-party witnesses in the Spiritualist community. Always absent from the scenes of his greatest triumphs, Home depended on others to testify to the spectacles he produced without ever personally witnessing. Home’s autobiography is thus doubly ‘ghost written’, first by the agent he paid to write it, William M. Wilkinson (Cottom 1991: 261), and second by all the external witnesses imported to impose meaning and order on a series of actions dissociated from their unconscious catalyst. Yet rather than focusing on these vacant and selfevacuated Spiritualist autobiographies, I want in this section to examine the life writing of those believers who attempted to directly invoke and intertwine the explicit hereditary determinism of their Spiritualist philosophy with the implicit individualism and experiential mandate of the auto/biographical form. Specifically, I will examine a selection of the capsule medium biographies serialised in British Spiritualist periodical The Medium and Daybreak, the two autobiographies of American seer and healer Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff (1857) and Beyond the Valley (1885), and the biography of famous fraternal American mediums the Davenport brothers, pseudonymously written by Paschal Beverly Randolph, The Davenport Brothers: The World-Renowned Spirit Mediums (1869a). Admittedly, by the mid-nineteenth century period in which modern Spiritualist believers took up the genre, the individualistic ethos of autobiography was already under siege from various sides. The increasing conventionality of life writing, the Victorian backlash against Romantic solipsism, and cultural fears about the homogenising effects of mechanisation were just a few of the features which contributed to a growing sense that the selves presented in popular autobiographical writing neither were, nor perhaps should be, entirely unique. As Linda Peterson points out in her groundbreaking study of Victorian autobiography, the

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genre is built on the formal paradox that unique, individual selves can be described through a series of fairly familiar and recognisable narrative structures (Peterson 1986: 2). These structures, argues Peterson, were inherited from Victorian writers’ encounters with other autobiographies which taught them how their own selves might be narrated. But Peterson’s model, with its emphasis on literacy and engagement with established genre traditions, has arguably only limited application to mediumistic life writers such as D.D. Home and Andrew Jackson Davis who lacked the formal education and cultural literacy that would facilitate an awareness of literary precedent. Indeed, Davis, like many other nineteenth-century mediums, staked his credibility as a seer on the continual (and often unconvincing) assertion of his own literary ignorance; his highfalutin trance messages could only seem miraculous in origin if their content could not be accounted for by the mundane processes of research, study and memorisation.19 If Spiritualist writers did not demonstrate, or admit to, the literacy of canonical Victorian autobiographers such as Newman, Mill or Ruskin, they nonetheless shared their revulsion with the egotism of romantic autobiography – witness the self-effacing and utilitarian rationales for writing which typically preface Victorian medium autobiographies – and their interest in the ways in which the human personality might be determined and mechanised from the outside. Where they differ is in their attitude to these processes of determinism and mechanised objectification, ones which for non-Spiritualist autobiographers frequently become sources of considerable personal anguish. In his Autobiography ([1873] 1989), for example, John Stuart Mill famously describes the near-suicidal dejection produced by his youthful necessitarian conviction that he was ‘the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances [. . .] my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control’ (Mill [1873] 1989: 134–5). A similar despondency manifests in John Ruskin’s Praeterita (1885–9), when the author suggests that his distinctive aesthetic vision may be merely a product of his own mechanical objectification. Thus he acknowledges: In blaming myself, as often I have done [. . .] for my want of affection for other people, I must also express [. . .] more and more wonder that anybody had any affection for me. I thought they might as well have got fond of a camera lucida, or an ivory foot-rule: all my faculty was merely in showing that such and such things are so. (Ruskin 1885–9: 404)

Even Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography ([1899] 2002), arguably one of the most deeply personal and emotionally intimate autobiographies

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of the period, is haunted by the spectre of mechanisation. Noting with weary disgust her relentless ability to keep working after the devastating loss of her eldest son, she writes: As for that life and that work for my daily bread which runs through everything with me, I dare not say how uninterrupted that has been [. . .] I am a wonder to myself, a sort of machine, so little out of order, able to endure all things, always fit for work whatever has happened to me. (M. Oliphant [1899] 2002: 96)

With the possible and significant exception of Anthony Trollope, whose Autobiography ([1883] 2008) notoriously celebrates its author’s mechanical ability to churn out identically sized portions of fiction on a daily basis, most of the canonical Victorian autobiographers present mechanisation and determinism as anathema to intellectual genius, emotional well-being and subjective independence. In Spiritualist life writing, however, the coordinates are very different. Indeed, if we were to follow some of the more narrow definitions of the genre propounded by the likes of George Landow and George Gusdorf, such works might not be considered autobiography at all, lacking the seemingly fundamental prerequisite of an individualistic, aware, or even present self.20 Interiority, in many cases, is made to take a second place to the more immediate and apparently secure markers of identity present in cranial shape, physical constitution and heredity. This shift in emphasis is particularly evident in the prominent 1870s and 1880s series of biographies and autobiographies published in The Medium and Daybreak, usually placed as leader article and accompanied by full-size portraits intimes of their subjects. These costly illustrations were by no means simply decorative; for the journal’s phrenologically trained editor James Burns, the detailed engravings provided substantiating evidence for the claims about personality and ability contained within the auto/ biographical text.21 Thus the 1883 capsule biography of S.C. Hall, Spiritualist, journalist, editor and notorious inspiration of Dickens’s Pecksniff, directs readers to ‘Observe what an arch each of the eyebrows makes. The organ of Individuality is equally large with the side organs. Here is a man that can observe correctly’ (‘Mr S.C. Hall’ 1883: 354; Figure 1). Reversing a common hierarchy of image and text in the Victorian biography, here the visual reproduction of the face supersedes the words for which an attuned observer, one who immediately recognises a well-defined organ of Individuality when he or she sees it, would have no need. In praising Hall for his clarity of vision, The Medium and Daybreak further lauded the skills of empirical observation and close attention that it hoped to instil in its readers.

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Figure 1. S.C. Hall in The Medium and Daybreak (1883). © The British Library Board.

The Medium and Daybreak auto/biographies also de-interiorised their subjects through their repetition of what was emerging as a standard trope of mediumistic life writing: the attribution of spiritual powers to heredity and race rather than to individual genius or conscious acts of training. Thus we are told of the infamous American slate-writing

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Figure 2. Henry Slade in The Medium and Daybreak (1876). © The British Library Board.

medium Henry Slade, exposed and charged with fraud in 1876, that: the medium is born with the power, and it oftentimes comes to him in childhood when it is neither understood by himself nor those round him [. . .] Trace back the history of any medium to childhood and parentage, and the wonderful power will be found in every instance to be hereditary and constitutional. (‘Henry Slade’ 1876: 626; Figure 2)

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Figure 3. William Oxley in The Medium and Daybreak (1885). © The British Library Board.

Slade’s mother and all of his brothers and sisters, apparently, were born with similar abilities, although none attained the celebrity of their distinguished relative. This inherited nature of mediumistic ability, argued Spiritualist and esoteric Egyptologist William Oxley, was so well established as to render the concepts of free will and self-direction totally obsolete. Writing in his own two-part serial autobiography for The Medium and Daybreak, he states:

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Every human being has his or her own part to play in the grand Drama of Life, and ‘each must play their part, or else be played upon.’ Heretofore the mass of mankind have thought they were the players, or actors, but unless I mistake the purport of the sweeping wave of Spiritual Influx now covering the whole earth, we shall all find ere long that we, who are inhabitants of the globe, are the played upon! The work of Spiritualism is to demonstrate, that the real Players are those Intelligences and Beings who inhabit Spheres that are not visible to the human eye, but nevertheless are all potent; and this being so, it will be acknowledged that they are the actors, and we are the reactors. If this be granted, then as one of the re-actors, I may be absolved from any charge of vanity in giving out so much of my history as may be sufficient to show who and what I am; and the reader must kindly allow me to tell my tale in my own way. (Oxley 1885: 2, original emphasis; Figure 3)

In this fascinating variation on the standard autobiographical apologia, Oxley justifies the act of writing about his personal self on the basis that he does not really possess one. All of the events in his life, and words on his page, are merely automatic reactions to supernatural stimulus. This remarkable formulation raises the question of whether autobiography is even possible under Spiritualist conditions, given that the only subjects deemed capable of determining actions and acquiring self-consciousness are disincarnate ones. Although the capsule biographies and autobiographies in The Medium and Daybreak constructed and promoted a model of depthless and reactive selfhood, their brevity prevented them from fully exposing the problems of deterministic identity for a movement that prided itself on its promotion of individualism. These would manifest more clearly and forcefully in the lengthier examples of Spiritualist life writing which embraced a hard hereditarian framework while simultaneously extolling the unique self-determination of their exemplary subjects. Paschal Beverly Randolph’s The Davenport Brothers and Andrew Jackson Davis’s The Magic Staff and Beyond the Valley are cases in point. What makes Davis’s and Randolph’s eugenic ideology remarkable is that they were both the kind of subjects that non-Spiritualist eugenicists would later target as dysgenic: Davis was the son of an alcoholic father and depressive mother in an impoverished upstate New York family, and Randolph was a bi-racial occultist and self-designated sex magician whose credibility as a medium was routinely predicated on the racist belief among his white listeners that no black man could come up with these transcendent messages without supernatural aid.22 The decision, then, of outsider figures like Randolph and Davis to embrace such a potentially self-defeating system of hereditary election remains one of the most intriguing and problematic paradoxes of nineteenth-century Spiritualism’s history.

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To be discussed at greater length in Chapter 4, Paschal Beverly Randolph is one of the, if not the, most fascinating figures in the history of nineteenth-century Anglo-American Spiritualism. Born into poverty in New York City in 1825, Randolph, the illegitimate son of mixedrace parents, taught himself basic literacy skills by copying out street signs;23 later, he apprenticed as a medium and trance speaker with early Spiritualist confederates John Murray Spear and Andrew Jackson Davis before travelling extensively in Asia, Africa and Europe, where he allegedly gained the hidden knowledge that would form the basis of his occult form of sexual science, available for purchase through mail order. Obsessed with the material and mystical conditions that surrounded conception and life, Randolph was, unsurprisingly, repeatedly drawn to life writing; indeed, one could argue that all his works, even the most extravagantly fictional and novelistic, belong in this category. Time and time again within his prodigious output, regardless of his ostensive subject, Randolph breaks narrative momentum to meditate on and reiterate the hereditary and somatic circumstances that have, for good or bad, produced his own unique constitution. Randolph’s longest and most recognisable piece of biographical writing was his 1869 biography of the Davenport Brothers, seemingly produced, as Randolph’s biographer John Patrick Deveney suggests, as a desperate money-raising venture and unaccompanied by any sincere conviction in the brothers’ supernatural powers (Deveney 1997: 354). Whatever Randolph’s opinion of the Davenports may have been, his faith in the theory of somatic spiritual determinism through which he frames their birth and, later, his own, is absolute and unyielding. He opens his account of the ‘strangely organized’ (Randolph 1869a: 10) Ira and William Davenport with a reverential and keenly Anglocentric account of the brothers’ natural history. Their mother – Randolph recognised women as the most important transmitters of supernatural ability to their offspring – is said to be ‘descended from an ancient English family of considerable importance’, with ‘a rich stream of healthy, strong, genuine English blood’ (Randolph 1869a: 10) running through her veins to counteract the pernicious effects of the American diet and lifestyle. Completing these auspicious conditions for the brothers’ conception was the health and vigour of their father, and the deep yet tranquil affection that existed between their two parents. Randolph joined Andrew Jackson Davis in believing that marital happiness produced not just the environmental but more importantly the biological stimulus for healthy children, with the offspring of temperamentally mismatched couples likely to emerge from the womb physically deformed or mentally damaged. But less important than the

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constitutions of the mediums’ parents were the dual teleological forces that worked through them: namely, heredity and supernatural impulsion. Randolph writes: Speaking with persons of rare judgment and experience in occult matters [. . .] the opinion was advanced, that the invisible powers – whether they be of the angelic orders, or disembodied men and women, formerly of and now visiting the earth again for redemptive and educational purposes; in other words, the power behind the veil – had, possibly for generations back, been labouring with and operating on the progenitors of the Davenport youths, for the express purpose of obtaining the results now triumphantly achieved. (Randolph 1869a: 12)

What Randolph proposes here is a simultaneous anthropomorphosis and etherealisation of heredity, turning it into a benevolent spirit guide who redeems the living, not just by telling them of the life to come, but by ensuring that they reproduce the right stock. The medium is extolled as avatar of a spiritual master race whose powers might best be understood through the study of biology rather than of hermetic texts or religious doctrine. In arguing for total hereditary determinism at a mid-century point when bioessentialism was still decades away from its fin-de-siècle apogee, Spiritualist life writers like Randolph and Davis undermined the individualism presumed as central to the Spiritualist revelation and their chosen genre alike. Or, more correctly, they sought to separate the concept of individualism from those of free will and agency, reconfiguring it into an alien and, from a modern point of view, virtually unrecognisable form. Humans may be unique, implied Randolph and Davis, but their own desires and actions had little to do with this distinction. In The Davenport Brothers, we see this belief echoed in Randolph’s digression on crime, a topic which, for understandable reasons, constantly troubled believers – if the spirits could see so much, why did they not identify murderers? Randolph answers: It is often asked, Why do not the spirits always expose crime, and bring the criminals to justice? I answer, Because jailing and hanging a man is very seldom justice; and spirits know, if we don’t, that crime is the result of bad organizations, for which the criminals are never responsible. (Randolph 1869a: 73, original emphasis)

But if the criminal – the wretched, slant-browed degenerate, as believer Arthur Conan Doyle would later characterise Jack the Ripper and his like in his 1919 Spiritualist treatise The Vital Message (Doyle 1919: 87–8) – was never responsible for his own corrupt organisation, then surely the medium could not be held responsible for his or her own

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either. What was to separate the two, the criminal and medium, apart from the social effects of their heredity? Neither seemed in possession of independent volition, being the hapless subjects of impulsion, maternal impressions and the guiding eugenicist spirits who presided over human reproduction. In Randolph’s numinous schema, it seems that the only way to escape the tyrannical dictates of ancestral taint and gain full selfhood, is to die. Indeed, this is the very vindication that Randolph imagines for himself in his own 1872 fragment autobiography P.B. Randolph, the ‘Learned Pundit,’ and ‘Man with Two Souls,’ His Curious Life, Works, and Career. Written as polemical defence against the charges of distributing obscene materials that had been trumped up against him by fraudsters, the book combines a compendium of collected press articles in support of Randolph’s ‘genius’ with brief glosses on the inherited nature of his difficult, ‘angular’ personality, the product he claims of the ‘Caucasian, aboriginal, and [. . .] royal blood, fresh from the veins of the Queen of Madagascar’ (Randolph 1872a: 4) that runs through him. Although he may never receive justice on earth, Randolph acknowledges, and his odd constitution may perpetually daunt him in life, the tables will be turned at death. Imagining the post-life fate of his persecutors, he crows with undeniable schadenfreude: Can any of these men who have wronged me, any of those at whose hands I have unfairly suffered in the world, ever be happy, dead or alive, so long as my soul – immortal as the ETERNAL’S – treasures up the bitter memory of my life blasted by their love of gold and slander? I think not; and devote the next ten centuries of supra-mortal life to the solution of the very tremendous problem. (Randolph 1872a: 5, original emphasis)

The two autobiographies of Randolph’s one-time mentor Andrew Jackson Davis are ultimately even more restrictive and even nihilistic in their account of human subjectivity than The Davenport Brothers, largely due to their reliance on the Harmonialist philosophy whose heavy biofatalism we have already explored. The first of these, The Magic Staff, appeared in 1857 when the young seer was only thirty-one years old and something of a cause scandale in the New York Spiritualist scene due to his controversial two early marriages: the first, in 1848, to a much older woman (Catherine De Wolf Dodge) whom he counselled to leave her husband on the supposed advice of spirits; the second, shortly after Catherine’s 1853 death, to Mary Fenn Love, another married woman whom he met in the midst of her ongoing divorce proceedings (Albanese 1992: 9–10).24 In 1857, it was Mary who penned the inspirational preface to The Magic Staff, using it to attempt to mitigate

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the fatalistic grain of the larger narrative and position it instead as a testament to the triumph of individual perseverance over conditions of adversity and want. Many of the events in Davis’s life encouraged such a reading. After an impoverished rural childhood, he grew into a sickly, malnourished and uneducated teenager who apprenticed for a short while as a shoemaker in Poughkeepsie, New York. There, after some mesmeric sessions with local tradesman William Levingston, he acquired the gifts of spiritual healing, clairvoyance and trance speech. For years, he was only able to perform under the control of his ‘operator’ S.S. Lyon until a spirit voice instructed him to work independently. This career path seemed to buttress the meliorist progress from dependence to self-reliance and individual emancipation that The Magic Staff claims to advocate; in reading about her husband’s victory over circumstances, Mary Jackson Davis suggests, others will be inspired to seek similar liberation. That he has reached a state of beautiful existence, where his affections are warm and beaming, his intellect clear and comprehensive, his soul pure, serene, devotional, and steadfast, and his heart ever filled with ‘a joy unspeakable and full of glory,’ by the dewy freshness of Wisdom’s precious gifts – that he has reached the glorious eminence in spite of organizational faults and discouraging conditions – is a fact in development full of promise, even to the lowliest and loneliest child of God! (Davis [1857] 1885: 18)

In other words, congenital conditions need not be a cage; through the grace of God, all of us might embark on a ceaseless course of progress. Yet it is clear from the very first chapters of The Magic Staff, and later again in Beyond the Valley, that any such improvement could not be self-directed, and might be curtailed for specific individuals before they began life outside the womb. Indeed, in the latter text, Davis suggests that the human character is fixed, or as he curiously chose to call it, ‘individualized’, ‘about two hundred days after conception, or ten weeks before birth’ (Davis 1885: 30).25 Although, in both autobiographies, he periodically gestures towards the possibility that some post-birth alteration might be possible, his examples consistently demonstrate the opposite propensity. Like Randolph, he tends to be at his most biofatalistic when confronted by the problem of crime, advising readers in Beyond the Valley that: criminals must not be brought into the world [. . .] by the wrongly married, who are the legalized makers of demoniac children, and the lawauthorized breeders of human moral monstrosities [. . .] the truest and the highest wisdom would (by sanctioning only true and scientific marriages) prevent the organization and birth of criminals. (Davis 1885: 347, original emphasis)26

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No product of the late century’s more pessimistic zeitgeist, Davis’s puritanical severity on this issue was just as strong in his early career when, as he recounts in The Magic Staff, he regularly preached against dysgenic marriage on the Spiritualist lecture circuit: I taught that the world’s business was [. . .] to prevent bad marriages; and that, to this end, those legal barriers which are deemed expedient for the regulation of individual content, should be placed high and strong between the sexes and the hymneal altar [. . .] behold the children of sensual progenitors! Behold the idle limbs and silly tongues of those who came from antagonistic parents legally wedded! (Davis [1857] 1885: 492, 497, original emphasis)

Here as elsewhere in Spiritualist epistemology, visual proof is everything; a mere glance at the haplessly and hopelessly addled offspring of the ill mated should be enough to propel immediate eugenic legislation. The Magic Staff and Beyond the Valley were not just treatises on Harmonial eugenics; they were also and primarily autobiographies, and it is this generic contextualisation that makes their severity on so-called defectives all the more peculiar. For it quickly becomes clear from his account of childhood that Davis is, by the dictates of his own doctrine, an impossible subject. The early chapters of The Magic Staff contain none of the rhapsodic descriptions of pure blood, healthy physiques and perfect marital bliss that Randolph imagined for the Davenport clan. On the contrary, they describe an early life afflicted by inherited and environmental degeneracy. Davis’s mother may, like that of the Davenports, have had the second sight, but she was also ‘simple and childlike’ (Davis [1857] 1885: 25) and, more damningly from the vantage of Spiritualist eugenics, grossly incompatible with her drunken husband. Such ill pairings, he later speculates, could only have one outcome: ‘evil offspring result from bad marriages, while from heart unions the world receives children at once peaceful and beautiful’ (470). Davis, far from being daunted by the implications of this schema for his own character, describes his parents’ constant discord with a strange relish, noting its blighting effects on each of the family’s children, in particular on his sister Eliza: [T]his radical and temperamental incompatibility – the barrier to conjugal peace and unity which Nature had unmistakably erected between husband and wife – came out with life-like manifestations in the mental characteristics of Eliza, and, in fact, with more or less distinctness, in each of the subsequent offspring. Hence [. . .] each child was born with certain hereditary disadvantages of body and disposition. (Davis [1857] 1885: 39)

Although Davis adds the proviso that these disadvantages were eventually overcome through years of effort (Davis [1857] 1885: 39), his

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evidence for this ability to repudiate tainted inheritance seems scant or non-existent. Eliza gives birth to a stillborn child; his father falls into paralysis; and another sister, Julia-Ann, dies suddenly in early adulthood. To contemporary readers, such events, all too common in the lives of poverty-stricken families in the early nineteenth century, certainly do not demand hereditarian or theological exegesis (as punishment for bad genes or original sin, respectively), but the case would or must have been different for Davis, given his frequent insistence that ‘all human diseases are the effects of transgressions – proofs of wrong living, wrong feeling, and wrong doing’ (Davis 1885: 339). Neither does he exempt himself from the moral and hereditarian diagnostics of sin that he applies to his kin. Describing his physical appearance at the time of his first experiments with mesmerism, Davis writes: my body was imperfectly developed; [. . .] my spine was short and weak [. . .] in my blood flowed the subtle poison of my father’s alcohol; my muscular fabric was unsound and inefficient [. . .] my whole appearance was calculated to inspire strangers with but little interest in my existence. (Davis 1885: 203)

The autobiographical voice here does not so much write the self as simply describe the ways in which it has already been inscribed by somatic and hereditary conditions. One might argue that the heavy-handedness of Davis’s autobiographical biofatalism is ultimately defeated by the seer’s apparent triumph over his defective heritage, one evidenced by the clarity of his visions and the extent of his professional success. Davis certainly wanted his life be read as a Horatio Alger-type testament to the power of self-dependence and autonomy, but the events and their Harmonial interpretation constantly implied a different story. The seer only freed himself from the debilitating thrall of a poor constitution and poisonous parental inheritance by subjecting himself to another, equally dominating influence: that of spirit control. The troubling possibility that his life might be interpreted in this way obviously struck Davis hard enough to force him to deny it, writing in The Magic Staff that ‘we have [not] been playing the part of insensate automatons under incessant inspirations from spirits, but [. . .] are self-existent and responsible beings’ (Davis [1857] 1885: 311). But this stipulation comes too late to convince; Davis after all provides readers with few instances when he does not immediately obey spirit direction, however bizarre.27 When he attempts to exert independence by ignoring this numinous guidance, he is eventually shown to be wrong, as in his marriage to Mary J. Davis. Davis’s autobiography reads like the confession of a machine serving the two masters of hereditary

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and spiritual determination and desperately trying to console itself with the comforting fantasy of personal choice. The cognitive dissonance evoked by The Magic Staff is a product, not only of its authorial subject’s alleged transcendence of the hereditary destiny he posits as inexorable, but also of its splicing of several fundamentally antithetical autobiographical modes: that of the liberal bildungsroman, which celebrates the individual’s ability to choose his or her own lot through self-chosen acts, and that of the eugenic Spiritualist case study, which converts original sin into unthwartable biological destiny and counsels readers that as unfit humans cannot be cured, they should not be born. The autobiographical self that emerges across Spiritualist life writing is thus both an individual and a collective, a free agent and a prisoner. He or she is also an uncanny version of the living dead, possessed of all the necessary organic functions that maintain life, yet mentally, morally and constitutionally animated by the desires and the hereditary qualities of the long departed. Such a subject cannot reproduce but only act as surrogate host, can achieve individuality only in the ability to recognise, espouse and practise the theology of absolute determinism. The medium’s life story is thus always already a necrobiography. If non-believing nineteenth-century autobiographers exposed the difficulty of accounting for the self truthfully or comprehensively – consider Anthony Trollope’s famous autobiographical concession: ‘That I, or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible’ (Trollope [1883] 2008: 1) – mediumistic writers make the more profoundly unsettling suggestion that coherent liberal selfhood is an impossible condition, that even the autobiographical form used to represent this chimera is itself the product of ineluctable bio-impulse. This explanation is exactly what Davis offers as defence for life writing in his introduction to The Magic Staff: ‘The instinct for autobiography is implanted in the nature of all men; but when left to seek gratification unguided by Wisdom, it rapidly degenerates into deformity and exhibits imperfections the most repulsive’ (Davis [1857] 1885: 25). Through an understanding of, and deference to, the Godhood of heredity, he suggests, we might breed better mediums and fitter autobiographies alike. In the chapters that follow, we shall see that Spiritualism’s highly paradoxical model of selfhood never acted as a stalemate to the movement’s cosmic eugenic consciousness. On the contrary, it enabled believers to theorise a remarkably flexible paradigm of human subjectivity, one capable of adaptation and application to a variety of ethical, political, social and aesthetic contexts. Hereditary fatalism and biological essentialism became key concepts in early Spiritualism’s numinous discourses of bioknowledge, in which death, no longer imagined as the end

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to life, became figured as a mechanism for human improvement. Those still living were encouraged to work hard to equip their bodies and those of their descendants with the optimal physiological qualities they would need to attain spiritual fitness in the next world, to help to create a perfect race here amongst the living that would anticipate if never wholly reproduce the potential heights of the afterlife. But this improving impulse would somehow have to both accommodate and find value for the very real instances of impairment – somatic, affective or intellectual – whose presence, anti-Spiritualists claimed, was all too evident in the ranks of the movement’s practitioners. Chapter 2 examines the first of several abject subjects that Spiritualist eugenics would attempt to both eliminate and recuperate: the intellectual subnormal.

Notes 1. Galton famously coined the term in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), taking it from the Greek eugenes to designate those who were ‘good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities’ (Galton 1883: 17). Intriguingly, he stipulated that its application need not be limited to hereditary transmission; rather, it would ‘[take] cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had’ (Galton 1883: 17). Here we see in miniature the dilemma that would daunt eugenics for the duration of its history: the ‘more suitable’ breeds of human are not automatically the best adapted to the current environment, and require constant succour if they are to survive alongside, never mind outbreed, the less suitable. 2. As Laura Marcus discusses in Auto/biographical Discourses (1994), Ellis’s 1904 Study of British Genius condemned the absence of full hereditary and racial information in contemporary biography in general and the Dictionary of National Biography in particular. 3. This interpretation of mediumistic identity and performance as representing an idealised form of femininity, one in which the female mystic gains power by becoming passive, has dominated the secondary criticism on Spiritualism since it was introduced by Alex Owen in her 1989 book The Darkened Room. Here Owen argues persuasively that ‘Spiritualists assumed that it was innate femininity, in particular, female passivity, which facilitated [the] renunciation of self and cultivation of mediumistic powers’ (A. Owen 1989: 10). So influential has Owen’s work been, that few studies of Spiritualism now fail to flag gender – femininity in particular – as the primary context for understanding mediumship. The popularity of Owen’s groundbreaking thesis has, however, had two unfortunate consequences: one, that of obscuring other ideological contexts for Spiritualism’s rhetoric of submission than that of gender politics; and two, that of producing the peculiar and certainly inaccurate impression that most of the movement’s

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6.

7.

8.

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leading figures and practitioners were women. Any survey of the nineteenthand early twentieth-century Spiritualist press, with its extensive rosters of touring mediums and membership lists for local Spiritualist organisations, will reveal that this is simply not the case. It is part of the goal of my study to move the study of transatlantic Spiritualism beyond an almost exclusive preoccupation with gender to consider a wider range of intellectual, social and scientific sources for the movement’s construction of identity. For more details on Owen’s adoption of Spiritualist belief, see Podmore (1906), Barrow (1986) and Taylor (1987). Podmore’s publications on Spiritualism and psychical research include Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism (1902), The Newer Spiritualism (1910) and, with F.W.H. Myers and Edmund Gurney, Phantasms of the Living (1886). See ‘Reply to Brother Evan’s Letter to Me, On the Part of the Shakers’ Communities in the United States’ (R. Owen 1856b) and ‘The Use, Advantages, and Beauty, of Man’s Formation, When He Shall be Fully Developed’ (R. Owen 1856c). Although often differing in political applications and outlook, phrenology and Owenism shared a broad cross-over appeal. Many early nineteenthcentury radicals were attracted to phrenology for the same reasons that they were drawn to Owenism; both eschewed the doctrine of original sin in favour of a progressionist view of human history and offered (apparently) practical advice on self-improvement (De Guistano 1975: 50; Cooter 1984: 224). Some of the connections between the two movements were more personal. Johann Spurzheim and George Combe met Robert Owen on separate visits to New Lanark in the 1810s and 1820s; Combe’s brother Abram was himself a passionate Owenite communitarian who set up a model school in Edinburgh based on the educational system he had seen at New Lanark. Indeed, some Owenite communitarians used phrenological techniques to select members for their communities, hoping to use head reading to eliminate the lazy and unfit subjects whose unrecognised deficiencies had, according to Robert Owen, led to the collapse of the New Harmony scheme in Indiana. Consider, for example, the horrified rejection of phrenological fatalism by the narrator of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd [1863] (1984) even as he or she accedes to its fundamental truth. The narrator describes and then compares the beautiful but congenitally dissolute groom James Conyers to notorious poisoner William Palmer, stating: ‘The phrenologists who examined the head of William Palmer declared that he was so utterly deficient in moral perception, so entirely devoid of conscientious feeling, that he could not help being what he was. Heaven keep us from too much credence in that horrible fatalism! Is a man’s destiny here and hereafter to depend upon bulbous projections scarcely perceptible to uneducated fingers, and good and evil propensities which can be measured by the compass or weighed in the scale?’ (Braddon [1863] (1984): 250–1). For many Spiritualists in the 1860s and 1870s, the answer to this rhetorical question was implicitly yes, and the Spiritualist Summerland was seen to offer not protection from but ultimate exemplification of the powers of biofatalism.

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9. As Karl Pearson notes, Galton himself underwent several phrenological readings throughout his lifetime, many of which predicted or confirmed his later exceptionality through his head shape (Pearson 1924: I, 157). Despite these flattering assessments, Galton eventually gave phrenology as little credence as he did Spiritualism, writing in a 1906 letter that: ‘The localization in quite modern times of the functions of the brain lends so far as I am aware no corroboration whatsoever, but quite the reverse, to the divisions of the phrenologist. Why capable observers should have come to such strange conclusions has to be accounted for – most easily on the supposition of unconscious bias in collecting data’ (qtd in Pearson 1924: IIIb, 577). 10. For a complete account of the Fowlers’ phrenological empire, see Madeleine B. Stern’s Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (1971). 11. Burns worked as a practising phrenologist and inspirational speaker, and edited two of the period’s most influential heterodox periodicals, Human Nature (1867–77) and The Medium and Daybreak (1870–95). 12. In Sexual Science, Including Manhood, Womanhood, and their Mutual Interrelations (1870), Orson Fowler declared that: ‘Reciprocal amatory action is exactly what all males and all females seek in each other. If Infinite Wisdom could have done without Amativeness in either, He would have omitted it in the one, but he has seen fit to incorporate it into both; thus signifying that its action is indispensable. He also ordained that both shall exercise it together, at the same time and place, and thereby absolutely compels cooperation as a paramount prerequisite to offspring. A very few females have averred that they were unconscious of pleasure at conception, but it is not possible to commence life without some movement in the maternal organs, and all action gives pleasure’ (Fowler 1870: 669, original emphasis). For more on Randolph’s occult philosophy of mutual orgasm, see Chapter 4. 13 Fowler’s list of eugenic qualities is intriguingly different than the one offered by Galton in ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims’, which favoured ‘health, energy, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition’ (Galton 1904: 2). The reasons, historical, personal and ideological, for these distinctions are well worth further examination. 14. See Chapter 4 for more on the problematic conflation of race and disability in Spiritualist thought. 15 For further explorations of Spiritualism’s potential application to sexual selection in the Spiritualist press, see Cora Tappan’s ‘Dynamics: Parentage’ (1874a), ‘The Law of Heredity’ (1886), Gerald Massey’s ‘Parentage and Social Reconstruction’ (1888), John Marshall’s ‘Society and the Planter: A Comparison’ (1890), ‘The Advent of Man: Thoughts on Parentage’ (1892), John Lamont’s ‘The Formation of Character’ (1892), ‘Can the Evil Effects of Heredity be Modified?’ (1894) and ‘Heredity and its Working’ (1908). 16. For more on the scientific status of neutral selection, see Motoo Kimura’s The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution (1983). 17. Other nineteenth-century Spiritualist advocates of the theory of maternal impressions include Nellie T. Brigham, John Lamont and Cora Tappan. 18. One exception is Redna Scott’s remarkable story ‘Under His Spell’, serialised in Spiritualist periodical The Medium and Daybreak between February

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23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

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and April of 1894. This narrative will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 6. For more on mediumistic performances of ignorance, see Chapter 2. See Landow 1979: xvi; Gusdorf 1980: 30. For other examples of illustrated phrenological biography in The Medium and Daybreak, see ‘R.B.D. Wells, Phrenologist’ (1878) and ‘Dr B.W. Richardson, F.R.S.’ (1883). See John Patrick Deveney’s biography of Randolph, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (1997), which quotes its subject as complaining: ‘If I wrote a book or a poem that evinced some power of mind, and refused to admit I either stole it bodily, got it from some one “away over in the Summer Land,” or was inspired to its production by rum, gin, or druggery, I was voted an infernal scoundrel, crazy, loon, or an accursed fool’ (qtd in Deveney 1997: 6–7). There is some debate as to whether Randolph was born in Virginia or New York, exacerbated by the absence of an official birth certificate. In opting for New York, I follow Randolph’s own account and that of his most thorough biographer, John Patrick Deveney. In the 1880s, he would marry for the third time, having come to believe that his relationship with Mary was not a true spiritual affinity and leaving her by mutual consent to wed Della E. Markham. A period, intriguingly, far later than that set by Thomas Aquinas for the ensoulment of a male child, which the Christian theologian places at two weeks post-conception. For female children, he posits a later date of four months into the pregnancy (Palmer 2004: 198). In both cases, children gain their souls or are, as Davis imagines it, ‘individualized’, far earlier than in Harmonialist philosophy. Davis appends to this passage a lengthy footnote which references ‘stirpiculture’, a term that indicates his familiarity with the writings of either Oneida Perfectionist J.H. Noyes or Francis Galton (both used the term). For Galton’s use of it, see ‘A Theory of Heredity’ (1875); for Noyes’s, see Wyatt (1976). Davis fulfilled his destiny as a seer when he followed the counsel of a disembodied voice which, speaking to him from the air while he was doing field work, told him, ‘You may desire to travel’. The voice later returned to complete the direction with: ‘to Poughkeepsie’ (Davis [1857] 1885: 169). Other spirit injunctions instructed him to prescribe skinned frog parts to cure a finger wound and to use warm rat skins as a poultice for deaf ears.

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Chapter 2

Spirits in Mind: Madness, Idiocy and the Cultural Capital of Ignorance

For many of Spiritualism’s early critics, Spiritualist belief and mental defect seemed to be natural correlatives. Where the first existed, they argued, the second was sure to lurk nearby as either consequence or catalyst. In many ways, the aetiological hesitation in this diagnosis was more troubling than the fact of the correlation itself. What was Spiritualism, a cause or effect of diseased minds? Were seances so dangerous as to trigger insanity in otherwise mentally healthy individuals1 – a disturbing enough possibility, given the wide popularity and availability of Spiritualist paraphernalia such as the planchette – or, worse yet, was Spiritualism’s spread merely the latest manifestation of a blight already at the core of the West’s mental stock, induced by either the failure of the Enlightenment project, an epidemic of hereditary monomania, poor education or atavistic reversion?2 By no means mutually exclusive, these competing somatic and environmental diagnoses were often overlaid in Victorian anti-Spiritualist rhetoric, as they are here in these grudging comments by Illinois state senator James Shields when, in 1854, he diffidently presented to Senate a petition signed by some 15,000 of his constituents in demand of an official inquiry into the new phenomena: I make it a rule to present any petition to the Senate, which is respectful in its terms; but having discharged this duty, I may be permitted to say that the prevalence of this delusion at this age of the world, among any considerable portion of the citizens, must originate, in my opinion, in a defective system of education or in a partial derangement of the mental faculties, produced by a diseased condition of the physical organization. (qtd in Davenport 1888: 154)

Whether caused by poor training or ailing brains, the consequences of Spiritualist practice were seen to be the same: an onset of delusion. As such, no matter how apparently trivial its phenomena, Spiritualism

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represented a problem that concerned the entire population, nonbelievers, dabblers and adherents alike. Spiritualism seemed dangerously poised to erode the mental health and intellectual distinction newly recognised as crucial for progress – at both individual and national levels – under the increasingly secular conditions of Western modernity. One need not look far to find traces of this intellectualist social panic in the literature of the nineteenth century’s canonical, and hence, with few notable exceptions,3 non-believing, writers. Perhaps the most famous of these is Robert Browning’s vituperative dramatic monologue ‘Mr Sludge, Medium’ (1864), a scathing attack on the credulity of participants in the genteel Spiritualist circles in which he and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning had begun to circulate in the 1850s.4 The monologue’s narrator Sludge, seen by some as an acid-etched portrait of Scottish-American medium D.D. Home, rounds on the wealthy patron Hiram H. Horsfall who threatens to expose him for fraud, pointing out that his sitter has only his own idiotic gullibility to blame: Who was the fool When, to an awe-struck wide-eyed open-mouthed Circle of Sages, Sludge would introduce Milton composing baby-rhymes, and Locke Reasoning in gibberish, Homer writing Greek In noughts and crosses, Asaph setting psalms To crotchet and quaver? (Browning 1864: 586–92)

Contrasting his own inventive, unrhymed and metrically eclectic speech with the monotonously monosyllabic raps of the seance room and the vulgar rhymes of spirit poetry, Sludge’s critique of Spiritualist practice is both aesthetic and intellectually derisory; his well-heeled supporters are no better equipped to distinguish between good and bad poetry than to evaluate truth claims. Admittedly, the pervasiveness of ignorance among the middle classes is no cause for alarm to Sludge, who rightly recognises it as a guarantor of his income. Undaunted by his expulsion, he sets his sights on new quarry across the ocean, asking rhetorically of Horsfall, ‘[I]s he the only fool in the world?’ (Browning 1864: 1525). Other meditations on the problem of Spiritualistically aligned irrationality and madness appeared in later British and American realist novels such as W.D. Howell’s The Undiscovered Country (1880), Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884) and Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland ([1885] 1976).5 The latter, a fascinating experiment in cross-gender fictional autobiography which loosely recounts events from Linton’s own life through the male persona of Christopher Kirkland, features a rapturous transcendentalist Mrs Dalrymple, whose

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friendship with Kirkland ultimately leads him to a fit of brain-fever, and a patently delusional spinster Mrs Pratten, whose addiction to mysticism is, along with her hysterical hatred of men, a symptom of pathological sexual repression. After spending some time with her, Kirkland concludes that ‘People who walk habitually in spirit-land do undoubtedly scatter a few of their wits by the way; and poor Mrs. Pratten had scattered some of hers, like the rest’ (Linton [1885] 1976: 113). In these texts by non-believing writers, pity, derision and occasionally fear are the most appropriate responses to a movement which had sacrificed the powers of mind of its own adherents and travestied the West’s great intellectual tradition by channelling crude, inaccurate and bowdlerised versions of its great literary works. Yet any account of modern Spiritualism’s role in contemporary debates about the spread of ignorance and intellectual defect which imagines it solely as a passive target, and relies exclusively on the writings of non-believers, is destined to present a dangerously occluded view of the movement’s own deeply conflicted fixation with mental health and normalcy. In this chapter, rather than viewing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spiritualism as simply the object of a pathologising medico-cultural gaze, I want to present it in a new light: as a highly creative, eager and impassioned participant in a reciprocal conversation about the meaning, use and dangers of intelligence, the moral signification of mental disability, and the lingering value of ignorance within an increasingly meritocratic society in which formal education and intellectual capital were coming to rival more traditional labour skills such as manual dexterity, bodily strength and physical resilience. Modern Spiritualist writing from the 1850s onwards provides ample proof of the movement’s fascination, even obsession, with mental illness and intellectual impairment, and of its desire to alternately eliminate the mental subnormal and aggrandise him or her as foundational figure in the impending Spiritualist Utopia. We must first recognise that the Spiritualist interest in plumbing the meaning of mental defect was only partly defensive. It is certainly true that believers had strong strategic reasons to challenge culturally ascendant definitions of idiocy and derangement,6 given that, on their basis, a number of the movement’s leading public supporters – Catherine Crowe, Robert Dale Owen, Louisa Lowe and Georgina Weldon – had been confined to lunatic asylums for short periods of time. Although Weldon and Lowe were later vindicated as victims of the lax lunacy laws which made it easy for husbands to dispose of inconvenient or unruly wives, the cases against Robert Dale Owen and Crowe were harder to answer.7 Crowe was briefly confined in 1854 after being discovered

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wandering naked late at night through the streets of Edinburgh, convinced that supernatural powers had rendered her invisible.8 Robert Dale Owen, politician, Spiritualist campaigner and son of the radical communitarian Robert Owen whose influence we discussed in Chapter 1, was admitted to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane in 1875 following a mental breakdown apparently caused by overwork and the aftermath of the exposure of two prominent mediums, Mr and Mrs Holmes, whom he had prematurely and publicly endorsed (Leopold 1940: 405). Although both Crowe and Robert Dale Owen recovered, the stigma of their mental illness clung to their reputations (and their cause) for many years after, functioning to a suspicious mass public as evidence that dabbling in the unseen leads to derangement. Some believers took the conventional tactic of qualifying such incidences as simply the results of stress, exhaustion or an illness that existed prior to the adoption of Spiritualist faith.9 But more creatively, if riskily, others embraced the link between Spiritualism and madness proposed by the doctors, albeit for very different reasons. What Spiritualism taught the living, they claimed, was that individuals had the potential to be inhabited by foreign intelligences of varying moral and intellectual characters, and those who over-extended or misused their mediumistic powers could find themselves possessed by a malignant spirit who forced them to behave in a manner akin to madness. So dangerous was this possibility, warned believer and journalist William T. Stead in Real Ghost Stories (1891),10 that only experienced Spiritualist professionals should be allowed a place at the seance table. ‘Anybody with a smattering of chemistry may manufacture dynamite’, he analogises, but the promiscuous experimenting with explosives is more likely to result in explosions than profit. And if you feel disposed to go in ‘for the fun of the thing’ into Spiritualism, séances, etc., every serious investigator has one word to say, and that is DON’T! (Stead 1891: vi)

But this scenario was not just levied as a scare tactic. Spiritualist theories of possession could also have the ostensibly empathetic function of exonerating those individual believers who suffered from short spells of derangement from responsibility for their illness. Although this application came inevitably to be mired in ethical contradiction, it nonetheless represents a compelling example of modern Spiritualism’s creative counter-discursive energy in the face of near-constant scrutiny from medico-intellectual elites, and of its efforts to defy the latter by alternately incorporating and exaggerating their grounding assumptions about mental pathology into sometimes unrecognisable forms.

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Spiritualism, Insanity and the Healthy Primitive Mind Before we can appreciate the innovation and startling paradoxes of transatlantic Spiritualism’s home-grown discourse on mental impairment, we need briefly to locate it in relation to some of its surrounding medical and anthropological contexts. It is perhaps no coincidence that the spread of modern Spiritualism, and the ensuing rationalist anxiety it provoked, was contemporaneous with the rise of hereditarian and degenerationist aetiologies of mental illness and impairment alike. In some ways, these new paradigms for understanding mental difference were serendipitous for those Spiritualists who, as we saw in Chapter 1, were already open to biodeterminist explanations of human potential and could now – albeit dubiously – claim scientific confirmation for their long-held conviction that free will was a fantasy. Of course, the affinity did not prove quite so helpful when medical practitioners began to turn the diagnosis back on hard hereditarianism’s mystical supporters, presenting them as victims of inherited monomania. The reasons for Anglo-American psychiatry’s hereditarian and biodeterministic turn in the latter half of the nineteenth century have been well explored by historians such as Roy Porter and Mark Jackson. At this time, they point out, new and established sciences of the abnormal mind – medicine, physiology, psychology and anthropology – struggled to name, diagnose and distinguish the diverse and often interlinked forms of cognitive impairment made newly visible within the concentrated space of the asylum. Without nosological distinction between the particularly slippery categories of madness and idiocy that, as Martin Halliwell points out, were routinely conflated until the latter part of the nineteenth century,11 there could be little hope for the rehabilitation and cure viewed as the most, if not only, desirable outcomes of medical intervention. Medical professionals found little source for rehabilitative optimism within the asylum spaces where sufferers of the most profound, acute and stubbornly undiagnosable conditions were confined and aggregated together. As Roy Porter describes: The brute fact of the growing multitudes flooding into the asylums soon [. . .] gave pause for thought [. . .] the verdict which became increasingly plain to the profession from the mid-nineteenth-century onwards was that most lunatics were obviously incurable. And this in turn gave a new boost to medical theories of insanity as an ingrained physical disease, perhaps even a hereditary taint, a constitutional diathesis, a blot upon the brain. To generations of psychiatrists whose daily occupation lay in watching the zombie-like living death of asylum recidivists [. . .] sober realism demanded a ‘degenerationist’ theory, the mad seen as retrogressives, as throwbacks. (R. Porter 1987: 20)

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Thus a widely disparate group of people classed as mentally abnormal – psychotics, catatonics, manic depressives, individuals with what we now might call Down’s syndrome or autism – started to appear as the equally untreatable products of disease, hereditary taint or atavistic reversion, subjects who might be made comfortable but never turned into fully normal and socially productive citizens. As noted earlier, Anglo-American psychiatry’s adoption of a somatichereditarian diagnostics model coincided with a similar development within Spiritualist discussions of insanity. Although most of the period’s non-Spiritualist physicians would have been repelled by this suggestion of ontological alliance, one nonetheless exists, and we do not need to establish a singular and crudely causal vector of influence between the two fields to mark it. Increasingly, there developed striking rhetorical and conceptual similarities between transatlantic Spiritualist and medical accounts of mental aberration, particularly in their shared conviction that abnormality was the result of mechanistic processes of hereditary and environmental determination, ones analogous if not identical to the man-making schemes described earlier in the century by Robert Owen. Here, for example, is anti-Spiritualist British alienist Henry Maudsley describing the origins of psychological deviance in his influential 1874 textbook, Responsibility in Mental Disease: It is certain [. . .] that lunatics and criminals are as much manufactured articles as are steam-engines and calico-printing machines, only the processes of organic manufactury are so complex that we are not able to follow them. They are neither accidents nor anomalies in the universe, but come by law and testify to causality; and it is the business of science to find out what the causes are, and by what laws they work. There is nothing accidental, nothing supernatural, in the impulse to do right or in the impulse to do wrong; both come by inheritance, or education; and science can no more rest content with the explanation which attributes one to the grace of Heaven and the other to the malice of the devil, than it could rest content with the explanation of insanity as a possession by the devil. (Maudsley 1874: 28)

Obviously no regular reader of the Victorian mystical press, Maudsley writes unaware of the fact that this mechanistic explanation had already long been embraced by very ‘supernaturalist’ thinkers – Owen, Jackson Davis, the Fowlers, Randolph and many others – whom his newly professionalised field sought to exclude. They too had insisted that man’s character was formed, not by but for him, in the great machine-shop of nature. What separated these competing medical and heterodox discourses on mental health and defect, then, was not that one was materialist and deterministic while the other celebrated free will and divine intervention, but rather that each differently assessed and valued the

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deterministic processes which both agreed were intrinsic to the mind. The determinism that for Maudsley and his fellow degenerationists was a source of neutral contemplation, or more often gloom, was, for many Spiritualists, a cause for celebration, in that it confirmed the consistency and regularity of natural law. Where Maudsley’s prose remains relatively calm and objective when outlining the mechanistic processes of mental development, for example, Andrew Jackson Davis’s becomes ecstatic and adjective-laden, glorying in the so-called ‘mighty and Magnificent MACHINE’ of nature (Davis [1850] 1851: 20). The professional medical belief that biodeterminism and mysticism were somehow antithetical represented at best, I would argue, a form of wishful thinking. In fact, Spiritualist philosophers and performers had been insisting on their consilience, particularly in relation to the aetiology of mental deviance, since the early 1850s. Inherited insanity and spirit possession, some suggested, were actually versions of the same phenomenon under different names, namely the psychological subjection of the living to the dead in the form of diseased ancestors or unruly spirits. As such, the preoccupation with possession in nineteenth-century Spiritualist diagnostic literature should not be seen merely as a throwback to pre-Enlightenment models of understanding mental illness. Far from representing a retreat to anti-modern superstition, the Spiritualist version of possession was a thoroughly modernised one which retrofitted older concepts of demonic interference to buttress Spiritualism’s ontological, scientific and ethical claims. To view mental illness as spirit possession was, first, to affirm the Spiritualist belief that disembodied beings existed and could enter the bodies of the living for good or evil; second, to endorse an aetiology rhetorically and analogically comparable – in its shared conviction in the determinative power of the dead – to that of the scientific hereditarianism whose cultural authority many Spiritualist believers coveted; and third, to morally exculpate its sufferers from their actions. The lunatic could be viewed as the vehicle for, but not creator of, his or her deranged behaviour, and mental aberration transformed from an encompassing identity into a supernatural importation. Were these views widely adopted, argued a series of 1865 leader articles in the London Spiritualist newspaper The Spiritualist Times, the treatment, outlook and social status of the mentally ill would improve significantly. The anonymous contributor (possibly editor J.H. Powells) writes: It is a matter of common experience amongst those who study Spiritualism that spirits possess, or obsess mediums, and it never need cause alarm where the person possessed or obsessed knows the fact; but where possession, or

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obsession, is not understood by the patient, he believes himself insane, and, in reality, acts insanely. (‘Insanity—No. 1’ 1865: 129–30)

The article then calls on Spiritualist healers to use mesmerism to build up their patients’ wills, the lack of which has made them susceptible to possession (and deserving of pity) in the first place. Instead of confinement and moral management techniques, there would be trance healing sessions and rescue seances with higher medical spirits. As outlandish as these suggestions may seem, they are nonetheless recognisably lodged in a humanitarian urge to liberate those diagnosed as insane from their status as incurable and dangerous abnormals. The possessed, after all, could hope to be exorcised. This possibility, as we shall see, was not extended by Spiritualist thinkers to all forms of mental aberration, least frequently of all to those with intellectual impairments. I will later say more about the differential status of intellectual impairment and insanity in modern Spiritualist diagnostic literature. At the moment, I want to turn our attention to modern Spiritualism’s incorporation and deployment of another paradigm commonly used to conceptualise and stigmatise both Spiritualists’ faith practices and mental abnormality alike: atavism. For a number of scientific anti-Spiritualists, most notably foundational anthropologist E.B. Tylor, the problem with the Spiritualist brain was that it was, simply put, primitive, mired in the rudimentary cognition and emotional processes of an earlier human evolutionary stage whose survivals could occasionally still be found at the far reaches of empire. In Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization ([1865] 1964), Tylor claimed that ‘no Greenlander or Kaffir ever mixed up his subjectivity with the evidence of his senses with a more hopeless confusion than the modern Spiritualist’ (Tylor [1865] 1964: 4–5). This potentially very damaging charge of mental primitivism – Tylor certainly intended it as no compliment – was adopted by some believers as a profitable line of defence. If Spiritualism was indeed a form of primitivism, they contended, it was necessarily immune to the forms of mental pathology that, according to alienists such as Maudsley, were unique to modern civilisation. This Spiritualist defence was made possible by the anti-telos at the heart of degenerationism, the scientific and social theory that rose to increasing prominence in Anglo-American medical thought following its development in 1857 by French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel. In practice an often deeply conservative theory that prized static equilibrium over change, degenerationism claimed that certain forms of mental, somatic and even aesthetic pathology might be understood as the products of evolutionary reversion. Counter-intuitively, however, it also suggested

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that one could only suffer this backwards move by first going too far forward, that degenerative reversion was the product of over-rapid modernisation.12 Within this schema, the degenerate mental defective was both of and outwith modernity, not simply civilisation’s abject Other but its ultimate exemplification. Where there was no progress, there would be none of the pathology associated with the higher races. Such was the assumption that allowed degenerationist Henry Maudsley to argue that so-called moral insanity was practically absent in those non-European indigenous cultures which, whatever their material sufferings, had largely been spared the awful psychological costs of cultivation. In The Physiology and Pathology of Mind, he writes: There seems [. . .] good reason to believe that, with the progress of mental development through the ages, [. . .] there is a correlative degeneration going on and that the increase of insanity is a penalty which an increase in our civilization necessarily pays [. . .] It is plainly impossible, for example, that the most typical moral insanity should occur where no moral development has taken place; before the native Australian savage [. . .] could first become morally insane, he must first be humanized and then civilized; development must precede retrograde metamorphosis, mental organization succeeds disorganization. (Maudsley [1867] 1868: 229–30)

Maudsley’s influential conception of the no longer necessarily noble but profoundly sane savage resonated with a number of his Anglo-American scientific contemporaries, including the English astronomer George Darwin (second son of Charles) and the American neurologist George Beard. Impelled by the disturbing and by no means isolated conviction that mental illness was reaching epidemic proportions in the West, Beard warned in 1872 that ‘While we escape or recover from many of the inflammations and fevers that decimate savage tribes, and are, on the whole, healthier and longer-lived, we are yet afflicted with a thousand phases of insanity to which they are comparative strangers’ (Beard 1872: 688). Responding to the same crisis one year later, George Darwin offered a solution based on the nascent eugenic social programme then in development by his second cousin Francis Galton: if modernity’s terrifying tide of mental disease was to be arrested, Darwin suggested, civilised nations needed to act quickly to legally bar marriages between the unfit (G. Darwin 1873: 412). In such a degenerationist context, being an anti-modern primitive was no bad thing. On the contrary, such an identity offered the only real immunity to the insanity apparently afflicting so much of Western civilisation. The primitive, unlike the degenerate, had never progressed enough to make himself sick. Instead, he had clung salubriously to the beliefs and ontological structures of the past, even while updating

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and converting them into contemporary language – thus demonic possession became spirit inhabitancy, and immortality simply an extension of the individual evolutionary scale. These are the ideas that fuel English Spiritualist and popular writer William Howitt’s 1863 opus, The History of the Supernatural in All Ages and Nations, a work which argues for the veracity of spiritual phenomena on the basis, not just of their current manifestations, but of their universal presence in the records of antiquity. There was nothing new, modish or ephemeral, he insisted, about spirit contact; as such, we could be assured of its reality. Cunningly turning the language of Spiritualism’s medical detractors back on its users, Howitt opens by declaring the scientific refusal to investigate the massive body of cross-cultural and historical evidence for spirit manifestation to be ‘the grave psychologic [sic] malady of the time’ (Howitt 1863: vi).13 Continuing in this pathologising strain, he adds that, ‘the natural condition of humanity is alliance with the spiritual; the anti-spiritual is but an epidemic – a disease’ (4), one whose metaphorical equivalent (and often actual somatic accompaniment) was paralysis. What was needed was a new class of spiritual investigators composed of: men with all their senses unsinged, with all their limbs perfect and healthy, and their eyes and minds as free as God and Nature made them, to seek and find truth. No half-men, no paralytics, who have lost the use of one side, and that best side, of their intellectual frames, through the vicious habits of an educational process, will ever become the pioneers of the knowledge of the yet undiscovered regions of human nature. As soon you might pit a Chinese lady, with all her toes crumpled up, to run against a full-blooded Arabian for the Derby. (Howitt 1863: 10)

In this astonishing series of ableist images, Howitt transforms the Spiritualist from a brain-addled degenerate into a member of a pure breed, one whose ascendancy is based on physical no less than mental perfection. This adulation of bodily strength and fitness allows Howitt to reverse both the Great Chain of Being and the logic of Enlightenment in the passage’s final line, suggesting that the high-pedigreed animal is superior to the upper-caste Asian lady, and that civilisation, through its fetish for mass education, produces not reason but deformity. In place of the empathy present in The Spiritualist Times’s sensitive discussion of mental illness, Howitt bristles with the same kind of palpable disgust for disability that, as we shall see, some of his co-believers were beginning to express without metaphorical couching. He himself seems to move beyond the metaphorical into the literal when, only a few pages later, he fantasises about a negative eugenic solution to the growing problem of scientific materialism’s pitiable incurables such as Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday:

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They must be suffered to die out, as the dried up stalks and stubble of a past season, and the energies of a new and more equally developed order of minds must be relied on for the prosecution of knowledge more important than even railroads and telegraphs, because embracing the eternities of nature and destiny. (Howitt 1863: 15)

As this example shows, individual Spiritualist responses to the medical discourses which pathologised their faith did not necessarily reject their presumptions about the moral connotations of deviance. But if the healthy primitive and the temporarily possessed lunatic could be recuperated, other types of mental deviants proved more obdurate. This differentiation is most evident throughout the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American movement’s rich literature on congenital intellectual disability.

Spiritualism and Intellectual Disability I noted earlier in this chapter that Anglo-American Spiritualist approaches to intellectual disability were not always as liberationist and egalitarian as the movement’s surrounding discourse on spirit-produced insanity might lead us to believe. This is nowhere more apparent than in the discussions of the prenatal and chronic forms of learning disability classified as ‘idiocy’ and ‘imbecility’ which appeared regularly in the Spiritualist press. Unlike the possessed lunatic, who might be cured through mesmeric exorcism, or the healthy primitive, immune to modern neurosis, the so-called idiot posed a uniquely thorny problem for Spiritualism’s teleological evolutionism. As the surviving records of nineteenth-century seance communications reveal, mediums and their audiences in this period routinely sought information from otherworldly controls about the place of intellectual impairment in a meliorist spiritual universe where body and mind were frequently assigned mutual identity and where mental fitness was often accorded moral value.14 What was to be the post-life fate of the idiot, the imbecile or the human born without language, given that spiritual advancement through the spheres was allegedly requisite on optimal physical, intellectual and moral normalcy? What, for that matter, did these impairments signify in earth-life? The meaning of intellectual disability within modern Spiritualism had to be negotiated through the somatic determinism and metaphysical eugenics that had come to dominate its literature. Predictably, this ideological combination did not always prove empowering for, or even egalitarian towards, the neuroatypical subjects under discussion. Too often in the mystical and occult writing of this period, mental disability emerges as

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a form of cosmic retribution for inherited sin (rather than the effect of providence), and people with intellectual impairments are only fully humanised when imaginatively cured through the perfecting process of death. Although other kinds of deviant subjects – most notably, as we will see, criminals – were subject to the same form of deeply troubling, world-denying therapeutics in Spiritualist writing, this pernicious form of ableist mysticism achieves some of its most virulent expressions in discussions of the non-criminal mentally disabled. An early example appears in English Spiritualist Mrs Newton Crosland’s influential Spiritualist conversion memoir, Light in the Valley: My Experiences of Spiritualism (1857). Crosland describes the seance gatherings that lead to her adoption of faith and later establishment as a leading figure in the London Spiritualist scene. In one chapter, she transcribes the following account of the origins of mental defect channelled to her by an unnamed medium during a private seance: Through many kind of vicious living you might become insane and your children inherit this liability – but it would take three or four generations of vicious living to polarize them to idiocy – with some constitutions more than others [. . .] You and yours become alike under the influence of darkness and evil, and your children even before their birth are interpenetrated with evil and viciousness, and, in some instances, are incarnations of evil and demon spirits – they are even possessed before they are born. Then God frequently in His mercy, to render them saveable, makes them idiotic, so that any and every sin they do is imputed to the possessing spirit and not to them. (Crosland 1857: 143)

Mental disability, according to Crosland’s medium, is the appalling result of insanity by possession left untreated. After several generations, exorcism simply becomes impossible; the seeds of the originally tainted stirp become not just hosts for, but actual incarnations of, demonic forces. Their idiocy may not be the source of their essential evil but it is an accompaniment to it, a condition granted as a gentle boon from a compassionate God who, curiously and perhaps blasphemously unable to reverse the effects of heredity, seeks to muffle them. That the individuals borne out of this process are interminably wicked is rendered beyond question; all that the Deity can do is to equip them with an exonerating stigma. As lamentable as mental disability is made to seem in this passage – and Spiritualist writers in this period rarely present it as anything but a horrendous if pitiable blight – it conceals a still more terrible fact: that of the existence of an innate and irremediable disposition to pure malice which even God himself cannot wholly abolish. Through generations of mismanaged breeding, Crosland’s medium suggests, demons might reign on earth, their power arrested only by supernaturally imposed

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impairment. In this version of Spiritualist eugenic theology, the transcendent qualities of good and evil are relegated to the status of byproducts of human sexual selection. As unpalatable as Light in the Valley’s moral aetiology of idiocy undoubtedly is, it has at least one advantage that some Spiritualist treatments of the same subject do not: namely, it affords people with mental disabilities a human soul, even if it is an allegedly evil and tainted one. Such is not always the case in surrounding Spiritualist approaches to intellectual impairment.15 In her early 1860s conversion memoir, From Matter to Spirit: The Result of Ten Years’ Experience in Spirit Manifestations (1863), prominent London Spiritualist Sophia De Morgan repeats and interprets a supposedly ‘real-life’ ghost story, told to her by an apparently reliable male friend, in light of her new faith. While walking down a quiet and beautiful English country lane some years earlier, the man realised he was being followed by a large red and white Newfoundland dog whose ‘face bore some resemblance to a calf’s’ (De Morgan 1863: 246). Suddenly it disappeared in mid-air, leaving him in a fit of horripilations. Similar sightings occurred in the neighbourhood until, some months later, the skeleton of a local, and long suspiciously missing, ‘poor imbecile boy’ (De Morgan 1863: 246) is dug up during excavations at his former home. This episode is offered as crowning proof of the spiritual evolutionism that De Morgan had been arguing for in the previous pages: Among the lowest spirits are those whose mental state has been imperfect, and whose character has on earth assimilated them in some measure to animals [. . .] supposing the brain to be very deficient in all the higher portions of organic fibre, but to have the lower ones in fair development [. . .] the result will be a character deficient in moral and intellectual qualities, but active in the animal propensities and feelings [. . .] They may be perfectly harmless, and even affectionate, and we may suppose that when the spirit has thrown off its outer husk and covering, a more exalted organization will succeed to the first [. . .] But the first state of the soul after its change will be exactly that in which it leaves the world; and as every quality has its corresponding form, the conclusion is that the unhappy being in whom animal instincts and propensities greatly predominate will bear in the external of the spirit body the impress of the inner life. (De Morgan 1863: 245)

Simply put, death’s wonderful ability to make the soul visually manifest will reveal the idiot to be what he or she has always been: not a demon, but an animal. Thus the animal ghosts which circulate in folklore and ghost stories might testify, not to the equal spiritual status of beasts and man – on the basis that both possess immortal souls capable of surviving death – but rather to the fact that some people are only nominally human, that in the truest (that is, spiritual) sense, they are animals that can only hope to rise up the evolutionary chain when ensconced in the

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next life, if at all. Indeed, for Andrew Jackson Davis, some people with mental disabilities could not hope even for that. In Death and the AfterLife: Eight Evening Lectures on the Summer-Land (1865), he claimed to have ‘found, on [spirit] inquiry, that certain kinds of idiots die like blossoms on trees that produce no fruit’ (Davis 1865: 49), leaving no trace personality for recuperation through the aeons. Disturbing as these blanket denials of equal human status and moral agency to people with intellectual disabilities might seem, it is important not to dismiss them as the temporary and ephemeral symptoms of an early Spiritualist movement still trying to stake out its professional and philosophical claims. On the contrary, these ideas, even if they never gained total consensus within the movement’s diverse and abundant literature on health and the afterlife, proved remarkably enduring within certain branches of modern Spiritualist thought through to the inter-war period and beyond.16 One particularly extreme example can be found in the 1936 channelled work by American playwright and automatic writer Edith Ellis, Incarnation: A Plea from the Masters. Here Ellis’s spirit control proposes that the mentally disabled not only lack souls, but act as dangerous drains on the recuperative resources of the afterlife. ‘Causes of idiocy occur when a soul does not enter the body’, she writes in the persona of her disembodied master, Hence the idiot is the animal man only [. . .] I wish [. . .] to point out [. . .] that there is only a life of unending monotony for the undeveloped mind [. . .] We see about us such a vast horde of these unfortunates that it requires all our fortitude to bear the pressure of their primitive thought. (Ellis 1936: 32)

Ellis’s vitriolic pessimism about the present and post-life potential of people with mental disabilities admittedly represents a particularly extreme position within the spectrum of modern Spiritualist thought. Far more common was the mystical meliorism of works like New Zealand Spiritualist George Warren Russell’s A New Heaven, a channelled novel composed in the late 1890s and published in 1919. Here the intellectually impaired are granted full equality with, and even superiority to, the neurotypical – but only after their entrance into the Summerland, where the dross of their defect is transformed into the gold of pure genius.17 Russell’s narrative focuses on the post-life bildung of protagonist Andrew Morrison, a Scottish farm worker who immigrates to New Zealand in the wake of a failed love affair. One night, after a long day of work, he sits at a campfire discussing the spirit world with Ihaia, a former Maori holy man put out of business by the missionaries. He falls asleep, finds himself drifting out of his body, and wakes on a wonderful spirit planet where intelligence and beauty are supreme moral

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goods, and where nature has been fully tamed and settled by supernatural technology. In their own great physical attractiveness and productivity, the disincarnate citizens of this realm epitomise its ideals. Among the many paragons Morrison meets here is Professor Chalmers, a man who claims to have known him during their earth-life. The Scotsman does not recognise him until Chalmers identifies himself as the son of a neighbouring minister. ‘I remember him!’ says a startled Morrison. ‘He had a little boy who was deformed and imbecile from his birth – poor chap! Nature treated him hardly. He was both blind and deaf as well.’ ‘Yes,’ replies Chalmers, ‘I AM HE!’ (Russell 1919: 106). This astonishing revelation provokes a fascinating colloquy on mental disability and the manifold requirements for its management, none of which, notably, are available in the earth sphere. Drawing upon a by now long-established Spiritualist reproductive philosophy, Chalmers explains that he was the product of a dysgenic marriage between two parents from families ridden with an insanity which, just as Crosland’s medium had predicted, hardened into idiocy at his conception. After a trying first twelve years of life in which he could neither see, speak, hear nor perform the most fundamental of mental tasks, he was relieved to find himself taken up to the great academy in the afterlife. Here, he explains, finally divorced from the flawed material frame and diseased genealogy that had caused his disability, he was able to realise his innate spiritual destiny as an intellectual paragon. In addition to genius, this numinous metamorphosis grants Chalmers something else that presumably would never have been available to him while alive: a sexual identity. Here, he is the accepted suitor of Morrison’s long-dead sister Marian, able to marry her now that his inheritable taint has been eradicated. Ironically, Chalmers becomes fit for conjugal love only by entering a numinous space in which sexual reproduction is obsolete – Russell’s heaven, like many but by no means all modern Spiritualist versions of the afterlife, being non-procreative. New lives are not engendered here; instead, existing types are purged of their earth-acquired defects and stabilised into quasi-Platonic ideals. Russell’s heaven is perfect precisely because it has eliminated what is arguably the greatest threat to any Utopia: the randomness of human coupling and the ensuing potential for unpredictable human mental, physical and moral variation. Having thoroughly eliminated disability from their own fold, the perfected denizens of this spirit realm work to reproduce the same eugenic meritocracy amongst the living via direct spirit influence on the sexual choices of earth’s women. ‘If I had my time on earth again,’ Morrison is told by the spirit of Henry Ward Beecher, ‘I would preach more to the women. Their wombs are the matrices in which men and women are cast!’ (Russell 1919: 171).

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This selection of channelled texts from the 1850s through to the postWorld War I period presents us with the modern Spiritualist version of what Nancy Eiesland has termed the ‘sin-disability conflation’ (Eiesland 1994: 72), a paradigm that presents disability as the logical consequence of a primal moral transgression – typically in these examples, that of dysgenic marriage. Its punishment is visited not on its perpetrators but on the unwitting offspring of their unions. But careless conception is not the only fault punished in this way; a series of seemingly lesser violations – a too ardent enjoyment of sexual consummation, an overindulgence in rich food during pregnancy, or a period of maternal depression – were also alleged to produce disability, hardwiring it in utero into children who could only escape their inherited destiny as brutal half-humans in death. Such a damning aetiology of impairment clearly clashes with, if not even overrides, the attempts at more sympathetic and egalitarian approaches to mental variation that one finds elsewhere in the period’s Spiritualist thought. One such example lies in the disability writing of Allan Kardec, influential founder of the French spiritiste movement which is distinguished from its Anglo-American counterpart by its advocacy of reincarnationism. Widely read, if not generally endorsed, in British and American mystical circles, Kardec often seems to adopt a far less essentialist approach to intellectual impairment than the likes of Crosland or De Morgan, claiming in Experimental Spiritism (published in 1862 and translated into English in 1874) that the bodies and souls of the mentally disabled were wholly separate: ‘The idiot is often only an idiot from the imperfection of his organs, but his spirit may be more advanced than you suppose; you have proof of it by certain invocations of idiots, living and dead’ (Kardec [1862] 1891: 275). Yet this separation was continually compromised in Kardec’s thought by a reincarnationist cosmology which implicitly linked suffering, or even simply deviation, to karmic punishment. In such a universe, the connection between spirit and body could never be entirely random or morally neutral. Given this, it is little wonder that so many of the transatlantic movement’s writers and public speakers would argue for the pre-conception prevention rather than post-life expiation of congenital disability. Such is exactly what American medium Cora Tappan did during an 1874 trance lecture at the Cleveland Hall in London. After meditating on the extreme unlikelihood for imbeciles and idiots to gain any kind of serious spiritual growth during their earth lives, she proposed: it becomes a question of serious import concerning human physiology and anthropology whether you will allow beings to be born into the world that will give no experience to the spirit, and allow it to be transported to

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spiritual existence without the experience that human life was intended to give. (Tappan 1874b: 178)

In this strand of eugenic Spiritualist thought, as in the phrenology which inspired it, human enhancement had distinct somatic limits that needed to be managed out of existence through internalised (self-monitoring) and externalised (legal restriction) forms of reproductive policing.

Spiritualism and the Cultural Capital of Ignorance The attitudes towards mental disability and deviation encountered above – which alternately imagined the temporarily mentally ill as possessed, and the idiot as either a neutered demon, subhuman animal or man-made monster whose only hope lay in death – might lead us to characterise the modern Spiritualist discourse on mind as deeply (although problematically) elitist, ableist and intellectually meritocratic, promoting a cult of intelligence which relied on the abjection of mental derangement and subnormalcy into the distant space of the Summerland. Such an interpretation might seem to gain force through the repetitive injunctions to study and learn – ones which sit in uneasy conjunction with Spiritualism’s simultaneous emphasis on spontaneous inspiration – that are doled out ad nauseam in the seance records printed by Spiritualist periodicals and specialist presses from the 1850s onwards. Yet we would do well to remember that this prevalence had a practical as well as an ideological function: pro-learning messages had the benefit of being sufficiently high-toned, vague and unobjectionable to pass for wisdom in the mouths of even the most inexperienced of mediums.18 And it is in these hosts, these uneducated and often theatrically ignorant vehicles for the platform of Spiritualist intellectualism, that we find the greatest challenge to the movement’s ableist (and often implicitly classist) hierarchy of mind. Although the genius may have stood at the apex of this structure, it was not he who made its structure manifest for seekers to view; this task required the offices of the altogether more plain-spoken, ignorant and intellectually suspect figure of the uneducated medium. The fact that many of the nineteenth century’s most famous and credited mediums were (or claimed to be) barely educated and subliterate was far more than a necessary if unfortunate effect of their class status; it was an absolute requirement of their presumed savantry, one that had to be in place if their authenticity was to be credited. Where ‘real’ ignorance did not exist – and this category of authenticity was increasingly difficult to define in Spiritualist thought – it was

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manufactured and performed, as in the case of Andrew Jackson Davis’s likely dissimulation about the extent of his own reading. Only the truly blank medium, one not only ignorant but also incapable of covert learning, could provide the necessary test conditions required for the substantiation of Spiritualist claims. Without him or her, there would be no need for, or object of, Spiritualist reform in the first place and no vehicle through which disincarnate intelligences might convey their wisdom. Ignorance provided the foundation for Spiritualism’s intellectualism, as well as for the medium’s moral authority and licence to work. In this final section of the chapter, I want to trace the tensions between this exaltation of ignorance in Spiritualist practice and the corresponding worship of intelligence, education and mental ability in Spiritualist philosophy, focusing particularly on those canny working-class mediums who were able to recognise, appropriate and exploit these competing discourses for their own purposes. To recognise the cachet of mediumistic ignorance in Spiritualist circles is not to deny the movement’s equal pride in the relatively small number of public converts from the ranks of the intellectual and professional elite. Their names were trotted out with almost litany-like regularity in the Anglo-American Spiritualist press: British physicist Sir William Crookes, American chemist Robert Hare, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, French Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet and foundational Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, about whom more will be said in Chapter 5. It is important to note, however, that such figures were typically lauded for their value as authorising witnesses rather than as producers of psychical phenomena themselves. The traits that made their endorsement so important to the movement – professional accreditation, lengthy training and demonstrable intellectual acumen – were by no means necessary to or even desirable in a spirit medium. Thus with the notable exceptions of middle-class practitioners such as William Stainton Moses, few of Spiritualism’s most famous public mediums had much in the way of a formal education. Although this lack of education impeded working-class aspirations in regards to the mundane world, it worked as a great advantage in their dealings with the next. We should not wonder, then, that so many mediums and their defenders would boast of their extravagant ignorance. John S. Farmer, in his highly reverential 1886 biography of the repeatedly exposed slate-writing medium William Eglinton, demonstrates this tactic in his expostulations on his subject’s scanty basic education, poor study habits and minimal religious knowledge. Perhaps Farmer hoped that this evidence of his subject’s unpromising early intellect might offset the charges of sleight-of-hand cunning laid against him. Similarly, in

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her preface to Andrew Jackson Davis’s autobiography The Magic Staff, Davis’s second wife Mary boasts that on their first meeting: In answer as to what books he had read, he said ‘I have only read a book called The Three Spaniards which I suppose is a romantic tale’[. . .] I was fully satisfied that his schooling had been very limited. He had no time then, nor for many years after, to apply himself to books, and from all that I can learn, has not done so to this day. His knowledge, now displayed, has been mainly gained in the clairvoyant state. (Davis [1857] 1885: 13)

Particularly noteworthy here is the verb that Mary chooses to express her realisation of the medium’s ignorance: satisfaction. In this context, I suggest, the positive connotations sometimes attached to this nominalisation should be preserved. Without Davis’s satisfying, validating ignorance, there could be no belief and no revelation, no undeniable evidence of supra-mundane intervention. Although not all mediums were entirely comfortable with the selfabasing performances of ignorance their witnesses often required of them – Paschal Beverly Randolph certainly was not, and Davis himself would try to take increasing responsibility for the superior content of his messages – others readily acceded to it. Thus in the early chapters of his gripping and poignant autobiography Leaves from My Life: A Narrative of Personal Experiences (1877), English trance medium J.J. Morse uses the proof of his intermittent childhood education to reject all personal claim to his supernaturally acquired knowledge: Personally, I may say all that I have in the way of education mentally, morally, and spiritually, is attributable to spiritual inspiration and the kindness of my spirit guides; and I am deeply sensible of the very different and distinct mental powers that exist in myself as the medium of to-day and myself as a little boy between ten and eleven, who had to commence the fight for life; and I am morally certain, and intellectually convinced, that my position as an individual to-day could not have been obtained unless I had been subjected to the spirit education referred to. Hence it is that I have nothing but gratitude for my guides and love for the philosophy they inculcate. I make no secret of the source to which I am indebted for my personal abilities, but those personal abilities are eclipsed and outdone by the efforts of my guides through my organization when I am under their influence. (Morse 1877: 26–7)

Although an ardent campaigner for the better training and accreditation of spiritual teachers, Morse makes it clear through his own example that minds are better improved by supernatural tenancy than by earthly pedagogical methods. The unschooled and dull-witted medium, his mind incapable of surreptitious learning and uncluttered by the facts and theories of a formal education, was the perfect host for the elevated thoughts of the distinguished dead.

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Nowhere was the unyielding ignorance of the medium more requisite, and more fetishised, than in the performance of one of the most spectacular feats in the nineteenth-century Spiritualist repertoire: xenoglossia, or the speaking in tongues supposedly unknown to the medium. Morse himself never managed it, although his most famous spirit control Tien Sien Tie, a long-dead Chinese sage of Confucian ilk, spoke in a pidgin English apparently strange and exotic enough to convince his Occidental audiences, presumably few of whom had ever visited the Far East, of its authenticity. For those who could accomplish it, the rewards were massive; those who could not, like Arthur Conan Doyle’s mediumistic second wife Jean, were in danger of risking their credibility through massive and embarrassing faux pas. In 1923, she and Arthur disastrously attempted to convince their anti-Spiritualist friend Harry Houdini of the existence of the spirit world by channelling his much-loved Jewish Hungarian mother Cecilia. Jean, an automatic writer, produced an effusive and moving letter from the dead mother to her son that failed to persuade for one reason above all: it was written in the English language which, Houdini records in his memoir A Magician Among the Spirits (1924), she ‘could not read, write, or speak’ (Houdini 1924: 157). More perplexingly yet – and a fact left out of his published description of the incident – the message was headed by a cross.19 Unconvinced by the Doyles’ ad hoc explanation that Cecilia Weisz must have mastered English (and converted to Christianity) in a pedagogically enhanced heaven, Houdini considered the test to have failed. If some spirits were able to retain their first language after death, even when speaking through the most untutored of vessels, there seemed no reason why all of them should not. The proof that such translational alchemy was indeed possible came thick and furious in the late Victorian and early twentieth-century Spiritualist press. The reports of xenoglossic phenomena typically rely on two primary assumptions: first, that the linguistic abilities of the eminent dead remain static (and so stylistically recognisable) in the spheres; and second, that those of their typically working-class invocators were unimprovable in life, so much so that cheating would be impossible. This exemption from suspicion in the case of language learning is extremely telling. It was not that lower-class mediums were in general believed incapable of subterfuge; on the contrary, they were monitored closely for physical tics and sleight of hand deception. The credit given to their xenoglossic performances, even in cases where the all too mundane sources of the language acquisition seem retrospectively obvious, reveals the extent to which their often middle-class audiences expected, wanted and needed their mediums to be intellectually limited. We see this desire

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with particular clarity in the Spiritualist memoir of enthusiastic and spectacularly naïve London Spiritualist Morell Theobald, a dupe both to fraudulent mediums and to the con man J. Spence Balfour who made him unwittingly complicit in a massive financial scam in the 1890s (Hamilton 2009: 161). Theobald’s seance participation was largely based in a home circle presided over by his servant-medium Mary. In his published collection of their seance records, Spirit Workers in the Home Circle (1887), he describes her capacities as follows: Mary was never really a servant until she came to live with us. She is superior to the servant class in many ways, though from delicate health she never received much education. She can write a decent letter and she has fair average intelligence, but that is all. She is quite innocent of any language but English, although we shall soon find she has been concerned in the production of messages in Latin, Greek, French, Welsh, Old Brittany, Hindu [sic], Italian, and Raratongan! (Theobald 1887: 94)

With astonishing efficiency, this passage demonstrates the ideological contortions required by Spiritualism’s valorisation of intelligence and normal-mindedness and simultaneous dependency on mental limitation. Mary is first elevated above the lumpen class who share her labour, a move which goes some way to retracting the class-blind egalitarianism Theobald had praised in the movement only a few sentences earlier – ‘Doubtless Spiritualism comes somewhat as a leveller of social distinctions’ (Theobald 1887: 93). She is then swiftly brought to earth by virtue of her poor education, the genteel result of a respectable period of ill health rather than of the competing demands of child labour. Yet the ‘fair average intelligence’ which Theobald grants her without ever defining, apparently precludes the memorisation of even a few lines of Greek or Latin from the numerous classical works he admits to having in his library, a room to which Mary would no doubt have had regular access. This ignorance is then converted into a virtue through its redesignation as ‘innocence’, a quality Mary preserves even when writing in Italian, French or ‘Hindu’, because at no time is she ever presented as an active user and knower of these languages, only an unwitting attendant on their production. Perhaps most astonishing of all in Theobald’s account is the absence of any of the surrounding test conditions and standards usually attached, even if cursorily, to physical mediumship in the period. Theobald makes it clear that none of the seances’ attendees had the linguistic expertise to judge the authenticity of the performance, and although he admits to having a schoolboy’s knowledge of Greek, nowhere does he avouch a familiarity with the Rarotongan language of the Cook Islanders. The evidence of spirit interference was staked not on the words themselves

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or their content, but on a profound conviction that the working-class medium could not – could never – know. The middle-class witnesses who credential the performance have, by contrast, the potential to know, even if they have not realised it in the instances described. This class- and gender-based epistemology was by no means confined to the Theobalds’ seances. It plays out also in the important early Spiritualist record Spiritualism (1853), when co-author John W. Edmonds describes his encounters with various xenoglossic mediums:20 I have known Latin, French, and Spanish words spelled out through the rappings, and I have heard mediums who knew no language but their own speak in those languages, and in Italian, German, and Greek, and in other languages unknown to me, but which were represented to be Arabic, Chinese, and Indian, and all done with the ease and the rapidity of a native. (Edmonds and Dexter [1853] 1854: 35, my emphasis)

Edmonds’s slip into the passive voice near the end of the sentence allows him to side-step what should have been the most pressing questions: who ‘represented’ the authenticity of these alien sounds? Why did this representation convince a man professionally licensed to make judgements? We can definitely observe here what Peter Lamont has called Spiritualism’s ‘crisis of evidence’ (P. Lamont 2004: 899). But not all values, judgements and meanings were thrown into dizzying aporia in these seance transactions. The medium’s exemption from established processes of evidence-sifting and evaluation, and his or her licence to thwart linguistic signification were based on one stalwart, grounding criterion: that of his or her supposed and required ignorance. This quality needed to be fundamental and enduring, for any xenoglossic medium recognised as capable of language learning through traditional (if concealed) routes would immediately be deprived of his or her trade. The discourse on xenoglossia reveals the extent to which Spiritualism’s intellectual meritocracy, its veneration of the hereditarily superior mind, rested on a corresponding cult of ignorance and radical idiocracy. The uneducated and ineducable, the low-witted, the intellectually impaired and the insane were at once anathema and absolutely fundamental to the Spiritualist mission, acting as its ontological guarantors. They were essential both in this world and the next. If their presence in the Summerland detracted from the higher sphere’s imagined superiority to the earth plane, it also confirmed the truth of individual survival. This was the very reasoning that Alfred Russel Wallace used to rebut the many anti-Spiritualist critics who cited the stupidity of seance messages as proof of the movement’s farcicality.21 In Miracles and

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Modern Spiritualism, his 1875 Spiritualist apologia, Wallace ridicules the modern scientific man for harbouring: [the] unfounded assumption that any beings who could possibly produce the asserted phenomena must be mentally of a high order, and therefore, if the phenomena do not accord with his ideas of the dignity of superior intelligences, he simply denies the facts without examination. Yet many of these objectors admit that the mind of man is probably not annihilated at death, and that therefore countless millions of beings are constantly passing into another mode of existence, who, unless a miracle of mental transformation takes place, must be very far inferior to himself. Any argument, therefore, against certain phenomena having been produced by preter-human intelligences, on account of the trivial or apparently useless nature of such phenomena, has really no logical bearing whatever upon the question. The assumption that all preter-human intelligences are more intellectual than the average of mankind, is as utterly gratuitous, and as utterly powerless to dispel facts, as that of the opponents of Galileo when they asserted that the planets could not exceed the perfect number, seven, and that therefore the satellites of Jupiter could not exist. (Wallace 1875: 45)

Although by no means expressed consistently in Miracles and Modern Spiritualism – Wallace later defends the intellectual quality of spirit messages and asserts that ethereal beings do indeed have ‘proportionately increased intelligence’ (Wallace 1875: 103, 45) – these sentiments represent a considerable departure from the eugenic disgust expressed towards mental subnormality elsewhere the movement’s literature, particularly in its rational breeding polemics and healing texts. While in the examples of the latter we have already considered, mental deviance and intellectual inferiority (or even simple mediocrity) were imagined as the products of sinful hereditary transgression, Wallace and others reintegrate them into a spectrum of human variation whose continuity in the next world is predictable and essential to the movement’s gospel of individual survival after death. If the denizens of the afterlife were to resemble their much-loved and formerly earth-bound selves, mental difference had to be preserved. What emerges in Wallace’s vindication of seance phenomena, and in other Spiritualist defences that adopted the same argument, is the emphatic conviction that a departed spirit’s right to recognition should be granted independently of its mental aptitude – in other words, it need not speak logically, intelligently or sanely, to be listened to and considered real. Unfortunately, this seems to have been far less frequently considered the case for those spirits still interred in a temporarily deranged or impaired body, living individuals whose mental deviation was seen to denote parental sexual incontinence, inherited sin or demonic possession. Although, as we have seen, few modern Spiritualist writers – Edith

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Ellis is the exception here – ever wholly denied the eventual possibility of recovery, or rather, mental normalisation, to these subjects, many predicated this potential on death. Only in the next world could the born idiot be enfranchised, either improved into genius or accepted as an equal member of an intellectually composite afterlife democracy, his channelled pronouncements, however erratic, now gaining a far more appreciative and responsive audience than they ever did before his death. He rises in the world by leaving it. Even to Spiritualism’s supporters, this must have sometimes have seemed like a one-sided and demeaning bargain, but for non-believers, it takes on an even more sinister cast. Extinction is surely an unacceptably high price to pay for empowerment. Yet rather than simply condemning these Spiritualist discourses of mental variation for their significant moral blind spots and sometimes vituperative advocacy of negative eugenic breeding practices, it is important to remember that they also enabled forms of social progress, particularly for those whose class, gender or race barred their access to a formal education. In the seance room, such individuals could gain cultural and economic capital by spouting – apparently at spirit behest – the same intellectually elitist and eugenic opinions that hindered their progress in the wider world. Only in this space could their limitations turn into licence. This counter-hierarchical potential was alternately recognised, lampooned and treated with deep suspicion in the period’s high-cultural and sensational anti-Spiritualist texts, including, as we have seen, Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge, Medium’ and the anonymously authored Confessions of a Medium (1882). The latter, allegedly autobiographical, narrative describes the fortunes of provincial naïf Mr Parker as he comes to London to pursue his interest in Spiritualism. Here he falls in with the accomplished and mendacious medium Mr Thomson who gradually reveals the true nature of his work and admits to being an out-and-out fraud. By then, Parker has become embroiled as an unwilling confederate, and cannot protest as Thomson fleeces his willing aristocratic dupes. After a particularly tense morning seance, Parker asks Thomson if he fears detection. ‘Oh, I can do anything here,’ is the reply, ‘they look upon me as half an idiot’ (Confessions 1882: 189).22 Half-idiots, in the context of the seance room, could cultivate their financial capital in inverse relation to their intellectual capital. Shrewd members of the working class knew that the guise of idiocy could produce the same level (if not kind) of upward mobility – economic rather than social – as education did for the middle classes. This mediumistic harnessing of this power arguably represents one of the most provocative and loaded instances of ritualised détournement in the modern Spiritualist movement. We should view modern Spiritualism’s conflicted discourse on mind

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and intelligence as more than just (or even primarily as) a pretext for mediumistic social climbing that capitalised on the dysgenic fears and class biases of its founding nineteenth-century milieu. As much as they participated in wider cultural stereotypes about the mentally ill, the intellectually impaired and the ineducable working classes, Anglo-American Spiritualists also made these subjects crucial to their progressive millenarian enterprise. Without the allegedly mindless, there would be no way to establish the supernatural provenance of genius; without babbling, foolish and nonsense-spewing spirits, no means to demonstrate the continuity of personal identity after death and challenge the hazy Christian picture of heaven as a site of constant, homogeneous and necessarily tedious praise. Any plan for universal reform that required the elimination of the low or abnormally minded would thus necessarily sacrifice Spiritualism’s greatest gift to the world: proof of the spirit’s immortal persistence in a future world better but not entirely different than our own. This tension between nineteenth-century Spiritualism’s epistemological dependence on defect and ignorance – on the medium’s constitutional inability to attain knowledge by non-supernatural means – and its simultaneous urge to eradicate these through eugenic means would, as we shall see, only intensify across the eclectic social, religious and reform projects spearheaded by the movement in the period of its ascendancy.

Notes 1. For discussions of this pathologising discourse on Spiritualism, see S.E.D. Shortt’s ‘Physicians and Psychics: The Anglo-American Medical Response to Spiritualism, 1870–1900’ (1984), Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (1989) and Roy Porter et al.’s Women, Madness, and Spiritualism (2003). 2. The most renowned proponents of the Spiritualism-as-hereditarymonomania hypothesis were Lyttelton Forbes Winslow and William Carpenter; advocates of the Spiritualism-as-primitive-survival argument included anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, folklorist Andrew Lang and psychologist Joseph Jastrow. 3. Including, most prominently, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Conan Doyle. 4. To say that the poem attacks Spiritualist credulity is not the same thing as to call it an attack on Spiritualism per se; on the contrary, as G.K. Chesterton points out, the poem itself poses as an automatic confession that spills forth from Sludge at the behest of mysterious forces beyond his control. For more on Browning’s equivocation on spiritual inspiration in the poem, see Chesterton’s Robert Browning (1903). 5. See Henry James’s The Bostonians ([1885–6] 2009) and Hamlin Garland’s

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

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The Tyranny of the Dark (1905) for further realist explorations of the links between Spiritualism and abnormal psychology. In its nineteenth-century usage, the term ‘idiot’ was less a precise medical designation than a catch-all name that could include a range of capacities and individuals. It could include and sometimes equate people who might now be classified as severely learning disabled and those who might be diagnosed with autism or major depressive conditions. Because it was used so variously, it is almost impossible to wholly determine what it describes in any of its specific Spiritualist usages. I use the term here as an important Victorian social construct only, and not as a descriptor of a ‘real’ and historically recoverable set of symptoms and identities. For further discussion of the medical origins and diagnostic imprecision of the label, see David Wright and Anne Digby’s From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities (1996) and Martin Halliwell’s Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film (2004). A full account of the Weldon and Lowe cases can be found in Roy Porter et al.’s edition of the two women’s writings in Women, Madness, and Spiritualism (2003). For more on this incident and Catherine Crowe’s involvement with Spiritualism, see Joanna Wilkes’s entry on Crowe in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008). Such was the goal of the leader article ‘The Insanity of Robert Dale Owen – What Caused it?’, published in the 30 July 1875 edition of The Medium and Daybreak. Its writer insists that Robert Dale Owen was merely temporarily worn out, and that traditional Christianity, with its sadistic emphasis on the manifold perils of damnation, was far more often a cause of mania and derangement than Spiritualism. This was published as the 1891 Christmas number of the Review of Reviews, the monthly journal founded by Stead in 1890 and edited by him until his death aboard the Titanic in 1912. As Martin Halliwell writes, ‘Until the late nineteenth century, madness and idiocy were not categorically distinct: idiocy was seen as an ill-defined area of insanity, where the sufferers were so profoundly affected that the only potential danger was to themselves’ (Halliwell 2004: 9). We can find evidence of this semantic equivocation in, among other places, British alienist Henry Maudsley’s The Physiology and Pathology of Mind which calls ‘imbecility, or idiocy’ ‘the sort of insanity most common in savages’ and in children (Maudsley [1867] 1868: 229). Probably the most notorious version of this thesis is the non-medical one rehearsed in Max Nordau’s Degeneration ([1895] 1993), which claims that over-rapid modernisation and urbanisation were producing mental decline in small, and fortunately destined for sterility, segments of the European population. Even in its early Spiritualist milieu, Howitt’s complaint is somewhat unjustified – prominent men of science, most notably American chemist Robert Hare, had indeed started to investigate and convert to Spiritualism by the early 1850s, and many more would follow in the 1870–90s. The movement’s accumulation of scientific supporters seems to have done little

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15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

Determined Spirits to reverse the tide of anti-Spiritualist public opinion, perhaps because these personal endorsements did not trump the fatal irreproducibility of seance phenomena under test conditions. To read more spirit-channelled discussions of mental disability, see Mrs Newton Crosland’s Light in the Valley (1857), Sophia De Morgan’s From Matter to Spirit (1863), ‘Spirit Communications—No. 4’ (1866), ‘Mrs Tappan at Cleveland Hall’ (Tappan 1874b) and ‘Death During Insanity’ (1897). The subject was also popular in non-channelled works of Spiritualist philosophy and afterlife fiction. Other contemporary Spiritualist equations of the idiot with the non-human appear in such works as Andrew Jackson Davis’s Death and the AfterLife: Eight Evening Lectures on the Summer-Land (1865). Here the seer proclaims that people with mental disabilities are animated only by ‘the instinct of the animal’ (Davis 1865: 49). The source of their soullessness, as with most forms of defect in Davis’s fiercely deterministic writings, is unfit marriage. See also ‘Spirit Communications—No. 4’ which appeared in The Spiritualist Times on 27 January 1866. Here a correspondent shares the recently acquired seance message that ‘the born idiot has never had the spirit-life at all developed; hence it is not conscious of its painful state, but is rather endowed with instinct as an animal’ (26). Readers might consider the furore around former English football manager Glenn Hoddle’s 1999 sacking in light of his controversial beliefs about the moral and spiritual status of the disabled. A student of the New Age spiritual philosophy propounded by friend and advisor Eileen Drewery, Hoddle told a Sunday Times reporter that: ‘You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and half-decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. I have nothing to hide about that. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow, you have to reap [. . .] You have to look at things that happened in your life and ask why. It comes around’ (‘Hoddle Puts Faith in God and England’ 1999). For non-fictional sources of this trope in the late Victorian Spiritualist press, see ‘The Brain of Idiots’ (1893) and ‘Death During Insanity’ (1897). In one characteristic example of this rhetoric from an 1877 issue of The Medium and Daybreak, the ‘solid common sense, intelligence, liberality and spiritual intuition’ of the movement’s supporters is contrasted with the blunt stupidity of critics who are, in an interesting moment of environmental and somatic conflation, said to be ‘unenlightened educationally and lowest in development organically’ (‘Assistance to the Public’ 1877: 84). For more on this curious omission, and on the Doyles’ and Houdini’s competing views of the incident, see Massimo Polidoro’s Final Séance: The Strange Friendship between Houdini and Conan Doyle (2001). It is important to point out that not all of the xenoglossic mediums Edmonds describes in Spiritualism were working-class mediums who benefited by harnessing the cultural capital of ignorance; indeed, his own distinctly middle-class daughter claimed this faculty. In her case, as in other home circles where the channel was a family member rather than an employee, the credibility of the performance was staked more on bonds of trust than on the assumption of ineducability. This stylistic critique of seance messages was one of the most common

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lines of attack in the anti-Spiritualist repertoire; as Daniel Cottom writes, ‘Noting the infelicities of Spiritualist writing, who among the general population could not manage to laugh? [. . .] if the movement could offer nothing better than these communications, many would say, then why should they waste their time?’ (Cottom 1991: 57). For more on the implications of, and Spiritualist response to, this critique, see Cottom’s Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals (1991) and Chapter 6 of the present monograph. 22. This blithe response echoes the rejoinder of Browning’s Sludge to his accusing patron Horsfall as he tauntingly reminds him of his refusal to apply rigorous test conditions during the seances: ‘Enough of tests! Sludge never could learn that!’ He could not, eh? You compliment him. ‘Could not?’ Speak for yourself! (Browning 1864: 494–7)

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Chapter 3

Eugenic Summerlands: Sexual Reproduction and Family Engineering in the Spheres

In the first book of the New Testament, the apostle Matthew records what has proved to be one of the most gnomic and controversial characterisations of the future life in Christian scripture: ‘For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven’ (22 Matthew 30: King James Version). With salvation, these words imply, comes an attendant liberation from the processes of sexual reproduction, the problems of population control, and the distractions of erotic desire that too often stand between man and God. Where other details about the coordinates of this transcendent space are left deliberately obscure in the Gospel, this prohibition of sexual love and its consequences has since seemed to some biblical interpreters to be uniquely direct and unequivocal. To become like the angels, they counsel, we must divest ourselves of the animal urges and exclusive pair bonds that ground us in the lower world. Yet this asexual and antierotic vision of heaven, reiterated in the writings of thinkers as diverse as Augustine and Jacob Boehme, has not always found a receptive audience among Christian believers, many of whom, such as eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, devised a series of creative and ingenious ways to rethink and reinterpret the scriptural prohibition on celestial marriage.1 For Swedenborg, as Cathy Gutierrez points out, the choice was to ignore rather than debunk ‘the conflicting injunctions to celibacy in the New Testament’ and promote in its place a heaven in which ‘marriage pervades all of creation from angels to worms and [. . .] sexual love is the concrete expression of the union of the masculine good and the feminine truth’ (Gutierrez 2009: 78). Other Christian dissenting groups, from the Shakers and the Oneida Perfectionists, would find strikingly different ways of reconciling Matthew’s words with a range of human sexual and marital practices from organised polygamy to lifelong celibacy. The important work of Gutierrez and other historians of religion such as Michael Wheeler, Pat Jalland and Hugh Urban has

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demonstrated the breadth, urgency and even ubiquity of attempts to romanticise and eroticise the afterlife in nineteenth-century Britain and America, ones which strove to replace a strictly theocentric vision of heaven with an amative one in which conjugal bonds could be continued from earthly existence, or even newly formed. For obvious reasons, many British and American Spiritualists in the nineteenth century placed themselves at the forefront of this crusade, insisting that any heaven where loving husbands and wives could not be reunited to resume their relations would be unworthy of its name. Yet, as we shall see in this chapter, the movement’s championship of a carnal afterlife was by no means simply romantic or sentimental but also deeply eugenic. Imagined, at least in part, as an aspirational model for human society, the Spiritualist Summerland could demonstrate the correct sexual and marital protocols so badly needed on earth; furthermore, the procreative work that took place in it could undo or reverse the dysgenic family combinations taking place down below. If it were not to act simply as a static repository for already judged souls, the Spiritualist afterlife needed to be a fertile and erotic one whose denizens could, reversing the usual logic of procreation, give birth to the living, sometimes in a curiously literal way. I want to consider if and how transatlantic Spiritualism’s eroticised versions of the higher spheres, often written under trance, succeeded in imagining alternatives to the heteronormative structures of patriarchal marriage and to the deleterious randomness of human coupling. Although often viewed as sexually radical through its ties, in the United States at least, to the Free Love movement,2 modern Spiritualism reveals a very different set of ideological identifications in its discourse on post-life sex and marriage, one in which earthly courtship structures are replaced not (just) because they are unequal and constrictive, but also because they fail to maintain an adequate continuity and improvement of the human type. The texts on which this chapter is based, some produced through conventional methods of fiction composition and others through putative supernatural direction, come from what has long been the least-discussed genre of modern Spiritualist writing: the afterlife novel. Overlooked in part due to a long-standing scholarly bias in favour of the movement’s phenomenal and political dimensions over its aesthetic products, these narratives played a crucial role in Spiritualism’s transatlantic discourse community, identifying and disseminating the key features that supposedly distinguished the ‘new heaven’, as George Warren Russell called it, from the old. Some, such as Florence Marryat’s The Dead Man’s Message (1894a), were written by popular authors who had already achieved mainstream success before interjecting their heterodox beliefs

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into their fiction; others were produced by mediumistic autodidacts like American medium Hudson Tuttle whose only literary production was in the service of their faith. Their critical neglect is particularly lamentable in light of their value in extending our understanding of both modern Spiritualist aesthetics and the movement’s vexed position towards traditional marriage. As John Patrick Deveney notes in his study of Paschal Beverly Randolph, the remarkable subject of our next chapter, ‘while not every reformer was a Spiritualist, every Spiritualist [. . .] was a reformer’ (Deveney 1997: 155), and in the nineteenth century this reformist agenda typically included a call for women’s emancipation within the patriarchal marriage structures that denied them equal property and parental rights. The presence of such feminist sentiments in both the writings and life histories of various notable Victorian Spiritualists has recently lead Marlene Tromp to credit the movement with initiating a form of progressive ‘sexual pandemonium’ (Tromp 2006: 21) in which traditional gender roles were reversed and women’s sexual liberation legitimated. As we shall see, a more complicated picture of Spiritualist sexual ideology emerges when we shift our focus from the personal behaviours and public politics of the movement’s leading mediums to focus on the depictions of post-life conjugality and family re-engineering that appeared in Spiritualism’s prolific afterlife genre. Although often different from, and sometimes open critically of, the conventions of Western marriage, the conjugal unions featured in these texts were by no means conducive to individual expression and unbridled, liberatory self-transformation. On the contrary, in such works as Hudson Tuttle’s Scenes in the Spirit World (1855), Carlyle Petersilea’s The Discovered Country (1889) and Florence Marryat’s The Dead Man’s Message (1894a), the Summerland freedom to remarry and remake one’s biological family acts all too often to simply substitute one form of enslavement for another.

A New Heaven? The Summerland in the Context of the Western Afterlife Tradition I have searched long and diligently, but have found no such heaven as the Bible describes. That book has undone me – utterly, irretrievably ruined me forever. I would that I had been born in a heathen land, and had never read its soul-destroying contents! (Tuttle 1855: 75)

So speaks the disincarnate banker Marvin in American medium Hudson Tuttle’s 1855 afterlife narrative Scenes in the Spirit World, as he explains to his fellow citizens in the spirit world why he has been hitherto unable to adjust to his new surroundings. Although far from representative

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in the vehemence of its anti-scriptural critique, this passage captures a shared characteristic of virtually all nineteenth-century Anglo-American Spiritualist descriptions of the higher life: namely, the conviction that the Spiritualist afterlife was innovative, unprecedented and antithetical in almost every way to its dangerously misleading Christian counterpart. ‘This was far better than the other heaven,’ muses the spirit protagonist Herfronzo in Carlyle Petersilea’s The Discovered Country, for there they were supposed not to marry, or be given in marriage; and I had always thought that I should prefer not to go to that heaven, for it would be a lonely and unnatural life – loving everybody just the same, all clothed alike, in long white robes walking about streets of gold praising God. (Petersilea 1889: 67)

For other Spiritualist writers, the theocentric model of heaven was not only alienating but also archaic, a primal relic of humanity’s earliest (and weakest) attempts at cognition. Thus the narrator in Amos K. Fiske’s 1891 novel Beyond the Bourn: Reports of a Traveller Returned from ‘The Undiscovered Country’ instructs us that, ‘The notions we were taught to hold of the occupations of the spirit life were like the fancies of childhood, and were the product of the childhood of the race’ (Fiske 1891: 45). Where the established conception of Christian heaven failed to be primitive or cruel, some insisted, it was simply ridiculous, a prospect that no intelligent person could consider with a straight face. So asserts the eponymous spirit narrator in L. Kelway Bamber’s World War I-era channelled text Claude’s Book (1918), separated by some seventy years from the movement’s earliest afterlife narratives yet retaining their anti-traditionalist bias. If ‘the old idea of Heaven’ were true, writes dead English fighter pilot Claude through his medium amanuensis, one would have to lose one’s sense of humour; for can’t you imagine the idea of one’s friends, large and small, old and young, fat and thin, some with knowledge of music, others with none at all, sitting, clad in white playing harps? (Kelway Bamber 1918: 56)

The resilient and grounding materiality of the body, with all of its ungainly bulges and imperfections, threatens to turn the heavenly chorus into a grotesque cacophony. A heaven that requires such unwittingly comic uniformity, suggests Claude, would be no paradise but rather a gross farce. Such claims of distinction from and opposition to an imagined mainstream are characteristic of most subcultures, and modern Spiritualism is no exception. What makes their iteration particularly interesting in this context is the force of denial and invention that must have been

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necessary to sustain them. The supposedly doctrinal object of these critiques simply does not exist. The kitschy version of heaven they send up, replete with rosy-cheeked harping cherubim, white robes and ivory thrones, is an invention of popular culture and fine-art conventions rather than Christian scriptural directive; indeed, with the marked exception of John the Revelator, the New Testament’s authors are notoriously tight-lipped on the subject of the world to come, with Jesus himself referring to it only in parable form. This reticence has many possible sources, including, as Michael Wheeler suggests, Jesus’s conviction that the reality and nature of heaven was too self-evident to require ethnographic description (Wheeler 1990: 3), or the desire to prevent a possible violation of the second commandment through an overly empirical account of heaven’s material culture – its paraphernalia of thrones, mansions and robes (Davies 1999: 94). Nowhere in the New Testament does one find the kind of consistent celestial party line that these modern Spiritualist writers and others so consistently, and perhaps even desperately, ascribed to it as a means of marking their own innovative identity.3 This is not to say that the traditional heavenly furniture that believers mocked had no cultural presence or authority, but simply that it lacked a scriptural one. The Bible in many Spiritualist afterlife texts simply functions as a false lead, an empty valence in what only appears to be a dialectical relationship. Equally worthy of suspicion are believers’ claims to have trademarked the first genuinely individualised, non-punitive and progressive Western afterlife. Anglo-American Spiritualism rose to prominence in the midnineteenth-century period when challenges to both Calvinist eschatology and theocentric models of the heavenly home were, as Michael Wheeler has demonstrated, common to the point of ubiquity,4 and few of the most common tropes of the Spiritualist Summerland lacked precedent in the afterlife spaces imagined by non-Spiritualist Christian and pagan believers alike. Certainly the idea of the self as a unique essence whose individual identity might survive death – or even exist prior to incarnation – has had a presence in Western thought at least since Plato’s Phaedrus; it is also what drives Christian models of personalised eschatological judgement. As Raymond Martin and John Barresi remark in their ambitious study of Western soul theory: It was critical to early Christian thinkers, and subsequently to all Christian thinkers, both that humans survive their bodily death as individuals and that as individuals they subsequently be held accountable for their earthly lives. Arguably, the promulgation and ultimate widespread acceptance of these doctrines contributed importantly to the emergence of Western individualism. (Martin and Barresi 2006: 56)

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Even if individual identity was imagined to subside after salvation – although nowhere is this dissolution stipulated in Christian scripture – it remained the non-negotiable criterion for entrance into some form of future state. Thus, when mediumistic writers endorsed the individualistic status of their afterlife, boasting, as does the ghostly Claude, that in it ‘your individuality is intact’ (Kelway Bamber 1918: 11), they were not so much creating a new celestial tradition as continuing an old one that had long been happily coexistent with, if not directly causal of, the very institutions and ideologies it aimed to reform. Even the insistent emphasis on self-improvement and perpetual labour so frequently embedded in modern Spiritualist afterlife writing was surely anodyne by the time of the movement’s first-wave peak. The Augustinian model of heaven as an eternal Sabbath, where permanently fixed because already perfect souls worshipped God in relative isolation from each other, has little presence in the period’s most famous nonSpiritualist literary descriptions of heaven, such as Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. ([1850] 2004), Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays ([1857] 1993), William Branks’s Heaven Our Home (1861) and Edward H. Bickersteth’s Yesterday, To-day, and Forever ([1866] 1869). In Hughes’s sentimental school novel, delicate and fever-stricken Rugby student George Arthur has a sick-bed vision of the next world in which he sees ‘a multitude [. . .] work[ing] at some great work [. . .] each worked in a different way, but at the same work’ (Hughes [1857] 1993: 297). Among the labourers is his own beloved father whom he longs to join, and is only prevented from doing so by a somewhat unexpected recovery. This celestial labour-yard scene is perfectly compatible with the Smilesian descriptions of post-life work one finds, for example, in Spiritualist treatises such as F.J. Theobald’s Homes and Work in the Future Life (1885), Mary Shelhamer’s Life and Labour in the Spirit World (1885) or Jesse Gostick’s wonderfully titled The Employment of the Dead (1862). In the latter, English Spiritualist Gostick asserts with grim satisfaction: There is no death; the soul knows no sleep; the dead are living and working. They left us for a higher state of life and are now associating with their kind [. . .] The living-dead think, and speak, and work where there is no darkness, where none have hidden thoughts, where the whole truth is always spoken, where there is no mirth, nor insincerity, nor wasted comments. (Gostick 1862: iv)

Leaving aside the thorny issue of how this erasure of humour and tactful insincerity might enable the preservation of personal identity and social harmony, Gostick instead lauds the Summerland for its perfect

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realisation of the Victorian cult of self-help and the religion of labour. For him as for so many of his co-believers, the advanced spirit was above all an eternal, unalienated worker freed by physical death from the material limits on productivity such as the need for rest, shelter and food. Needless to say, this platform was hardly subversive of the ideology of nineteenth-century capitalism, whatever some of the movement’s selfdeclared radicals might have suggested. In Britain at least, so sweeping and effective had been the cultural reimagining of the individual’s postlife potential – no longer a passive subject of salvation or damnation, but an active labourer capable of and addicted to self-improvement – that, by the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Geoffrey Rowell has suggested, ‘The hell-fire sermons of the great preachers no longer carried conviction, and their descriptions of the details of eternal torment [. . .] were [. . .] likely to seem full of unwarranted speculation and morally offensive’ (Rowell 1974: 212).

Sex and Marriage in the Spiritualist Afterlife Novel If the Spiritualist Summerland can be seen as culturally banal in its teleological momentum and privileging of self-help and duty – certainly too indebted to other emergent and established celestial cosmologies to warrant Arthur Conan Doyle’s claim that its reality was proven by its uniqueness5 – its modes of literary inscription, aesthetic ideology and genre fusion were decidedly more exciting. The Spiritualist afterlife novel is a fascinating generic hybrid, as diverse in its thematic influences and formal incorporations as it was popular with Spiritualist readers and writers. It is also, arguably, stubbornly resistant to standard methods of literary exegesis, its very classification forcing the critic into an immediate and substantial ontological quandary. After all, to what extent is it legitimate to consider these texts as novels at all, given that so many of them were produced under putative modes of trance and prefaced with statements which disavowed the presence of active authorial choice or imagination in their composition? As non-believing readers, we are under no compunction to accept such claims, but we do need to recognise their implications for the movement’s readership and emergent anti-aesthetic suspicion. To many seance room converts, the application of the term ‘fiction’ to some of the following works would have seemed a travesty; indeed, even those books advertised or subtitled by their Spiritualist authors as works of pure invention were likely to be read by the faithful as the unconscious products of spirit control. Although full of tributes to the beautiful, there is often a deep suspicion of, or

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even hostility to, the processes of wilful artistic creation in Spiritualist afterlife writing, expressed in the common claim that what seemed like individual creative choice was actually the result of natural law working through a supine imagination. The implications of this anti-individualist aesthetic for the movement’s relationship with late-century experimental realism and, in particularly, literary naturalism, will be considered at greater length in Chapter 6; at present, it is enough to recognise that the genre’s paradoxical relationship to the issue of free choice, one that we will soon see at the heart of the Spiritualist post-life marriage plot, is inherent in its very pose of authorial composition. Despite their frequent disavowal of invention, the afterlife narratives that flourished in the Anglo-American Spiritualist community from the 1850s to the 1920s are remarkable works of creativity, notable particularly for their dynamic synthesis of elements from Christian cosmic tour literature, pagan underworld lore, classical mythology, contemporary ethnography, science fiction and the utopian tradition. They range as dramatically in ambition and quality as they do in production method: some consisting of little more than a brief, luminous sketch of the higher state, others presenting their readers with lurid synaesthetic dreamscapes of an afterlife in which all periods of history and recorded products of the human imagination coexist in a state of palimpsestic simultaneity. An example of the latter, English mystic J.S.M. Ward’s automatically written A Subaltern in Spirit Land (1920) transcribes the experiences of the author’s dead brother Rex, a World War I casualty, as he fights Ancient Egyptian crocodile-headed monsters, meets Sir Gareth and Lady Lyonesse from Arthurian legend, and travels back to the Mesozoic period to witness the golden age of the dinosaurs.6 This combination proved too much for one of the modern movement’s most famous, and arguably most credulous, disciples, Arthur Conan Doyle, who in his own copy of the book (now held in the collection of the Harry Ransom Center in Texas) wrote on the frontispiece, ‘Interesting, but rather wild.’ To raise the eyebrows of the man who whole-heartedly endorsed the authenticity of the Cottingley Fairies is, we might observe, no mean accomplishment. Although Ward’s phantasmagoric excesses are not strictly typical of the genre, they demonstrate the ample imaginative possibilities that existed within it. Once one has dispensed with the constricting vision of heaven as a site of theocentric fixity, the afterlife opens itself up to narration and aesthetic experimentation in hitherto unimaginable ways. Heaven might no longer be a place simply of satiety, but of fertile creativity and production. The goal of afterlife labour was as much to improve conditions on earth as to maintain them in the hereafter. Departed spirits might make

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or inspire beautiful works of art – English medium William Stainton Moses’ spirit control ‘Imperator’, for example, claimed to be part of a spirit band dedicated to the catholic pursuits of ‘art, science, literature, culture, refinement, poetry, paintings, music, and language’ (Moses [1928] 1952: 2)7 – or create physically and mentally enhanced human beings. A description of this kind of stirpicultural work, reminiscent of Paschal Beverly Randolph’s account of the Davenport brothers’ metaphysical genealogy, comes in American medium Mary Shelhamer’s Life and Labour in the Spirit World (1885). Shelhamer’s control, a dead Indiana girl named Katie Kinsey, explains: There are many [. . .] branches of reform relating to human interests that are looked after by wise spirits who are labouring for the advancement of mankind, and one especially, and an important theme, is that which comes under the title of Heredity, and which concerns more vitally, perhaps, than does anything else the health, happiness, and prosperity of the coming races. Much thought and observation long since taught a large class of thinking spirits [. . .] that unless man attends to the offspring he rears by providing them with the very best pre-natal conditions for growth and development, it will be almost useless for him to attempt to reform him of gross habits and impure tendencies after they have entered upon the arena of mortal existence and strife. (Shelhamer 1885: 221)

The singular importance which Shelhamer attaches to prenatal constitution, and the ease with which she dismisses virtually all programmes of post-natal improvement, should by now seem familiar, the priority of hereditary determinism acting both to catalyse and limit Spiritualism’s other reform interests in women’s suffrage, abolition and working-class enfranchisement. Yet Shelhamer’s inspired vision has another function in addition to simply echoing the movement’s biodeterminist faith: it also makes sex and reproduction the chief business of the dead. The afterlife in Life and Labour in the Spirit World becomes earth’s biomanufactory, a place whose ‘especial’, most vital and consequential work is to forge the race anew so that sin and depravity become somatic impossibilities. Even if the Summerland’s denizens did not actually mate with the living – although some Spiritualists and occultists, including Paschal Beverly Randolph, did not rule this out8 – they could work through the receptive minds and warm flesh of the living to prevent the dysgenic couplings, aberrant children and, more ominous still, race suicide that a number of believers, including William Colville and Oliver Lodge, felt to be terrifyingly imminent. In The Spirit Spheres Attaching to the Earth, Colville proposes ‘Were it not for disclosures from the spiritual side of life, life would not be worth living to, at least, half the population of the globe’ (Colville 1884: 4–5). The resulting despair, warned Oliver Lodge

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in 1902, would surely and swiftly translate into devastating action; convinced that there would be no survival, he speculates, the unbeliever ‘would, with all his companions, leap, not for life, but for death, and dying would leave no progeny to face the hideous mockery they had faced’ (Lodge 1902: 20). The horror of such an extinction intensifies through the speed at which Lodge imagines its occurrence: if we do not turn back the tide of atheism, he suggests, the twentieth century might be humanity’s last. Imagining a future in which the annihilationist hypothesis prevails, he speculates: ‘then would human nature turn back upon itself in throes of revolt; evolution would cease, and the human race, after a few reactionary generations, obliterate itself completely from the face of the Earth’ (25).9

Reaffiliating the Celestial Family in Tuttle, Carlisle and Marryat This emphasis on the biologic of survival suggests that Spiritualism’s ideology of sex had distinctly less to do with the pleasures of jouissance and erotic emancipation than with the serious business of racial regeneration and ecological conservation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the movement’s Summerland romance narratives, three of which – Hudson Tuttle’s Scenes in the Spirit World; or, Life in the Spheres, Carlyle Petersilea’s The Discovered Country and Florence Marryat’s The Dead Man’s Message – we are about to encounter in detail. Produced over a span of forty years and across two continents, these texts are united by the prominence of their authors in the transatlantic Spiritualist community and by their shared commitment to exploring and resolving the complications which ensue from the continuation of old, and the creation of new, conjugal and kinship ties in the Summerland. The texts are also invaluable documents for contemporary sexuality studies, providing the base material for a potent critique of the critical tendency to map subversive macro-political meanings onto marginalised and heterodox sexual ideologies.10 There is arguably no more deviant or outsider sexual identity than that of the erotic dead, challenging as it does both the biological exclusivity of amative sensation and reproduction to the living, and a nearly two-millennia-old tradition of Christian thought on the function and fate of the post-life body. Yet for all its potential subversive force, the sexualised Summerland in these three compelling Spiritualist thought experiments is ultimately a place where existing social hierarchies are hardened and in which the individual is subjugated to the race for all eternity.

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The first of the narratives, Hudson Tuttle’s Scenes in the Spirit World; or, Life in the Spheres established an important precedent for both the plots and marital politics of the abundant Spiritualist afterlife writing that was to follow in its wake. After a brief overture on earth, the narrative follows its protagonists through the brief crisis of death forward to their picaresque education in, and exploration of, the spirit world. It concludes, as do a number of others in the genre, with a meta-narrative act of imaginative communion in which the disembodied characters are depicted entering an entranced medium to speak directly to the readers through the momentarily conflated media of reading and seance entrancement. Tuttle, a farmer and medium from rural Ohio who was to become a major figure in the American Spiritualist scene, composed the work when he was only twenty years old, a precocious age that, along with the fact of his extremely limited education, is invoked in the book’s preface as proof of its allegedly supernatural derivation. His career spanned an impressive breadth of the movement’s modern history, opening in the early 1850s in the aftermath of the Hydesville rappings and enduring through to his death in 1910, by which time he had authored (at least) ten substantial pieces of Spiritualist literature, including two works of esoteric anthropology, Arcana of Nature (1860) and The Origin and Antiquity of Man Spiritually Considered (1866). The most astonishing of all these contributions has, unfortunately, been lost to posterity, if indeed it ever existed: in his preface to the 1855 first edition of Scenes in the Spirit World, Tuttle’s friend Datus Kelley describes a 360-ft-long panoramic painting of each of the earth’s successive geologic evolutionary stages apparently produced by Tuttle under trance. No record of this work remains, and it is difficult to imagine how a canvas the size of a football field could have vanished without leaving at least some kind of trace. Regardless of its realisation, the projected size of the painting demonstrates the colossal scope of Tuttle’s philosophical ambitions for Spiritualism. Unwilling to restrict himself to the task of consolation alone, Tuttle used Spiritualism to perform a grand cosmological synthesis of the origins, evolution and transcendental interconnections of all life on earth. This all-encompassing cosmic vision is immediately apparent in the (allegedly) spirit-dictated Scenes in the Spirit World, which functions both as a sentimental portrait of an individual marriage and a universal treatise on the role of right coupling and right procreation in humanity’s evolutionary ascent. Its protagonists are Hero and Leon, an aged couple whose all-consuming mutual devotion rivals that of the classical lovers from whom their names have been corrupted. Their blissful lives have been spent in a beautiful and geographically unspecified pastoral

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location, where they have raised two offspring described as ‘what nature designed children to be, perfect models [. . .] trained from infancy in morality and intellect’ (Tuttle 1855: 24). This fusion of the natural and social, in which human training and contrivance works only to reinforce what was always already intended by nature, is also characteristic of the afterlife in which the couple find themselves soon after the novel’s opening. Hero dies first, moving upwards through the spheres to purify herself and prepare an appropriate reception for Leon when he joins her there. Shortly afterwards, they are reunited on the celestial plane and study together under the benevolent guidance of the ancient sage Pythagoras, who directs them to various locations on heaven and earth where they gain the understanding that will allow them to ascend to the highest sphere. It has to be admitted, this plot structure does not make for particularly gripping reading. The indefatigably upwards motion of Tuttle’s spiritual trajectory eliminates the conflict and uncertainty that Radcliffe Edmonds has recognised as crucial to the suspense of classical underworld narratives: Anomaly and crisis make interesting and tellable stories; normality and quotidian tedium do not. Only when the deceased experiences difficulty in transition or when a living person crosses to the realm of the dead and then back again is there a story to be told. (Edmonds 2004: 21)

The latter scenarios have been deliberately omitted from Scenes in the Spirit World, perhaps with the intention that the resulting lack of narrative tension would create more space to explore and promulgate the Spiritualist concept of soul affinity. At the time of Tuttle’s writing, the concept of soul affinity was considered one of the most controversial aspects of American Spiritualism, potentially more socially seditious and dangerous than even the mediumistic challenge to the established church hierarchy. Derived loosely from Swedenborgianism and Neo-Platonism, Spiritualist affinity theory held that no marriage could be considerable real unless it was founded on a notoriously loosely defined form of authentic spiritual love; Spiritualist couples who felt they lacked true connection might sever their relations immediately and without legal sanction when their destined match appeared. This right was not just extended to the living; indeed, in Spiritualist philosophy, individuals were often imagined as most likely to find their ideal mates after death. Spiritualist ‘affinityism’, as John Patrick Deveney explains, rested on the notion (itself based on pseudo-scientific theories of ‘magnetic’ attraction) that feelings of ‘true love’ – and not the mere legal relationship

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of husband and wife – were the best indicator of a person’s God- or Natureintended partner. Formal marriage, in other words, was irrelevant. At a more thoughtful level, ‘soul affinity’ became enmeshed with variations on the Swedenborgian and Platonic idea of the androgyne, in which the polar and eternally co-existent halves of the soul must seek each other out in this world or the next to achieve wholeness and completion before they can, as a unity, proceed back to their divine origin. (Deveney 1997: 11–12)

It is easy to see how this theory could – and indeed, did – give rise to charges of licentiousness and sexual anarchy when put into practice by some of the American movement’s most controversial public figures, including Andrew Jackson Davis, John Murray Spear and Victoria Woodhull. But when translated into a fictionalised Summerland, Spiritualist affinityism took on a distinctly different cast. Here the quest for one’s true mate ceased to act as a suspect vehicle for the pursuit of illicit pleasure and became instead a means for conserving a series of elect biotypes as they supervised the purgatorial punishment of the improperly mated. Leon and Hero’s relationship forms the text’s archetypal affinity, their attachment described in terms that owe as much to the physical sciences as to the language of affect. They have spent their lives in a state of mutual devotion, ‘drawn together by the gentle gravitation of love; united by the ties of true affinity which can never be severed; content with the little world of happiness found in the other, and the never-ending delights which surrounding nature afforded’ (Tuttle 1855: 13–14). Their state of nuptial bliss forms a stark contrast with the enmity and suffering of the unhappy couples they encounter in the lower spheres, pairs whose thoughtless marriages have bestowed upon them and their offspring a form of pseudo-damnation that is no less horrifying for its apparent impermanence. The first of these that Hero and Leon encounter head an almost monstrously large family of plague victims, a group stricken down not by the ferocity of the disease alone but by the inherited moral failings which Tuttle’s narrative effortlessly equates with immune deficiency. Pointing out the group of ten miserable, squalling spirit children and their two spirit parents, Pythagoras explains: Many years since, while passing over the earth, I encountered them, the same as now. The parents whom you behold, worn down with care, were unhappily mated. They falsified their internal character, and each made the other believe that the two were perfectly adapted to each other [. . .] Can you ask what the offspring of such unions can be? They inherit but few of the good qualities of the parents, but all the bad, and that too in an excited state. This is an ill-understood, but an unavoidable consequence of embryonic growth. The Bible said truly of such: ‘Conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniquity.’

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These children illustrate this. They hate their parents, and are kept together only by fear. (Tuttle 1855: 33)

In this instance, Pythagoras’s critique of marriage is not that it is insufficiently free or empowering for its participants, but that its impure forms contaminate the stock of the living. Moral virtue simply cannot survive the annihilating force of such deceptive, rancorous and, worst of all, prolific procreation. For what is particularly striking about Tuttle’s model of marital degeneration, and in effect makes it far more threatening and momentous than the more well-known fin-de-siècle version disseminated by Max Nordau, is that unfitness in no way corresponds to infertility. While readers of Nordau’s late-century jeremiad might have taken comfort from its closing affirmation that the degenerate were destined for sterility and early death, Tuttle’s audience is offered no such salve; on the contrary, the worst consequence of the plague family’s prolificacy is its endurance. ‘Ten children!’ exclaims Pythagoras: No parent can rear during their earthly life that number, and impart all the necessary vitality and instruction their natures require. And what right have parents to bring immortal beings into the world, if not prepared and qualified to sustain them? (Tuttle 1855: 34)

Here the duty of care is extended beyond the usual biological limits of earth-life through to the eternity in which dissembling parents will be tied to the horrifying fruits of their union. Spiritualist degenerationism elevates bad marriage to the status of profound sin precisely because its effects cannot be waived away by death. A similar rhetoric of moral obligation attends the subsequent defence of free love in the chapter titled ‘An Unhappy Marriage’. Here the triad of Leon, Hero and Pythagoras meet the hapless and aptly named spirit Lucian whose name is a playful allusion to the classical author of Dialogues of the Dead. The four enter into their own discussion on the subject of Lucian’s disastrous earth-marriage to a fickle woman who only pretended to love him in order to gain his wealth. ‘I can not approve the doctrines of free love as commonly understood’, he bewails, ‘and yet I feel there should be more freedom in love. As soon as love is confined, it is love no more’ (Tuttle 1855: 28). Yet love confined, or at least naturalised into eternal monogamy, is exactly the boon with which all of Tuttle’s spirits, Lucian included, are ultimately rewarded as a result of their improvement. Lucian achieves this destiny when he accepts personal responsibility and stops blaming the spirit world for his doomed earth-marriage, admitting that it was the result of his own lecherousness – he abandoned his simple and plain first love Mary in order to wed her more attractive friend. As with most affirmations of individual choice

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and accountability in Spiritualist afterlife writing, however, this moment is profoundly strained, coming as it does after a strenuous denunciation of ill-mated parents for producing children who have no option but to live out the wickedness implanted in their bioplasm. Nonetheless, accept responsibility he does – and a grave one it is indeed, as Mary has died of grief after the abandonment. But of course, death is no impediment to romantic attachment in the Spiritualist cosmos, and no sooner does Lucian make his confession than his original love Mary reappears. Lucian’s first marriage, because based purely on ‘animal instinct’ (60), now instantaneously dissolves and he and Mary are free to unite permanently and ascend through the cosmos together as two parts of one organic whole. In Tuttle’s vision, true marriage is achieved not through but in defiance and final conquest of the base sexual instincts, with ‘free love’ acting as the conduit to rather than antithesis of an eternalised monogamy. In Scenes in the Spirit World’s final moments, we ourselves are inducted into the text’s monogamist and eugenic fraternity through the metafictional auspices of seance communication. Pythagoras leads his band of followers down to an elevated Spiritualist circle on earth – one characterised by the seriousness and piety that Tuttle’s own seances no doubt required – and enters into the body of its entranced medium. This momentary union between the living and the dead morphs into the culminating vehicle for the text’s reproductive ideology. Pythagoras, after a lengthy opening address in which he describes the post-life experiences of various spirits, promotes the cause of universalism and preaches pity for the congenital criminals who have no control over their actions, concludes by urging his listeners to accept their considerable procreative responsibility. ‘They commit an outrage against humanity’, he warns, ‘who heedlessly throw their offspring upon society with diseased constitutions’ (Tuttle 1855: 139). Then, in the novel’s startling final sentence, he bids us: ‘Do right, act justly, love your race’ (143). Only when the text stops here do we realise that we are never to return to the thirdperson narrative voice that constitutes all but the final chapter of the book. By concluding with a sustained period of second-person address, Tuttle compels our participation in the novel’s spiritual communion and makes his audience the explicit target of his emotional eugenic appeal. Fascinatingly, by this point in the text the argument for post-life survival seems to have been almost entirely subordinated to this larger reproductive imperative, functioning virtually as a mere pretext for the vital task of ensuring the fitness of the living through correct coupling. Free love becomes more ecologically instrumentalist in Boston Spiritualist and composer Carlyle Petersilea’s The Discovered Country

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(1889), a late-century Swedenborgian romance which also embraces an erotic vision of the afterlife. In some respects it presents a far more extravagantly polyamorous Summerland than Scenes in the Spirit World, focusing not on a single pair of perfect married lovers whose affinity remains intact after death, but on a series of individual spirits who seek and find love only after death has simultaneously rejuvenated their immaterial bodies and liberated them from unhappy earthly attachments. Yet the pairings and kinship groups produced by this numinous state of sexual liberation have the unexpected effect, not of creating a new social order, but rather of homogenising kinship groups by effectively purging them of their racial diversity. Petersilea’s afterlife is not procreative – no new souls are born here – but it is a site of family reengineering where lines of descent can be retrospectively edited through post-life conjugal affinities. Published under the pseudonym ‘Ernst von Himmel’, a nom de plume that playfully blends the German word of heaven with an aural pun on the earnestness of Petersilea’s Spiritualist faith, The Discovered Country is written in a hybrid style which combines the spiritual confession with auto-thanatography. Its narrator, nameless at first but later given the extravagant title of Herfronzo, is a successful but spiritually despondent musician who has become emotionally distanced from his children and lost his Christian faith. When death comes upon him early in the first chapter, he finds himself utterly unprepared and ignores his friends’ urging that he pray for Christ’s forgiveness. This omission proves to be no great detriment, as the Summerland in which he subsequently finds himself has little concern for the conventional displays and creedbound practices of earthly worship. On the contrary, Herfronzo’s antitraditionalism and agnostic secularism proves the greatest expedient to his advancement, allowing him to bypass the false religious teachings and, equally if not more importantly, conjugal bonds that impede the progress of other spirits. Through this series of emphases, Petersilea clearly seems to ally his new heaven with the forces of social and religious progress. This radicalism soon comes under strain, however, through the text’s complicated deployment of what it presents as the ultimate catalyst and site for social transformation, namely the biological family unit. As in Scenes in the Spirit World, what makes kinship ties so important in The Discovered Country is their thermodynamic endurance. The deathlessness of the Summerland ensures that family members will live in close proximity through all eternity. Petersilea’s afterlife is a fecund place of permanent surplus, an Edenic wonderland where nature has finally broke free from tooth and claw. When Herfronzo is deposited

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there by angel transport, he notes with astonishment, ‘There is not one dead or decaying leaf in all this beautiful foliage, not a single imperfect tree. Every flower is perfect, bright, and exquisitely lovely’ (Petersilea 1889: 8). This standard of horticultural perfection-in-stasis extends also to the Summerland’s human and animal inhabitants, the abundance of the latter contrasting intriguingly with their absence in Tuttle’s Scenes in the Spirit World.11 Herfronzo tests the unnerving plenitude of the new sphere first by attempting to pull off a tree branch, then by stamping some insects underfoot, and finally, when all these attempts have failed to produce damage – in arguably one of the most unintentionally funny episodes in the entire canon of Spiritualist afterlife writing – by strangling the friendly dog who comes to greet him: The dog came to me and I thought I would choke it, just to see if that too could not be hurt; I choked away to my heart’s content, but the dog remained just the same good-natured, jovial fellow as ever; he could not be strangled or killed, so I arrived by successive stages to the fact that everything which I saw was spiritual and imperishable the same as I now know myself to be. (Petersilea 1889: 31)

As in so many nineteenth-century mystical texts, Herfronzo reasons like a scientist to reach a Spiritualist conclusion: all life lasts forever and nothing is ever lost, so the prerogative of forging proper marriages and healthy offspring is more important than ever before. It does not take Herfronzo long to meet his match. A kindly and wise shepherd named Voncelora adopts him and introduces him to his beautiful wife Katrina and her even more stunning ‘sister’ Fraulein Helene. Herfronzo is immediately smitten, but unsure as to how to proceed in light of the earth-bound marital ties that apparently still bind him. His new family soon make it plain that the conjugal and, even more fascinatingly, direct blood relationships established in life no longer have any authority here. Rejecting Herfronzo’s claim to be a twice-married man, the shepherd-guide retorts: You are a perfectly free man, unmarried, and you never were married. Very few persons are ever truly married, until they get here; and no man can marry here, until he find his rightful other-self or counter; for no half, that is not the other half of his spirit, can possibly fit him. (Petersilea 1889: 46)

Helene, he urges, is Herfronzo’s natural match, and thus their coupling the fulfilment of Platonic biodestiny. Just before their marriage, a union cemented not by legal processes but by thought-melding, Helene reveals herself to be Herfronzo’s unrequited lost love Mrs Bancroft, a portly forty-something married woman whose daughters were once his piano

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students. Herfronzo’s astonishment at this revelation is not only the result of her significantly enhanced physical appearance, one that has rendered her hitherto unrecognisable despite their former attachment, but also by the fact that she had been so consistently and, as it seems, metaphysically correctly, referred to in the new life as ‘Fraulein’. This titling suggests that she has had her conjugal and even maternal identities waived away, her hymen implicitly restored during the general process of physical repair and beautification that accompanies all spiritual metamorphoses. Helene’s children are notably absent from her descriptions of her post-life missionary work and attachments; while she has visited Herfronzo and his children many times – now apparently retroactively hers by virtue of the couple’s romantic affinity – her own seem no longer able to draw her. In the new world time of immortality, Helene is able to retrospectively inhabit the mystical kinship bonds that both always and never were. This incident is by no means the only retroactive act of family reengineering to take place in The Discovered Country, the most significant of which manifests within Herfronzo’s own ancestral line. Towards the narrative’s conclusion, the kindly Voncelora clarifies his true relationship to Herfronzo: he is his father. This revelation is a source of simultaneous comfort and profound disorientation. On the one hand, it partially soothes the anxieties produced by Voncelora’s uncanny physical resemblance to Herfronzo’s still-living son Karl, the only one of his children for whom he feels any attachment. When the shepherd spirit and the living boy stand side by side during the former’s visit to earth, the similarities are overwhelming; raised but never directly named here is the possibility for the living to be cuckolded by the dead, to have their own biological children be the real progeny of disembodied intelligences. Voncelora’s direct blood relation to Karl provides a feasible biological alternative to this supernatural mode of generation, but it is not this familiar mode of biological inheritance that the shepherd emphasises in his account of their resemblance. Instead, he announces: I am your son’s guardian spirit; and have been for many years. He is, and has been far more to me, than he ever was or will be to you [. . .] His body was directly propagated by yourself. His soul belongs to me by right of near kinship. (Petersilea 1889: 58)

As the important stipulation ‘more than he ever will be to you’ suggests here, this system of spiritual parentage may accompany, as it does here, ancestral descent, but it can also supersede it. And far from being simply an affective or intangible form of affinity, spiritual parentage has an intensely material basis, retaining and intensifying the shared physical

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characteristics of those it connects. Under its operations, no random variation can upset the chain of inherited resemblance. Families in the afterlife thus differ from their mundane counterparts primarily by the consistency and unanimity of their phenotype. This homonymic drive of Petersilea’s Swedenborgian paradise achieves its most startling manifestation in what we might call the compulsory Aryanisation of the family unit. The new celestial family in which Herfronzo finds himself is a supernaturally whitewashed one, expunged of the taint of his Jewish biological mother who has been replaced by Voncelora’s ‘lovely blond’ soul affinity Katrina (Petersilea 1889: 153). Voncelora explains that although the ‘dark-eyed girl of Jewish descent [. . .] made me a good wife; we were not intended by nature for each other; and when death came we were forever separated’ (154). The repeated stress on ethnic markers in this passage suggests that the couple’s spiritual incompatibility was both signified through and produced by that most stubborn impediment to all true affinity: namely, ethnic and religious difference. Indeed, it is a significant feature of The Discovered Country that all true angels – the latter the term Petersilea uses to refer to the composite entity formed by the perfect union of ideally matched male and female spirits – are virtually phenotypically identical. When Herfronzo travels with his own physically consonant spirit wife Helene through the universe on a post-marital tour, he notes that all the surrounding angels ‘fitted each other; and yet [. . .] were distinctly marked, male and female, but no blue-eyed male, was mated to a dark-eyed female; both had blue eyes, or both had dark eyes, and in size they were the same’ (150). Indeed, so closely do angel husbands and wives resemble each other in the higher spheres that their relationships begin to take on an incestuous cast, one heightened by the tendency of angel groupings to refer to each other as sister and brother, and exemplified in the breeding practices of the planet the novel presents as ideal utopian state and analogue of earth’s future evolutionary destination: Jupiter. The two angel couples of Voncelora and Katrina and Herfronzo and Helene travel here together near the narrative’s close to see ‘what Earth and its inhabitants are to be some day’ (Petersilea 1889: 211). What they discover is an extremely advanced society whose social, moral and physical superiority rests on their practice of a perfected, static and incestuous form of reproduction. The Jupiterians are born in twinned heterosexual pairs who go on to spawn their own duplicates in adulthood. This system has the advantage not only of fixing planetary population at an unchanging optimal number, but also of ensuring consistency of type from generation to generation. As Voncelora explains:

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The male and female are one from their birth, man and wife, and remain so until their ascension. The planet Jupiter has long since ceased to multiply in numbers, they merely hold their own, and the man and wife never have but two children which are born at the same time and are the future man and wife to be. The inhabitants of Jupiter are very far on their road to perfection; they are extremely wise and God-like. (Petersilea 1889: 214)

Although Jupiterian reproduction inevitably produces ‘a great deal of uniformity’, he concludes, ‘it is of so high an order that one does not tire of it’ (Petersilea 1889: 217). For these prototypes of the coming race, as for the angel-dwellers of the higher spheres who inhabit a space of amorous apartheid, godliness equals sameness. In few other places can we find a better example of the deep complexities in progressive American Spiritualist attitudes towards race than in this text’s fascinating combination of egalitarian humanitarianism with a metaphysical resistance to miscegenation. Just as the ‘Free Love’ on offer in Tuttle’s erotic afterlife excludes all forms of attachment but perpetual heterosexual monogamy at the behest of the species, so too in The Discovered Country is true affinity restricted to those who are so ethnically and physically identical as to be virtually one flesh. In both narratives, Summerland marriage reform works to fuel not individual liberation and diversity, but stasis, homogeneity and the joy of everlasting uniformity without the usual tariff of tedium. The final, and arguably most conservationist of my three examples, is prolific English novelist Florence Marryat’s The Dead Man’s Message, a novel which culminates by transforming the feminist promise of afterlife marital liberation into a form of silenced enslavement. My admittedly polemic argument here runs counter to the far more celebratory reading of the novel recently offered by Marlene Tromp, who suggests that the novel’s gender politics follow the trajectory of Marryat’s own contemporarily radical personal experience as a remarried divorcee ‘who behaved independently of many social, if not legal, boundaries [. . .] [and] was attracted to Spiritualism [. . .] and its unconventional philosophies’ (Tromp 2006: 60). For Tromp, ‘Marryat’s novel promised that women might have marital and perhaps even sexual happiness and that they might safely cross social boundaries to achieve this if they accept the guidance of the faith’ (62). Without wishing to challenge Tromp’s astute and compelling reading of Marryat’s public and personal politics, I suggest that Marryat’s biography need not provide the hermeneutic template for the ultimately, if not initially, patriarchal model of perpetual marriage embedded in The Dead Man’s Message’s Spiritualist teleology. Of the three afterlife narratives examined at length in this chapter,

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Marryat’s is the most self-consciously fictional one, published under the subtitle ‘An Occult Romance’ and devoid of any claim to have been the product of entranced inspiration. This framing does not indicate Marryat’s lesser degree of faith in the empirical reality of Spiritualism than Tuttle or Petersilea – on the contrary, she had hinted at her heterodox sympathies as early as the 1870s before proudly making her beliefs public in her 1891 conversion narrative There is No Death (1891)12 – but rather represents a canny and calculated strategy of appeal to the huge non-Spiritualist audience for occult fiction in 1890s Britain. Under this familiar genre cloak, Marryat clearly hoped to convince her wide readership to exchange their pleasure in the gothic thrills of the unexplained supernatural for a serious engagement with the ethical, social and conjugal implications of an all too tangible afterlife. Given this ambition, it is not surprising that the imaginative territory and narrative trajectory of The Dead Man’s Message should be so much more familiar than that of Scenes in the Spirit World and The Discovered Country. The bulk of its action is set in contemporary London as viewed through the eyes of living-dead protagonist Professor Aldwyn, and its plot is clearly drawn from that most popular of Victorian non-Spiritualist tales of supernatural ethical conversion, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Unlike Dickens’s Scrooge, however, Marryat’s eponymous dead man has to pass permanently into the afterlife before harrowing visions of the consequences of his cruelty can reform him. Aldwyn is a stereotypical Spiritualist target, a selfish, petulant and atheistic scientist whose fondness for vivisection is matched by an equal penchant for the mental torture of his long-suffering second wife Ethel and his children Gilbert and Maddy. Death is the only (partial) palliative for the Professor’s numerous sins, the gravest of which entails his reckless procreation of children with chronic moral defects. Marryat seeds evidence in favour of bioethical birth control throughout the novel’s two central narrative spaces of 1890s London and the timeless afterlife, the former acting as proving ground for the determinist mechanisms sanctioned by the latter. In both worlds, the sins of the father routinely outweigh the role of women in bearing and shaping their offspring. Thus it is that Aldwyn’s two children from his first marriage, Gilbert and Maddy, find their adulthoods blighted by the intemperance and rashness they have irresistibly inherited from their father. Neither the guidance of their benevolent stepmother Ethel, nor the hereditary influence of their virtuous biological mother Susan, now an elevated spirit in heaven, can reverse this tyrannical patriarchal imprint. As such, the two are routinely presented as pitiable failed individuals. ‘It is not the poor children’s fault’, remarks Ethel on the siblings’ obstinacy,

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‘if they inherit it from him’ (Marryat 1894a: 84). One poisoned paternal seed can rid whole subsequent generations of their agency and full human subjecthood: thus Maddy, by virtue of the flawed temperament inherited from her father, prepares to make a disastrous marriage with the caddish photographer Wilfred Reynolds who will compound Aldwyn’s sins by combining them with his own and passing them on to his own progeny. The tragedy of this fatalist patriarchal chain is that its victims are all too aware of their own subjection. Thinking about her dead mother, Maddy wonders: Why did she ever marry such a man as my father? She did us a worse turn than she did herself; for poor Gilbert and I have the misfortune to have his blood in our veins; whilst in that, she of course, came off scot free. (Marryat 1894a: 103)

The marked omission of Susan’s blood as equivalent biopresence in this description is particularly telling, annihilating maternal agency and suggesting that the only ameliorative work that women might perform on degenerate stock is to refuse to host it. Indeed, it is this very sentiment that provides Ethel with her chief consolation following Aldwyn’s death: ‘I do feel so thankful that I did not bring a child into the world. Fancy having a son or daughter with that man’s disposition. It would have broken my heart!’ (Marryat 1894a: 84). The apparently transcendental fact of women’s powerlessness in both the processes of sexual and social reproduction is confirmed and complicated in the narrative’s eugenic afterlife. Aldwyn’s passage to the next world follows the conventions established in the previously discussed narratives: he dies, experiences a brief period of ontological confusion as to his new state of existence, and is then met by a specially assigned spirit guide who offers to lead him to redemption through a process of guided atonement. In no other text encountered thus far, however, is the improvement process so grimly punitive or the potential for transformation so equivocal; here the irreconcilable combination of Marryat’s patriarchal determinism and post-life meliorism reaches its logically strained limits. Consider the bizarre outcome of Aldwyn’s attempts to reunite in the Sphere of Introduction with his own father, the figure who should by the surrounding narrative logic be to blame for his rancorous character. Aldwyn eagerly approaches his father, only to be repulsed with reproaches for his routinely unfilial behaviour in life. The senior Aldwyn says: The ties of nature are not recognized here, unless they have been accompanied by the ties of the spirit. What sympathy do you expect my spirit to have

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with yours? I see you now as you are. A man eaten up with love of self, with less spirituality than many a little child; for you have trodden it under foot, and dwarfed and stunted it, until it has dwindled down to an abortion. Had you given the reins to the natural love God implanted in your breast, for the good of your fellow creatures, you would have nourished and enlarged it; but, as it is, you have nearly killed it. The only thing which survives the pettiness of earth, is Love. If you cannot bring that in your hand I see nothing to communicate with. There can be no fellowship between God and Belial. (Marryat 1894a: 67–8)

Two things are striking here: the passage’s Manichean staging of the father–son relationship as a contest between the divine and the demonic, and its attribution to Aldwyn junior the self-determinative powers denied to both his children and his wives. He is, in a description that fully exploits the rich fin-de-siècle lexicon of degeneration, a self-made abortion, a viable birth who has deliberately trampled and perverted his soul into a state of defect far worse than any visible physical deformity. Marryat brings the force of this negative comparison home by contrasting Aldwyn’s cold reception with the whoops of delight and jubilation that greet a severely diseased and crippled woman as she arrives in the spheres just moments after him. The glorious soul which has always thrived under her impairment – whether by dint of personal will or paternal inheritance – grants the woman far more spiritual capital than her stunted fellow arrival. This scene encapsulates the sustaining paradox of The Dead Man’s Message’s denunciation of paternal sin. Both the moral difference between Aldwyn’s father and himself, and the gap between the disabled woman’s physical impairment – erased after mere moments in the new life – and her spiritual beauty indicate the possibility that we might free ourselves from the dictates of the body and its inherited or diseased capacities. Such a potential is fundamental to all forms of Spiritualist, and most forms of Christian, salvation. Did it not exist, Aldwyn would never have fallen into the depths, nor would the crippled woman have been able to evade the moral defect with which, as we have seen, a number of prominent modern Spiritualists believed congenital disability to be commensurate. That such dualism is allowed to exist in the novel suggests that we are bound neither to the sins nor the virtues of our fathers, and that bodies and souls need not be yoked together in a relationship of viciously determinative and transparent identity. Yet such slippages and ruptures are nowhere else available in Marryat’s fanciful cosmology. Aldwyn’s children certainly do not enjoy the freedom their father has exploited for largely mercenary ends, and are instead, as we have seen, largely condemned to lives of self-destructive involuntary

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impulsion. This juggernautic force of bad paternity is both fatal to its victims and sanctioned by God himself. As Aldwyn and John Forest hover over the dying Gilbert, who lies blinded on a merchant ship following a vicious attack by a crew mate, the spirit guide explains, ‘having you for his father [. . .] I repeat (and I speak by virtue of the orders given me from above) that you are the only person to blame for Gilbert lying here at the point of death’ (Marryat 1894a: 165). Animals and women no less than children are equally enslaved to providence in The Dead Man’s Message’s overwrought fictional meditation on the joys and pitfalls of free will. We need only consider the post-life fates of both Aldwyn’s first wife Susan and the countless animal victims of his vivisectional practice, all of whom are linked by virtue of their mutual torment at the hands of materialist sadism. Death, instead of liberating them from their oppressor, merely binds them to Aldwyn even more closely through an unshirkable obligation of reform. Cathy Gutierrez has recently written convincingly on the importance of such forms of post-life attachment in Spiritualism’s complicated poetics of memory (Gutierrez 2009: 31); what interests me here is the way in which the priority of remembrance – Aldwyn must be surrounded by his victims as totemic reminders of his past infractions – trumps the rights of violated spirits to individual movement and direction. Since his death, Aldwyn has found himself constantly accompanied by a band of small spirit animals that dance around his feet. When he asks Forest for an explanation, he is told: They are the spirits of the dumb brutes whom you tortured in the name of science [. . .] All the long, weary hours of acute pain under which you kept these helpless creatures of God, in order that you might watch their hearts beating [. . .] have been reckoned up, and the animals themselves are ordained to accompany you throughout the hell you have created for yourself, till your own tortures will have so accumulated that you would be thankful to exchange them for those you made them suffer – aye, even to have your head and body laid out and secured on the vivisecting table, as theirs were, whilst all your nerves and most of the delicate portions of your system are mutilated by the dissecting knife. (Marryat 1894a: 132–3)

By act of Sisyphean ordination, these sacrificial victims thus have no choice but to share Aldwyn’s hell through the agonisingly long parade of aeons required to expunge the original sin, lingering in a state of bondage that replicates rather than corrects the master–slave power dynamics of their murder. Neither botanic paradise nor gilded city, Marryat’s afterlife morphs into a celestial vivisectional table on which the very few humans who once did have agency – Aldwyn, in this case – are tortured for taking away that of others who, even in death, remain enslaved.

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This thraldom finds its final subject in Aldwyn’s dead first wife, Susan. Death had initially but, as it later ensues, only briefly, freed her from the man with whom she was constitutionally and temperamentally incompatible. This temporary breach allows her to absent herself from the Sphere of Introduction when her newly departed husband arrives in it, and even prevents her from approaching her own still-living children too closely. This is the explanation offered by spirit guide John Forest as to why Susan can visit Aldwyn’s second wife Ethel but not her own son and daughter Gilbert and Maddy: ‘though she loves Madeline, as being part of herself, the taint which you have left upon her is so strong as to prevent her mother getting as near to her as she can to Ethel, who has no blood of yours in her veins’ (Marryat 1894a: 97). Here, post-life marital liberation takes on a distinctly melancholy cast, severing women from their children by a form of contramagnetic force as it frees them from their tyrannical husbands. But even this desired conjugal separation does not last long. When in The Dead Man’s Message Aldwyn finally accepts responsibility for his crimes and begs permission to begin the lengthy repentance process, he is rewarded with a new spirit guide – Susan. She is delivered to him in terms that might please even the staunchest defender of traditional gender roles within marriage: silent, dutiful and capable of exerting power only through gentle moral influence. Forest states: Susan, your first wife, is commissioned to remain by your side whilst the Almighty keeps you on this earth. She may not speak to you, but you will see her and feel her presence wherever you go – her influence will lead you aright – and when you have attained her altitude she will be conscious that it has been so, and welcome you as a friend and a fellow-worker. (Marryat 1894a: 43)

If Aldwyn’s death has emancipated his second wife Ethel to marry her first love Ned Standish, it has done so at the expense of his first wife’s brief and alienated post-life independence. In effect, Marryat’s afterlife becomes a deeply patriarchal one, restoring rather than transforming earthly conjugal bonds on terms which seem less equal than ever. Susan is muffled and indentured by God to her formerly abusive husband, locked to him through the duty of improvement. As in Scenes in the Spirit World and The Discovered Country, the amorous liberation promised by the Summerland in The Dead Man’s Message transforms into a system of heteronormative reification and perpetual bondage. As Hugh Urban has recently noted, it is undeniable that, at least in practice, nineteenth-century transatlantic Spiritualism was ‘one of the most important and controversial forces in [the] search for alternative

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modes of sex and marriage’ (Urban 2006: 62). But I would suggest that a prevailingly disproportionate attention to the biographies and public campaigns of some of the movement’s leading feminist activists has obscured the profound social, racial and sexual conservatism embedded in many of the movement’s imaginative accounts of the life to come, new worlds where the hierarchical structures from which the dead have only seemingly escaped are reified. In this Spiritualist genre, what Urban presents as the prototypically modern association between sexuality and personal empowerment seems logically suspect and irreparably severed. If amorous desires and sexual coupling are permitted in the spheres, it is only because here sex has been metaphysically stripped of any revolutionary potential it ever tenuously claimed. Individualities are subsumed within Platonic dyads; wives become celestial handmaidens, and new heavenly partners are fitted together on the basis of phenotypical identity. The erotic structures of the nineteenth century’s new afterlife reinforce time and again the rectitude of like sticking to like, of heterosexual monogamy and its traditional gender dynamics, and the importance of the purity of form. Sex and propagation are exalted here precisely because neither leads to variation. Not all of the faithful could have found this promise unambiguously attractive, comforting or empowering. In the chapter which follows, we will trace the consequences of this homotypical and eugenic vision of the higher life for prominent mixedrace Spiritualist and occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph, a believer whose racial, hereditary and social identity did not fit easily into any of the Summerland’s recognised categories. From the elevated imaginative heights of the new heaven, we now move down to earth to trace the plight of the hybrid within the movement’s complex racial ideology.

Notes 1. See Augustine’s City of God, Book 18 (circa 426) and Jacob Boehme’s Of Heaven and Hell (1622). In the latter dialogue, when the scholar asks if there will be husbands and wives, or parents and children, in heaven, his master rebukes: ‘Why art thou so fleshly-minded? There will be neither Husband nor Wife, but all will be like the Angels of God, viz. Masculine Virgins. There will be neither Son nor Daughter, Brother nor Sister, but all of one Stock and Kindred. For all are but One in Christ, as a Tree and its Branches are one, though distinct as Creatures; but God is All in All. Indeed, there will be spiritual Knowledge of what every one hath been, and done, but no Possessing or Enjoying, or Desire of Possessing earthly Things, or Enjoying fleshly Relations any more.’ 2. For more discussions of the ultimately conservative nature of the American

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Determined Spirits Free Love movement, see Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (1989) and Hal D. Sears’s The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (1977). This is not to say that the version of heaven Spiritualists laughingly mocked or furiously refuted was a self-invented fantasy with no real cultural presence or authority. Far from it, the representations of paradise they sent up were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century popular culture and are familiar to us even now, but are no more directly and exclusively scriptural in provenance than the common Michelangelo-inspired image of the Christian God as a noble-featured old white man with a long beard and a robe. Indeed, such sentiments feature prominently in some of the most popular non-Spiritualist novels of the period, including Rhoda Broughton’s sensational Cometh Up as a Flower ([1867] 2010) and Marie Corelli’s bestselling The Sorrows of Satan ([1895] 1996). In the former, narrator Nell hopes for a heaven in which her father will not be transformed after death into ‘a glorified saint’, but will rather retain all his aged charm (Broughton [1867] 2010: 48); in the latter, the fallen angel Lucio Rimanez, who knows of the state he speaks, announces: ‘I do not believe in the clerical heaven [. . .] I cannot picture the angels in white smocks with goose wings, or the Deity as a somewhat excitable personage in a beard. Personally, I should decline to go to any heaven that was only a city with golden streets’ (Corelli [1895] 1996: 122). In his first published confession of Spiritualist faith, The New Revelation (1918), Doyle had offered the following naïve ad populum interpretation of the repetitiveness of seance communications: ‘When [. . .] we find a very great agreement as to details, which are not at all in accordance with any pre-existing scheme of thought, then I think the presumption of truth is very strong’ (Doyle 1918: 64). Unfortunately, the example that Doyle chooses to illustrate this point – namely, that the dead retain the same physical appearance and personality they had on earth, and recognise their loved ones – immediately fails to live up to this weight of iconoclastic expectation. Doyle’s astonishing attempt to exceptionalise a long culturally ubiquitous concept of heaven betrays, one might argue, a substantial anxiety of influence, or deep unease about the mainstream assimilation and softening down of beliefs that once seemed to offer Spiritualism a radical cachet. One might as well argue that the frequent similarities between the stories of putative UFO abductees must be proof of their reality, as there could be no other way but through actual extraterrestrial contact that they could encounter the clichéd figure of the grey, almond-eyed and probebrandishing alien. A major yet understudied figure in the history of twentieth-century British occultism, Ward was involved in Spiritualism, theosophy and esoteric Hinduism (he claimed, somewhat dubiously, to have been ordained as a Brahmin High Priest in Madura in 1916) before joining the esoteric sect known as the Orthodox Catholic Church of the British Empire in 1935 (‘Life of J.S.M. Ward’). In this period he also turned to prophecy, allegedly predicting the outbreak of World War II, the collapse of empire, the spread of Islam and the second coming of Christ. His career provides a fascinating example of the fate of modern Spiritualism after its nineteenth-century

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height as its elements were alternately absorbed by the mainstream and by modern occultism. First published in 1928, More Spirit Teachings is a posthumous collection of some of the articles Stainton Moses wrote for Light in the 1880s and early 1890s. As John Patrick Deveney points out, both American Spiritualist Thomas Lake Harris and French occultist Joseph-Antoine Boullan were two prominent advocates of the possibility of sexual relations between humans and spirit entities. Of course, the irony here, as Lodge himself acknowledges, is that the Spiritualist hypothesis was just as likely to increase suicide rates as to reduce them. If we thought death would automatically improve our condition, we might ‘rush quickly, happily and without hesitation into the arms of the Deliverer’ (Lodge 1902: 20). Lodge’s preventative solution to this danger is to emphasise the imperfect condition of the Summerland’s lower spheres, reminding readers that life will not immediately improve there. Other believers were less careful. In a contribution to the 1920 collected anthology of British Spiritualist writings on the post-life fate of children, The Nurseries of Heaven, F. Fielding Ould posits that the afterlife is more capable of providing decent shelter and education for poor children than the state: ‘Philanthropists and Sociologists may wring their hands over infant mortality and the premature death of little children, and they are right to do so, but what does it mean for such a child itself? No words can express the magnitude of its gain, for there are no unwanted children there, and there is no poverty’ (Ould 1920: 29–30). So profound and irresistible are these gains, suggests medium Mabel Corelli Green’s disembodied daughter in the 1922 afterlife narrative Life in the Summerland, that it were better it had been kept a secret till now: ‘You could never live on the earth if you realized how wonderful this world – or rather, I should say, this side – is’ (Green 1922: 19). The Spiritualist hypothesis could drive universal species regeneration or an epidemic of mass suicide. In either case, the Spiritualist afterlife was linked directly to the reproductive and evolutionary fortunes of the living. See Alkeline Van Lenning’s ‘The Body as Crowbar: Transcending or Stretching Sex?’ (2004) and Imogen Tyler’s ‘Against Abjection’ (2009) for recent critiques of postmodernism’s naïve celebrations of the radical political potency of the grotesque and the sexually deviant. In Tuttle’s work, Pythagoras explains the non-survival of animals in the spirit world as a result of their insufficient individuation. Individuality, he states, is ‘in man the key-stone’ of identity, ‘while it is wanting in animals, and consequently death demolishes the structure’ (Tuttle 1855: 23). I am struck here by the absolute modernity of Tuttle’s vision, which presents monadic selfhood, rather than faith, virtue or election, as the key to eternal life. For more on the sacralisation of individuality in modern mysticism, see Hugh B. Urban’s Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (2006). For more on Marryat’s Spiritualist sympathies in her 1870s periodical fiction, see Georgina O’Brien-Hill’s ‘“Above the Breath of Suspicion”: Florence Marryat and the Shadow of the Fraudulent Medium’ (2008).

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Chapter 4

Blended Souls: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Occult Miscegenation

We must accept the facts of nature. We must become a yellow-skinned, blackhaired people – in fine, we must become Miscegens, if we would attain the fullest results of civilization. David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, ‘Miscegenation’ ([1863] 2005: 52)

The Mulatto as Man of the Future At the time of itinerant occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph’s dramatic death by suicide in 1875 – he shot himself in the head outside the Toledo home he shared with his estranged wife Kate Corson – the American attitudes towards interracial identity that had dogged him all his life were undergoing a significant sea change. No longer viewed simply as a necessary if regrettable consequence of slavery that would phase out after Emancipation, race mixing was, as Robert Bernasconi and Kristie Dotson point out, coming increasingly in the Reconstruction period to look like a prospective national destiny, one that could only be averted through the implementation of strict anti-miscegenation laws that would check the impulses that a supposedly universal natural antipathy to interracial coupling could not.1 Perhaps the most savvy and influential exploiters of this panic in the period of our study were the calculating Copperhead journalists David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, who, in the run-up to the 1864 presidential election, published an anonymous hoax pamphlet entitled ‘Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Race, Applied to the American White Man and Negro’ ([1863] 2005). Posing as a sincere expression of the secret core of abolitionist thought, it proposed that the white race could only be saved from extinction by a strong infusion of African blood. Dramatising this fate with vampiric candour, the pamphlet’s anonymous narrator warns,

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‘The white people of America are dying for want of flesh and blood. They have bone and sinew, but they are dry and shrivelled for lack of the healthful juices of life’ (Croly and Wakeman [1863] 2005: 62). Replete with the blood of their former slaves, whites might regain their former healthy vitality by taking on a new hue. This chapter charts the career-long efforts of Paschal Beverly Randolph, a central but until recently almost entirely elided figure in the history of nineteenth-century transatlantic Spiritualism, to embrace and systematise the miscegenationist utopianism lampooned in the notorious Croly and Wakeman scare pamphlet and elsewhere at the American mid-nineteenth century. To do so, he chose to employ the same raciological hierarchies and essentialist ethnographic designations that had so often been levied against him during his apprenticeship in the 1850s American Spiritualist circuit, ones which helped to force his initial break from the movement to which he would nonetheless repeatedly return for the rest of his career as a professional occultist and healer. Through Randolph’s intriguing but arguably always already doomed project of repurposing popular raciology to seek racial liberation (if never equality), he became a crucial precursor to, and likely influence on, the fin-de-siècle African American occult revival whose political and aesthetic dimensions have been documented by Susan Kay Gilman. So too did his ambitious occult raciology prefigure the mystical tendencies of those later twentieth-century Afrocentrist political ideologies which, according to Paul Gilroy, inevitably reproduced rather than subverted the categories of metaphysical essence complicit in racial subjugation (Gilroy 2000: 38). Despite these very real and inherent problems in his occult philosophy of miscegenation, it would be a mistake to dismiss Randolph as no more than a self-defeating eccentric, marginal even within the already fringe arena of nineteenth-century American mystical heterodoxy. Indeed, arguably more any other single figure within the transatlantic arena of nineteenthcentury mysticism, Randolph – whose diverse and chaotic literary output included works of esoteric sexology, autobiography, fiction, anthropology and afterlife narration – exposes and manipulates the deeply segregationist and often implicitly white supremacist impulses present in even the most overtly abolitionist forms of Spiritualism. That these tendencies have been, with only few exceptions, persistently downplayed in recent historical reconstructions of the movement seems both a cause and effect of Randolph’s exclusion from the canon of nineteenth-century Spiritualist writing. No study of Spiritualist eugenics could be complete without recognising the compelling efforts of this remarkable self-taught American magus to rescript the dominant narratives of evolutionary and racial destiny in favour of his own mixed blood.

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The Raciological Legacy of Transatlantic Spiritualism Race has long represented something of a blind spot in the contemporary scholarship on transatlantic Spiritualism. Encouraged by the movement’s – in America at least – manifestly reformist nature, and by the frequent advocacy of abolition by believers on both sides of the Atlantic, some critics have too hastily ascribed the same largely progressive tenor to Spiritualism’s treatment of race as was often manifested in the movement’s politics of gender. For such commentators, the seance room could be just as empowering a place for non-whites as it often was for the non-mutually exclusive groups of women and the white working classes. The evidence typically offered for this assessment, however, remains scant and speculative. Consider, for example, Ann Braude’s suggestion in her otherwise superlative study of American Spiritualism’s sexual politics that because African-American Protestants did not base their faith on regularized doctrines produced by a trained clergy and dependent on written texts [. . .] they may have drawn the line of orthodoxy so as to include Spiritualism more frequently than did white Protestants. (Braude 1989: 29, my emphasis)

The tentative ‘may’ here is striking, necessitated by the paucity of historical evidence on actual African American involvement in the modern Spiritualist tradition emanating from the Hydesville rappings and Andrew Jackson Davis’s Harmonialism.2 As proof, Braude is only able to name a few nineteenth-century black churches in Washington DC which invited white Spiritualists to speak and a short list of five African Americans – Black Shakers Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot; an obscure ‘Mr Anderson’ listed as an attendee at an 1866 Spiritualist convention; and abolitionists William Cooper Nell and Sojourner Truth – who publicly linked themselves to the movement (Braude 1989: 29).3 All in all, the subject of non-white participation in the modern movement receives only a single paragraph in Braude’s entire monograph, a distribution that seems astonishing in light of the ubiquity of Indian and African American spirits in period seance transcriptions. Here it seems that Braude’s desire to recognise nineteenth-century American Spiritualism as a vehicle, not simply for groups of whites to share their abolitionist sentiments, but for actual cross-race participation, clearly surpasses the evidence. As the more cautious critic Robert Cox reminds us, ‘all the talk of universal brotherhood, all the rhetoric of antislavery and civil rights, translated into only a handful of African-Americans at the tilting tables of the northern states’ (Cox 2003: 166). Undaunted by this dearth of evidence, other writers have staked their

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argument for the cross-racial appeal and empowering potential of the movement on extremely liberal definitions of modern Spiritualism – ones that combine a wide panorama of indigenous, heterodox and even fairly conventional religious beliefs – and on texts written by people who never publicly identified as believers. A prime example of this strategy appears in John Kucich’s 2004 study Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, which claims that modern Spiritualism ‘offered an important bridge between black and white culture’ (Kucich 2004: 8) on such evidence as the popularity of literary angels and ghosts in African American periodicals from the 1850s. The adoption of long-established and culturally ubiquitous supernatural archetypes with no unique ties to modern Spiritualism seems, I would argue, meagre proof of a widespread African American receptivity to the new movement. If the primary evidence for Spiritualism’s cross-ethnic appeal comes from such vague supernatural motifs and from the work of African American writers like Harriet Jacobs who, as Kucich admits, ‘chose not to embrace Spiritualism’ (17), then it might be time to reevaluate the initial hypothesis. Yet Spiritualism’s most radicalising interpreters remain undissuaded. If the movement’s commitment to racial diversity cannot be evidenced in its actual constituency, they argue, then it can be demonstrated in the receptivity of white believers to spirits of non-European descent, in particular those of Native Americans. Thus the frequent seance-room invocation of the spirits of Indian maidens and African American slave children is presented as proof of a profound identification and empathy on behalf of their white and typically female interlocutors. Making this connection in 2006, Marlene Tromp writes: The binaries that shored up imperialism collapse in the face of the stark identification that occurred between spirit and medium in the séance [. . .] the fluidity implied in the identity of the colonized and colonizer in these acts of materialization undermined the English sense of superiority and Orientalist inferiority. (Tromp 2006: 79)

The implication is that the mediumistic performance of non-white identity is automatically and principally an act of subversion, functioning either, as Amy Lehman has suggested, to promote the allegedly automatic sympathy between white women Spiritualists and other generic members of the oppressed (Lehman 2009: 127), or in Tromp’s analysis, to show, via the virtuosity of the impersonation, that the assumptions of essential difference on which racial hierarchies rest are chimeric. Both these understandings of the white Spiritualist channelling of nonwhites strike me as problematic. Empathy may have been one potential outcome of such acts of impersonation, but it can hardly have been the

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only or even most frequent one. Many Spiritualist believers themselves acknowledged that most white mediumistic attempts to materialise non-white spirits had a lot more of minstrelsy than politicised identification in them. Blasting this aspect of American Spiritualist performance following an 1874 trip to the United States, British medium J.J. Morse reports: it is somewhat disagreeable to see the function of mediumship reduced to the level of show business. To see a woman dressed in fleshings, clothed in Indian costume – beads, bow and arrow, all complete – go through an Indian wardance may be highly amusing to some; to my mind it is simply a disgusting degradation of a noble office. (Morse 1877: 54)

As a transracial materialisation medium himself – Morse was best known for his ancient Chinese spirit Tien Sien Tie – the writer’s words hint at a self-conscious anxiety about his own exoticised performances of difference. Recent critics have echoed Morse’s diagnosis of crossracial channelling as a practice often rooted in crude contemporary stereotype and the traditions of the popular stage, with Bridget Bennett noting that ‘[i]t is very probable that traditions of black face minstrelsy [. . .] were crucial to informing the modes of performance that took place within séances’ (Bennett 2007: 12) and Patrick Polk confirming that ‘dubious and derogatory performative modes of racial essentialism have been crucial to Spiritualist delineations of black flesh and spirit from the very beginning’ (Polk 2010: 27). Needless to say, this provenance significantly curtailed the egalitarian potential of Spiritualist transracial performance. After all, former slaves who came back through white mediums, as did this one to Banner of Light house medium Mrs J.H. Conant in 1857, to say, ‘Massa no make nigga work hard; nigga all happy; massa go way – niggas all happy when he come home’ (‘Tole, An Alabama Slave’ 1857), can hardly be credited with dismantling the ideological edifices of white supremacy or colonialism.4 Mimicry, as Homi Bhabha has demonstrated, may produce or reveal the ontological emptiness at the heart of the imperial project when performed by the colonially disempowered, but it is less clear that such counter-hegemonic results ensue when those at the top of a given racial hierarchy impersonate, for an audience of their peers, those on the bottom. We must also remember that, on the early American Spiritualist scene, these invocative acts of cross-racial impersonation occurred against the backdrop of the massive forced displacement of the North American indigenous population and the enslavement and then institutionalised segregation of African Americans. When placed in this context, as Bridget Bennett and Molly McGarry have argued, the willingness of white believers to

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accommodate non-white spirits in their circles may have been little more than a compensatory response to their unease in dealing with still-living racial others.5 Any system of cross-racial communion in which the most welcome members of specific minority groups are dead ones must surely be of limited political potential. This is not to deny the sincerity of many white Spiritualist expressions of support for Native and African Americans, nor is it to reject outright the possibility that the colonial ambivalence described by Tromp ever occurred during some – if perhaps only in a minority of – materialisation seances. I simply suggest that these liberationist micro-political effects may have been overstated or emphasised in the well-intentioned historical recovery work that has sought to render the movement as overtly anti-racist as it presumably was anti-patriarchal. If we are to adequately understand the plight of that relatively small number of nonwhite mediums who practised and published on the Anglo-American Spiritualist circuit, we require a more complicated and less congratulatory understanding of the movement’s racial dynamics. Indeed, only through such a picture can we begin to address some of the reasons why the uptake of modern Anglo-American Spiritualism amongst non-whites seems to have been so relatively low,6 rather than continuing to speculate on the possible existence of its undocumented widespread popularity within Native and African American communities. One does not need to search far within the archive of white Spiritualist writings on race to begin to form a hypothesis. It is hardly surprising, for example, that non-whites seeking recognition and vindication for their own phenotypically marked identity might be a suspicious of a Spiritualist philosophy that, on occasion, glorified the post-life extinction of all non-Caucasian ethnicities. Such are the sentiments of Adèle Magnot, the mesmeric subject of the French Swedenborgian and socialist Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet whose trance utterances were recorded in his seminal spiritual work The Celestial Telegraph; or, Secrets of the Life to Come. Published in France in 1848 and first translated into English in 1850, Cahagnet’s text of spirit-channelled messages had a foundational influence on the early Anglo-American movement and helped to direct the tenor and no doubt content of subsequent mediumistic performances for years to come. Adèle, when asked to report on the fate of racial variation after death, replied, ‘The souls of Negroes are as white as ours; it is only in the skin they differ from us; but in heaven everyone is white’ (Cahagnet 1851: 59). Such a celestial lightening up is presented by her spirit control as the necessary consequence of heaven’s perfectionist status and the natural hierarchy of the races. After all, the spirit asserts:

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There are no negroes who like their colour. When they compare it with that of whites, they envy the white colour. They prefer us in all. Black women seek after white men, and black men after white women. They have no affection for their colour, had they any they would be deprived of it in heaven where all men are white. (Cahagnet 1851: 41)

Here the afterlife is enlisted to confirm the self-aggrandising white fantasy of universal erotic desirability while purging it of the threat of miscegenation; if everyone is washed white as snow at death, there can no longer be any danger of racial intermixing. Although not all popular Anglo-American accounts of life in the spheres promised a similar deracialisation, even those which preserved phenotypical difference were often highly segregationist and implicitly hierarchical in a way that must surely have alienated those non-white Americans all too aware of the grim realities of life under an actual or effectual apartheid system.7 The best example of this phenomenon is furnished by the highly influential Spiritualist cosmology of Andrew Jackson Davis. For Davis, as Robert Cox points out, race was no barrier to entrance into the afterlife, but it certainly determined one’s place within it. In Death and the After-Life: Eight Evening Lectures on the Summer-Land (1865), the seer elaborated his vision of a rich, varied and multi-tiered Summerland in which individual moral status rather than wealth or social connection established ultimate placement. Within this cosmology, he conjectured that separate races and nations occupied unique, mutually exclusive spaces in the spheres on the basis, presumably, of their essential moral uniformity. The fancifully titled Monazolappa was an ‘exclusively African realm’ (Davis 1865: 71), while Wallaveesta and Passaeta belonged to separate Native American tribes (78). Once established, these celestial territories were as fixed and unchanging as the human soul itself, each race acting as the place-bound and ranked embodiment of a metaphysical moral, emotional or intellectual state. Thus for Davis: The Negro may be said to represent the left side of humanity [. . .] the Caucasian [. . .] the right, and the opposite races work leftward and rightward in all countries and all history. The Negro is artful and emotion. He represents nature in her senses; the Caucasian is nature in her brains and organs. (Davis 1865: 179)

It is evident even from this brief description that the separate-but-equal status Davis claimed for the races was illusory, mere sensory awareness being no more equal to intellectual perception in Davis’s Summerland than it was in his descriptions of the society of the living. Characterising the white members of the latter, he remarks:

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No representative of any other race has such pre-eminence. He eats freely of everything, breathes all atmospheres, enjoys all possible shades of pleasure. He pursues happiness through progress [. . .] The Caucasian seems to be representative of the higher race to come. (Davis 1865: 181)

Thus although the Summerland could provide ‘localities for all divisions and shades of the human race’ (Davis 1865: 185), only one wearily predictable group is granted pride of place as the avatar of a new evolutionary dawn. More dismaying in Davis’s model of the Summerland than the resurgence of a white supremacist hierarchy dressed up in emancipationist rhetoric is its thorough negation of mixed-race identity. Where was the multi-ethnic subject to go in this newly segregated heaven, divided into strictly delineated and self-policed precincts for the ideal of each type, but utterly devoid of hybrid zones? Fidelity to a singular phenotype or ethnicity, in Davis’s schema at least, was as rigid and unyielding in the afterlife as allegiance to one’s soulmate; there was no place for split affinities and multiple allegiances there. All people were welcome into the spheres as long as they not only knew, but also desired, their racialised place. The mixed-race subject in this cosmology seems destined to be split into multiple conflicting pieces, denied synthesis and meaning in the Summerland until one blood or phenotype is given definitional power over all the others. In this condition, the fate of disembodied mulattoes in Harmonial cosmology resounded with that of their stillliving counterparts in the American mid-century.

Miscegenation in Mid-Victorian American: Social, Biological and Political Contexts Although the word ‘miscegenation’ was a new coinage in 1863, the phenomenon it described had been a ubiquitous part of American life since the colony’s earliest beginnings, with immigration, contact with indigenous peoples and the institution of slavery combining to create a variety of consensual and non-consensual opportunities for sexual relationships between peoples of markedly different ethnic ancestries. If the contempt with which open and consenting interracial relationships were typically treated in American public life remained relatively consistent from the early colonial era through to the mid-nineteenth-century period of Randolph’s early career, the popular rationale for anti-miscegenation, as Robert Bernasconi and Kristie Dotson have shown, varied dramatically and rapidly. While miscegenation had initially been viewed as an economic problem – one that muddied the legal status and thus property

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value of the mixed-race children of slaves – it was by the 1850s and 1860s more commonly presented as a medical and evolutionary one (Sollors 2000: 51; Bernasconi and Dotson 2005: I, vii). Inspired by works such as Scottish ethnologist Robert Knox’s polygenesist The Races of Man (1850), some American scientists and religious figures began to argue that Africans and Caucasians were separate species and, as such, any product of their interbreeding would, like the mule, be almost assuredly sterile. When manifold evidence proved the contrary, the polygenesists took a different tack, invoking the spirit of French anthropologist Paul Broca’s On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo (1864) to claim that mixed-race people, even if not immediately or eventually infertile, would inevitably prove weaker, less intelligent and consistently more disease-prone than either of their parents. Furthermore, if and as their own offspring reproduced among themselves, subsequent generations would become successively frailer and more diseased until they lost the ability to reproduce entirely. Herein lay, it was supposed, the real danger of miscegenation to the young nation: if enough of its citizens became covertly or ambiguously mixed-race, the population would be destined for extinction. As Bernasconi and Dotson explain, ‘mulattoes, who were seen as constituting a distinct biological population, formed a particular biological threat in societal terms because they were, so to speak, already “infected”’ (Bernasconi and Dotson 2005: I, ix). The most ardent promoter of this miscegenation-as-disease hypothesis in the mid-nineteenth-century United States was Alabama doctor Josiah Nott. Adopting severely flawed methodological techniques, he interpreted 1840 census figures that seemed to show higher mortality rates for the children of mixed-race couples to buttress his rejection of biblical monogenesis and to provide pseudo-scientific support for his ingrained faith in the moral, intellectual and physical supremacy of the white race. In the provocatively titled ‘The Mulatto as Hybrid’ ([1843] 2005), Nott exposes all too plainly the emotional and ideological motivations behind his seemingly scientifically detached argument for separate race creation. He invites his readers to: Look, first, upon the Caucasian female with her rose and lily skin, silky hair, Venus form, and well-chiselled features – and then upon the African wench, with her black and odorous skin, woolly head, and animal features – next compare their intellectual and moral qualities, and their whole anatomical structure, and say whether they do not differ as much as the swan and the goose, the horse and the ass, or the apple and pear trees. (Nott [1843] 2005: 10)

Drawing upon a naïve form of popular empiricism, Nott suggested that his proposition need no further proof than a cursory and untrained

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white glance. Although he strove to give polygenesis credibility through the language and techniques of the new sciences, his main evidence for its existence lay in the apparently non-falsifiable self-evidence of absolute difference that slavery was imagined to manage rather than produce. Nott’s bluster aside, it was obvious that racial identity in midnineteenth-century America was anything but self-evident or registrable with Linnaean precision, a situation nowhere more apparent than in the ontological chaos caused by the passage of conflicting state antimiscegenation laws in the 1860 and 1870s. While these laws aligned in prohibiting marriage between white and black Americans, they failed to agree on how these supposedly stable racial identities might be defined. Demonstrating the ensuing confusion, William Zabel asks: Who is a Negro under such laws? There is no uniform definition, so it is difficult to know. The different definitions create racial chameleons. One can be Negro in Georgia because he had a one-half Negro great-grandmother, and by crossing the border into Florida, become a white because Florida makes him a Negro only if he had a full Negro great-grandmother. (Zabel [1965] 2000: 57)

This mutability only exacerbated anti-miscegenation panic; after all, how could one avert the annihilative destiny augured by race mixing if there was no way of identifying stable type, if racial ‘type’ was itself nothing but an elaborate legal fiction? The mulatto thus figured more and more as a dangerous interloper, an invisible threat to the survival and integrity of the various races which had produced him. So strong was the public revulsion against this figure, or rather, so strong was it popularly imagined to be, that, according to some white American commentators in the 1870s (Nott’s polygenetic theories being by this time largely abandoned), mass-scale miscegenation would be resisted even if it were proved to be the sole solution to the nation’s social and political problems (Bernasconi and Dotson 2005: III, vii). One such writer, the doctor and novelist E.W. Gilliam, speculated in an 1883 essay that the only way for recently freed slaves to become true American citizens and patriots was for them to breed systematically with whites, ‘for he could be no American, however the letter of the law might read, who, after the lapse of a century, should retain the exclusive hue and affinity of a stranger race’ (Gilliam [1883] 2005: 17). This mode of assimilation, however necessary, would, Gilliam concluded, nonetheless remain impossible, seeing that blacks stand apart from the whites, and make a distinct and alien people. Any advancement of the blacks is an advancement of the African, as such [. . .] The advancement of blacks, therefore, becomes

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a menace to the white. No two free races, remaining distinctly apart, can advance side by side, without a struggle. (Gillam [1883] 2005: 17)

Blended together, blacks and whites were imagined as the parents of a feckless, feeble and sterile population; separate, they are positioned as natural and unyielding antagonists who will fight each other to the death rather than cooperate. These competing nineteenth-century analyses of miscegenation offer no future for the multi-racial nation but one of violence, strife and extermination. It was in this national sphere, one in which all-out race war was cast by some as more popular than, and even preferable to, free interracial mixing, that Paschal Beverly Randolph conducted his remarkable career. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the man who, in Hugh Urban’s recent estimation, became ‘arguably the most important figure in the rise of modern sex magic’ (Urban 2006: 55), started his life in extreme privation. Randolph was an autodidact who taught himself to read and write during a childhood and adolescence almost entirely devoid of formal education. Both this unexpected literacy and, simultaneously, his aura of untutored ignorance proved of great service during Randolph’s youthful apprenticeship as a trance speaker in the 1850s Spiritualist scene, where he moved in the same milieu as some of the young movement’s leading luminaries. By 1858, he had publicly – if incompletely – renounced Spiritualism, accusing its followers alternately of racism, atheism, sexual immorality and political incendiarism.8 Yet despite these denunciations, Randolph remained under the intellectual influence of Spiritualist Harmonialism for the rest of his career, even ultimately embracing those elements of Davis’s system – in particular the rejection of universal immortality – that had most outraged him as a young man.9 He spent the next few years travelling around the world and honing the tenets of his occult system of sexual science, apparently learned from mystical sects in the Near East. The mail-order sale of these esoteric secrets was one of the many, largely unsuccessful, ways that Randolph struggled to make a living during the remaining years of his short, tempestuous life. Alternately idealistic, depressive, arrogant, compassionate, visionary and relentlessly self-contradictory, Randolph is an incredibly complex figure whose mystical thought tends to slip away like quicksilver when one tries to systematise it. Rather than attempting to resolve his constantly evolving theories of spiritual generation and blending into a consistent creed, I want instead to examine how he accounted for and gave supernatural value to the fundamental mutability and admixture that he recognised as integral to his identity. ‘Everyone knows that P.B. Randolph is a sang mêlée – a sort of

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compound of a variety of bloods’, Randolph writes with characteristic aplomb in his 1860 denunciation of modern Spiritualism, The Unveiling. ‘It is so; nor is he sorry’ (Randolph 1860: 8). There is perhaps no more frequent, even ritualistic, feature of the many versions of recapitulated autobiography that flood Randolph’s published work than this bold self-identification as a miscegen, a figure whose blood is as mixed as the fortunes this condition apparently confers on him. Again in his wandering 1872 fragment autobiography P.B. Randolph, the ‘Learned Pundit,’ and ‘Man with Two Souls’, written to raise funds and support in the wake the obscenity charges trumped up against him by fraudsters,10 he identifies his extravagantly varied blood as the definitive factor in his personal destiny: I owe my successes, – mental – to my conglomerate blood; my troubles and poverty to the same source [. . .] My mother was once a beautiful sang mêlée of various strains of blood. She had some Madagascan, French, Spanish, Indian, and Oriental in her, all of which I have, and several others besides, as English, Celtic Cymrian, Teutonic, and Moorish, all within a period of two hundred and eight years, – at least, so says the Herald’s college in England, – for several of these conspired to form the strange and cranky breed of men known as the Randolphs on one side of my line, – how near the truth I do not know, neither do I care, further than to regret the facts; because not a great sinner myself, yet I have suffered more than fifty malefactor’s deaths; whence I conclude three things: that the sins of the father are visited upon the children; that mine must have been great rascals; and that I have paid their debt and my own to boot. (Randolph 1872a: 3, original emphasis)

From the breathtakingly international veins of his mother came, he claimed, all those qualities that might elevate him to the level of an angel, while the old-world blood of his father kept him firmly aground, where he paid again and again for the inherited sins of character that he could never fully expunge. Bowed down but undefeated by these hereditary quirks, Randolph consistently dodged the tragic mulatto archetype and, far from rejecting or concealing his mixed ancestry to pass as a mono-ethnic subject, paid continual and spectacular homage to his own hybridity. In today’s intellectual marketplace, such historical articulations of hybridity are often welcomed as the prescient signs of proto-postcolonial identity and anti-essentialist resistance, as subversive blows against a nineteenth-century cult of the pure on which oppressive cultural and political formations – colonialism in particular – were apparently based. Indeed, it is tempting to read Randolph’s racial consciousness in this light, combining these oft-made declarations of mixed-race pride with his substantial involvement in the abolitionist cause and in the education of emancipated slaves (Deveney 1997: 166) to remake him as an early

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anti-racist activist. Such a political reclamation is already under way, proceeding part and parcel with Randolph’s growing rediscovery by the contemporary New Age community. As John Patrick Deveney points out, ‘Along with Ida B. Wells, Marie Laveau, and Marcus Garvey, he has recently become one of the seven black “racial avatars” recognized by the Aquarian Spiritual Center of Los Angeles’ (252). But there are important reasons to resist this sanctification, not least of which is its tendency, as Deveney recognises, to smooth over the deep ambivalence of Randolph’s attitudes towards racial equality. This ambiguity is nowhere more evident than in his wholesale endorsement of the theory of biological creation notoriously enlisted to buttress slavery at the midcentury (Gilman 2003: 57): namely, polygenesis. Polygenesist accounts of evolution held that the human race was not one species but many, each formed in separate acts of creation. Flying in the face of both biblical monogenesis and the pesky evidence of the continued fertility of mixed-race individuals, polygenesis nonetheless enjoyed a brief ethnological resurgence in the mid-nineteenth century as an explanation for and defence of the seemingly inveterate difference between phenotypically varied peoples (Stocking 1987: 64). As a mixed-race man of African ancestry, Randolph makes an unusual if not bizarre defender of a theory typically used to assert the racial superiority of whites, but nonetheless it was one he adhered to throughout his life. He presented his most concerted argument for separate race creation in Pre-Adamite Man (1864), a work whose title suggestively links it to one of the very earliest European expositions of polygenesist thought, French Calvinist Isaac de La Peyrère’s 1655 Praeadamitae. Based on Randolph’s travels through the Near East and co-jointly dedicated to President Abraham Lincoln and the Rosicrucian Charles Trinius, this remarkable work of esoteric anthropology displays the blend of polymathic breadth, neologistic style, factual error and overconfident assumption of originality characteristic of the work of many autodidacts. In it, he adopts the self-styled pose of an ‘Adamicide’ (Randolph 1864: 1) to undermine the biblical establishment of Adam as the father of all the races while also, and potentially contradictorily, incorporating the theories of Charles Lyell and the evidence of the contemporary fossil record to dispute the purported scriptural creation date of 4004 bc. The reason these two moves seem incompatible is that polygenesist arguments typically required a short period of human presence on earth. While it might seem possible for current levels of human phenotypical variation to have evolved through variation over a period of six million years, the case would surely – apparently – have been different if there had only been six millennia to play with. In arguing for the longer

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timescale, Randolph was effectively removing the chief scientific objection to monogenesis. But this extended chronology did little to dampen Randolph’s polygenetic conviction; not the one hundred thousand years he now allotted to Homo sapiens, not even an infinite period of time, could, he felt, possibly have naturally created the extent of variation now observable in the human species: [I]t is IMPOSSIBLE that any of the Nigritian race, the American Indian [. . .] and the Chinese, could have sprung from one common stock. Intermarriage could never change people as we see them, had all originally been alike. True, the darker races bleach white by amalgamation with the lighter races; but no possible amount of admixture will ever make people change from white to jet black, the originals being white in the first place. Take it as you will, here is a fact that cannot be gotten over. Undoubtedly all men are entitled to rights alike, and are equally to be regarded as heirs to immortality; but they are not all descended from one original pair. In the great battle of the Polygenesists against the Monogenesists, the former must carry the heaviest artillery. (Randolph 1864: 113)

Even the Darwinian model of human descent from a simian ancestry, a theory that Randolph later came to accept (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 207), seemed more tenable to him than the possibility that one (seemingly) static human race might morph into another. Like influential Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz before him, and with equally limited success, Randolph attempted to divorce his brand of polygenesis from the blatant racism with which it was usually accompanied by insisting that separate creation did not create different spiritual or legal value.11 Yet this separate-but-equal stance on human racial variation was far from consistent throughout his writings, in which he occasionally assumed a firmly anti-egalitarian stance, as in his 1874 sex magic treatise, The Mysteries of Eulis:12 I do not believe in the, to me, absurd dogma of human equality; it is the demonstrable negation of all human reason and experience; is a hypocritical, cruel and delusive falsehood; [which] puts people out of their element and into wrong positions. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 103, original emphasis)

Randolph’s suspicion of equality, combined with his unguarded tendency to echo the rhetoric of some of the period’s most vituperative and white supremacist polygenesists, routinely compromised his ostensibly democratic intentions. Thus, channelling Josiah Nott mid-way through Pre-Adamite Man, Randolph insisted that most instances of mixed-race procreation were destined to end in sickness and sterility, concluding ‘Partially congruous mixtures tend to destruction by disease, monstrosity, or barrenness, while only fully congruous combinations have an enduring vitality’ (Randolph 1864: 251).

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What are we to make of the efforts of this publicly and proudly open man of mixed-race identity to ventriloquise white supremacists like Nott by pathologising some (although not all) forms of interracial procreative combination? Why would a sang mêlée insist that there was no primal biological unity of the human species, that races were reified types whose inter-combinations often led to disaster? One can certainly detect in these sentiments a significant amount of internalised racism. Such is the opinion of Randolph’s biographer John Patrick Deveney, who calls Pre-Adamite Man ‘quite revealing about Randolph’s personal struggle to come to grips with his own origins’ (Deveney 1997: 150). Perhaps most telling of all, both in Pre-Adamite Man and elsewhere, is Randolph’s tendency to cite the supposedly overwhelming mental inferiority of sub-Saharan Africans – a population with whom he repeatedly, and probably inaccurately, denied any ancestral connection – as the evidence for polygenesis. In Pre-Adamite Man, he echoed the defenders of slavery by claiming ‘it is doubtful if the Negro, since the world began, ever even approximated to such a high state of civilization as he has attained on Northern American soil’, adding, however, ‘that he will achieve great things in the future[;] [it] is but of course a mere question of time’ (Randolph 1864: 69). In his later writings of the early 1870s, even this prospective hope of eventual improvement dimmed, leaving him with the conviction that ‘A true negro never reaches a stage of mental development enabling him to master metaphysics; nor at maturity does he ever surpass in capacity the adolescent average Anglo Saxon’ (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 48, my emphasis). Apparently exempt from the taint of Negro blood by virtue of his allegedly separate Madagascan heritage, Randolph was able to make these pronouncements without compromising his own keenly felt intellectual eminence. Indeed, he suggested in Eulis, some sub-Saharan African indigenous peoples were fixed at so low a state that they lacked not only mental capacity but also even an immortal soul. He offers the mostly fictional examples of the ‘tailed “Men” of Namaqua Land, the dwarf peoples of gorilla-land, and the offspring of Hottentot women captured and impregnated by the giant apes of Nigritia’ (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 207) as proof that: [i]t does not follow that [. . .] all who are undoubtedly human, are also possessed of power to exist consciously subsequent to actual death; for unquestionably all are not thus endowed who possess the external and ordinary characteristics of humanity; and there are thousands who pass and repass us in the streets every day of our lives who are no more Immortal than the fish they ate for dinner. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 207)

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Randolph’s final clause admittedly rejects an exclusively racial basis for selective immortality, as does his subsequent declaration that: It is not race, nation, or complexion, that determines a title to supra-mortal existence [. . .] the dark-hued Southern and Oriental races and peoples outnumber the Northern and fair ones in the ratio of about twelve thousand to one hundred. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 218)

But his choice of preliminary examples, encompassing some of the most lurid myths of white racism, remains nonetheless significant. Deveney concludes: Randolph may have been black, but he was also and above all a believer in his own abilities and culture – an aristocrat – and he could never reconcile his achievements with those of the ‘thick-lipped Negro of the “Stupid Tribe”’. (Deveney 1997: 150)

The philosophical principles and dubious evidence base behind Randolph’s polygenetic beliefs form an uncomfortable fit with latterday attempts to reclaim him as a prophet of anti-racist hybridity. But, equally, I would argue that they are far from straightforwardly compatible with the familiar tenets of white supremacy. If Randolph was not an interracial revolutionary, neither was he just a self-hating reactionary who sought to gain favour with an establishment that constantly marginalised him by endorsing its metaphysics of race. A third possibility exists, one that illuminates and gives weight to his conflicted relationship with the emergent Spiritualist movement. It lies in the priority he places on personal will and on the necessity of phenotypical difference for his liberationist theory of sexual and psychic ‘blending’, a term he first used in Dealings with Dead (1862; later republished in 1872 as Soul! The Soul World) to describe acts of conscious, purposeful communion between mortals and higher cosmic intelligences. Practised correctly, blending could strengthen love ties among humans while putting them in contact with the supra-mundane aetheric beings who watched and guided their actions from the spheres (Randolph [1872b] 1932: 8–9). In this mystical context, polygenesis becomes, not just (or even at all) an ideological justification for racial subjugation, but a necessary foundation for the radical difference that blending requires. It also provides a stable starting point for Randolph’s miscegenationist progressivism. If the human species were initially one, born into a state of undifferentiated unity, then the racial and psychic blending produced by miscegenation might represent nothing more than a regressive return to a golden era of monotone skin and identity. Polygenesis allowed Randolph to present a starting point for the species that was markedly

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different from what he imagined as its blended, miscegenative destiny. His seemingly counter-intuitive advocacy of it allowed him to position racial, spiritual and sexual mixing as fundamentally progressive techniques in humanity’s ongoing Enlightenment project of conquering base instinct by acts of will. Such a miscegenative triumph forms the centre of Randolph’s curious and thinly veiled autobiographical novel, The Wonderful Story of Ravalette (1863). Pervaded with strong and frequent denunciations of modern Spiritualism – a movement which, Randolph declares in the preface, ‘has done no good whatever, save in that it has called attention to new directions’ (Randolph 1863: v) – the novel follows the history of its Rosicrucian hero Beverly, a melancholy sang mêlée abandoned by the world, as he is pursued by the mysterious ‘Dhoula Bel’. Bel, the transmigrated spirit of an ancient grand vizier whom Beverly had ordered executed when he himself was in a former life, frequently and confusingly switches personas throughout the novel, reappearing in the shadowy anagrammatic figures of ‘Ravalette’, ‘Ettelevar’, ‘Mai Vatterale’ and ‘Miakus’. He represents a sinister band of Continental Rosicrucians who have two mysterious designs on Beverly: first, to compel him to undergo the ‘Sialam Boahghiee’, a mysterious magnetic sleep that equips dreamers with prophetic power; and second, to prevent him from marrying ‘a woman in whom not one drop of the blood of Adam circulates’ (56) and thus escape their thrall. Such a marriage, as Beverly’s beautiful mulatto mother had revealed on her deathbed, would liberate him from the cycle of eternal transmigration in which he is currently trapped. After numerous occult visitations and mysterious encounters in Europe and America, Beverly has a final showdown with Dhoula Bel in Paris in which he, first, consents to undergo the magnetic sleep, then prophesies a number of (improbable and ultimately unrealised) future events, and finally marries the beautiful Zoroastrian girl Evambléa. Several months later, the narrator encounters Beverly’s recently widowed bride on the streets of the unnamed American city where she is strolling with their infant son. The child, fancifully named (as would Randolph’s own child later be) ‘Osiris Budh’, represents the redemption of both parental bloodlines from the tyrannous control of long-dead personalities. Ravalette is a revelation, not least of its author’s often maddening penchant for extravagant neologistic naming and contorted plots, but more importantly, of his obsession with the redemptive power of blood and the figure of the unassimilated racial composite. The mystical sang mêlée in this novel is neither a figure of disease nor a bland, middling synthesis of the various ethnicities s/he incorporates, but a dynamic, Blakean container of competing oppositions. We can see this emphasis

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on productive tension and dynamic contrast in Randolph’s descriptions of both his fictionalised persona Beverly and his mother Flora, neither of whom, fascinatingly, is ever referred to as ‘mulatto’ in the novel, as if Randolph was attempting to defy his surrounding culture’s attitude towards interracialism by rejecting its definitional terms. The hero and his mother have racial identities too complex to be encapsulated by a single, mathematically calculated category; ‘not a direct cross’ of any two single races, Beverly is described as the product of: at least seven distinct strains of blood intermingled, if they did not perfectly blend. Save when in high health and spirits, and weather extremely cold – at which times he was pale – his colour was a rich, light bronze, like that of the youngsters one sees in such profusion, scampering like mad through the narrow and torturous streets of Syrio-Arabic cities, demanding ‘Bucksheesh’ from every Frank they saw. (Randolph 1863: 13)

While we might recognise here Randolph’s dismayingly frequent tendency to conceal or exchange his African heritage for a seemingly more distinguished Arab pedigree, what strikes me most is the description’s emphasis on the mutability of race even within a monadic subject. Beverly can alternate from bronze to pale precisely because his rival bloods are not fully assimilated, not synthesised into a singular, coherent whole. The same is true of his mother Flora, who claimed immediate kindred with the red-skinned sons of the northern wilderness, but th[e] blood in her veins mingled with the finer current derived from her ancestor, the Cid – a strain of royal blood that in the foretime had nerved noble-souled men to deeds of valour, and fired the souls of Spanish poets to lofty achievements in the rosy fields of immortal song. (Randolph 1863: 17)

This combination, along with the maternal impressions produced by Flora’s antipathy to her brutal husband, has ‘doomed [Beverly] from birth to strange and bitter experiences’ (Randolph 1863: 20–1), but so too has it equipped him with the unique spiritual insight to see beyond the veil. As the Armenian mage Miakus advises him, the prophetic powers unleashed by the Sialam Boahghiee are available only to those ‘persons who are singularly constituted as you are—whose veins are filled with the mingled blood of all the nations that sprang from the loins of the Edenic protoplast, the Biblical Adam’ (102).13 Damned by the fate imposed on him as passive, dreaming embryo, the mystical sang mêlée in Ravalette liberates himself by actively forging a spiritual and sexual connection a woman whose blood is sufficiently different from his own –whose ancestors may have originated in a wholly separate act of polygenetic creation – to transform his determined hereditary scripts. The couple break the chain of inherited doom through

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blending and the consequent production of a superior child, acts that well illustrate the close connection between Randolph’s critique of mainstream Spiritualist practice and his endorsement of an active, oppositional practice of miscegenation. Spiritualism, Randolph felt, with its emphasis on passive trance and possessive mediumship, sapped precisely the self-will necessary to pursue such utopian reproductive combinations. Unlike the helpless medium tied up in his or her cabinet, the practical Rosicrucian occultist would consciously and deliberately contrive to blend with his or her paired opposite. This injunction to wakeful, intentional communion is repeated again and again in Randolph’s writings of the 1860s and 1870s, works which make the connection between active clairvoyance and eugenic procreation absolutely explicit. Thus he counsels in Seership, ‘As a Rosicrucian, I know men ever fail and die mainly through the feebleness of WILL. Clairvoyance will teach the adept how to strengthen it’ (Randolph [1870] 1884: 26, original emphasis). Indeed, he continues, ‘Clairvoyance should be cultivated by everybody, and then there would be fewer marriage mistakes’ (26). These words echo the pithy advice he had first offered in The Unveiling, that ‘All men should seek heaven wide awake!’ (Randolph 1860: 19). To consent to passive mediumship, he concluded provocatively in this volume, was to accept a bondage far more total and absolute than that contemporarily suffered by African American slaves, claiming that: [w]hosoever does so associate with spirits, whose only passport to our affections and confidence consists in their ability to manifest, and talk ‘highfalutin’, is on the high road to a slavery far more terrible than even Southern bondage is to the poor black victims of its dreadful sway, – and God knows that is almost past endurance. (Randolph 1860: 46)

From Fiction to Practice: Blending as Sex Magic Technique The miscegenationist utopianism and the valorisation of the will that, as we have seen, permeate both Randolph’s esoteric anthropology writings and Ravalette, became even more crucial in his late 1860s and early 1870s writings on sexual magic. In these he urged for passive mediumship and the hereditary doom produced by callous, careless mating to be replaced by active blending and practical, pleasure-driven eugenic sex. Both relied on a conscious, intentional sympathy between their participants in order to succeed; both, if managed correctly, could expedite humanity’s spiritual and evolutionary progress both here and in the higher realms. Equally importantly, the sexual magic techniques that

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Randolph had formulated and synthesised in his travels would eliminate what he viewed as the twin abominations of modern life, namely artificial birth control and abortion. Both were only necessary, he upheld, by virtue of vitiated wills of Western white women who lacked the physical control and the passionate intensity of their dark-skinned sisters who could, he argued in Eulis, prevent conception simply by mental concentration. In a piece of singularly unimpressive birth-control advice, he advises his readers: All mothers and obstetricians know the enormous expulsive power of the uterus; and that contractile and expansive power, like that of any other sphincter, is measurably under her will. When she sees fit to keep it closed, no other power but her own can defeat it [. . .] In the will, she has the only natural agent and means, justified of nature and God, of controlling the number of her children. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 72–3, original emphasis)

Arabic and Asian wives, he continued, had mastered this art long ago, and when one of their number wanted to prevent impregnation, she either times her meeting with her husband, with reference to her period; or, if accident prevents that, she merely places the ball of her thumb in her mouth, breathes hard upon it, strains and ‘bears down’, and is instantly out of danger, for both ovum and zoosperm are forthwith expelled by the forceful contractions of the uterine and abdominal muscles. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 74, original emphasis)

From this practice came the happy fact that, according to Randolph, ‘the Oriental wife is always pure: there are not a hundred adulteresses or child-killers in Islam, with its 200,000,000 votaries!’ (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 119). The cumulative effect of these ideas, however outlandish, was to transform the marital bedroom from a space of obligation or spontaneous desire into a laboratory of the will.14 Here specially prepared and magnetically attuned adepts could come together under controlled conditions to produce new and beautiful compounds, or rather, children, from that most spiritual and yet volatile of bodily fluids, semen. Describing insemination as if it were an alchemical process, Randolph warned his readers in Love and its Hidden History (1869b): two drops of semen are, so far as human chemistry is concerned, precisely alike [. . .] yet one shall be the germ of genius, the other become a Hottentot, murderer, knave, fool, politician, or some such human nuisance [. . .] chemical conditions determine future offspring. (Randolph 1869b: 44)

If insufficiently magnetic, semen could drain or weaken its female recipient; if wasted, not expelled directly on the ‘neck of the uterus’, or,

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worst of all, prematurely ejaculated (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 313) – Randolph, like phrenologist Orson Fowler, insisted that mutual orgasm was essential to eugenic reproduction (Randolph [1873–4] 1997: 312) – its offspring were bound to be defective or morally tainted in some way. He explains: Whenever you see a rich and jouissant beauty and power in a girl or boy [. . .] wherever you see force of genius – you may rest assured that the mother conceived when impassioned. Au contraire, whenever you see genuine meanness [. . .] you may safely wager your life that such a being was begotten of force, on a passionless, sickly, used-up wife, and you’ll never lose your bet. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 315)

Here is born a unique form of modern procreative shame: if wicked children were, according to some of the less esoterically inclined Spiritualists we have encountered, the product of their parents’ lack of temperamental affinity, they were in Randolph’s schema the walking proof of their father’s inability to bring their mother to orgasm. Randolph deserves credit as, along with Orson Fowler, one of the few figures in the Western eugenic tradition to mandate female sexual gratification into the stirpicultural process. The Randolphian sexual laboratory was a place not only of mutual pleasure at the service of the species, but also of endless interracial creative combination. Indeed, in the dynamic crucible of the bedroom, individuals might escape even the innate racial qualities and essences that Randolph, as we saw earlier, sometimes posited as metaphysically obdurate. The true Negro, he had suggested by way of obsequious backhanded compliment in Eulis, could never reach the mental level of the Anglo-Saxon – although this inequality, he then speculated, was more than compensated for by his corresponding superiority in love. So far, so depressingly familiar; these sentiments seem to resemble nothing more than mystically dressed-up versions of the hackneyed white supremacist clichés about black sexuality and intellectual capacity ubiquitous in nineteenth-century America. But Randolph’s sex magic also provided a fascinating buy-out clause from this particular, and indeed all forms of, inherited racial identity, one that that was most accessible to women but potentially conferrable on men as well. Those individuals unhappy with their predestinate racial fate might evade it through a self-metamorphosing act of procreative love. Such is the remarkable possibility that Randolph identifies in his tantalisingly brief discussion of pregnancies by multiple partners in Eulis. Explaining this mechanism of transracialisation, he writes: It is utterly impossible for a negress having borne a child to a white father ever to give birth to one perfectly negro, – even though its father, like herself,

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has never a drop of other blood in him, – for the reason that the blood of the white man, through his child, has mingled in the mother’s veins. More than that, her blood under the microscope will not show the same crystalline forms after the birth of the mixed child as it did before. Just so is it impossible for us not to be made better or worse by lip touching. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 16–17)

If the negress is no longer able to bear a child of her own birth race after a single experience of cross-race conception, then it can only be because her own biomarkers have fundamentally changed, transformed and hybridised permanently at the moment sperm meets ovum. On the face of it, this fantastical schema of biosexual metamorphosis appears highly patriarchal and extremely sexually conservative. A woman’s racial identity, it assumes, lacks the endurance and strength of her male partner’s; while he has the ability to forever change her blood and that of her subsequent children, congress with her leaves him apparently unaltered. Furthermore, the possibility of this racial imprinting is brandished in Love and its Hidden History as a warning to women about the dangers of infidelity and serial monogamy. ‘[A]ny woman who steps aside from her duty to her own husband’, asserts Randolph, ‘becomes charged with a foreign chemistry and magnetism that she can never wholly get rid of on earth; and the love she bore her husband grows weaker from that moment, until it is wholly lost’ (Randolph 1869b: 116). But this cautionary advice was by no means consistent or uninterrupted; by the time of Eulis, it had been largely abandoned and replaced with a new emphasis on the improving potential and dynamic possibilities of chemico-affectional metamorphosis. The passage from Eulis in the previous paragraph, for example, appends a description of Randolph’s own sudden spiritual restoration after a period of great despondency by a platonic kiss from a young girl. By aligning the two – a restorative cheek kiss from a female child to a male adult, and sex between a black woman and a white man – he implicitly imbues them with the same improving powers. But more important than the intersubjective and biological effects of such acts of love, whether uplifting or degrading, is the very possibility that a transmutation can occur at all. Through free emotional and sexual choice, all individuals, regardless of the blood destiny handed out to them at birth, might deracinate and then fashion themselves anew into whichever form their wills dictate. As radical as this process of transracialisation might seem, it was still not the most extreme metamorphosis that Randolphian blended sex could offer to, and indeed, had supposedly already conferred on, human beings. If procreation could re-type women (and, implicitly, all their future children) by imprinting them permanently with the

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biocharacteristics of their one-time partners, then what might ensue if they blended, not just with men outside their race, but with beings from a higher dimension? This possibility, elusive but tangible, forms an important goal of Randolph’s occult sexology, manifesting in his writings on the spiritual evolution of the soul and on the eugenic destiny of the species. Like English Spiritualist Alfred Russel Wallace, Randolph had by the late 1860s largely accepted the Darwinian hypothesis – or, at least, his own eccentric understanding of it – with the demurral that it alone could not account for the appearance of the higher human intellectual and moral characteristics which, far from being useful to primal humans, may actually have been detrimental. Wallace’s solution in ‘The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’ ([1870] 2002) had been to posit an evolutionary Spiritualist synthesis, whereby a ‘higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed, by means of more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with’ (Wallace [1870] 2002: 208). Advocating his own version of this synthesis in Eulis some four years later, Randolph suggested a possible mechanism by which this evolutionary intervention had occurred. Pondering the archetypal moment in which a non-human primate gave birth to the first full human – as if such a transformation were achievable in a single incident of generation – he writes: Now either the parent-apes were capable of conferring what they had not themselves – which is equivalent to extracting the greater from the lesser – an absurdity on its very face, – or man is not Immortal by right or dint or reason of birth, and must, therefore, reach that condition [. . .] in some other way [. . .] children must have the quality conferred upon them at the very instant of generation; must acquire it during the gestative period, at some other point or moment of their career, or finally gain it in some mysterious or miraculous manner not generally known or fairly understood. (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 208)

Immortality then, that most important but still not yet, in Randolph’s late-period writings, universal human characteristic is fundamentally linked to biological processes, imaginable not only as the result of divine intervention, but potentially a product of the technology of the orgasm or so-called ‘instant of generation’. Here in Eulis, as in Randolph’s description of the mediumistic genealogy in The Davenport Brothers (1869a), the supreme spiritual agencies do not eschew but rather directly manipulate the basely material foundations of human sexual reproduction and pleasure, using the moment of climax to create a new race of mortal/immortal human hybrids. While the passage above remains equivocal about the precise physiology of immortalisation, Randolph would be more explicit elsewhere.

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At another point in Eulis, and repeated in ‘The Ansairetic Mystery’, he describes an opening of the ‘inner nostrils’ (Randolph [1874a] 1930: 122) at the point of orgasm which allows the male and female partner to breathe in ‘all of the powers and knowledges of the exalted entities of the celestial hierarchy’ (Deveney 1997: 223). Once inhaled, the new soul then travels down the man’s spine and into his glans to be ejected into the womb of a woman who has equally attuned her breath to the cosmic aether. Here it fuses with, and is given shape by, the hereditary preconditions, emotional temperament and active will of its parents. Such a process is not without peril, for poor genitive conditions – the worst of which being rape – or a flawed interface with the spiritual world could create disastrous results, either in the form of an evil and impaired child, or in the permanent mental and moral damage of the participating couple. Lovers are thus bid to remember that ‘In the orgasmal moment there is middle-ground; for we either rise toward heaven or descend hellward’ (Randolph [1873–4] 1997: 316). Of all the factors shaping human development over the life course, from environmental conditions to hereditary predisposition, Randolph insisted that the most important of these was ‘the ejective moment’, for in it: not only may we launch Genius, Power, Beauty, Deformity, Crime, Idiocy, Shame or Glory [. . .] in the person of the children we may then produce, but we may plunge our own soul neck-deep in Hell’s horrid slime or else mount the Azure as contemplar associate Gods. (Randolph [1873–4] 1997: 317)

Thus although sexual reproduction could be a as potentially damning force, imprinting on its products the unsought angularity or ‘unpopular complexion’ (Randolph 1860: 8) that Randolph alternately celebrated and rued all his life, it also provided a means of undoing even the most obdurate markers of self, allowing lovers to deracinate and even respeciate themselves into the ranks of the seraphim. It is hard to imagine a more stark contrast to the pessimistic midcentury figurations of the mulatto as dangerous pathogen than this ebullient miscegenetic mysticism. The sang mêlée functioned for Randolph as both a unique racial avatar and a potential everyman, a particularly vivid example of the intersubjective combination and dynamic blending available to all humans, however ‘pure’ in type, through the chemical effects of procreative heterosexual sex. As products of this process, we are all of mixed race, universally if to differing degrees estranged from the discreet polygenetic silos into which humanity was first created. Furthermore, this combinative state need not end at birth or even with death; with the correct partner selection, individuals might continue to chemically, racially and spiritually remake themselves over the course

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of their lives and throughout the eternity that awaits most – although, importantly, not all – of them afterwards. And as the individual is remade in this imaginative occult sexology, so too is Harmonialist Spiritualism, transformed into a vehicle for the perfection, rather than abandonment, of conscious will. Randolph’s men and women of the future were not sleepwalking free lovers, but alert and knowing actors in a metaphysical programme of cosmic blending, agents equipped with wills strong enough to close their wombs by mind force alone or to draw down the highest powers of the spheres into their loins. Despite the rich range of opportunities for subjective transformation that it offered believers, however, Randolph’s scheme of progressive blending, like Harmonial Spiritualism itself, does not resolve easily or coherently into a singular politics. If, as I argued earlier in the chapter, Randolph’s endorsement of polygenesis need not signify his tacit ideological support for the raciological paradigms that enabled slavery, neither does his championship of racial hybridity translate into the progressivist anti-essentialism with which it is typically, and perhaps increasingly unconvincingly, associated today. The mercurial volatility of miscegenation in Randolph’s occult sexology provides an interesting counter to the often overly idealistic assessments of hybridity’s subversive capital that have, argues Tavia N’yongo, flourished in the United States since the 2008 election of Barack Obama, a man whose biracial identity has led some pundits to prematurely hail his victory as proof of the final death of American racism (N’yongo 2009: 2). Without denying the significance of this historic victory, suggest N’yongo and other critical race critics, it cannot sustain the impossible weight of the selfcongratulatory telos laid upon it. In addition to their regrettable inaccuracy, premature assertions of the triumph of multiculturalist hybridity over racist monoculturalism have, as Paul Gilroy reminds us, one further drawback: they leave the concept of race itself intact, choosing to emphasise its decreasing importance rather than to expose and then demolish it as a biological fiction. For Gilroy, ‘the only ethical response to the conspicuous wrongs that raciologies continue to solicit and sanction’ (Gilroy 2000: 41, original emphasis) is to abandon the idea of race entirely. It is certainly not a solution that Randolph himself recognised. His concept of the sang mêlée, complete with its detailed mathematical calculation of blood origins and ratios, is nothing if not supremely raciological, and while he may have redistributed the values assigned to specific racial identities within his surrounding culture, in no instance did he challenge their ontological existence. Blood and phenotype never ceased to matter, because for Randolph they were fundamentally metaphysical

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qualities. As such, his mystical thought provides a particularly elegant demonstration of N’yongo’s claim that miscegenation is less a longawaited antidote to racism than it is an ideologically flexible part of the latter’s conceptual history. ‘Racisms’, he writes in The Amalgamation Waltz, ‘can emerge, thrive, and transform quite effectively without ever being undone by the magical, privatised powers we invest in interracial intimacy and reproduction’ (N’yongo 2009: 175). Both magical and private at once, Randolph’s occult philosophy of the bedroom expresses all the potential, and all the infuriating limitations, of a mystical eugenic system that simultaneously affirms and denies the fixity of racial biotype.

Notes 1. For more on the paradoxical naturalisation and legislation of anti-miscegenation sentiment in late nineteenth-century America, see Bernasconi and Dotson’s three-volume edited series Race, Hybridity, and Miscegenation (2005) and Werner Sollors’s anthology Interracialisms: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (2000). 2. Here I distinguish between the largely white modern Spiritualist movement catalysed by the 1848 Fox rappings and characterised by seance participation, and the Black Spiritual movement pioneered in the early twentieth century by Mother Alethea ‘Leafy’ Anderson and centred in cities such as New Orleans, Chicago and New York. Although, as Hans Baer has demonstrated, there are some continuities between these two forms of American syncretism, their constituencies, locations, practices, beliefs and genealogies are too different to be conflated; indeed, suggests one of Baer’s informants, the contraction of ‘Spiritualism’ to ‘Spiritual’ within the Black movement may have originated from a deliberate desire to separate itself from ‘predominantly White Spiritualist groups’ (Baer 1984: 7). 3. As important as these invitations to white Spiritualist speakers from black churches may have been, we would do well to remember other incidents in which white Spiritualist proselytisation was graciously but firmly rejected by African American faith groups. The 14 April 1906 edition of Light records the following example: ‘At a late convention of Spiritualists in Missouri, the President boldly faced the colour-prejudice and said that as spirits are all spiritually equal in the next world, we ought to anticipate that condition here [. . .] “We welcome you, our coloured brethren,” he said to a party of negroes. But their speaker was equal to the occasion, and he politely reciprocated back the little touch of patronage while he fully reciprocated the kind greeting. “We are proud of our race,” he said. “We are not seeking associations with the white churches. We desire to be allowed to develop ourselves, by ourselves, among ourselves. We will become a nation within a nation, and our foster-nation will be proud of us; but it will be by our own efforts that we must raise our race”.’ (‘Notes by the Way’ 1906)

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4. This remark comes from an automatically written message produced by white American medium Mrs J.H. Conant and published in the ‘Messenger’ section of the Boston Spiritualist newspaper, Banner of Light, for which she was house medium. For the complete message, see ‘Tole, An Alabama Slave’ (1857). 5. As Molly McGarry notes, ‘Spiritualists seemingly could not live without Native American spirits but were unsure as to how to live with existing native nations’ (McGarry 2008: 85). Putting an even more cynical spin on white conjurations of indigenous spirits, Bridget Bennett suggests that it was only ‘once Indians could be regarded as being well on the way to being extinguished, [that] speaking for them [. . .] became an attractive prospect to some’ (Bennett 2007: 10). 6. There are, of course, important exceptions to this general tendency, the most notable being the New Orleans-based spiritualist circle headed by distinguished Creole Henry Louis Rey from the late 1850s to the 1870s. The circle’s mediums included J.B. Valmour and Nelson Desbrosses. For more on this group, see Jean-Marc Allard Duplantier’s PhD thesis, ‘Nos Frères d’Outre Golfe’: Spiritualism, Voudou, and the Mimetic Literatures of Haiti and Louisiana (2006). 7. This segregationist impulse has an enduring – although not unchallenged – presence in Anglo-American Spiritualist afterlife writing, one that lasted long past the end of the Civil War and was by no means restricted to the United States where slavery had made racial apartheid a more familiar institution. In L. Kelway Bamber’s Claude’s Book, channelled by the eponymous British solider Claude to his grieving mother, the naturalness of this post-life ethnic and national segregation is explained as follows: ‘Yes, people here live in “sets” or “colonies,” because those of like interests and nationalities gravitate naturally to each other, and to their own people. Otherwise, you can imagine, it would not be very happy if you found yourself mixed up with people of every nationality, with dissimilar tastes and experiences, and with nothing in common between you, for the fact of dying does not change you in any way’ (Kelway Bamber 1918: 97). 8. Randolph’s hostility towards, and often simultaneously expressed support for, modern Spiritualism features in almost all of his published occult writings, most notably in The Unveiling; or, What I Think of Spiritualism, to Which is Appended his World-Famous Medicinal Formulas (1860), The Wonderful Story of Ravalette (1863), Seership! The Magnetic Mirror ([1870] 1884) and Eulis: Affectional Alchemy ([1874a] 1930). 9. In The Unveiling (1860), Randolph accused his former mentor Davis of perpetuating what he termed ‘the Buffalo doctrine’, namely a pernicious neo-Calvinist belief in non-universal immortality. Davis had indeed written in The Present Age and Inner Life that: ‘There are children or persons born among all races of men, who, in consequence of being defective in their cerebral structure, never reach the important crisis, never pass that equinoctial line which separates the animal from the human! SUCH, feeling no immortality, are without it. The Bushman of New Holland, the inhabitants of the interior of Africa, the Cannibals, to some extent, and Children whose brains are so structurally unbalanced as to make them idiots from birth – such, belong wholly to the outer world and have no immortality’

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(Davis 1853: 271, original emphasis). Initially horrified by this belief, and no doubt by the overweening racism of its denial of salvation to the African populations which it equated with congenital idiots, Randolph angrily described it as ‘the most infamous dogma that ever emanated from fool, madman or devil [. . .] the direct baby of hell, the complete child of the fiends’ (Randolph 1860: 46). By 1874, these reservations seem to have been forgotten as Randolph himself took to asserting selective immortality. In The ‘Ghostly Land’, he wrote that, ‘some men are immortal. But some trees were not intended as fruit-bearers. Seminal fluid [exists] to stock the globe with sentient life; yet not one-tenth of the fruit reaches ripeness [. . .] The rest are wasted. Is man an exception to this awful rule?’ (Randolph 1874b: 18, original emphasis). Davis’s and Randolph’s attempted fusion of Social Darwinism with soul theory constitutes one of the most fascinating and yet hitherto unexplored aspects of the American Spiritualist movement’s complex liberation theology. See chapter 9 of Deveney’s Paschal Beverly Randolph for full details of the plot by confidence men Thomas Churchill and W.F. French to defraud Randolph of his copyright income. In his 1850 essay ‘The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races’, Agassiz had insisted that polygenesis need not imply racial hierarchy, writing that, ‘all men are men, equally endowed with the same superior nature and made of one blood, inasmuch of this figurative expression applies to the higher unity of mankind, and not to their supposed genital connection by natural descent’ (Agassiz [1850] 2005: 118). This ethical appeal to a unity that supersedes biological connection seems to get thrown to the wind when later, in the same article, Agassiz deems the arguments for racial equality to be ‘mock philanthropy and mock-philosophy’ (124). Quoted here from the 1930 edition of the text, titled Eulis: Affectional Alchemy; The History of Love; Its Wondrous Magic, Chemistry, Rules, Laws, Moods, Modes, and Rationale. Here, for reasons that remain unclear, Randolph briefly enlists the monogenetic patriarch Adam – soon to be dethroned in Pre-Adamite Man (1864) – as originator of humanity’s primeval diversity. As Hugh Urban notes, Randolph’s deeply conservative sex magic was intended only for heterosexual, married and monogamous lovers (Urban 2006: 57).

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Chapter 5

Criminal Man and Recidivist Spirit: Spiritualism, Criminal Anthropology and Thanato-Rehabilitationism

In 1920, only a few short years after his public declaration of Spiritualist faith, Arthur Conan Doyle returned to the periodical in which he had decades earlier made his international reputation as creator of the master detective Sherlock Holmes to argue for a new approach to the problem of crime, one wholly different from the ratiocinative method trademarked by his archetypal fictional creation. ‘A New Light on Old Crimes’, published in The Strand in January, presented the popular author’s conviction that Spiritualism, and Spiritualism alone, could quell the growing tide of contemporary lawlessness by enlisting otherworldly intelligences to maintain public order. In so doing, these numen would provide an ultimate rejoinder to the persistent cui bono? question that had plagued the movement since its first wave in the 1850s. Spiritualism and the recently coalesced discipline of criminology were, Doyle insisted, natural partners, an affinity proven by the (apparently) well-acknowledged role of dreams and revenants in solving some of the nineteenth century’s most notorious crimes, including the infamous Red Barn murder of Maria Marten. In the current century, he predicted, such triumphs of Spiritualist detection would only increase, with the very existence of psychic forensics acting as a formidable disincentive to would-be malefactors: I venture to say that that the mere knowledge that the police had any ally against whom every cunning precaution might prove unavailing would in itself be a strong deterrent to premeditated crime [. . .] if it had not been for vague scientific and religious prejudices, it would surely have been done long ago. Its adoption may be one of the first practical and material benefits given by psychic science to humanity. (Doyle 1920: 74)

Itself founded on an act of homicide detection – the Fox sisters alleged their first spirit communicant to be the murdered pedlar Charles B. Rosma – Spiritualism would ensure its future scientific, social and moral

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authority by furnishing the world with a foolproof and ineluctable system of criminal justice, one in which no dark deed, however hidden or obscure, could evade the all-seeing vigilance of the higher spheres. Doyle acknowledged only one valid, and frequently levied, objection to his exuberantly optimistic utopian fantasy of a spiritualistically facilitated end to crime. If the spirits could help the living detect crime, why did they so seldom do so? Why, in the wake of so many unsolved murders, thefts, rapes and acts of violence in which the good suffered at the hands of the vicious, did the spirit world remain stubbornly mute? Why again, in a country where capital punishment was still legal, did it maintain silence in cases of false conviction when the innocent were wrongfully sent to the gallows and thus prematurely into eternity? These are questions which, as we saw in Chapter 1, had similarly troubled earlier generations of believers, some of whom, such as Paschal Beverly Randolph, explained this spirit reluctance as an ethical refusal to punish the biologically predestinate compulsion to crime. For the more conventionally Christian Doyle, however, their reticence was better explained in terms of the lack of sufficiently trained psychic intermediaries and of the mysterious power of grace through suffering: Any criminologist could name off-hand a dozen cases where innocent men have gone to the scaffold. Why were they not saved? I have written in vain if I have not by now enabled the reader to answer the question himself. If the physical means are not there, then it is impossible. It may seem unjust, but not more so than a ship provided with a wireless may save its passengers while another is heard of no more. The problem of unmerited suffering is part of the larger problem of the functions of pain and evil, which can only be explained on the supposition that spiritual chastening comes in this fashion, and that this end is so important that the means are trivial in comparison. (Doyle 1920: 73)

Behind this confident assertion of self-evidence, there is, of course, an important equivocation here: if unjust punishment is part of (a benevolent?) God’s plan, then no amount of mediumistic detectives will, or should ever, attain 100 per cent accuracy in their conviction rate. This conflict between the efficacy, meaning and desirability of Spiritualist detection is just one of many reasons why it has failed to become recognised as a viable criminological project in the ninety years since Doyle’s exuberant endorsement. Today, forensic psychics remain on the shadowy fringes of contemporary criminology. The value of their results is highly disputed, and those British and North American police forces that do occasionally hire mediums for assistance in unsolved cases rarely admit so in public.1 In light of the expansion of the New Age channelling industry and the ubiquity of professional psychics,

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Doyle’s suggestion that the only impediment to success was sufficient practitioner numbers no longer seems persuasive, and the problem of selective unmerited suffering remains no more comprehensible, never mind soluble, than it was in 1920. Accruing small but always debatable successes from time to time, Spiritualist criminology in the West remains a dubious and divided enterprise, a once-promising programme of metaphysical detection reduced to fodder for prime-time television drama and Hollywood thrillers. In this chapter I want to trace other reasons for Spiritualism’s failure to produce an effective or coherent discourse on criminology, ones that have less to do with the subsequent fate of psychical research in Western cultural life than with a series of ontological contradictions about the origin of deviance and the nature of judgement that emerged from the nineteenth-century movement’s rich and obsessive discourse on crime and rehabilitation. Chapter 2 foreshadowed these issues in its discussion of the Spiritualist willingness to conflate hereditary disability with moral deviance; here I am concerned specifically with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century believers’ appropriation of the new and cutting-edge discourses of criminology, and of criminal anthropology in particular, to give positivist prestige and novelty to older folk beliefs about the innatism of crime. In doing so, some would requisition the thought of one of Spiritualism’s most notorious European scientific converts, the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso whose own late-life adoption of Spiritualist faith worked to fulfil, rather than abandon, the biodeterminist agenda of his earlier forensic career. In focusing on the persistent but hitherto unexamined affinity between nineteenth-century biocriminology and modern Spiritualism, I aim not only to deepen our understanding of the intended social applications of Spiritualist determinism in this period, but also to provide a new explanatory context for its appeal to thinkers like Doyle and Lombroso who, prior to their conversion, had devoted so much of their disparate careers to meditating on the origins, motivations and appropriate treatment of the criminal offender. Despite the recent and long-overdue wave of revisionist scholarship on Lombroso and the Anglo-American reception of criminal anthropology, Spiritualism continues to be viewed as little more than an embarrassing footnote to the life of the man widely recognised as the father of modern criminology, earning little if any mention at all in the several excellent studies of his career and biography that have emerged since 2000.2 This oversight is regrettable for a number of reasons, not least of which being that Lombroso’s twin investigative passions, when read in tandem, reveal the extent to which metaphysical and positivist understandings of

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deviance had become compatible, and mutually conflicted, at the turn of the century. Lombroso himself considered the two stages of his career to be deeply, even mystically, intertwined, writing in his posthumously published psychical research study After Death—What?: I thought it my predestined end [. . .] and my duty to crown a life passed in the struggle for great ideas by entering the lists for this desperate cause, the most hotly contested and perhaps most persistently mocked at idea of the times. (Lombroso [1909] 1988: xv)

From the vantage point of the history of ideas, there are, I suggest, valid reasons why we should follow Lombroso’s lead (if not his faith) in looking for continuity between his criminological and Spiritualist investigation. This chapter will not focus on the connections between criminal anthropology and Spiritualism in Lombroso’s oeuvre alone; it will first trace the growth of a biodeterministic discourse of crime across AngloAmerican Spiritualist journalism, fiction and philosophy more broadly, focusing particularly on the persistent ontological clash between the movement’s forensic, hereditarian and anti-eschatological mandates. If the resulting confusion would, along with other factors, help to undermine and certainly marginalise the putative project of psychic forensics, Spiritualist criminology nonetheless produced a radical, if never wholly realised, criminological paradigm: it aimed to redefine the offender, not (or rather, not just) as a paragon of wilful sin, a victim of circumstances, a social threat or a pitiable defective, but also as prophet of a new progressive age that he or she would help to usher in not despite but because of his or her inherent deviance.

Criminology and Spiritualism: A Metaphysical Affinity Although the nascent field of criminology would not earn its standard name and discrete disciplinary status until the 1890s, the study of crime as a generalised phenomenon was widespread throughout the nineteenth century, pursued under the aegis of a number of allied fields including medicine, law, anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychiatry and phrenology (Rafter 2009: xv). The seemingly disparate problems of crime and of man’s potential post-life survival drew a remarkably large number of common investigators, with Cesare Lombroso being only the most famous. In the early 1850s, New York State Supreme Court Judge John Worth Edmonds became one the earliest and most prominent American converts to the movement, describing in his seminal 1853 Spiritualist text Spiritualism (co-created with medium George T. Dexter) how he

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combined judicial efforts to improve prison conditions with mediumistic outreach work among the spirits of executed offenders (Edmonds and Dexter [1853] 1854: 191). Edmonds’s fellow believer John Murray Spear also came to Spiritualism in the early 1850s after years spent campaigning for prisoners’ rights, leading the American anti-death penalty movement both as a founding member of the Massachusetts Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment and co-editor, along with his brother Charles, of the abolitionist newspaper the Hangman (Buescher 2006: 45). As Murray’s 1882 campaign to commute the capital sentence of teenage serial killer Jesse Pomeroy makes clear, his Spiritualist, abolitionist and phreno-criminological beliefs were absolutely inseparable: Pomeroy, he insisted, was the hapless victim of violent maternal impressions recklessly induced when his pregnant mother had visited a slaughterhouse, and would, if executed, go on to produce far more mayhem among the living as a wrathful revenant than he could from the confines of a cell (290). For Spear, as for many of his fellow believers, the superiority of the Spiritualist approach to crime lay in its ability to maintain law and order both here and in the hereafter, apprehending violent offenders among the living population while minimising the potential aeon-enduring harm of the executed. Given the penological preoccupation of these early and influential believers, it is little wonder, as Cathy Gutierrez has shown, that criminal spirits should have featured so regularly in nineteenth-century seance rooms in both America and abroad, where they returned to describe the torments – self-inflicted rather than divinely ordained – that awaited lawbreakers after death and to narrate their own redemption through the gradual processes of self-directed progress (Gutierrez 2009: 29). As Spear’s example demonstrates, two of the central goals of Spiritualist criminology were the detection of unknown offenders and the prevention of post-life recidivism. But these were not, as we shall see, necessarily or even usually complementary aims, nor do they cover the entire spectrum of Spiritualistic approaches towards, and creative interpretations of, criminal deviance. Indeed, some of what happened during the performances of criminal-channelling mediums might be characterised as simply good theatre, unconnected to an explicitly religious or rehabilitationist aim. Take the events that took place during an 1878 seance with Madame Hugo d’Alesi at the Parisian Society for Psychological Studies, recorded and later printed in the British weekly The Spiritualist. Exploiting public interest in the notorious recent Marie de Manach murder case, in which a young woman’s eviscerated and bisected body was found floating in the Seine, d’Alesi channelled the final dying moments of the victim to ghastly gothic effect.

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‘The narration’, reports the correspondent, ‘is graphic and natural, although necessarily somewhat horrible; and the whole tale bears on the face of it a good semblance of authenticity’ (‘A Murderer and his Victim’ 1879). The medium later restored the Christian decorum that her sensationalist performance might have seemed to disrupt by having Manach’s spirit publicly forgive her murderer and pity him for occupying a benighted position in the lower spheres. Such Grand Guignol performances were by no means confined to Continental mediums; in 1879, leading English slate medium William Eglinton conducted a series of spectacular materialisation seances in which he played both parts in an entranced performance of the fatal final hours of a doomed love affair between a sixteenth-century priest and his lover Hortense Dupont. From the account provided by attendee Florence Marryat, a popular melodramatic author and actress herself, Eglinton used the event to chew up the spectral scenery, enacting the monk’s entrapment and repeated stabbing of Hortense, his tearful contrition at her feet, and then careful concealment of her corpse. Overall, the event is described in terms of a sensational theatrical performance, with Eglinton winning the plaudits of comparison to the leading British actor of the day, Henry Irving: Imagine, our little party of four in this somber old house, the only ones waking at that time of night, watching by the ghostly light of a turned-down lamp, the acting of this terrible tragedy. Mr Eglinton’s face during the possession was a perfect study, from which Irving might have taken a lesson. (Marryat 1879)

There is a fascinating suggestion in this that Marryat was both aware of and complicit in the deliberate theatrical contrivance of Eglinton’s performance, which she recommends as a study to other professionals, but it is soon buried under her closing emphasis on the moral seriousness of the act’s forensic authenticity. She concludes: [I]t was so awful to think that there we actually witnessed the revival of a crime that has held its perpetrator in the continual bondage of sin for four hundred years, that we had no thought for anything but the solemnity of the scene. (Marryat 1879)

As Marryat’s final statement makes clear, the subject of murder, its causes and its consequences was rarely if ever only of theatrical interest to Spiritualists. On the contrary, the seance room could not just enact but also detect crimes, identifying those culprits who still evaded the law and, perhaps more usefully, diagnosing and preventing future crime through the channelling of sociological and eugenic revelations.

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Admittedly, neither effort was particularly successful, perhaps the former least of all, with few clear-cut instances of effective mediumistic intervention in contemporary crime detection featuring in the mid- and late-century Spiritualist press.3 More frequent were explanations as to why efficient and immediate Spiritualist detection remained impossible. Some of the proffered reasons were purely practical: for example, the suggestion that mediums were inhibited from coming forward by frequent and pervasive police discrimination. Reporting on the infamous Whitechapel murders in 1888 – a case later allegedly but unverifiably ‘solved’ by London-based medium Robert James Lees4 – the London Spiritualist periodical Light lambasted the mainstream legal establishment for failing to pursue the psychic investigation methods that could end the killings instantly: When any detective business is needed, Spiritualism is at the fore [. . ] [Yet] when a medium goes, as one (we know) did, to offer his services for what they are worth, the only result is that the policeman tells him that he is a fool [. . .] will any candid friend tell us how Spiritualists are to help the police under these circumstances? Perhaps we may ask too why we should save the police the trouble of using their senses? (‘Jottings’ 1888, original emphasis)

As would Arthur Conan Doyle, the anonymous writer here insists that Spiritualism’s potential extends far beyond the straightforward provision of consolation. If only the public could be taught to acknowledge spirit authority, their bodies and properties, no less than their souls, would be protected by a supernatural police force. But, as others pointed out, the difficulties faced by Spiritualist forensics went far beyond the scepticism of police forces. A far more grave and metaphysically robust impediment came from the spirits themselves who, as they were articulated in seance rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, asserted their refusal to collaborate with a corrupt earthly judicial system that meted out the spiritually disastrous punishment of death to its most debased reprobates. Of course, neither of these sentiments – that capital punishment was immoral, and that secular justice was a poor substitute for divine judgement5 – were contemporarily unique to modern Spiritualism, which flourished in a nineteenth-century period when capital punishment legislation in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain, was regularly challenged by a wide range of reformist groups. Yet what was remarkable about Spiritualism’s particular deployment of these tenets was its unique and simultaneous filtering of them through the perspectives of innatist supernaturalism and contemporary biocriminology. Thus, even in the late-century period when Lombroso’s theories of atavistic criminality were being blasted

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in the mainstream British press – a blustering opposition that, as Neil Davie has shown, concealed the pervasiveness of similarly innatist beliefs in Britain’s contemporary criminological literature (Davie 2005: 19) – UK-based Spiritualist periodicals were publishing approving summaries of the Italian professor’s work and asserting its confirmation of what they had long known thanks to spirit revelation. The similar receptivity to criminal anthropology in the American Spiritualist scene is somewhat less surprising, given that Lombroso’s contemporary standing was much higher in the United States than in Great Britain.6 For many of the faithful both there and in Britain, criminal anthropology seemed to confirm and give weight to the metaphysical first principles foundational to Harmonialist Spiritualist philosophy. The anticipation of and appreciation for criminal anthropology within nineteenth-century Spiritualist discourses on crime is further evidence in the growing case against Lombroso’s singularity that has been spearheaded in recent years by scholars such as Neil Davie and Nicole Hahn Rafter. In focusing on the body as matrix for criminal activity, remarks Rafter, Lombroso placed himself firmly within, and not outside, the mainstream of nineteenth-century criminological thought in which ‘all early theories [. . .] were biological’ (Rafter 2008: ix). If Lombroso’s identification of the atavistic mechanisms and stigmata which characterised deviance was relatively unprecedented, his somatic emphasis was shared by a long list of predecessors and contemporaries which included romantic-era phrenologists Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, and fin-de-siècle eugenicists Francis Galton and W.D. McKim – the latter an American physician who in 1900 anticipated Nazi euthanasia procedures by calling for the ‘painless’ gassing of the criminally defective (McKim [1900] 2009: 263). Although biocriminology may have experienced marked shifts in its levels of public acceptance and authority throughout the nineteenth century, it was never scientifically marginal; even, as Neil Davie points out, in the profoundly therapeutic and individualistic context of Victorian British criminology, the search for a distinctive criminal type – for a set of physical and mental traits believed to be common to all criminals, or at least to certain kinds of criminals – would in fact prove to be [. . .] enduring [. . .] during the whole period from 1860 to 1918, despite wide-ranging changes in the socio-economic, political, and economic climate in which they are grounded. (Davie 2005: 23)

Although often appealing to Spiritualist thinkers in the period of our study, biocriminology also posed them with some difficult metaphysical challenges. To understand their nature, we need only review

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some of the central tenets of one of biocriminology’s most influential contemporary vehicles, Lombroso’s Criminal Man. Published in five different Italian editions between 1876 and 1896–7, the book can lay claim, alongside Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), to being one of the most misunderstood scientific treatises of the nineteenth century. Today we are most familiar with its controversial and scientifically unsubstantiated claim that a certain percentage of the criminal population – somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent, depending on the edition, but never all of them – were ‘born criminals’, atavistic, congenital defectives whose compulsion to crime was a result of their proximity to an earlier, more primitive phase in human evolutionary development. Jinxed in the womb, and indistinguishable from sufferers of moral insanity (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 218), these benighted primitives had no choice but to compulsively sin until the state stepped in to educate, hospitalise, segregate or, in only the most extreme cases, execute them – this measure to be pursued always and exclusively for the sake of social protection, and never for the purposes of sheer bloodyminded punishment.7 This last stipulation is particularly important. Lombroso’s biological determinism, his willingness to racialise crime as a special characteristic of non-white ‘primitive’ races, and his conviction that women were naturally on a lower moral and intellectual level than men8 have latterly made him an easy target for the contemporary academic left, who have tended to see in him only the reactionary values of racism, classism and sexism that typify our most stereotypical visions of the nineteenth century. Yet Lombroso’s enduring commitment to reform over punishment provides just one of the many reasons to resist this caricaturish reactionary portrayal. Many more are revealed for the English reader in Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter’s 2006 translation and compilation of Criminal Man’s five original editions. In their magisterial work of editorial scholarship, we find, woven through Lombroso’s atavistic biologism, simultaneously expressed support for a host of feminist and socialist causes, including more liberal divorce laws (which would, in Lombroso’s opinion, decrease the incidence of spousal homicide), increased state aid to the poor, cheaper public housing, equal pay legislation for women, reduced working hours for the working classes, liberal governance, and the expansion of state education (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 331–7). Like Spiritualism, criminal anthropology always aimed to manifest a progressive form of biodeterminism, one that would end the injustice of treating some offenders as if they were deliberate transgressors who could control their behaviour if they chose.9 But if positivistic and Spiritualistic biocriminology were allied in their

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shared humanitarian and exculpatory mandate, they were less reconcilable in their attitudes towards death. Capital punishment, as we have noted, was an only rarely advocated solution in criminal anthropology, but it was viewed as a final one. This did not hold for Spiritualists, who adhered firmly to a belief in post-life survival. Biocrime was necessarily a much thornier problem for them, given their assurance that death was as much an impossibility for atavistic reprobates as was self-control. In the second part of this chapter, we will examine how different Spiritualist believers attempted to resolve this dilemma and, in so doing, recuperate and release the early project of psychic forensics from the philosophical quandary about judgement that lay at its heart. Fascinatingly, in this effort some would, even if unintentionally, end up endorsing a tacit programme of negative eugenics in which, despite Spiritualism’s public opposition to capital punishment, death would emerge as the only truly humane, empowering and effective rehabilitation treatment for the born deviant.

Biocriminology in the Spiritualist Press The philosophical continuities which Lombroso identified between his Spiritualist and criminal anthropological research in After Death— What? had already long been acknowledged by the fin-de-siècle Spiritualist press by the time of the book’s 1909 publication. Indeed, Spiritualist periodical Light had provided Lombroso with one of his few positive British press reviews in the 1890s, publishing in 1893 an article that promised, ‘Those who get away from matter and realize that man is only a presentment of spirit, will find the observations of Mr Lombroso exceedingly suggestive’ (‘Characteristics of Criminals’ 1893: 242). For followers of the phrenologically tinged new revelation, the idea that flesh and cranial shape should act as platonic reflections of a determining interior soul seemed perfectly natural, and many were eager to embrace its new disciplinary articulations as a means of gaining scientific capital. Beyond this authorising mandate, Spiritualist biocriminology also, as we have seen, shared the ethical goal of mitigating the blame attached to compulsive recidivists. Of course, such mercy was only warranted if criminal identity truly was irresistible and hence mundanely unreformable, a view with which some spiritualists were uncomfortable even as their deterministic faith directed them towards it. Some would find a buy-out clause from the implicit hopelessness of born deviance in the Lamarckist strategies of child protection and adoption measures. Thus American medium Cora Tappan, speaking under the

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spirit guidance of Dr Benjamin Rush before a British Spiritualist audience in 1875, advised: Take the criminal – the murderer, if you choose – remove him from the conditions that produce the crime, and then surround him with just those states and circumstances that will call out his better, higher, and nobler nature; and he who committed the crime once will not be likely to repeat it. (Tappan 1875: 43)

As an American founding father, pioneer of medical psychiatry, and abolitionist dedicated to the eradication of slavery and capital punishment alike, Rush was a particularly well-chosen spiritual exponent of these environmentalist solutions. Yet their coherence is nonetheless undermined by Rush’s, or rather Tappan’s, simultaneous adherence to the bleak hereditarian diagnostics of British alienist Henry Maudsley, endorsed perhaps in deference to the anticipated sympathies of her English audience. Maudsley had argued in The Physiology and Pathology of Mind ([1867] 1868) and elsewhere that criminality was an inherited form of insanity whose sufferers represented a breed apart (Rafter 2008: 103); this conviction is surely what Tappan had in mind when she had Rush announce, ‘I have been unable to make any distinction between disease and crime’ (Tappan 1875: 43). Despite this unresolved tension between its Lamarckist and Maudsleyan impulses, Tappan’s diagnosis was at least an optimistic one, presenting a model of transformation that could be enacted during the deviant individual’s life cycle. A similar mood of hope pervades the Spiritualist criminological thinking of Tappan’s most famous convert, the English medium and healer W.J. Colville who offered a prognosis almost identical to his mentor’s during an 1883 trance lecture at the Rodney Hall in Liverpool. Speaking through his animating spirit ‘George Thompson’, Colville declared crime to be a physiological malady produced by ‘abnormal developments in some regions of the brain’ (Colville 1883: 577). This cerebral abnormality could, however, be cured through educational therapeutics. Repeat offenders were to be admitted into aesthetically pleasing ‘moral hospitals’ (578) where they would apprentice in a trade, exercise, study and benefit from the improving influence of the beautiful; further, they would learn the love of work and community life that apparently rendered alcoholism, so often a catalyst of crime, utterly unattractive. As the result of this programme, capital punishment would become as unnecessary as it was morally offensive. Like fellow socialist Spiritualist Alfred Russel Wallace, Colville wanted justice rather than charity or punishment for the most desperate members of the lower classes; further, he viewed this

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goal as perfectly compatible with a biocriminological understanding of their behaviour. But not all of Colville and Tappan’s Spiritualist peers would be able to extract an earthly rehabilitationist ethos from the ascendant discourse of Spiritualist biocriminology. Certainly no prospect of improvement during life features in the automatically written reflection on crime produced by working-class medium E.W. Wallis (later editor of The Two Worlds) during an 1877 seance at the Spiritual Institution in London. ‘We regard all criminals as deranged for the time being’, he stipulates, allowing no distinction between, say, occasional minor property theft and serial sexual violence. ‘It is our opinion that all such imperfect beings are more to be pitied than blamed, and all the circumstances of parentage, birth, surroundings, and education should be considered ere they be condemned’ (Wallis 1877: 83). This causation model provides the answer to the question that prompted the trance speech, namely, ‘Why do not Spirits Detect Crime and Expose the Criminal?’ To do so would be to insert the blameless into a justice system predicated on the faulty belief in universal moral responsibility. But if criminals are not to be blamed, neither are they to be liberated or made to subject to rehabilitation. On the contrary, his controlling spirit calls for them to be confined – and again, remember that Wallis’s channel has made no distinction between types of crime here, so this drastic solution is posited in relation to all offences – within lunatic asylums where their present and future genetic threat can be nullified. Wallis’s possessing intelligence was a eugenicist as well as a hereditarian who insisted that: society, individually and collectively, is responsible for its criminals, and for permitting it to be possible for them to exist, by allowing its members to live in ignorance of the laws of life, and thus bringing into the world children so imperfectly organized, and permitting them to be surrounded by such gross conditions that they cannot but act as they do. (Wallis 1877: 84)

There can be little doubt which laws of life are here referred to. By concealing or obscuring, for the supposed sake of public decency, the allied mysteries of human sexual reproduction and hereditary transmission, society was committing the far graver error of permitting a diseased class for whom there was no hope of recovery to perpetuate itself. This stern message is given further negative eugenic emphasis by its syntactical arrangement; note that it is not the conditions associated with under-class life – poverty, malnutrition, domestic violence or limited access to education – that should be banned from existence, but rather the criminals themselves. If hanging is reprehensible, it is only because it cuts off the criminal seed too late in its developmental career. Better that

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it should never emerge from the womb than become a hopeless burden on the state, or, worse, a force of untrammelled vengeance in the postlife spheres. For, as an 1888 article on the Whitechapel murders in The Two Worlds asks, ‘If he [Jack the Ripper] is unfit for earth, is he not also unfit for higher life?’ (‘The London Tragedies’ 1888: 618). I may seem to be suggesting thus far that the fatalistic and rehabilitationist branches of Spiritualist biocriminology were separate, the one aligning itself with more conservative, negative eugenic, and even potentially pro-death penalty concepts of punishment, the other more relativistic and environmentalist. Of course, within a heterodox subculture which believes there is no terminus point for human life, this is a false distinction. For Spiritualists, death could not be viewed as a punishment or an act of forcible extinction, but as a removal to another – and often, significantly superior – environment. Far from being opposed to environmentalist rehabilitationism then, the death penalty had in Spiritualist thought the capacity to become its supreme form. The very logic that underwrote Spiritualist condemnations of capital punishment – namely, that it did not end the offender’s life, but simply gave it greater scope – could also implicitly sanction the practice when reconfigured as euthanasia. Although this argument was rarely made nakedly in the late nineteenth-century Spiritualist press, it undergirds a significant portion of the movement’s popular cross-over crime and sensation fiction, texts in which the ideological tensions between Spiritualism’s hostility towards state-administered execution and simultaneous faith in death as an ultimate if never immediate rehabilitation tool could be smoothed over and resolved through genre conventions. The romantic thanatorehabilitationism of this fascinating genre of subcultural crime fiction is particularly striking when first contrasted with the more unilaterally abolitionist discourses that populated the Anglo-American Spiritualist press in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Spiritualism, Abolition and Thanato-Rehabilitationism Although the nineteenth-century histories of the abolition movement in the two countries this study considers were dramatically different, surrounding attitudes towards the death penalty on behalf of transatlantic Spiritualist believers were remarkably consistent. Capital punishment was legal in both the United States and Great Britain throughout the period of modern Spiritualism’s major first wave, abolished de facto in the United Kingdom in 1965 and de jure in 1969 but still legal at the time of writing in twenty-two American states, including Texas,

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Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and California.10 Despite this differential level of abolition, it is important to remember, as Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle point out, that the anti-death penalty movement had its earliest successes in the United States, where it peaked in the same 1840s decade that gave birth to modern Spiritualism (Hood and Hoyle 2008: 11). The initially greater strength and visibility of the reform movement in the United States than in Great Britain was at least partially due, as Henry Schwarzschild has argued, to abolition’s wider support by the former nation’s mainstream religious establishments throughout the nineteenth century. While in Britain, capital punishment was generally unopposed by the Church of England until its final eradication, the case was and remains somewhat different in the US, where abolition now ‘has the committed support of virtually every significant religious denomination, from the Roman Catholic Church and numerous Protestant denominations, to most branches of American Judaism and even some American Islamic groups’ (Schwarzschild 1993). In the 1840s and 1850s, however, the bulk of religious support for abolition in both countries came from biblical liberals and dissenters, and it is no surprise that adherents to the new Spiritualist revelation followed suit (Potter 1993: 62). Throughout the century, American and British abolition movements remained keenly aware of each other, the latter learning from the former that partial, early success could lead to failure in the future. After effecting a considerable reduction in public hangings by the 1850s, American abolitionists were dismayed to see state execution, now largely if not entirely tucked away from public view, cease to be a pressing sore on the nation’s conscience. Sympathetic British observers, whatever their religious affiliation, thus began to suspect that ‘to secrete [capital punishment] away would dangerously delay its final demise. The experience of the United States gave grounds for their fear’ (Potter 1993: 87). The story of the nineteenth-century abolition movement in these respective national contexts is, of course, much more complex than this brief summary allows; here I seek only to establish that the social environment which gave rise to the late-century Spiritualist abolitionist writings we are about to encounter was one in which initial public support for abolition was decidedly on the wane. It is perhaps this sense of decline that gives so much of the period’s Spiritualist anti-capital punishment writing its sense of urgency. This great legal sin, one compounded by the judiciary system’s ignorance of the biological, hereditary and spiritual inculpability of its victims, was in danger of becoming invisible. Prison chaplains who eased their own consciences by offering meaningless and cursory rituals of penitence to the condemned were in some senses the most to blame: by leading

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prospective criminals into the false belief that their actions, no matter how heinous, could be expunged by a brief admission of penitence, they were guilty of virtual incitement. Such is the message of an 1865 leader article on capital punishment in the short-running, London-based weekly, The Spiritualist Times: Spiritualism [. . .] presents the murder-disposed with examples far more effectual for good than those presented by the Hangman. It shows that the murderer is haunted by his victim, and that he must continue to suffer remorse until he has sufficiently expiated his offense, thus proving that no mere avowal of guilt and feeling of repentance at the last moment on the scaffold can atone for the guilt that lies heavy on his soul. (‘Civilization—Its Supreme Criminals’ 1865: 241)

Despite Spiritualism’s anti-Calvinist public face, sentiments such as these, as Cathy Gutierrez has pointed out, are by no means antithetical to traditional Christian eschatology (Gutierrez 2009: 29); what they suggest is not the impermanence, but rather the long duration of post-life punishment, one whose proto-Freudian horrors were so great that they would, if widely known, prove a far greater deterrent to prospective murderers than the mere threat of hellfire. Also in kindred with established Christian visions of hell – and indeed, with most legal deterrence theories – is the article’s presupposition of universal free will, of the ability of would-be criminals to change their behaviour in response to a rational understanding of its consequences. This conviction was something of a rarity within an ensuing body of popular Spiritualist abolitionist thought increasingly willing to diagnose unstoppable compulsion in the deeds, not only of delinquents but also of law-makers and politicians. When rebutting John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian defence of capital punishment, for example, the British Spiritualist monthly Human Nature argued provocatively that: murderers, hangmen, members of Parliament, and other life-takers [. . .] are creatures of their organic and educational circumstances. The murderer does not slay his victim because of his innate desire to do so. He is himself the victim of circumstances over which he has no absolute control. (‘On Mr Mill on Capital Punishment’ 1868: 238)

If no players in the legal system could be counted on to act as free, rational liberal subjects, then earthly reform efforts were futile; the only remaining option was to intervene in the criminal life cycle before it started. This was the eugenic criminological solution favoured by English medium J.J. Morse, here offered during an 1892 address to the Manchester Spiritualists’ Debating Society:

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My opinion is that punishment, per se, will not eradicate the murder instinct half as rapidly, or in any degree as successfully, as will those efforts that tend to improve the physiological and physical conditions of human life. HAVE THE RACE BORN RIGHT, in the first instance, and right generation will destroy the need for regeneration. (Morse 1892: 171)

Morse’s endorsement of (positive) eugenic criminology was made in the context of an avowedly abolitionist stance, one premised on his ‘utter [. . .] dissent as reason and judgment dictate’ (Morse 1892: 169) to capital punishment. But there was no necessary or exclusive alliance between the two positions; and we can find similar eugenicist strains in the arguments of those (admittedly few) Spiritualist supporters who openly defended capital punishment. One of these was provoked to espouse her beliefs publicly during Light’s 1890 campaign to raise a Spiritualist abolitionist petition. Isabelle de Steiger, a British occultist, mystical painter and member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, wrote to the periodical’s correspondence column to complain that abolition had received too much Spiritualist energy, misdirecting attention from the real source of social unrest and violence – inherited vice. Instead of penological reform, what was needed was state control over reproduction and even selective euthanasia, methods which would ensure that deviant seeds – their corruption implanted at the moment of conception – never came to fruition. Reform-minded spiritualists needed to ‘try and prevent the birth and life of future murderers’ (Steiger 1890, original emphasis). After all, she continued, we all have it in our power to shape the future humanity [. . .] With an advanced knowledge of all the lovely and unendingly interesting arts and sciences, natural philosophy and nature in a thousand forms, we might all have perfectly healthy bodies, and in consequence perfectly healthy minds. (Steiger 1890, original emphasis)

Repeating the by now rote Spiritualist equation of bodily with mental perfection, Steiger’s letter suggests that physical fitness is not the effect but rather the necessary precondition of cognitive vigour and moral sanity. If the death penalty was to be faulted at all, it was not for its cruelty but for its failure to quell the danger of the diseased protoplasm at an earlier stage. In an exasperated reply, Light editor William Stainton Moses (pseud. M.A. Oxon) struggled to contain his irritation with this by no means uncommon strand of mystical thought: ‘I confess myself somewhat impatient of that weary waiting for a future perfected generation which will be able to do without hanging [. . .] Let us abolish the hanging and let us also educate the race’ (‘Notes by the Way’ 1890). Moses’ frustration, however understandable, seems nonetheless

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curiously myopic; after all, the very utopian futurism here blasted had long been a defining presence in the pages of Light and in those of its reformist Anglo-American counterparts. Who else, if not the Spiritualists, could be blamed for over-determining the redemptive potential of the future in the period’s mystical thought, for promulgating the conviction that, as believer Emma Carra had quaintly put it much earlier in an 1857 letter on prison reform to the Boston-based Spiritualist journal Banner of Light, ‘there’s a good time coming, so it is no matter if we don’t get our deserts in this world’ (Carra 1857). No matter how often believers insisted on the banality of Spiritualism’s new heaven, or on the post-life maintenance of personality, whether good or bad, their movement nonetheless remained mired in a teleological thanatology. And perhaps nowhere were the consequences of this enduring attachment more evident, and more troubling, than in Spiritualist debates on rehabilitation. The afterlife, if only in its superior potential to facilitate, if not instantly confer, human improvement necessarily figured in the heterodox imagination as a better environment for the born defective than the lower world. It is via this line of reasoning, rather than in the relatively few direct Spiritualist avowals of support for capital punishment,11 that we find the strongest evidence of Spiritualist sympathy for what I will call thanato-rehabilitationism, that is, the romanticised support for death, not as penalty per se, but as superior means of criminal transportation. This apotheosisation of (earth) death as cure is present in some of Spiritualism’s earliest literary productions. In the twenty-third chapter of John Edmonds and George Dexter’s Spiritualism ([1853] 1854), for example, we find a seance communiqué with one ‘Tom Jones’, a former convict spirit allegedly sentenced to death by Edmonds himself. Despite the surrounding Spiritualist wisdom that such punishment could only induce vengeance in its victims, Jones is an exuberantly penitent and even grateful spirit who clearly bears his judicial persecutor no malice. On the contrary, he uses Dexter’s writing mediumship to blanket Edmonds with praise, asking: Do you know why I embraced your knees just now? Well, Judge, I was so thankful that I was removed by your mandate from my former state of ignorance and blindness into the next sphere, where I have become a man, and I am now sent here by wise ones to speak to you. (Edmonds and Dexter [1853] 1854: 235)

What better propaganda for the death penalty than this, a thankful, and now fully matured and masculinised, criminal spirit sitting in gratitude at the feet of his judicial executioner? Edmonds, perhaps aware of the

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uneasy fit between this particular visitation and his own prison reform work, added a footnote to the text to explain that although the death penalty was seen by some as barbaric, it would soon be unnecessary when Spiritualism had effected a complete revolution in contemporary morals. This admission only gives the spirit’s startling contrition more unsettling force; even as the victim of a brutal penological system, Jones is as happy and grateful as the stereotypical happy plantation slave who we saw in our last chapter featured in the seance writings of white American mediums. The spirit leaves Edmonds after acknowledging ‘the wisdom and justice of the sentence which had sent him out of his life’ and praising the fact that he, even though ‘through an evil deed [hanging,] had been ushered into a better and happier state than that which he occupied while here’ (Edmonds and Dexter [1853] 1854: 236). Surely no earthly rehabilitation system could possibly effect such an effective and grateful conversion.12 One might be tempted to dismiss this mawkish and almost masochistic scene of the worm thanking the boot as simply the contrivance of a canny medium, Dexter, all too aware of the guilty conscience of his morally conflicted listener. Edmonds was, after all, in an incredibly rare position within the American Spiritualist community: as his faith called on him to embrace an anti-eschatological vision of the life everlasting, so his profession as state judge put him in a position to punitively sentence individuals to death. No small amount of equivocation must have been required to maintain these competing identities. Yet while these circumstances may explain the specific motivations for Edmonds’s thanatorehabilitationist logic, they cannot account for its persistence in other Spiritualist genres, most notably in its crime and mystery fiction. Here thanato-rehabilitationism emerges less as a potentially guilt-driven retrospective compromise, and more as a moral and even political ideal. We see this positioning in W.A. Carlile’s The Mysteries of Ravenswood, a socialist psychical mystery story serialised in the Manchester Spiritualist periodical The Two Worlds in 1893. Doubtlessly inspired by the popularity of preternaturally gifted fictional detectives Sherlock Holmes and his predecessor Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), the narrative presents the first-person recollections of aged country gentleman Colonel Marston as he describes the mysterious events that decades earlier effected his Damascene conversion from aristocratic conservative to socialist Spiritualist. One day, Marston’s son Harry disappeared just after being seen standing on a cliff with his cousin and love interest Clara. She and her dissolute brother Frank have lived with the Marstons since their father was killed in a battle with anticolonial Indian tribesmen. Detectives are called in, and soon suspicion

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falls on Clara, whose seeming guilt is exacerbated by her denial of the plain evidence of her appearance on the cliff that day. Luckily, the examining detective and the doctor are no ordinary professionals, but rather students of the psychic sciences who quickly identify an alternative explanation for Clara’s apparent subterfuge and subsequent nervous collapse. Echoing Gurney, Myers and Podmore’s psychical research classic Phantasms of the Living (1886), Doctor Leyburn suggests that Clara has an astral double which has been projecting itself around the estate while she herself lies fevered in bed. Sergeant Starleigh, also a Spiritualist believer, later supplements this hypothesis by suggesting that on the morning of the disappearance it was a mesmerised Clara, rather than her astral double, who appeared on the cliff and pushed Harry over the edge against her will. Both men are proven correct. Clara was indeed hypnotised by her evil and calculating brother Frank, an unrepentant thief and head of a gang of local forgers; Harry survived, but stole away from the scene in despair at the thought that his lover had tried to kill him. The Spiritualist explanation solves the mystery and answers Harry’s doubts about his lover’s fidelity, while psychic criminological methods allow Starleigh to identify the true culprit. The wicked Frank dies in a fall from his cliff-side lair before he can be apprehended, and Clara and Harry are free to marry and continue the Marston family line. As plots go, this one is random and often incoherent, but these limitations are obviously beside the point; the serialised tale was clearly never intended to be much more than a vehicle for the pervasive socialist propaganda that functions as its true heart. Throughout the narrative, episodes of dramatic narrative action are repeatedly interrupted by Marston’s late-dawning reflections on the plight of the proletariat. Thus when he climbs down the cliff in search of his son’s corpse, he recollects that it was at that spot some years earlier where a poacher fell to his death while evading the groundskeeper: ‘Ever since then, I had a feeling that I saved pheasants for my own killing at the expense of a man’s life’ (Carlile 1893: 291). Henry’s disappearance soon comes to figure less as a source of mystery than a type of under-class karmic revenge, a deferred payment for years of exploitation and casual violence perpetuated by his father. Even the very furnishings of the house become complicit in this process of retribution. Struck for the first time by the bloody provenance of the colonial war trophies displayed on his study wall, Marston reflects that ‘each captured blade stood for a man’s life’ (305). Marston’s conversion is not complete, however, until his domestic service staff abandon him en masse in the wake of the events, provoking from Doctor Leyburn a chiding lecture on the alienation of labour under capitalism. Marston then speculates:

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Can it be true that I am rich only because [the coachman] and his class are poor? If I and my order enrich ourselves at the expense of the workers who produce all the nation’s wealth, is it not inexpressibly mean of us to expect gratitude when we throw them a few crumbs of what they themselves have propagated? (Carlile 1893: 387)

This dawning moment of class-consciousness, more welcome for its long deferral, is ultimately rewarded with the restoration of the family’s name. For all of The Mysteries of Ravenswood’s radical insights on the economically and ideologically produced nature of class and colonial inequity, however, one subgroup remains irreparably abject – that of the criminal class, as personified by Frank Marston. Perhaps this incorrigibility stems from the fact that he represents less a class than an ingrained biotype, his large-scale swindling operation, in contrast to the justified minor pilfering of the proletariat, the result of atavistic bad blood. Such is Marston’s suspicion about his nephew in the serial’s first number, and this conviction remains intact at its close. No counter-hypothesis ever appears to Marston’s initial reflection that ‘in [Frank] a strain of bad blood had manifested itself [. . .] I sometimes thought that in Frank there must have been a reversion to some disagreeable ancestor, but who it was I could never find out’ (Carlile 1893: 279). In such cases of hereditary recapitulation, even the revolutionary overthrow of the class system touted obsessively throughout the narrative can do nothing. There is only one solution, and Frank finds it by hurtling unexpectedly over the edge of the cliff. Marston’s response to this death is ultimately one of relief and happiness, both feelings ushered in by his newfound Spiritualist conviction that the higher spheres will cleanse Frank of his criminal stigmata. Thanking his proselytiser Doctor Leyburn, he remarks: You have given me a glimpse of a great and glorious philosophy, and the sight has brought peace and light to my soul. I will therefore grieve no more for Frank, for wherever he may be he is in the place that is best for him. (Carlile 1893: 593)

In The Mysteries of Ravenswood, a story explicitly targeted at The Two World’s socialist Spiritualist audience, workers and aristocrats may find redemption through social transformation, but not born criminals. For them there is only a celestial penitentiary whose sometimes-violent admission procedures need trouble no earth-bound consciences. Carlile’s attempted synthesis of biocriminological, socialist and Spiritualist utopian worldviews becomes with sinister ease an apologia for the therapeutics of death.

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Yet more strained in its efforts to merge thanato-rehabilitationism with class reform is Florence Marryat’s 1896 Spiritualist thriller, The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs. Like The Mysteries of Ravenswood, it features a highly derivative plot, one whose most recognisable antecedent is George Du Maurier’s phenomenally successful Trilby (1894). Indeed, Marryat’s novel provides a pointed example of the ability of inventive Spiritualist writers to appropriate and exploit popular fictional archetypes to suit their own religious ends. Its eponymous heroine is a simple-minded, thick-bodied and clumsy servant girl who works in the lodgings of the reclusive Italian refugee Professor Ricardo, and shares none of the graces or anatomical distinctions of her fictional prototype Trilby O’Ferrall. Hannah’s ability, unwanted and terrifying to her, to catalyse poltergeist phenomena draws her to the attention of the brooding Italian scholar who has spent years in occult study trying to renew contact with his former wife Leonora d’Asissi whom he murdered years earlier in a jealous rage. Now believing his marital suspicions to have been unjustified, Ricardo, along with his German friend and confederate Doctor Steinberg, begins to use Hannah as means of channelling and seeking forgiveness from Leonora. The remainder of the narrative provides a cautionary tale on the dangers of such a mercenary endeavour. Hannah’s untutored mind and supine body make her an easy target for Leonora’s villainous spirit, which returns not to offer forgiveness but to wreak havoc. Once in secure possession of Hannah’s body, Leonora marries and then poisons Ricardo before setting her amorous ambitions on Steinberg; he, discovering her crimes through the spiritual agency of his newly dead friend, attempts to incriminate and then exorcise her. A struggle ensues, and Hannah/Leonora falls down the stairs and sustains fatal injuries. Released by violence from her possessing demon, the former servant lingers just long enough to resume her rustic speech patterns and recognise the spirit of her mother as she arrives to guide her daughter to the other side. With Hannah dead, and Leonora exorcised with almost comic ease – all Steinberg has to do is call on God’s help for her spirit to screech and disappear – the stain of murder is finally expunged, albeit at a horrible cost. Hannah Stubbs is not obviously modelled on Lombroso’s biocriminal type, although she shares with the male version of the latter a distinctly bestial cast. To Ricardo, she is ‘a simple piece of clay – a heifer newly driven from pasture – an animal with all her senses undeveloped’ (Marryat 1896: 26); to his friend Steinberg, ‘an animal, with grand vitality and perhaps magnetism – with any amount of bodily strength and no brain’ (Marryat 1896: 47). The narrator, although condemnatory of the men’s experiments, nonetheless shares these judgements,

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explaining Hannah’s consent to accept sweets and alcohol as bribes for participation in their scandalous private seances on the basis that ‘she was thoroughly sensual, and the good things before her appealed to her senses much more than the honour of being asked to take a chair in the presence of gentlemen’ (Marryat 1896: 73–4). The fact that Hannah is not a devious innate offender, but rather a lumpish, dim and childlike manual labourer makes her not less, but rather more, dangerous from the vantage of the novel’s cosmic criminological perspective. So constituted, she is just as unable to repel the domineering influence of Leonora d’Asissi than the innate offender is to resist his or her urgent anti-social impulses. Hannah’s rudimentary physiology renders her an easily occupiable space for mercenary spirits. Although not born a criminal, she is nonetheless perfectly bioadapted to host such subjects’ posthumous killer instincts. In focusing on the enduring danger of the disembodied murderer – in this case, Leonora – The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs seems written in clear ideological sympathy with the general Spiritualist argument against capital punishment, and indeed, all forms of violent death. After all, when the fiendish Leonora is finally confronted with her crimes, she provides a rationale identical to the one typically attributed by Spiritualists to executed convict spirits. She has returned, she explains to Steinberg, [b]ecause I am no longer able to commit crimes for myself – because the execution gives me a reflected satisfaction – because, above all, my thirst for revenge was ungratified, and I longed to make Sorrento [Ricardo] feel the same misery he had inflicted upon me! That is why I returned, not to earth, for I have never left it, but to a human body, and if you wish to know who helped me to it, it was yourself. (Marryat 1896: 320, original emphasis)

A single act of murder, Marryat suggests, reproduces itself through cosmic time; the best treatment for a violent recidivist like Leonora would thus seem to be to keep her alive for as long as possible and extend her opportunity to reform in earth-life. But the novel’s great irony lies in its refusal to extend the same provision to its working-class criminal vehicle, Hannah Stubbs. Once her possession is over, her death becomes structurally necessary: she reverts to her original state of childlike naïveté, loses all of the cultural acquisitions and indeed memories she gained during her period of supernatural bildung, and hastens rapidly towards a demise presented as a form of benediction. As in the case of Carlile’s degenerate Frank Marston, Hannah’s death features as a merciful and necessary route into an otherwise inaccessible sphere of progress. Retaining to the last the disdainful vocabulary of Ricardo and

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Steinberg, the narrator declaims in the text’s final line, ‘Poor, ignorant, innocent Hannah Stubbs! Stupid, plain, and uninteresting, as she came from His hand, she returned to her Creator, to be beautified and refined and enlightened, under the process of her Father’s love!’ (Marryat 1896: 339). Marryat would repeat the same ending scenario years later when describing the death of her protagonist Harriet Brandt in The Blood of the Vampire, published in the great anno vampire of 1897. Brandt, the illegitimate daughter of a sadistic vivisector and his vampire batbitten, mixed-race lover, realises too late that her cursed inheritance causes her to unconsciously enervate and ultimately kill all those to whom she shows affection. After the death of her beloved new husband Anthony Pennell, she takes poison and leaves a note which reads: ‘My parents have made me unfit to live. Let me go to a world where the curse of heredity which they laid upon me may mercifully be wiped out’ (Marryat [1897] 2010: 187). For Marryat’s hapless homicidal vehicles – whether dull-witted and rough-hewn working-class mediums like Hannah Stubbs, or hereditarily poisoned parasites like Harriet Brandt – post-life treatment becomes the only viable and ethical means of rehabilitation. If their crimes are not of their choosing, all the more reason to quickly speed them into a realm where they might gain aesthetic beauty and moral agency simultaneously.

From Thanato-Rehabilitationism to Regeneration: Criminal Man as Species Saviour The examples of Spiritualist criminological discourse we have considered thus far might seem to confirm some of the twentieth and twentyfirst century’s darkest assessments of the social and political stakes of biocriminology. Despite the undoubtedly earnest humanitarian agenda of its heterodox adopters, biocriminology functions time and time again in these examples of nineteenth-century Spiritualist writing as a dangerously resigned and apolitical hermeneutic paradigm, creating a discourse which, after paying initial lip service to the power of self-improvement and environmental reform, works to minimise or under-emphasise the economic catalysts to crime, to deny the individual agency of the offender, and to imagine a now-stingless death as the most ethical and indeed pragmatic treatment for the recidivist criminal. Were we to stop here, we would be left with a grim picture indeed of the ideological work of Spiritualist biocriminology. In this final section, I want to move beyond this pessimistic picture by focusing on a simultaneously emergent Spiritualist counter-discourse to the sustaining rhetoric of

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thanato-rehabilitationism. In it, the foundational assumptions of biocriminology are employed, not to stigmatise and evoke sympathy for an offender whose only hope lies in death, but rather to imagine the criminal type as an improvisational regenerator of the human species, one whose extinction would come at the cost of great peril to the non-criminal majority. This degenerationist utopianism is one that, fascinatingly, finds its apogee in the writing of the Spiritualist convert typically associated with its biofatalistic opposite: Cesare Lombroso. Often – if never, as noted earlier in the chapter, entirely accurately – associated only with the reactionary and anti-environmentalist strand of nineteenth-century biocriminology which runs through so much Spiritualist writing, Lombroso was also the father of a unique evolutionarily utilitarian theory of crime, one that he refined further through his work with mediums. Put simply, he came to believe that the born criminal, far from pulling the race backwards towards a state of primitive lawlessness, might through his stigmata of deviance lead humanity to a hitherto unimaginable level of social and intellectual progress. Lombroso’s interest in the progressive evolutionary efficacy of the criminal type predates his conversion to Spiritualism, although it arguably found its highest expression in his new faith. It is well known that the Italian’s commitment to criminal anthropology had, by the end of the century, led him into a partial and contemporarily unpopular support for the death penalty;13 less publicised, to his anglophone readers at least, was his concurrent belief in civilisation’s dependence on crime for its own futurity. Remarkably, he argued for these seemingly antithetical positions – that society both needs, and yet must eliminate, the born criminal – in the same place: the final edition of Criminal Man from 1896. In that volume’s conclusion, Lombroso proposes: The organic anomalies of criminals counter the misoneism or fear of innovation that typifies normal individuals. Therefore criminals see more clearly than average men the defects of current governments. Their desire for change, coupled with their impulsiveness and inclination to do wrong, pushes criminals to the forefront of revolutions. Their crimes reveal the same innovative spirit as characterizes many revolutionaries, and while occasionally harming many to the advantage of a few, they introduce significant innovation. (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 352)

Quick to hedge the potentially dangerous implications of this admission, he immediately adds that this use-value should not cause criminality to be tolerated or even encouraged. But it should and could, he continued, lead to ‘less severe methods for preventing and punishing lawbreaking’ (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 354), including those that ‘[channel]’ the ‘fervour for goodness and justice’ of politically motivated rather

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than simply atavistic criminals into ‘ambitious, altruistic works’ (355). ‘Perhaps’, he concludes, ‘only the eruptions of moral enthusiasm that animate real criminals of passion and political criminals are capable of waking the apathetic masses of humanity to a new and useful future’ (355). The language of Gibson and Rafter’s graceful translation is here irresistibly suggestive to the student of Lombroso’s later Spiritualist writing. With the right ‘channel’, deviance and criminality could be converted into the gold of cultural advancement and freedom from tyrannical governance. In Eusapia Paladino, Lombroso found his perfect channel. He began sitting with the extraordinary Italian peasant woman in 1892 at the height of his notoriety as a criminal anthropologist, attending seances with a distinguished coterie of Europe’s contemporary scientific elect which included Charles Richet, Giovanni Ermacora and Charles du Prel.14 Although his Spiritualist investigations began while he was still revising and issuing new versions of Criminal Man, they found no place in it, appearing extensively in print only after his death, in the posthumously published Ricerche Sui Fenomeni Ipnotici e Spiritici (1909) (printed simultaneously in English as After Death—What?). Paladino was one of the most renowned and accomplished mediums of her age, able to produce a wide range of spectacular phenomena (including levitation and materialisation); she was, however, also a skilled cheat who was caught repeatedly in the act of faking manifestations and who publicly admitted her fraudulence in 1910 (Brandon 1983: 133; Pearsall [1972] 2004: 224). Remarkably, Lombroso was by no means oblivious to these deceitful tendencies; in fact, he blithely acknowledges them in After Death—What?, noting in a gently admonishing tone: Many are the crafty tricks she plays, both in the state of trance (unconsciously) and out of it, – for example, freeing one of her two hands held by controllers, for the sake of moving objects near to her; making touches; slowly lifting the legs of the table by means of one of her knees and one of her feet. (Lombroso [1909] 1988: 102)

Despite this awareness, he remained able to exempt Paladino from blame while retaining an unquestioned faith in her mediumistic authenticity by recognising in her the same quality that he had, in the first edition of Criminal Man, diagnosed in the brigand Villela’s skull ([1876–96] 2006: 46): biological impulsion. If Criminal Man had represented Lombroso’s attempt to posit a natural history of the male bio-offending type, then his final work aimed to formulate a natural history of the criminal medium. In his hands, the two identities are made to share an extraordinarily common

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set of biomarkers, pathologies and hereditary precedents. Lombroso’s painstaking descriptions of his extensive sessions with Paladino not only document her physical and psychological characteristics with the same scrupulously taxonomic detail previously applied to his convict subjects, but they also locate in her many of the same somatic conditions. Thus, after a battery of biometric measurements and medical tests, which included recording Paladino’s weight, cranial shape, menstrual cycle, and uric colour and composition, Lombroso concluded that she evinced the epileptic character typical of the born criminal. He had clarified this symptomology in the fourth edition of Criminal Man, concluding that ‘the inexorable weight of statistics confirms the family relationship – indeed the unity – of criminality, moral insanity, and epilepsy’ (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 257). The force and implications of this established affinity must have struck Lombroso when he recognised in Paladino a ‘left eye present[ing] the phenomenon of Claude Bernard Hörner, as in epileptics’ (Lombroso [1909] 1988: 103), and ‘an asymmetry in arterial pressure that is common in epileptics’ (106). From this, Lombroso deduced that Paladino’s epileptic symptoms, instead of being anomalous within the profession of mediumship, were, as ancient and contemporary primitive societies knew, generalisable to the entire class. He concludes: The pathological, epilepsoid origin of the medium is attested by the universal consensus of all ancient and barbarous peoples – a consensus carried to the point of adoration of epilepsy and to the artificial creation of epileptics in order thereby to secure a prophet, who is the genius of primitive peoples. (Lombroso [1909] 1988: 155)

If After Death—What? never quite calls for the worship of Eusapia Paladino as a criminal epilepsoid saint, it does work to rewrite her somatic degeneracy for socially and morally productive ends. The defective constitution which drove her tendency to trick and lie to her sitters also – in a paradox that Lombroso swallowed whole without any seeming doubt – produced her very real ability to contact the dead and provide comfort to the grieving. As such, Lombroso’s supernatural cosmology does not evince the maudlin pity for born criminality demonstrated by so many of his co-believers, including Arthur Conan Doyle who would a decade later challenge his readers in The Vital Message to ‘imagine that Providence, all-wise and all-merciful [. . .] could punish the unfortunate wretch who hatches criminal thoughts behind the slanting brows of a criminal head?’ (Doyle 1919: 87). Such a treatment, implied Doyle, would be impossible. He continues:

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In its worst forms all crime, from Nero to Jack the Ripper, is the product of absolute lunacy [. . .] one could well imagine that the man whose organic make-up predisposed him with irresistible force in that direction should, in justice, receive condolence and sympathy. (Doyle 1919: 87–8)

By contrast, Lombroso’s epileptic criminals did not need to wait for the afterlife to receive proper restitution; they could be put to work, and given social authority, in the here and now. Without the pathological, asymmetrical and hysterical bodies of the medium class, Lombroso suggested, there would be no new age; the dead would have no vocal conduit or physical medium for their materialisation. For indeed, he believed that the spirit forms that manifested in seance rooms were comprised, not of their own ethereal essence, but of the actual flesh and physical particles they borrowed from their often pathologically defective mediums. He counsels investigators to realise that: the body of the spectral appearance is formed at the expense of the psychic, and the matter is confirmed by the circumstance that in the first materializations of mediums many of the phantasms they evoke bear a certain resemblance to the face or the limbs of the medium [. . .] something which must have fostered still further the suspicion as to trickery or deceit. (Lombroso [1909] 1988: 120)

While contemporary non-believers might be amused by the extent of Lombroso’s apparent credulity here – his refusal to consider the strong possibility that spirits looked like their mediums because they frequently were them in disguise, as numerous spirit-grabbing exposures had proven – we also need to recognise the importance of this implicit reorientation of Spiritualist biocriminology’s mandate. The seance room became for Lombroso, not a place in which to pity incorrigible defectives, or for mawkish displays of gratitude from the gratefully executed, but rather a site in which the born criminal could exercise her or his world-regenerating genius. In championing the cheating, epilepsoid Paladino and others like her, Lombroso attempted to merge a new and more viable conciliation between Spiritualism and criminology than had hitherto been achieved or imagined. If spirits could not or would not detect criminals, for any number of reasons – because of the unjust nature of earthly judicial systems, the insufficiently skilled nature of the communicating medium, or the tendency of such a supernaturally assisted forensic system to induce laziness in earthly police forces15 – then born criminals might detect spirits, might be transformed, via their eccentric somatic and hereditary features, into superlative visionaries whose spectacular

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seance phenomena could convince even the most hardened sceptic. Without defect, there could be no access to social innovation and spiritual revelation – no progress without the organic anomalies of criminals, no higher knowledge without the slanted brows, bulging eyes and epileptic tremors of the natural seer. Spiritualist eugenics had, in this system, necessarily to fail, for if it succeeded in its putative goal of eradicating the criminal type, it would eliminate the means of the movement’s revelation. In embracing mediums whose bodies, minds and characters marked them as degenerate and pathological, Lombroso succeeded both in confirming the utilitarian model of deviance asserted at the end of his masterwork Criminal Man and in superseding, if only partially, the thanato-rehabilitationist and eugenic impulses of the heterodox faith system in which he was newly immersed. As we turn now to our final chapter, it is time to consider another kind of unstable and potentially revolutionary Spiritualist medium: the literary text. We shall see how imaginative literature functioned within Anglo-American Spiritualism not only as a disseminative vehicle for the various strands of spiritualist eugenic ideology we have traced thus far, but also as their object, a form of creative expression intimately linked to the biological processes and evolutionary histories of its producers and readers. As such, Spiritualist literary criticism warrants examination as a supernaturalist forebear to evolutionary psychology and contemporary bioaesthetics, one which interrogated the evolutionary function of creativity and the fate of artistic individuality when no longer limited to the temporal span of the human life cycle. Anglo-American Spiritualism produced a host of thinkers and critics who were as dedicated to the reform of traditional supernatural literary genres as to that of human beings. Now that we have achieved an understanding of the depth, breadth and complexity of the movement’s biodeterministic ethos, we can begin to appreciate the import of its efforts to improve literary type in tandem with human type.

Notes 1. For more on the use of psychics in contemporary American policing, see Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi’s The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime (1991), H. Rachlin’s ‘Psychics and Police Work’ (1993), Hibbard et al.’s Psychic Criminology: A Guide for Using Psychics in Investigations (2002) and Liz Martinez’s ‘Looking into the Crystal Ball’ (2004). As Martinez notes, ‘many police agencies refuse to work with psychics – or if they do, they keep the fact deeply buried’ (Martinez 2004: 54). 2. See in particular the groundbreaking and field-redefining work of Nicole

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

Determined Spirits Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson, who in 2006 published the first complete English translation of all five editions of Lombroso’s Criminal Man. Other key recent interventions in the study of criminal anthropology include Gibson’s Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminality (2002), David Horn’s The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (2003), Neil Davie’s Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860–1918 (2005), and Rafter’s The Criminal Brain (2008) and The Origins of Criminology (2009). This is not to suggest that some Victorian mediums did not claim, usually retrospectively, to have successfully solved certain mysteries through spirit contact; indeed, many did, but the evidence for such ‘solves’ remains vague and anecdotal rather than precise and externally attested. The scientific testing of forensic psychic ability – rather than of telekinesis or psychometry – has been more consistently pursued in the mid-twentieth century than in the nineteenth. See Lyons and Truzzi 1991 for more on the growth of contemporary psychic forensics. The claim that Lees successfully solved the Ripper case by directing detectives to the house of an eminent surgeon, later reputed to be royal physician Sir William Gull, was first proposed by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976) and has since featured in a number of fictional treatments of the case, including Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999). Despite its popularity, the story of Lees’ apparent discovery and its supposed subsequent cover-up by the Royal Family remains largely discredited. For full details, see Begg et al.’s The Jack the Ripper A–Z (1991). As Maurizio Ascari has argued, many pseudo-rationalistic works of Victorian crime fiction work to re-sacralise judgement by importing supernatural motifs and occult techniques into the detection process (Ascari 2007: 55–6). Nicole Hahn Rafter notes that the warm American reception accorded to Criminal Man acted as consolation to Lombroso in the wake of British hostility: ‘Beset by European critics, Lombroso took comfort in his “almost fanatical” US following’ (Rafter 1992: 541) Lombroso explains his concept of the correct application of capital punishment in the fifth and final edition of Criminal Man (1896), affirming that ‘When criminals repeat bloodthirsty crimes for the third or fourth time – despite being punished by incarceration, deportation, and forced labour – there is no choice but to resort to that extreme form of natural selection, death’ (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 348). But, he adds, ‘Maintaining the death sentence does not mean using it. It is sufficient that it should be suspended like the sword of Damocles over the most terrible criminals, those who have attempted to kill innocent people. This removes the last justifiable objection to capital punishment, that it is irreparable’ (348). See Gibson and Rafter 2006: 15–21. Lombroso explains the injustice of rationalist jurisprudence in the first volume of Criminal Man as such: ‘legislators, believing exceptions to free will to be rare, ignore the advice of psychiatrists and prison officials. They do not understand that most criminals really do lack free will’ (Lombroso [1876–96–7] 2006: 43). This passage is particularly important for its dem-

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

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onstration of Lombroso’s uncertainty of the extent of born criminality; although he regularly presented born criminals as a minority of the offender population (somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent), here he suggests that lack of free will characterises ‘most’ criminals in general. See Hood and Hoyle 2008: 46, 115. As they note, despite the outstanding legality of capital punishment in thirty-seven out of fifty states, its application has become increasingly rare since 2000, partly due to lack of support within the justice system and to an ‘improvement in the quality of defense counsel, the exclusion of juveniles and the mentally retarded, and the spread of life without the prospect of parole’ (115). Although rare, pro-death penalty positions are by no means entirely absent in the Victorian Spiritualist press. For an example, see J.W. Jackson’s ‘Capital Punishment’ in the October 1872 issue of Human Nature. Speaking of the general Spiritualist support for abolition, he complains, ‘Our philanthropy is very maudlin. We don’t believe in the unavoidable penalties of crime, and as a necessary corollary into the false premise, we virtually fondle sin and pet iniquity. Our chosen hero is not the man who struggles victoriously with temptation, but rather he who weakly succumbs to it’ (Jackson 1872: 454). Regardless of how we may feel about Jackson’s untroubled support for an even then unpopular penalty, his critique of Spiritualist abolition – that lenience to the offender could only be purchased at the cost of his free will – seems largely justified. For further instances of this sentiment in the movement’s afterlife writing, see the pseudonymous Life Beyond the Grave, Described by a Spirit through a Writing Medium, attributed to ‘A Spirit’ and published by E.W. Allen in 1877. Its communicating spirit claims: ‘Paupers and criminals have everything to gain by the change from one world to the other. They have nothing to lose, and they leave nothing behind with regret; on the contrary, it would be a happy release for most of them to be free from the necessity of supplying the needs of the body, had they not to supply the needs of the spirit indeed’ (‘A Spirit’ 1877: 98). See Gibson and Rafter 2006: 15. Italy had abolished capital punishment in 1889, so Lombroso’s support for its restricted application (to only the most violent and dangerous criminals) in the final edition of Criminal Man went decidedly against the majority position in his home country, although it would have seemed far less controversial in Great Britain and the United States. See chapter 2 – ‘Experiments with Eusapia’ – of Lombroso’s After Death— What? ([1909] 1988) for a full description of the participants and test conditions. This risk is anticipated in an 1888 Two Worlds article on the Jack the Ripper murders, which warns that if spirits were to become detectives: ‘the result would be that earthly institutions would cease to be necessary; human beings would become automata, waiting upon the spirit world to do their work for them, whilst the toiling, suffering spirits of humanity would simply be liberated from the martyrdom of earthly existence to become a spiritual Scotland Yard, form a detective force for earth, and spend their eternity in doing for man what man ought to do for himself’ (‘The London Tragedies’ 1888: 618).

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Chapter 6

Dead Letters: Bioaesthetics and the New Realism in Fin-de-Siècle Spiritualism

The Literary Ghost and the Aesthetic Contract In her influential account of the rise of British supernatural fiction, E.J. Clery contends that the literary ghost only obtained a stable, even prominent, position in the eighteenth-century fiction market through a series of negotiated concessions.1 Chief among these was its abandonment of any aspirations to the status of the ontological real. Positioned outside the purview of empiricism and narrative realism alike, the literary spectre moved into an autonomous aesthetic space in which it apparently remained for the duration of the nineteenth century, functioning not as a figure of mimesis, but as a catalyst for affect. Clery observes: Within the regime of the aesthetic the ghost-seer could abandon her or himself to the voluntary flux of sensation, untroubled by the need to judge the perceived object by the standard of truth [. . .] the significance of the spectre [was] to be determined by the quality and intensity of the feeling it arouse[d]. (Clery 1995: 46)

In this account, the question of the ghost’s authenticity became for Enlightenment readers a pesky impediment to its aesthetic contemplation; once it had been dispensed with, they were able to experience in the ghost story a perfect form of negative capability, revelling in the spectre’s evocation of beauty and terror without any philistinic grasping after evidence of its reality. If Clery is correct, then the very conditions that inaugurated the popular ascension of the literary ghost story in Britain rendered it inimical to the modern Spiritualist movement. Any of the ghost story’s benefits to the new movement would thus have been quickly overshadowed by its formidable detriments; if the genre had initiated a popular taste for the supernatural that Spiritualist writers and performers could exploit, it had also relegated the tenets of their faith to the realm of the literary fantastic. Spiritualist believers from

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the mid-nineteenth century onwards knew that if their movement were to succeed, it would need to transform not only conventional religious beliefs and practices, but also – no less importantly – aesthetic conventions and genre expectations as well. No longer an autonomous, distant and ontologically deferred object of aesthetic meditation, the spectre would have to become a viable subject for realist literary narration. The reification of the spectral was not the sole ambition or effect of nineteenth-century Spiritualist literary reform efforts that this chapter will trace, but it was the one from which many of their subsidiary goals followed. In liberating the spectre from the distanced Palace of Art, nineteenth-century Spiritualist writers also hoped to assuage the anxieties that, according to Sasha Handley, drove its eighteenthcentury aestheticisation in the first place: namely, the fear of death and decomposition newly exacerbated by Enlightenment-era secularisation. Commenting on the earlier period, she suggests: The aestheticization of ghosts [. . .] indicates that a process of abjection may have been underway in these years [. . .] the displacement of the human corpse or ghost was a prime example of abjection, because images of decay and dissolution represented traumatic reminders of individual mortality. The treatment of ghosts by the Graveyard poets and in Gothic fictions reminded readers of this inevitability, while diluting the harsh reality of death by projecting ghosts into a fictional or imaginative space. (Handley 2007: 122, original emphasis)

The less real and more extravagantly aesthetic the ghost, in other words, the less terrifying mortality. While some might question the logic of this imputed historical episode of abjection – surely, if one were terrified by the prospect of personal extinction, one would want the ghost to seem more rather than less real – it nonetheless provides a useful conceptual counterpoint through which to bring the ideological goals of Spiritualist literary aesthetics into relief. In Spiritualist fiction, the ghost would, by becoming real(ist), reverse an abjectification process initiated at least half a century earlier, bringing death back into the fold of human experience by representing it not as the end of the human life cycle but as merely one further chapter in its evolution. Here the techniques of literary realism would work to biologise the ghost, positioning it not as a fanciful contrivance, but rather as an inevitable stage in the human developmental process. This analogy between biology and realism, here merely suggestive, nonetheless allows us to anticipate the affinity between Spiritualist aesthetics and the scientifically aspirational versions of literary realism – specifically French naturalism – that arose at the fin-de-siècle and whose existence we will later trace in the pages of the Spiritualist press. Before evidencing and analysing this striking affinity

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between Victorian Spiritualist aesthetics and the ambitions of the new realism, however, I want first to address why realist experimentation should for so long, despite its pervasive presence, have remained one of the least examined dimensions of the movement’s literary impact.

Spiritualist Literary Aesthetics and Post/Modernism: An Exercise in Myth Building In this book’s introduction, we encountered Daniel Cottom’s brash dismissal of nineteenth-century Spiritualist philosophy on the basis that ‘what this movement had to say of spirits was practically insignificant in comparison to the practices that composed its saying’ (Cottom 1991: 109). The perils of this evasion, which stubbornly privileges form over content and retrospective high cultural resonance over originary formulation, are well demonstrated in the burgeoning scholarship on transatlantic Spiritualism and literature that have emerged since the 1970s. Howard Kerr’s landmark study Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900 (1973) is exemplary in this respect. With a title that clearly demarcates its two subjects as separate – Spiritualism is to be considered when it appears in, but not as, American literature – Kerr posits the relationship between popular and canonical nineteenth-century American literature and Spiritualism as largely unidirectional. After only a brief acknowledgement of the movement’s own channelled literary productions, he focuses on Spiritualism’s appropriation as literary fodder by a variety of largely canonical, non-Spiritualist writers, including James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howells. In these authors’ works, modern Spiritualism features alternately as subject for satirical deflation, occult fantasy or realist critique, but never as a site for legitimate aesthetic production, reception and debate. As such, the only relationship between nineteenth-century American realism and Spiritualism that Kerr’s study is capable of imagining is one of enduring suspicion. ‘[M]ost American writers’, he concludes, ‘whatever their particular responses to the movement, had been critical to some degree’, even though their work had been ‘inspired by [. . .] figures of importance in the movement’s history – the Fox sisters, Eliakim Phelps, Andrew Jackson Davis, Judge John Edmonds, Thomas Lake Harris, Robert Dale Owen, Ada Hoyt Foye, John V. Mansfield, Victoria Woodhull, and Cora L.V. Hatch’ (Kerr 1973: 221–2). Kerr separates his subjects into neat and distinct constituencies, with the mediums, despite their combined production of a prodigious body of

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genre-spanning literature,2 quarantined from the category of ‘American writers’ and confined to the role of inspirational muses able to provide raw material for, but not comprehension of or response to, the major literary genres and developments of their day. Such a divisive approach implicitly replicates the judgement of American novelist John Hay’s 1883 novel The Bread-Winners: ‘To people like the ordinary run of believers in spiritism, the opera, the ballet, and the annual Zola are unknown, and they must take their excitements where they can find them’ (Hay [1883] 1901). Yet as their own expansive body of literary criticism makes clear, many British and American Spiritualists were no less cognisant of and responsive to the ideas of Émile Zola than they were to those, as we have seen in previous chapters, of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton or Cesare Lombroso. Kerr’s disavowal of the potential affinities between Spiritualist aesthetics and literary realism has fuelled what remains today the most common critical assessment of the movement’s writing culture and practices: namely, that modern Spiritualism represents an early manifestation of the avant-garde and anti-realist impulses that would coalesce in surrealism and postmodernism. This interpretation, although sometimes persuasive in reference to specific Spiritualist works, falters when generalised to the entire late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spiritualist corpus, and often directly contradicts the most commonly expressed positions on literary value and function within the movement’s late-century press. It can also take considerable historical licence in its effort to fuse the chronology of modern Spiritualism with the advent of the formally innovative and self-conscious aesthetic strategies apparently unique to canonical high modernism. Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism (2002) provides a telling case in point here. Compelling in its appraisal of the Spiritualist resonances of key modernist works such as Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and The Wasteland, Sword’s analysis stumbles when it tries to corral Spiritualist aesthetic criticism and experimentation within the early twentieth-century modernist period, suggesting that ‘whereas nineteenth-century mediums pursued a primarily religious and domestic agenda [. . .] modernist era mediums pursued instead an intellectual one’ (Sword 2002: 13). Apparently unlike their Victorian precedents, modernist-era otherworldly narratives are claimed to be philosophically searching, meta-textual and politically invested (11–12).3 Readers who have followed our study thus far will recognise that absolutely none of these characteristics are unique to the Spiritualist writing of the modernist era alone; equally, they will be unconvinced by the suggestion that Spiritualist writing only became intellectual in or about 1910. Sword evidences an all too common critical desire to

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appropriate everything that seems aesthetically interesting or self-aware about Spiritualist writing for the modernist period alone, one that occasionally leads to fundamental factual error. For example, describing the universal language projects of several leading Spiritualist figures, she states, ‘In the late nineteenth century, many prominent Spiritualists – among them Charles Beecher, Robert Owen, and Victoria Woodhull – were deeply involved in language reform movements’ (20). Robert Owen was indeed interested in language reform, but given his death in 1858, this involvement can hardly be dated to the heady proto-modernist days of the fin de siècle, unless the critic partakes of the Spiritualist hypothesis herself. Spiritualism’s experimental literary ambitions were not limited to either the conventional historical parameters or aesthetic signatures of high modernism. If Sword over-polarises the distinction between Victorian and modernist Spiritualism, reducing it into a hierarchical binary of the unintellectual and the intellectual, other critics have eschewed the possibility of a self-aware Spiritualist aesthetic practice altogether. I speak here of Daniel Cottom, whose Abyss of Reason (1991) is a magisterial and highly influential study of the anticipatory contribution of two different cultural movements – Spiritualism and surrealism – to the poststructuralist critique of logocentrism and Enlightenment rationality. Like Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism, which it clearly inspired, this is an investigation of Spiritualist writing that views its subject largely through an anachronistic theoretical lens. Cottom freely admits to having little concern with the origins and growth of modern Spiritualism (Cottom 1991: 21); his true object of inquiry, he explains, is the movement’s ‘suggestiveness’ to later cultural movements and, indeed, to the deconstructionist critic. Among Spiritualism’s many ‘suggestions’, Cottom posits, was the idea ‘that reason had been oversold’ (15) and ‘that words are never entirely present or self-evident [. . .] that communication is always interpretation that is subject to irreducible uncertainties’ (55). These ideas are in turn said to account for the movement’s alleged subversion of ‘positivism and its fellow traveller, the aesthetics of realism’, and thus ‘the forms of art that were privileged in their day’ (6). These statements, I suggest, present misleading views of both Spiritualist ontology and the complexity of nineteenth-century realism. While it is certainly true that many Spiritualist works implicitly expose rationality and authority as arbitrary categories, one would be hard pressed to find a critical mass of believers who identified themselves as so dedicated; Cottom himself admits as much – ‘Spiritualists generally contended that they were, in fact, committed to reason and empirical tests’ (35) – but does not let the implications of this acknowledgement deter him from his thesis. It

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is also, of course, possible to view nineteenth-century Spiritualism in its newly constituted poststructuralist form as somehow antithetical to Victorian realism – but only if we view the latter as a naïvely positivist formation which was largely blind to the mediated nature of reality and the enduring problems attendant on representation. This is not the case, as Cottom later acknowledges when he writes that mid-Victorian realism ‘aspired to be a truthful representation of natural reality [. . .] yet could forward this aspiration only by appealing to an idea of nature beyond the limits of any particular perceptions, conventions, institutions, and faculties of communication’ (92). If Victorian realists were always already self-aware about the paradoxically metaphysical requirements of their mimetic technique, already sceptical of representational transparency, then what, one wonders, was there for Spiritualist subjectivism to expose or challenge? Could it be that Spiritualist aesthetics, far from providing a subversive foil to, and precocious rebuttal of, nineteenth-century realist strategies, actually developed in tandem, even imaginative sympathy, with the latter? That the relationship between Spiritualism and literary realism was not just one of rivalry, resistance, or cheap imitation, but also of empathy and co-experimentation? And how would that relationship look if we reversed the usual contextual trajectory to examine the representation of literary realism in Spiritualist writing, rather than vice versa? In the rest of this chapter, I will sample from the extensive body of late nineteenth-century AngloAmerican Spiritualist fiction and literary criticism to do exactly this, basing my interpretation not simply on the retrospective suggestiveness of Spiritualist writing practices for contemporary theory, but rather on what nineteenth-century Spiritualists themselves had to say about the innovative function and sophisticated nature of literary realism, and the difficult question of which fictional genres were best suited to narrate the new ontology.

The Origins of Spiritualist Literary Criticism In one sense, the question of which literary genre best fitted or highlighted Spiritualist truth was moot among the community of nineteenthcentury believers who insisted that all written works, regardless of their subject or mode of address, could be attributed to spirit causation. From this perspective, Virginia Woolf’s claim in her 1937 diary that ‘I think writing, my writing is a species of mediumship’ (Woolf 1937: 5, 101) seems less like a bracing modernist insight about the impersonality of authorship than a continuation and incorporation of a Spiritualist

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critical trope that had been in existence since at least the 1850s. ‘All genuine poetry is, of its own nature, spiritual;’ English believer William Howitt had insisted some sixty years previously in his early Spiritualist work, the encyclopaedic The History of the Supernatural in All Ages and Nations (1863), ‘all genuine poets write under inspiration’ (Howitt 1863: 412). This mode of composition was not, he continues, confined to poets alone: In their closets, and under their truest influences, all authors, prose or poetic, are Spiritualists. Nothing would be easier than to establish this position, from the pages of every man and every woman who have written with sufficient energy to seize on the spirit of their age. (Howitt 1863: 412)

Howitt’s book then does just that, diagnosing, as would many other Spiritualists, Charles Dickens as a secret adherent whose own novels bore the impress of supernatural inspiration.4 This kind of aesthetic ‘outing’ was endemic in nineteenth-century British and American Spiritualist circles, with touring preacher and medium J.M. Peebles claiming Charlotte Brontë as one of the faithful, C.W. Rohner naming Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and Florence Marryat attributing belief to a whole host of recent predecessors and contemporaries, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, John Milton and Dinah Mulock.5 Some mediumistic writers went beyond the mere identification of secret literary co-believers to imagine and narrate the numinous processes of spirit-derived aesthetic inspiration in their own channelled works, reproducing in their plots the same processes that had supposedly catalysed their personal creativity. In Mrs E.B. Duffey’s automatically written Heaven Revised: A Narrative of Personal Experiences (1909), the spirit narrator recounts a vision of an earth-bound housewife receiving messages from a dead poet, one who is himself merely the conduit for the disembodied occupants of a loftier sphere than his own: At first she disregarded them; but they seemed to insist upon being recorded; and so finally, almost sighing at the trouble they gave her, she wrote them down. Then other lines followed, and these too, she penned in accordance with the resistless impulse which controlled her; and so she wrote on from time to time, not knowing wherefore or what she was writing until at last a poem began to shape itself and she perceived her meaning. When the poem was nearly completed the inspiration left her, and she was compelled to finish it, and by means of her own dulled intellect supply the missing lines. The poem was not the same as that produced by the spirit-writer, but identical in idea and sentiment; though having being filtered, as it were, through the medium of her weaker, more earthly intelligence, it was feebler in character, and lacked the loftier expression and purer sentiment. (Duffey 1909: 50)

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If this poem has been a collaborative enterprise, it has needless to say been an unequal one, with all the best material coming from her disembodied partner. At the conclusion of this scene, Duffey’s spirit-narrator asks his guide if all poetry is created in this manner and, if so, what this process might mean for the treasured concept of artistic innovation: ‘Is there, then, no such thing as originality among mortals?’ ‘No,’ replies the spirit. ‘Earth is only the reflex of the spirit-world’ (Duffey 1909: 50). It is easy to see why some believers might have found this suggestion, and its bleak scenario as culture as nothing more than an enduring thirdrate plagiaristic transmission from the great beyond, to be distinctly uninspiring, and certainly unflattering to the cultivated aura of genius attached to their movement’s most vaunted literary works. It is for this reason that, although most Spiritualist writers agreed on the universal and ubiquitous influence of spirit on the imagination, few were content to leave the question of artistic responsibility at that. It was not enough simply to declare that all great works of literature were intrinsically Spiritualist, because inspired by the other world; some styles, modes of treatment and generic conventions had to be identified as more Spiritualist than others, more amenable to the new truths and forms of subjectivity promulgated from the spheres. Their determination was to be the task of Spiritualist literary criticism, a distinct and vibrant tributary of the movement’s literature that emerged out of the early philosophical and afterlife literature of the 1850s and found its apogee in the late-century Spiritualist press, most notably in the British Spiritualist weekly Light. Unlike other subgenres of Spiritualist writing, this one was concerned not, or rather not just, with establishing the reality and nature of spirit phenomena, but with monitoring its artistic translation and reception within those popular fictional forms which, believers well knew, were always destined to attract wider audiences than the movement’s specialised religious texts and seance records. Notably, late Victorian Spiritualist literary critics sought to convert the spectral into a legitimate subject for realism, while still retaining the cultural capital allotted to extravagantly aesthetic forms of supernatural writing earlier in the century. In doing so, they would have to take on some formidable opponents from an anti-Spiritualist literary establishment whose main objection to modern Spiritualism was not that it was false and delusive, but rather that it was ugly and inartistic.

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Contesting and Transforming the Aesthetic Supernatural Since Spiritualism’s mid-nineteenth-century genesis, there had been no shortage of non-believing writers to launch complaints against the clumsiness and vulgarity of the movement’s literature,6 and it should perhaps come as no surprise that, by the fin de siècle, many of the most vocal of these in Britain were linked to the aestheticist movement. Frequently, their dislike of Spiritualism’s newly material and scientised ghosts served as an extension of their contempt for contemporary realism and its obsession with the tedious quotidian. One such figure, Vernon Lee, used the preface to her 1890 collection Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales to mount an impassioned defence of the romantic tradition of supernatural fiction currently, in her opinion, under threat by the incursions of the Society for Psychical Research: [A] number of highly reasoning men of semi-science have returned to the notion of our fathers, that ghosts have an existence outside of our own fancy and emotion; and have culled from the experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years ago, being nine years of age, saw her maiden aunt appear six months after decease, abundant proof of this fact. One feels glad to think the maiden aunt should have walked about after death, if it afforded her any satisfaction, poor soul! But one is struck by the extreme uninterestingness of this lady’s appearance in the spirit, corresponding perhaps to her want of charm while in the flesh. Altogether one quite agrees, having duly perused the collection of evidence on the subject, with the wisdom of those modern ghost-experts, when they affirm that you can always tell a genuine ghoststory by the circumstances of its being about a nobody, its having no point or picturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, stale, flat, and unprofitable. (Lee [1890] 2006: 38)

Her sentiments echo those of Vivien in Oscar Wilde’s seminal decadent essay, ‘The Decay of Lying’ ([1889] 1986), who laments: the dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr Myers’s two bulky volumes on the subject, and in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things I have ever read. There is not a fine nightmare among them. They are commonplace, sordid, and tedious. (Wilde [1889] 1986: 83)

Wilde’s most famous critique of the deadening effects of psychical research on the creative imagination appears in ‘The Canterville Ghost’ ([1887] 1968), a children’s story about a three hundred year-old British ghost menaced by a family of American tenants who move into his stately home and refuse to be frightened of him. After a brief exposure to the ghost’s most theatrical manifestations – performances bearing such melodramatic titles as ‘Red Reuben, or the Strangled Babe’ and ‘Dumb

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Daniel, or the Suicide’s Skeleton’ – the Otis family accept his existence with a nullifying sangfroid: Mrs Otis expressed her intention of joining the Psychical Society, and Washington [her son] prepared a long letter to Messrs. Myers and Podmore on the subject of the Permanence of Sanguineous Stains when connected with crime. That night all doubts about the objective existence of phantasmata were removed forever. (Wilde 1891: 127)

Incapable of the doubt and uncertainty requisite, for Wilde, to the aesthetic experience, the Otis family simply exchange one form of dogmatism for another. Their imperturbable pragmatism sends the ghost into a fit of despondency from which he is only rescued by the innocent faith and wonder of their youngest child Virginia. She takes him seriously and participates in the secret rites that exorcise him peacefully into the beautiful Garden of Death, an imaginative realm whose mystery and aestheticism stand in stark contrast to the tedious banality of both Spiritualist- and SPR-sanctioned accounts of the afterlife. If, as is routinely affirmed in critical genealogies of the fin de siècle, aestheticism stands as a crucial precursor to modernism, then what we see in Lee’s and Wilde’s proto-modernist texts is not an affinity with the so-called Spiritualist aesthetic, but rather a vehement rejection of what they see as its fundamental moribundity and inartistry. In the intensity of their satirical derision, they point to a deeply felt associative affinity between Spiritualism and a, to them, escalating and creatively stifling programme of Victorian realism, one that subsequent literary historians of this period seem largely to have missed.

Spiritualism and the Lure of the Naturalism While such charges of tediousness may not have bothered the distinguished members of the SPR – after all, what would-be scientific society could object to the characterisation of their findings as unfanciful and overly empirical? – they certainly rankled the wider Anglo-American Spiritualist community. Imaginative literature had long held an important, albeit ambivalent, position in the transatlantic movement, serving both as a vehicle for dissemination and as a common product of trance mediumship. Although some believers felt that their faith could only suffer from a continued association with the fictional forms in which spectres had for too long been confined and misrepresented,7 most recognised the vital place that creative literature had to play in Spiritualism’s progress. The attacks on the inartistic crudity of their

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literary productions thus placed believers between Scylla and Charybdis, where they were ridiculed for their alleged susceptibility to fanciful delusion on the one part, and lambasted for their lack of aesthetic taste and facility on the other. If they were to continue to exploit fiction and poetry as means of popularising their cause, they would need to seek ways of writing that could rebut both of these charges by combining the imaginative and the mundanely feasible in a convincing way. This new form would be distinguished less by empirical verisimilitude – that is, its ability to reproduce established ontological truths – than by its attempted adherence to emergent biological and anthropological paradigms about the nature of human behaviour. It would first have to abandon the routine terror techniques and affective sensationalism of the gothic romance and the contemporary ghost story,8 deeming these unfit to document the realities of the spirit world. What better model for such a radical form of ghost fiction than the new realism, naturalism in particular, emanating from the Continent? The naturalist turn in fin-de-siècle Spiritualist aesthetics manifested itself in three main ways: in the support of transatlantic Spiritualist writers for fiction which narrativised the biodeterministic and hereditarian schema of human pre- and post-death existence we have traced throughout this study; in the British Spiritualist press’s remarkable championing of particular European naturalist writers; and in Spiritualist literary criticism’s increasing advocacy of realism, not simply for its verisimilitude, but for its innovation. Consider the following review of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra from an 1889 issue of the Spiritualist journal Light: The literature of what may broadly be called ‘the occult’ shows itself increasingly in modern literature, especially in the literature of prose fiction. Certainly we had much of it in writers of a somewhat earlier period – Scott, for example – but even with Scott the supernatural as people used to call it, was rather ‘romantic’ than ‘real.’ It has been reserved for these later days to see the old supernatural, the new Spiritualistic, become the staple ingredient of the novel. We get no romances now. (‘Cleopatra’ 1889)

Redolent with Enlightenment triumphalism, the review credits Spiritualism with liberating the artistic imagination from its outmoded Gothic forms and ushering it into the era of rational, anti-romantic modernity. It is a sentiment that we encounter again and again in the paeans to Spiritualism produced from the mid-century: American convert Robert Dale Owen pronouncing in Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860) that Spiritualism had finally put paid to the ‘gaudy supernaturalism’ (R.D. Owen 1860: 149) of Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, and an anonymous writer in an 1890 issue of Light

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commenting that ‘among the many things which humanity ought to be grateful to modern Spiritualism’ for was a ‘change in literary method’ (‘Toxar’ 1890). Regardless of whether one believed in the reality of seance-room phenomena, these writers imply, one could not deny modern Spiritualism’s massive boon to the fortunes and dissemination of literary realism. It will be obvious from the examples above that the definitions of literary realism employed by its Spiritualist defenders were by no means standard or canonical ones. The characterisation of writer H. Rider Haggard, a leading figure in the late Victorian romance revival, as vanguard of the death of romance is, for example, one that would make many readers balk. But such seemingly counter-intuitive judgements were based less on the supernatural subjects and exotic settings of specific fictions than on their potential compatibility with Spiritualist ontology. Thus popular romancer Hall Caine found himself accused in the Spiritualist press of being both a covert realist and a plagiarist who had stolen a central plot incident in his popular novel The Deemster (1887) from the Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research (‘Notes By the Way’ 1888). Similarly, a reviewer in Light praised H. Rider Haggard’s She for its ‘extraordinary realistic skill’, a feature which made ‘it difficult to conceive that the work is purely one of imagination’ (‘She’, 1887). In 1889, another writer offered proof for this suspicion by claiming personal acquaintance with the West African Obeah woman on whom Haggard’s Ayesha was based (‘The Real Origin of She’ 1889). Popular authors such as Haggard and Caine may have posed as proud, primal romancers,9 but Spiritualistically attuned readers knew better. As an 1884 editorial in Light insists, there was no better proof of the success and importance of modern realism than in the massive amounts of new ‘supernatural’ fiction flooding the late Victorian book market: since Spiritualism has become widely known, we have a class of story that is realistic vraisemblance, and which evidently implies on the part of the writer more knowledge than is safe to shew [. . .] these stories are founded on fact, if they be not narratives of actual occurrences, and [. . .] those who write them must have had what Spiritualists call ‘personal experience’ in some way or another. (‘Notes by the Way’ 1884: 1)

Tainean Echoes in the New Spiritualist Fiction In their annexation of the traditional subject matter of romance within the precincts of realism, Spiritualist literary critics suggested that there was no phenomenon, no matter how outlandish or apparently invented,

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that might not eventually have a basis in natural law. Their attempts to consolidate the supernatural with the real were matched by the efforts of Spiritualist fiction writers to synchronise their plots with the latest theories about just what this ‘natural law’ might be and how it drove human action and identity. Thus, as Spiritualist critics were arguing that romance was potentially real(ist), based in the possible everyday, Spiritualist fiction writers were modernising the terms by which reality could be understood. And some did so by narrativising the paradigms of hereditary determinism we have hitherto traced, adopting a pseudoTainean formula of race, moment and milieu to explain the origin of psychical abilities and spirit manifestations. As important an influence on French naturalism as the physiologist Claude Bernard, literary critic Hippolyte Taine had famously argued in 1863 that the three factors of race, moment and milieu were the chief determinants of human personality and, hence, of literary work. The critic, insisted Taine, must examine the literary text like a palaeontologist studies a fossil, searching for the combination of individual, environmental and historical forces that had produced its unique form (Taine [1863] 1965: 2). Literature, in Taine’s formulation, ‘resembles that admirable apparatus of extraordinary sensibility, by which physicians disentangle and measure the most recondite and delicate changes of a body’ (35). The naturalists, like Émile Zola, who followed Taine would take his evocation of the scientific function of literature to heart, using their fiction to expose (or rather, imagine) the hereditary, geographic and historical impulses that shaped and determined modern life. The individual in the naturalist novel is less of a free, self-making agent than a subject of unseen biological and environmental forces that he or she has a minimal capacity to resist. ‘All that can be said’, claims Zola in ‘The Experimental Novel’, ‘is that there is an absolute determinism for all human phenomena. From then on, investigation is a duty’ (Zola [1880] 1964a: 18). A similar conviction in the triply determined nature of human behaviour and development features as prominently in nineteenth-century Spiritualist fiction as it does in the movement’s non-fictional seance records, parentage manuals and podium trance speeches. We have already encountered several fictional examples of this engagement; here we will consider two of the movement’s most explicit and fascinating literary explorations of the hybrid deterministic paradigms that also underwrote the new French realism: Laurence Oliphant’s novel Masollam (1886) and Redna Scott’s serial Under His Spell, which ran in the British Spiritualist journal The Medium and Daybreak between February and April of 1894. Although neither attained wide audiences or strong critical endorsement, these two little-known texts are worth

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our attention for the way in which they take up and positively appraise the forces of involuntary impulsion (whether hereditary, evolutionary or mesmeric) that were being simultaneously being treated as terrifying threats to personal agency in more mainstream popular gothic texts such as George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). For Scott and Oliphant, as earlier for Robert Owen and George Combe, determinism could liberate rather than simply enslave the individual; their plots, like Zola’s, posit the as yet poorly understood laws of biological inheritance and environmental determinism as explanatory rubrics for the great problems that daunted human society. While Zola would no doubt have been horrified by the comparison, these two Spiritualist writers nonetheless share with him a faith in the ability of the new hereditarian sciences to ‘penetrate to the wherefore of things, to become superior to those things, and to reduce them to a condition of subservient machinery’ (Zola [1880] 1964a: 25). Drawing upon Oliphant’s real-life experiences as a member of American Spiritualist ‘Brotherhood of the New Life’ community in the late 1860s,10 Masollam follows the attempts of its titular character, a thinly veiled portrait of Thomas Lake Harris, to gain influence over leading British MP Sebastian Hartwright by using his beautiful adoptive daughter Amina as lure. Corrupted by his dangerous susceptibility to evil external influences, Masollam becomes himself enamoured with Amina, and she is forced to flee to back to her Druse birth family in Damascus in a move that provokes both the mystic’s vengeance and a series of increasingly convoluted plot twists. By the end of the novel, Masollam has been redeemed from the forces of evil; Sebastian Hartwright is revealed as Amina’s lost brother, who will now devote himself to learning his people’s ways; and Amina has herself become a healer and initiate into the esoteric Druse lore hitherto only available to men. What unites the novel’s various erratic plots is the narrative’s continual staging of mediumistic ability as the combined product of race and milieu, and of the accelerated processes of evolution that adapt its characters to an impending historical moment. As Masollam’s mystic confederate Santalba says: Man’s organism is undergoing a change: and the vulgar evidences of it are to be found in [. . .] Spiritualism, mesmerism, occultism, and so forth [. . .] This change means a quickening of organic sensibility and an increase of faculty, whereby man’s receptivity to forces [. . .] has been augmented. (L. Oliphant 1886: 221)

Defined through these processes, the mystic becomes a particularly apt subject for naturalistic exploration, more clearly susceptible to racial,

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anatomical and evolutionary compulsion that the self-making subjects of the mid-Victorian realist bildungsroman. When, following the lead of George Eliot’s narrator in Adam Bede, Oliphant interrupts his plot in order to defend his subject matter and unorthodox characters, he justifies his choices as a naturalist would11 – by taking on the pose of a scientific investigator whose goal is to probe the risks and advantages of a new stage in human evolution, namely the dawning of telepathic consciousness. He writes, he insists, not as a Spiritualist believer per se, but as someone who realises the dangers of superstitiously rejecting psychic phenomena out of hand: Hallucination, delusion, hysteria, monomania, and so forth, are all words coined to express phenomena, the origin of which those who use the terms are absolutely unable to account for or explain, and with which, therefore, they can only deal empirically. If the study of them involves a departure from the region of what is called ‘positive science,’ into a region called ‘mystical,’ the sooner a distinction so false and so pernicious in its effects is removed the better. There is nothing mystical whatever in an investigation into any of these moral, psychical, and physical phenomena upon which the happiness of the human race depends. (L. Oliphant 1886: 241)

Hysteria and mental illness are not the sources of Spiritualist belief, claims Oliphant’s narrator, but they might well be its products if the laws of spiritual manifestations are not studied with a scientific eye. The key to understanding and, indeed, improving the lot, of the human race lies in plumbing the spiritual sources of mental pathology with the tools of psychic science, no matter how unorthodox or bizarre such an endeavour might seem. The narrator’s sentiments here echo Zola’s famous defence, borrowed from Claude Bernard, of the often prurient subject matter of naturalism on the basis of its necessity to a complete understanding of human life: ‘You will never reach really fruitful and luminous generalizations on the phenomena of life until you have experimented yourself and stirred up in the hospital, the amphitheatre, and the laboratory the fetid or palpitating sources of life’ (Zola [1880] 1964a: 27). No true literary experimenter can be deterred by bourgeois prejudices and arbitrary ontological distinctions between the real and the metaphysical. Like Masollam, Redna Scott’s Under His Spell investigates the individual’s determination by forces of evolutionary, and ergo supernatural, inheritance. In this purview, it shares the agenda, if not the literary prowess, of the great novels of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. The serialised novel opens on what seems to be a profoundly un-supernatural scene: Jack Sinclair, the young heir of an established middle-class professional family, sits in his parlour filling out an entry for Douglas [sic]

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Galton’s ‘Record of Family Faculties’ prize competition.12 When he asks his sister Juliette for help, she dismisses his genealogical drudgery work as vulgar and futile: Heredity! What nonsense! What is the use of knowing what your great grandfathers and grandmothers were like, and what were their virtues and failings? I am sure I do not care to rake up all the musty old tales of my ancestors. (Scott 1894: 124, original emphasis)

To his rejoinder that such a record might prove useful in managing and improving the Sinclair stock, she replies: What does it matter if our great aunt was mad. I am not, and I don’t think I ever shall be [. . .] I hate all these new sciences! [. . .] I wish all the ‘Heredities’ were at the bottom of the sea. (Scott 1894: 124)

The ensuing narrative works to sharply rebuke Juliette’s eugenic Ludditism. Her disregard for heredity almost leads her into a fatal marriage with Ralph Trevor, a handsome baronet’s son whose attractive appearance conceals the streak of congenital madness that later causes him to shoot himself in a fit of depressive rage. His death leaves Juliette free to marry the more hereditarily compatible Phillip Stirling, a mysterious stranger who enters the household as a psychic healer and uses his mesmeric abilities to take all the Sinclair women ‘under his spell’. He is later revealed to be the son of Juliette’s long-lost uncle Hugh, an eccentric whose spiritual powers helped fuel the – erroneous, as it turns out – rumours of the Sinclair family’s predisposition to insanity. In this unique 1894 variation on the by then well-established sinister mesmerist tale, Stirling uses his powers to defend rather than imperil the purity of the woman he loves. At the serial’s conclusion, the Sinclairs are thus rescued from the horror of hereditary insanity through the revitalising power of consanguineous marriage, a move that hearkens back to the mystical eugenic incest practised by the denizens of Jupiter in Carlyle Petersilea’s The Discovered Country (1889). Born out of an endogamously intimate pairing, Juliette and Phillip’s own children are sure to enhance the pedigree of the psychically distinguished Sinclair line even further. Under His Spell not only links mesmeric ability and heredity together in a causal relationship, in which the former is the product of the latter; it also posits the two as near-identical mechanisms. As Juliette points out, Jack’s distrust for mesmerism is hypocritical in light of his ardent championing of heredity; both are deterministic forces whose power the individual might harness and investigate, but never neutralise – ‘Did you never hear of mesmerism as well as heredities?’ (Scott 1894: 140) she asks when he questions her about Stirling. In submitting to the

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mystically gifted visitor, however reluctantly at first, Juliette bows to a power no less implacable than the biological imperatives that form Jack’s special study. In each case, the acceptance of determinism is vindicated. Jack’s efforts win him the Galton Family Records prize and the knowledge that he can marry without fear of protracting a mentally unstable line, while Juliette’s assent to her cousin’s psychic seduction secures her future happiness. The characters are most fulfilled when they realise they are least free, not self-determining liberal subjects but grateful students and scions of hereditary determinism. In its conclusion, the serial bears out the opinion of prominent British Spiritualist and Light editor William Stainton Moses, that to be a true Spiritualist, no less than a naturalist, is to acknowledge ‘the manifest action of unseen influences in impinging on our world and directing and controlling our acts’ (‘Notes by the Way’ 1886). Perhaps even more startling about Under His Spell than its championship of Galtonian eugenic record-keeping is its unique genre positioning. The serial was advertised in The Medium and Daybreak as a ‘Lyceum Leader’, that is, as a story for pupils in the various Children’s Progressive Lyceums that sprang up in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s as Spiritualist alternatives to traditional Sunday-school instruction.13 This placement underlines the story’s didactic function and demonstrates its absolute distance from the romantic and aesthetic traditions of supernatural fiction. As a Lyceum reading, Under His Spell aims not to scare children or fill them with imaginative wonder, but rather to equip them with a rational knowledge of the principles of hereditary and spiritual determinism that they might employ in their future lives. It emphasises the importance of calm investigation, the value of deference to pseudo-scientific laws of biological inheritance, and, most intriguingly, the hazards of impulsive love – Juliette faces the greatest danger, not from the mysterious foreign mystic whose stares and hand gestures force her to abandon her will, but from her English aristocratic suitor whose charming manners and good looks prevent her from properly and ‘scientifically’ investigating his genealogical provenance. Under His Spell thus advocates a new science and an investigative methodology, both distinguished by their declared opposition to various forms of romantic subjectivity.

Light, La Rêve and the Naturalist Author as Channel What! We are here in this age when railroads and human spirit is travailing with new truth, and there are men of naught, and blockheads, who deny the

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present [. . .] The horizon widens, the light rises, and fills the heaven; but they bury themselves at their ease in the tepid mud where their digestion proceeds with a voluptuous slowness [. . .] Let us have madmen; we can do something with them. Madmen think; each has some strained idea which has broken the spring of his intellect [. . .] But for God’s sake, let the fools and mediocrities, the impotent and the idiotic be killed; let us have laws to rid ourselves of these people who take advantage of their own blindness to say that it is night. (‘A Modern Commination’ 1879)

This excerpted polemic was reprinted in full on the leader page of the 4 July 1879 issue of Britain’s then-oldest Spiritualist newspaper, The Spiritualist. In its length –occupying almost an entire column – and lack of editorial mediation or comment, the passage commands authority as a stand-alone summation of the campaigning Spiritualist mindset, one imagined here as existing in imaginative sympathy with negative eugenic tactics. Only when the congenitally ignorant, those pathologically incapable of adjusting to the new truths, are legally exterminated can there be creative and spiritual progress. As unusual as it is to find this level of figurative homicidal venom directed towards non-believers in the latecentury Spiritualist press, more startling yet is the passage’s derivation – it is tagged as an extract from the bellicose authorial introduction to ‘Emily’ (sic) Zola’s 1866 proto-naturalist essay collection, Mes Haines (My Hates).14 Appearing at the height of Zola’s Continental infamy, and well over ten years before his reappraisal and rehabilitation in the British press in the wake of the Vizetelly trials,15 this fascinating Spiritualist appropriation of Zola as mouthpiece provides a tantalising intimation of things to come. In the decades which followed, Spiritualist literary criticism in Britain would be increasingly willing to recognise the new Continental realists, not as corruptors of public morals but as potential allies and valuable fellow travellers. In this final section of the chapter, we will see that the British Spiritualist press’s engagement with naturalism was both conscious and deliberate, a logical complement to the movement’s quest for a modern realist aesthetic that might authorise and biologise the supernatural. We have already encountered two ways in which late Victorian Spiritualist fiction writers and literary critics sought to align themselves with the new realism: first, in their campaign to reject romance as a vehicle for Spiritualist fiction, and second, in their growing consensus that what constituted literary realism was not simply a penchant for the mundane and the average, but rather the ability to explain character and action in terms of hereditary, environmental and historical determinism. The strongest evidence that Spiritualism’s commitment to biodeterminist forms of literary realism was directly linked to an interest in naturalism

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is yet to come: it lies in the reviews of Zola and the Medan group that circulated in 1880s and 1890s issues of the British Spiritualist journal Light. Founded in 1881 by Edmund Dawson Rogers, this weekly periodical quickly became one of the UK’s most popular, and certainly most durable, Spiritualist papers; 2011 marked its 130th year in print.16 Light’s routinely measured approach to Zola stands out against both the general opprobrium against the writer in the British press that was only beginning to wane in the early 1890s, and the moralistic, even puritanical tenor of belief that some felt to distinguish the British movement from its American branches. Given this reputation for moral propriety, the mere fact that Light would take any interest in France’s most infamous literary enfant terrible might itself seem astonishing – after all, what could the horrors of Parisian drinking dens or impoverished French mining towns possibly have do with the happy tidings of the glorious Summerland? Yet as Chapter 3 earlier demonstrated, the criminal underworld and the resplendent overworld had more to do with each other in Spiritualist thought than many might suppose; and indeed, in the single instance of critique among the repeated late-century references to Zola in Light, we find that it is not simply his obscenity but rather his allegedly inadequate realist aesthetic that is attacked. Abandoning the usual tactic of condemning Zola’s seemingly prurient fascination with sexual life, an anonymous 1893 Light article entitled ‘Realism’ decries the author’s trademarked genre practice for being insufficiently authentic. The writer asks: Is this realism which seizes vice or virtue, principally vice [. . .] and notes every line of its presentment, whatever that colour may be, a true ‘realism’ after all? Or is it not an abject confession that the ‘real’ has slipped away and the ‘unreal’ has taken its place? (‘Realism’ 1893)

Rather than pursuing this intriguing Jamesian question of whether physical experience constitutes the dominant or even sole basis of ‘the real’, the critic then hastily retreats into a closing affirmation of the value, if not verisimilitude, of a by then clearly anachronistic Spiritualist idealism. The writer notes: There has been and happily there still is [. . .] a school of literature which makes vice to be punished and virtue to be rewarded. That this is not always so in ‘real’ life in no way destroys the abstract truth of such a consummation, for we all feel that such a consummation ought to come about even if it does not. (‘Realism’ 1893)

In this moment, the fascinating charge that Zola’s work is insufficiently realist gives way to the more routine allegation that it is not sufficiently

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pleasant. Yet what is most remarkable about this momentary recourse to romantic idealism is that, to regular readers of Light, it must surely have registered as atypical, standing out as a deviation from a wider climate of enthusiastic approval for realism, and for naturalism specifically, within the paper’s literary columns. Evidence of this support is widespread. We find it in an 1896 review which praises Zola disciple and Medan group associate J.K. Huysmans for writing, in En Route (1895), a novel that ‘is, from beginning to end, flooded with mysticism and Spiritualism’ (‘En Route for Rome’ 1896). Although not a scatologically naturalist novel in the tradition of, for example, Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882), En Route nonetheless draws upon the narrative and sensory techniques of Huysmans’s 1880s naturalist works to produce a psychological account of its protagonist’s adoption of monastic life, one whose realist effects place it well outside the tradition of the aesthetic supernatural. Another member of the Medan group lauded in Light was the naturalist novelist and playwright Léon Hennique, whose Spiritualist novel Un Caractère (1889) was commended as much for its realism of treatment as for its mystical subject matter. The anonymous Light reviewer imagines Hennique’s response to the charge that his Spiritualist topic is unsuited to his habitual genre: He would probably say, and surely with truth, that Spiritualism is realism of the highest description, and that so far from [there] being an incompatibility between the two, they are one [. . .] the readers to whom [Un Caractère] especially addresses itself [are] those by whom the ‘propagande Spiritualistic’ is [. . .] especially needed [. . .] It will introduce new and rather startling aspects of truth as realistic as anything which the great masters of its school have presented to their countryman, and if they excuse us for saying so, much more profitable. (‘Spiritualism and Realism’ 1889)

Spiritualism and the new realism are here figured as a lucrative and expedient combination; the latter genre serving as a far more effective vehicle for the promotion of Spiritualist belief than either the ghost story or even the earnest accounts of seance communication published by ardent converts. Naturalism may have been criticised for its overemphasis of the often ugly and sordid nature of everyday life, but it was exactly to the status of the everyday that Spiritualism aspired. Through an ontologically realist framing, readers would learn to recognise spectral manifestations, not as extraordinary events accompanied by wonder and terror, but rather as confirmations of a numinous reality so common and universal as to produce neither the necessity of abjection nor the experience of the sublime. Further evidence of Spiritualist literary criticism’s affinity with naturalism lies in its analogous formulation of the nature of authorship in the

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modern age. This affinity is superficially similar to, but substantially different from, the connection between mediumship and modernist models of creativity theorised by critics such as Helen Sword and Jill Galvan. The latter has argued that the apparent passivity and possession of the automatic writer seemed to epitomise the ‘fragmentations of identity, subversions of literary traditions, and celebrations of intersubjectivity’ (Galvan 2010: 24) valorised by the modernist aesthetic. I suggest, on the contrary, that, given their mutual reliance on heavily deterministic theories of human identity, their kinship lies less in a shared investment in contingency and indeterminacy than in their faith in the obduracy of personality. Although the creative artist may be open to intersubjective possession in Spiritualist literary criticism, his ability to host different identities was figured as a product of precise hereditary, racial and environmental coordinates. The capacity for self-evacuation so crucial to the medium and to the writer alike was itself recognised as the product of determinism, not of choice. To put it another way, only uniquely determined individuals could attain the egolessness necessary for creation, could suppress or lose their selves by result of a unique biological adaptation. This is exactly how the beautiful Amina explains the powers of her magus father in Oliphant’s Masollam: For the time that any individual influence is thrown violently upon him, he almost feels himself to be that individual. And as this peculiarity is more marked in him than in any one else, his own individuality becomes marked, from the very fact that it is constantly assuming, in an intense and exaggerated form, the individuality of others. (L. Oliphant 1886: 177)

After the publication of La Rêve (1888), Zola became of particular interest to Spiritualist literary critics because of this very Masollamlike ability to make impersonality his own individual genius. While the mainstream press accused him of notorious egotism and a dangerous addiction to distinction pursued at all costs, Zola was applauded in Light for allegedly writing at the behest of dead authors just as his own characters responded to the directives of ancestral inheritance. The sixteenth volume in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Rêve was immediately recognised as a curiously atypical addition to the Zola corpus. It tells the story of Angélique, a beautiful young foundling taken in by the kindly Hubert couple and reared to a life of spiritual devotion and disciplined labour. At the novel’s climax, she overcomes local class prejudices to marry the idealised young aristocrat Félicien and collapses blissfully in his arms as they exit the church, dying in perfect happiness before her romantic dream can be punctured by the carnal realities of married life. The novel concludes without any of the explicit references

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to violence, sexuality, scatology and degradation that Zola’s readers had come to expect. Some French critics, astonished by this seeming turnabout, charged Zola with toadying for membership in the conservative Académie française – claiming, in other words, that the novel was the product of nothing more than personal ambition and self-promotion (A. Brown 2005: xv). Yet Light praised it for a directly opposite reason: namely, that the novel’s eccentric purity testified to the existence of mysterious forces operating on the author’s supine imagination: La Rêve [. . .] might be read aloud to little girls in a French convent [. . .] The work opens up difficult questions. The newspapers assert that it is a simple intellectual freak, a theme as completely outside of the sympathies of the author as a prize poem on Timbuctoo. Silenus is in a fanciful mood for the moment, but he is about to return to his wallowings in the Rougon Macquart mire. If this be true the problem is very difficult indeed. What and who is behind the imaginative writer? And what is imagination? [. . .] Is the leading genius of France a mere telephonic wire through which Madame Guyon can talk one day and Pietro Aretino the next? (‘Zola in Ghostland’, 1889)

If some of the rhetorical moves here are familiar – the metaphoric equation of mediumship with telegraphy, the appropriation of major authors for Spiritualism – others are markedly less so. Particularly astonishing is the simultaneous extolment of artistic distinction and impersonality. It takes ‘the leading genius of France’ to be an effective conduit for self-evacuation. The vision of the artist as an exemplar of impersonal personality presented in Light is one that Zola endorsed, even if he would have recoiled at the periodical’s attribution of his work to spirit possession. Throughout his controversial career, when called to defend himself against accusations of indecency and arrogance, Zola had pointed to the unoriginality of his approach and conclusions. In ‘A Letter to the Young People of France’, an essay which urged the nation’s youth to trade in their penchant for worn-out romanticism in favour of the newly positivistic realism of the day, he says: I am not an innovator [. . .] [I] am not trying to boom an invention. My only role has been that of a critic who studies his times, and who tries to show, supported by strong proofs, in what direction the century appears to be moving. (Zola [1880] 1964b: 90)

Naturalism, he claimed, was itself largely devoid of originality even though capable of recording the spirit of the new. The frequency with which Zola repeated this sentiment urges us to view it as more than just a flourish of false modesty or shameful disavowal in light of bad press. Indeed, it was Zola’s adherence to an impersonal and

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anti-improvisational ethos of writing that created one of his rare disagreements with Claude Bernard. For Bernard, a man of science apt to romanticise the literary art to which he had aspired in his youth, the true author was a unique individual who could filter the world through his characteristic consciousness. Zola countered: I absolutely reject this definition. On this basis if I represented a man walking on his head, I should have made a work of art, if such happened to be my personal sentiments. But in that case I should be a fool and nothing else. So one must add that the personal feeling of the artist is always subject to the higher law of truth and nature [. . .] we must accept determined facts, and not attempt to risk about them our personal sentiments, which would be ridiculous. (Zola [1880] 1964a: 51–2)

In the face of determined fact, therefore, personality had no place. But chief among those determined facts, as Zola’s hereditarian plots repeatedly emphasised, was human personality. The same paradox, as we have seen, haunted Spiritualist writing on mediumship, a faculty allegedly open to all but really only perfected in specific biotypes. What really links these two seemingly disparate late Victorian discourses on human agency, then, is not their championship of subversion and intersubjectivity, but rather their implicit faith in natural inequality. Such is the quality of Zola’s thought singled out for approving attention in an 1890 issue of the Manchester Spiritualist journal, The Two Worlds: ‘The word “Equality” [. . .] was to him an anomaly, for equality among men of different natures and intelligences was impossible’ (‘Sparks from the Foundries of Progress’ 1890). If artists were to be objective recorders, detached instruments of the naturalism that Zola referred to as ‘the power of our age’ (Zola [1880] 1964c: 257), their ability to be so was based on bio-individuation, just as the great universal truths mouthed through entranced mediums had to be linked to specific dead personalities, ones capable, for the purposes of verification, of ready identification and authentication. Spiritualist and naturalist discourses on authorship and identity made impersonality and indeterminacy fundamentally reliant on their exact opposites, determinism and essentialism; more than this, they sometimes rendered the contrasting pairs virtually indistinguishable. What did it matter if a medium’s power were authenticated through his or her accurate duplication of the inimitable style and prowess of, for example, P.B. Shelley, if the great romantic poet had himself never been more than an empty container for departed intelligences? Neither could the medium be truly vacant, unmarked or selfless when such specific hothouse conditions – think of the biographical fixation and speculative genealogies in the

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auto-hagiographies of Home and Randolph – were required for their conception. The unique, monadic personality is as necessary as it is dispensable within the determinist aesthetics of naturalist and Spiritualist literary criticism. It is in this ambivalence that we find another, final reason to question the polarising positioning of nineteenth-century Spiritualism as modernism’s anticipatory yet persistently less sophisticated shadow. Writing recently on T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Jill Galvan distinguishes its model of the poet’s interventionist relationship with tradition from the apparently more passive versions of mediation practised in Spiritualism, concluding that: [Eliot’s] vision of impersonal channelling differs from the way Victorian Spiritualists had understood it [. . .] For all its focus on the community of tradition, then, the essay’s most striking metaphor offers the poet as an impervious agent instead of an intimately affected part of a network. (Galvan 2010: 183)

Far from being inimical to Victorian Spiritualism, this description of Eliot’s split loyalty to individual agency and impersonality only aligns him more closely with the movement’s – and indeed with realism’s – complex awareness of the necessity and profound limitations of individuality. The modernist poet thus morphs into an avatar of Paschal Beverly Randolph, who had urged his readers in 1860 that they must seek heaven wide awake, must merge with the great mystical consciousness through the contours of their own distinct, angular personalities (Randolph 1860: 19). In the Spiritualist imaginary, channelling, whether of the ghostly or aesthetic variety, always accommodated the preservation of some form of selfhood, and frequently a biodeterministic one. Spiritualist literary criticism had been founded on the paradoxical impetus both to exalt the arts and to liberate the supernatural from the aesthetic. Such quixotic ambitions could only lead to contortion and contradiction, not only in regards to the question of the value of individualism but also of literature itself. We can find traces of the resulting breakdown in works such as Amos K. Fiske’s Beyond the Bourn: Reports of a Traveller Returned from ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (1891), an afterlife narrative which extols the beauties of the higher spheres while imagining the obsolescence of the arts as requisite to the fulfilment of the movement’s utopian goals. The novel’s spirit narrator travels to a communitarian planet whose socially engineered perfection – its inhabitants are physically beautifully supermen and women – has led to the extinction of literature. ‘Long ago’, a guide explains, ‘the minds of these people had ceased to be employed in creating worthless literature,

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and what had been created of that kind had fallen into oblivion and gone to dust. There was no longer any demand for such productions’ (Fiske 1891: 111). Such is perhaps the inevitable fate of the arts under any totalising scheme of Eugenic meliorism such as that promoted by Spiritualism. Once perfection has been hard-wired into the race, neither literature’s instrumental function as a putative didactic device, nor its ability to register randomness and unique subjectivity, would be needed. Modern Spiritualism, in both the extent of its textual production and the intensity of its critical engagement with questions of inspiration, aesthetic value and genre, can easily be characterised as a literary no less than a religious movement; yet in its deterministic plotting of authorship and genre, it also had the potential to demote the aesthetic to the status of mere evolutionary anachronism, a passing phase in the race’s irresistible progression to a non-literary future.

Notes 1. For other analyses of the late eighteenth-century aestheticisation of the supernatural, see Handley (2007) and Marshall (2010). 2. Thomas Lake Harris alone was a prolific poet who authored over forty books in his lifetime. 3. Jill Galvan repeats this sentiment in her 2010 study The Sympathetic Medium, claiming that: ‘In a sense, early twentieth-century mediums were more discernibly mentally invested than their precursors. Some saw their vocation as “intellectual adventure” because they delivered automatic writings in classical languages or concerning ancient culture. In addition, the channel’s own mind was discussed as an important basis of translation from the afterworld to our world’ (Galvan 2010: 185). This over-broad historical distinction neglects both the ubiquity of classical allusion and xenoglossia in nineteenth-century Spiritualism and the heavily, even predominantly, philosophical focus of the first-generation Spiritualist works produced by movement heavyweights such as Andrew Jackson Davis, Hudson Tuttle and William Stainton Moses. 4. As has been well documented, Charles Dickens was one of the most frequently channelled of the major Victorian authors after his death in 1870, routinely conjured up in seance rooms to renounce the anti-Spiritualist scepticism he had demonstrated in life and even to finish his last incomplete novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). For more on posthumous versions of Drood, see Sword 2002: 43–4. 5. See Peebles’s Seers of the Ages (1870), Rohner’s ‘Spiritualism from a Poetical Point of View’ (1876) and Marryat’s The Spirit World (1894b). For other, more generalised versions of the all-literature-is-spirit-inspired hypothesis, see ‘Poetical Inspiration’ (1876), Life Beyond the Grave, Described by a Spirit Through a Writing Medium (‘A Spirit’ 1877) and Mary Shelhamer’s Life and Labour in the Spirit World (1885).

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6. Further examples include F. Anstey’s ‘The Decay of the British Ghost’ (1884) and Robert Buchanan’s ‘The Literature of Spiritualism: “Post Mortem” Fiction’ (1887). In the former, Anstey blames the rise of the SPR and Spiritualism for the gradual extinction of the old romantic ghost, noting that ‘one cannot expect to prove a phantom like a proposition; phantoms are not to be dealt with as an Old Bailey treats a hostile witness – they have never been used to it’ (Anstey 1884: 257). Buchanan targets not the new empirical mode of treating the supernatural, but rather the vague and abstracted nature of much Spiritualist poetry, calling it ‘silly and saponaceous’ (Buchanan 1887: 238). 7. ‘Notes by the Way’ in the 28 January 1883 edition of Light laments that ‘Ghosts are to be confined to fiction!’ and hopes that ‘the time will come when an editor will see that a scientifically-attested fact, even about a ghost, is at least as well worth attention as a highly imaginative and creepy story’ (‘Notes by the Way’ 1883). A fascinating counterpart to the aestheticist critiques of the ubiquity of psychical rhetoric, this piece suggests that gothic and romantic modes of writing the supernatural remained in clear ascendency in the 1880s, much to the detriment of Spiritualism. Other examples of Spiritualist anti-fictional critique can be found in ‘Unspiritual Spiritualism’ (1887), E.W. Wallis’s ‘The Importance of Spiritualism’ (1892), and ‘Miss Mina Sandeman’ (1898). 8. In saying this, we must not forget that the production of fear was only one, and by no means the only, goal of the Victorian ghost story, many of whose examples aimed instead for sentimental consolation (Rhoda Broughton’s ‘Poor Pretty Bobby’ ([1872] 1997) and Mrs Oliphant’s ‘The Lady’s Walk’ ([1882–3] 1997), for example) or humour (Jerome K. Jerome’s Told After Supper (1891)). 9. Haggard explicitly positions himself as a romancer in his famous 1887 essay ‘About Fiction’. Here he deems the passion for romance ‘coeval with the existence of humanity’ (Haggard 1887: 172), praises its enduring aesthetic and moral force, and looks forward to the day when it will have vanquished the prurient contemporary taste for American realism, as represented by the popularity of William Dean Howells, and French Naturalism, as represented by Émile Zola. 10. For more on Oliphant’s involvement with this sect, see Sarah Willburn’s Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings (2006). 11. As David Baguley notes in Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (1990), naturalists typically responded to attacks on the morality of their work by emphasising the scientific detachment and objectivity of their form. He writes, ‘It was probably, thus, a law of naturalist aesthetics that the more intensely the moral reprobation was expressed to attack them from without, the more insistently did the naturalists claim the neutral ground of a scientific method or [. . .] of mimetic representation’ (Baguley 1990: 46). 12. It seems that Scott has named the wrong Galton here. Distinguished engineer Douglas Galton was far less likely to have sponsored such a competition than his cousin Francis, the father of modern eugenics and author of the 1884 book Record of Family Faculties, intended for ‘those

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13. 14. 15.

16.

Determined Spirits who care to forecast the mental and bodily faculties of their children, and to further the science of heredity’ (Galton 1884: 1). For more on the Lyceum movement, see Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (1985), pp. 100–3. Zola did not use the term ‘naturalism’ to describe his method until 1867 in the preface to Thérèse Raquin. For an account of Zola’s shifting reception in late-century Britain, see Mary-Elizabeth Leighton and Kristen MacLeod’s ‘The Trials of Naturalism: Zola in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination of the Fin-de-Siècle’ (2001). Light is now published as a quarterly review by the College of Psychic Studies in London. For more information, see http://www.collegeofpsychicstudies.co.uk/publications/light.html.

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Inaugurated in the nineteenth century, the relationship between otherworldly contact, eugenics and human bioengineering which this study has mapped has arguably never been closer than in the last decade. In December 2002, some 150 years after the first rappings were heard in Hydesville, another dynamic new religious movement announced the dawning of a utopian eugenic age in which humans would be scientifically perfected and immortalised through the benevolent direction of unearthly higher powers. Clonaid, a controversial US-based human cloning company with links to the Raelian UFO religion, claimed to have facilitated the birth of the world’s first human clone, a baby girl named Eve. In the weeks and months that followed, amidst a growing public furore, they professed the birth of at least four more. The scientifically unsubstantiated nature of these allegations – now widely supposed to have been hoaxes – did little to diminish the alternating waves of intrigue, anger and fear they evoked in the contemporary imagination.1 Even if, as now seems likely, Clonaid never actually produced any real human clones, it had elicited a particularly heated and provocative new phase in that oldest of debates: what sorts of humans should there be? Who should decide? What spirit (or spirits) presides over the ongoing Enlightenment project to liberate the body from the tyranny of suffering, pain and decay, to replace the chaos and uncertainty of lived experience with order, stability and harmony? For Raelians, cloning is a profoundly spiritual act that fulfils by duplicating the primal scene of human creation. According to the movement’s founding prophet Raël, formerly a French musician and race-car driver by the name of Claude Vorilhon, we are ourselves the product of an extraterrestrial cloning experiment conducted by a superior alien race known as the Elohim (Raël 2005: 10). Still monitoring their protégés from afar, the Elohim now want humans to resume and take charge of the original experiment using the newly developed technology of nuclear

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transfer. At a 2001 group meeting in Montreal, Raël promised that all believers – or at least, he suggested, those under his own age at the time of fifty-six – could use cloning to live again and again in the same regenerated human body (Palmer 2004: 84). An inverse form of immortality to that promised by modern Spiritualism, in which it is the individualised spirit and not the earth body that survives, the version of eternal life offered by Raelism is nonetheless just as passionately invested in new scientific theories of, and approaches towards, human bioenhancement as its nineteenth-century predecessor. For both, the study of inheritance and genetics leads directly into rather than away from the otherworldly and the metaphysical. Arguably, this willingness to link the two is the most culturally mainstream aspect of their dynamic and, to the nonbeliever outlandish, belief systems. After all, as Bernard Pulman notes in a recent discussion of public attitudes towards human cloning, the debate is already charged with deeply metaphysical connotations and impulses, as the following, by no means infrequent, line of defence for cloning research makes clear. He describes it as such: [C]loning would make it possible to reproduce loved ones who either have died or are extremely likely to die soon. The most frequently cited case here is that of parents wishing to replace a child who died at a young age, the idea being that a physical resemblance would allow them to see the clone as a sort of reincarnation of the deceased child who might then be able to take up that person’s existence where it was left off. (Pulman 2007: 142)

The odd persistence of this metempsychotic fantasy in the face of constant debunking by scientists – who point out that no act of nuclear transfer ever produces an exact copy of the original, and that even if it did, this genetic identity would not produce duplicate character – is proof of its obdurate appeal. In the face of the inevitability of death, reincarnationist and spiritualist longings can surface in the least expected of places, merging with, rather than collapsing under, new scientific advancements to offer even secular materialists the hope of an eternal life of growth and progression. Clonaid’s pioneering vision of techno-assisted immortality for the elect – that is, for its own believers2 – is just one of the many reception sites for the legacy of Spiritualism’s eugenic utopianism within the eclectic cultures of the global New Age. To note this affinity is not to say that the trajectory between modern Spiritualism and the disparate network of beliefs, activities and lifestyles now classed loosely as ‘New Age’ is a direct, causal or unilinear one. On the contrary, some recent scholars of religion have argued that the New Age is simply too varied and uncoordinated a phenomenon to be classified as a coherent movement at all,

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never mind as the logical outgrowth of any single historical expression of Western heterodoxy (Sutcliffe 2003: 11). But important continuities between the two remain. Most immediately, we see in the contemporary New Age the same dedication to personal liberation, self-development and individualism that permeated the rhetoric, if not with consistency the core, of Spiritualist thought in the period of our study (Heelas 1996: 18–19). We can also observe a similar fascination with the mystical practices and beliefs of certain Western and Eastern indigenous cultures, particularly those of Native Americans; a commitment to the empowerment of women that is often asserted through a celebration of their traditionally assumed qualities of intuition, empathy and passive reception; a continued creative delight, particularly within channelling and ufological circles, in the performance and narration of otherworldly journeys and identities; and an equally passionate investment in mind–body–spirit identity that can and sometimes has led to reprehensible moral judgements about the meaning of disability and poverty (M. Brown 1997: 163, 98, 149). These affinities, the latter in particular, provide us with strong cause to take seriously what may seem like the fringe beliefs of an eclipsed nineteenth-century religious subculture and philosophy. The New Age, until recently assessed almost exclusively as a product of the postmodern, late capitalist zeitgeist,3 one dedicated to indeterminacy, relativism and what Paul Heelas has termed ‘epistemological individualism’ (Heelas 1996: 20), has important roots in the supernaturalised biodeterminisms of the nineteenth century that are arguably nowhere more apparent than in the controversial attitudes towards suffering and inequality expressed in some of its outlets. Although my own study has not performed an extended genealogical analysis of the current New Age in light of these often-forgotten precedents, it is my hope that it will encourage one. The ecstatic eugenic futurism and hard hereditarian cosmology of Victorian and early twentieth-century Spiritualism is a crucial part of the New Age’s mixed inheritance. More important, however, than any impetus that Determined Spirits might provide for a re-evaluation of the contemporary New Age are its implications for the prevalent characterisation of nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle Spiritualism in the transgression-fixated field of Victorian studies. As I noted in my Introduction and throughout, there has long been a critical over-eagerness to assert the politically proleptic and emancipatory dimensions of Spiritualist practice, to either take Victorian believers too easily at their own word as champions of the freedom, egalitarianism and individualism that their hard hereditarian and biodeterminist beliefs then often retracted, or to ignore their words altogether, to pass over the Spiritualist textual archive as an

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unnecessary encumbrance whose inconvenient preoccupations with the fixity and fatality of type, with thanato-rehabilitationism and the pre-birth manufacture of criminality, and with racial determinism and celestial apartheid sit uneasily with attempts to recuperate the movement as a harbinger of a relativistic postmodernism. In drawing attention to these often-suppressed dimensions of modern Spiritualist belief, it has not been my intention to demonise the movement nor to deny the very real opportunities for personal liberation and progressive political expression and symbolic action that it offered many of its participants. I have simply sought to add balance and depth to our current picture of this incredibly complex movement whose legacy is evident in many aspects of contemporary Western thought, from the ongoing investigations of the mind–body relationship through to new speculations on the evolutionary origin and function of human creativity. There is, I realise, is a danger that my analysis may appear to tacitly endorse the liberationist micro-political claims of postmodern identity politics by diagnosing their absence in the literature of modern Spiritualism. Spiritualism, I may seem to be implying, was less ideologically subversive and progressive – these two qualities often unreflectively linked in writing on the movement – than we have hitherto supposed simply because it lacked the necessary radical tendencies du jour: a sufficient attraction to indeterminacy, anti-essentialism and performative self-transformation. Were this indeed my conviction, my study would be little different from those I have critiqued, leaving intact as it would the naïve assumption that certain styles of identity are uniquely, universally and transhistorically bound up with set political meanings. If only more nineteenth-century spiritualists truly had been less biodeterministically minded, such an argument might run, then the transgressive plaudits often awarded to them would have been deserved because anti-essentialism and liberation, apparently, always go hand in hand. This strikes me as a hugely problematic if common assumption. If the previous chapters have demonstrated some of the darker iterations of occult hereditarianism and Spiritualist eugenics – the channelled directives for state intervention in the marriages of an increasingly broad collective of the so-called ‘unfit’, a category which could encompass anyone from the severely mentally disabled to the temporarily unhappy; the mystical plots which imagine criminal behaviour as congenitally innate and curable only by the termination of earth-life – they have also revealed some of the surprisingly egalitarian applications of these beliefs. Spiritualist believers argued that mental variation and human deviance were as requisite to the impending era of human perfection as they were at other times imagined as its anathema. Without dysgenic

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types, there could be no progress. Thus, as we have seen, ineducable and innately deviant mediums were imagined to possess the unique spiritual capital that made them alone fit to channel and evidence the existence of disembodied spirits, and the mulatto was temporarily re-envisioned as a dynamic redeemer who could through his mystical combination of bloods give new life to a dying race. While it is unlikely that the subjects so described wholly welcomed vindication on these often condescending and crudely instrumentalist terms, it nonetheless remains true that biodeterminism in the Spiritualist context gave many putatively dysgenic types the authority and mobility they would otherwise have struggled to access. What the rich and generically diverse body of Spiritualist literature we have encountered demonstrates is the incredible, and sometimes treacherous, political and creative flexibility of hard biological determinism and eugenic idealism. This is a capacity we would do well to keep in mind in our historical moment when new human genome mapping techniques and cloning advancements continue to be greeted in Western life with polarising and often knee-jerk reactions from individuals across the political spectrum. The Spiritualist archive also encourages us to continually rethink and broaden the horizons of the established history of Western eugenics, reminding us that the channels through which some of the modern age’s most radical socio-scientific ideas about human population management, breeding, and bioenhancement circulated were not just those of this world alone but also of the imagined spheres beyond it.

Notes 1. See ‘Clonaid’s Claims were a Hoax’ (2003). Susan Palmer’s Aliens Adored: Raël’s UFO Religion (2004) provides an extended and nuanced account of the controversy. 2. Susan Palmer records a September 2000 Raelians meeting in Montreal at which Raël made it clear that cloning would only benefit those far-seeing enough to accept its necessity: she recounts, ‘“Those who choose to accept it shall live forever, those who are against it – let them die!” was his battle cry’ (Palmer 2004: 178). 3. An important exception to this tendency is the work of Steven Sutcliffe, which convincingly extends the origins of the New Age back from the 1970s into the 1930s (Sutcliffe 2003). My own study suggests that this genealogical lens be broadened even further into the Spiritualist and Theosophist past.

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— (1871), Primitive Culture, London: John Murray. ‘Unspiritual Spiritualism’ (1887), Light, 27 August 1887, p. 402. Urban, Hugh B. (2006), Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism, Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Lenning, Alkeline (2004), ‘The Body as Crowbar: Transcending or Stretching Sex?’, Feminist Theory, 5.1, pp. 25–47. Van Wyhe, John (2004), Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism, Aldershot: Ashgate. Viollet, Marcel (1910), Spiritism and Insanity, London: Swan, Sonnenschein. Wallace, Alfred Russel [1870] (2002), ‘The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’ in Andrew Berry (ed.), Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology, London: Verso, pp. 192–209. — (1875), Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, London: James Burns. — (1898), ‘Spiritualism and Social Duty’, Light, 9 July 1898, pp. 334–6. Waller, John C.W. (2001), The Social and Intellectual Origins of Sir Francis Galton’s Ideas on Heredity and Eugenics, DPhil Thesis, University College London. Wallis, E.W. (1877), ‘Why do not Spirits Detect Crime and Expose the Criminal?’, The Medium and Daybreak, 9 February 1877, pp. 83–4. — (1892), ‘The Importance of Spiritualism’, The Two Worlds, 3 June 1890, p. 270. Ward, J.S.M. (1920), A Subaltern in Spirit Land, London: William Rider and Son. Weismann, August (1891–2), Essays Upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, ed. Edward Bagnall Poulton, S. Schönland and A.E. Shipley, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wheeler, Michael (1990), Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Paul (2007), ‘Acquired Character: The Hereditary Material of the “SelfMade Man”’, in Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds), Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, London: MIT Press, pp. 375–97. Willburn, Sarah (2006), Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in NineteenthCentury Mystical Writings, Aldershot: Ashgate. Wilde, Oscar [1889] (1986), ‘The Decay of Lying’, in De Profundis and Other Writings, London: Penguin, pp. 57–87. — [1887] (1968), ‘The Canterville Ghost: A Hylo-Idealistic Romance’, in The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde, New York: Heritage Press, pp. 123–54. Wilkes, Joanna (2008), ‘Crowe, Catherine Ann (1790–1872)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winslow, L.S. Forbes (1877), Spiritualistic Madness, London: Baillière Tindall. Wood, Roger J. (2007), ‘The Sheep Breeder’s View of Heredity Before and After 1800’, in Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds), Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, London: MIT Press, pp. 229–50. Woolf, Virginia (1937), Entry for Sunday, 11 July 1937, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Index

ableism, 29, 67, 69, 74 abolition see capital punishment; slavery, abolition of abortion, 108, 133 Adare, Viscount (Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin), 19 ‘The Advent of Man: Thoughts on Parentage’, 56n aesthetic, spiritualist conceptions of the, 16, 17, 92–3, 172–7, 181–2, 192–6, 197n affinity, spiritualist concept of, 97–8; see also marriage African-Americans occult revival, 115 participation in spiritualism, 116, 119, 139n as spirits, 15, 116, 117–18 After Death, What?, 151, 166–8 afterlife fiction, 7, 72, 88–9, 92–111 afterlife, spiritualist views on, 15, 13, 15, 29, 71, 79–81, 87–92; see also afterlife fiction; children: in the afterlife; criminals: in the afterlife; race, in the afterlife; thanatorehabilitationism Agassiz, Louis, 127, 141n agency in phrenological thought, 29 spiritualist attitudes towards, 17, 24, 32, 33–4, 37, 39, 48, 71, 107 see also free will; individualism Allen, H.G., 37 Anderson, Mother Alethea ‘Leafy’, 139n Anderson, Amanda, 24 animal spirits, 70–1, 84n, 102, 109, 113n

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Anstey, F., 197n anti-spiritualism, 5, 9, 35, 58, 65, 79–80, 84n, 85n, 179–81 Aquinas, Thomas, 57n Ascari, Maurizio, 170n asylums, spiritualists incarcerated in, 14, 16, 60–1 atavism, 16, 58, 65–8, 149, 150–1; see also criminal anthropology; degenerationism Atkins, F.A., 38 Augustine, St, 86, 91, 111n autobiography, 23, 40–2, 53 spiritualist, 13–14, 31, 39–54 see also Medium and Daybreak: capsule autobiographies in automatic writing, 71, 77, 93–4, 192, 196n automatons, humans as, 52 Baer, Hans, 139n Baguley, David, 197n Balfour, J. Spence, 78 Bamber, L. Kelway, Claude’s Book, 89, 91, 140n Banner of Light, 118, 140n, 158 Barresi, John, 90 Barrow, Logie, 18n, 55n Beard, George, 66 Beecher, Charles, 176 Begg, Paul, et al., The Jack the Ripper A–Z, 170n Bennett, Bridget, 7, 19n, 118, 140n Bernard, Claude, 184, 186, 194 Bernasconi, Robert, 114, 121–2, 139n Bhabha, Homi K., 118 bible in spiritualist thought, 88–90

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Index Bickersteth, Edward H., Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, 91 bioengineering, in spiritualist thought, 12, 13, 101, 103, 199; see also eugenics: in spiritualist thought bioessentialism, 2, 3, 4, 15, 33, 48, 53, 118; see also determinism; fatalism, biological; hereditarianism; race: in spiritualist thought birth control, 106, 124, 133 black spiritual movement, 139n blending, 16, 129, 130–8; see also miscegenation: in Paschal Beverly Randolph’s thought; sex: with supernatural entities body, 3, 11, 32, 89, 95, 108 the medium’s, 166–9 moral meaning, 39 relationship to the spirit, 14, 71 see also mind-body identity; physical fitness Boehme, Jacob, 86, 111n Boullan, Joseph-Antoine, 113 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, Aurora Floyd, 55n Branks, William, Heaven Our Home, 91 Braude, Ann, 18n, 31, 112n, 116 Brigham, Nellie T., 56n Broca, Paul, On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Human Races, 122 Brontë, Charlotte, 178 Broughton, Rhoda Cometh Up as a Flower, 112 ‘Poor Pretty Bobby’, 197n Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 6, 59, 82n Browning, Robert, 5, 178 ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’, 59, 81, 82n, 85n Buchanan, Robert, 197n Burns, James, 28, 36, 56n as editor of The Medium and Daybreak, 34, 42 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 178 Cahagnet, Louis-Alphonse, The Celestial Telegraph; or, Secrets of the Life to Come, 119–20 Caine, Hall, The Deemster, 183 Caldwell, Charles, 28 Calvinism, 32, 34, 90, 140n, 156 ‘Can the Evil Effects of Heredity be modified?, 56n capital punishment, 146, 151, 154–6, 170n, 171n; see also spiritualism:

FERGUSON 9780748639656 PRINT.indd 221

221

and capital punishment; thanatorehabilitationism Carlile, W.A., The Mysteries of Ravenswood, 159–62 Carlson, Elof, 19n Carpenter, William Benjamin, 14, 19n, 82n Carra, Emma, 158 celibacy, 28, 29, 86; see also marriage: restrictions on Chambers, Robert, 8 channelled texts, 35, 69, 71–2, 84n, 89, 92–3, 174, 178–9, 195; see also automatic writing; inspiration, spiritualist theories of ‘Characteristics of Criminals’, 151 Chesterton, G.K., 82n children in the afterlife, 113n dysgenic, 50, 51, 69, 94, 98–9, 100, 106–8, 153 as eugenic products, 25, 38, 47–8,104–5, 133, 136, 137 lyceums, 188 mixed-race, 121–2, 134–5 see also families; prenatal conditions clairvoyance, 50, 132 class attitudes to working-class mediums, 74–9, 81, 82 middle-class mediums, 75, 84n politics in spiritualism, 2, 4, 8, 18n, 94, 116, 160–1m working-class radicalism, 22–3, 26 Clery, E.J., 172 Cleveland Hall, 73 Clonaid, 199, 200, 203n cloning, human, 199–200, 203, 203n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 178 Colville, William Juvenal, 152–3 The Spirit Spheres attaching to the Earth, 94 Combe, Abram, 55n Combe, Andrew, 38 Combe, George, 38, 55n, 185 The Constitution of Man, 27–8 Conant, Mrs J. H., 118, 140n conception, 30, 47, 56n, 73, 133, 157 cross-racial, 134–5 see also ensoulment; prenatal conditions Confessions of a Medium, 81 Cooter, Roger, 26, 27, 55n

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Determined Spirits

Corelli, Marie, The Sorrows of Satan, 112n Corson, Kate, 114 Cottingley Fairies, 93 Cottom, Daniel, 1, 5, 18n, 85n, 174, 176–7 Cox, Robert, 18n, 116, 120 Cox, Serjeant (William Edward), 11 criminal anthropology, 3, 8, 16, 144–5, 148–51, 165, 170n; see also atavism; criminals; criminology; Lombroso, Cesare Criminal Man, 150, 165–7, 169, 170n, 171n criminals in the afterlife, 146, 158–9 eugenic spiritualist attitudes towards, 50, 100, 147, 153–4, 156–7, 161–2, 202 as products of heredity, 48–9, 150 as regenerators of the race, 145, 164–9 see also criminology criminology, 145; see also psychic forensics Croly, David Goodman, 114, 115 Crookes, William, 6, 11, 75 Crosland, Mrs Newton (Camilla), Light in the Valley: My Experiences in Spiritualism, 69–70, 73, 84n Crowe, Catherine, 60–1, 83n D’Alesi, Madame Hugo, 146 Darwin, Charles, 11, 20n, 21, 29, 67, 175 On the Origin of the Species, 150 Darwin, George, 66 Darwin, Leonard, 12, 20n Darwinism, 20n, 127, 136, 141n; see also evolution; natural selection Davenport Brothers, 14, 40, 47; see also Randolph, Paschal Beverly: The Davenport Brothers: The World-Renowned Mediums Davenport, Reuben Briggs, 19n Davie, Neil, 149, 170n Davis, Andrew Jackson, 9, 13–14, 15, 41, 47, 48, 49–53, 57n, 63–4, 75, 76, 98, 116, 174, 196n Beyond the Valley, 14, 40, 46, 50–1 critique of Christian establishment, 34 Death and the Afterlife: Eight

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Evening Lectures on the Summerland, 71, 84n, 120–1 The Great Harmonia, 8, 31–4, 39 The Magic Staff, 14, 40, 46, 49–53, 76 The Present Age and Inner Life, 140–1n see also harmonial philosophy Davis, Mary Jackson, 49–50, 52, 76 De Guistano, David, 26, 27, 55n De Morgan, Sophia, From Matter to Spirit: Ten Years Experience in Spirit Manifestations, 8–9, 70–1, 84n ‘Death During Insanity’, 84n degenerationism, 3, 9–10, 29, 62, 63, 64, 65–7, 83n, 99, 108, 165; see also atavism; Nordau, Max: Degeneration demon spirits, 64, 67, 69, 74, 80 Desbrosses, Nelson, 140n determinism, 10, 12, 17, 41–2, 189 attitudes towards, 63–4 environmental, 24–5 as exculpatory doctrine, 11, 26, 34, 64, 151, 164 in nineteenth-century radical thought, 22–3, 24, 31 in spiritualist thought, 2–3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 16–17, 25, 33–4, 40, 47–8, 53, 68, 94, 144, 184, 185, 188, 192, 194–5, 201, 203 see also criminal anthropology; hereditarianism Deveney, John Patrick, 47, 57n, 88, 97–8, 113n, 126, 128, 129, 141n Dexter, George T., 145, 158, 159 Dickens, Charles, 5, 11, 42, 178, 196n A Christmas Carol, 106 Digby, Anne, 83n disability, 12, 30, 32–3, 38, 54, 56n, 67, 72, 73, 108, 201; see also mental disability; sin-disability conflation disease, spiritualist understandings of, 13, 37, 38–9, 52, 98 divorce, 150 Dodge, Catherine De Wolf, 49 Dotson, Kristie, 114, 121–2, 139n Doyle, Arthur Conan, 2, 6, 77, 82n, 84n, 92, 93, 142–4, 148 The New Revelation, 112n The Vital Message, 48, 167–8 Doyle, Jean, 77, 84n

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Index

223

Drewery, Eileen, 84n Du Maurier, George, Trilby, 162, 185 Duffey, Mrs E.B., Heaven Revised: A Narrative of Personal Experiences, 178–9 Dugdale, Richard, 8, 9, 19n Duplantier, Jean-Marc Allard, 140n Dupont, Hortense, 147

hereditarianism; sex: as eugenic practice; spiritualism: and eugenic matchmaking; stirpiculture evolution, 2, 10, 11, 14, 36, 126, 127, 169, 202 spiritual, 20n, 37, 68, 70, 96, 136, 185, 186 see also Darwinism; natural selection

Edmonds, [Judge] John, 174 Spiritualism, 79, 84n, 145–6, 158–9 Edmonds, Radcliffe, 97 education in the afterlife, 12, 96, 113n defects in as cause of spiritualist belief, 68 of mediums, 76, 75 phrenological, 26, 30, 31, 34–5, 65n Eglinton, William, 75, 147 Eiesland, Nancy, 73 Eliot, George, Adam Bede, 186 Eliot, T.S., ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 195 Elliotson, John, 9 Ellis, Edith, Incarnation: A Plea from the Masters, 71, 81 Ellis, Havelock, 23, 54n Empiricism, 3, 17, 26, 42, 122–3, 176, 181, 182, 197n English, Daylanne, 21, 22 ensoulment, 50, 57n environmentalist approaches to social problems, 9, 12, 19n, 34, 152, 154, 164; see also Lamarckism epilepsy, 167–8 Ermacora, Giovanni, 166 eschatology, Christian, 13 ethnology, 122 eugenics, 3, 12, 19n, 20n, 21, 22, 29, 54n, 56n, 188 in the afterlife, 94 and biography, 23 and criminology, 16, 156 lamarckist, 19n, 151 and nature vs. nurture debate, 20n negative, 9, 11, 16, 28, 67, 73–4, 81, 149, 151, 153, 154, 189 as religion, 10, 20n in sex magic, 15, 132–9 in spiritualist thought, 2–3, 9–12, 15, 46, 49, 51, 53–4, 67, 68, 70, 72, 74, 82, 87, 100, 107, 121, 169, 195–6, 199–203 see also Galton, Francis;

families in the afterlife, 101–5 large, 98–9 Farmer, John S., 75 fatalism, biological, 4, 8, 12, 14, 26, 30; see also determinism; hereditarianism femininity, in spiritualist thought, 4; see also mediumship: feminine characteristics of Finnegan’s Wake, 175 Fiske, Amos K., Beyond the Bourn, 89, 195–6 Foreordained: A Story of Heredity and Special Parental Influences, 38 Fowler, Lorenzo, 28, 56n, 63 Fowler, Orson, 28, 29, 56n, 63, 134 Hereditary Descent, 29–30 Sexual Science, including Manhood, Womanhood, and their Mutual Interrelations, 56n Fox Sisters, 6, 9, 10, 142, 174 confession of fraudulence, 6, 19n Foye, Ada Hoyt, 174 free love, 31, 87, 99, 100, 105, 111–12n free will in criminals, 170–1n spiritualist attitudes towards, 9, 14, 23, 31, 32, 34, 45–6, 48, 62, 63, 109, 138, 156 see also agency

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Galen, 8 Gall, Franz Josef, 26, 149 Galton, Douglas, 197n Galton, Francis, 9, 11, 19n, 20n, 22, 29, 40, 56n, 66, 149, 175 ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims’, 56n family records competition, 188 Hereditary Genius, 22, 39 ‘Hereditary Improvement’, 20n ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, 21, 22

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224

Determined Spirits

Inquiries into Human Faculty, 54n Memories of My Life, 10–11 Record of Family Faculties, 39, 187, 188, 197–8n ‘A Theory of Heredity’, 57n see also eugenics Galvan, Jill, 7, 192, 195, 196n Garland, Hamlin, The Tyranny of the Dark, 83n Garvey, Marcus, 126 genius, 10, 14, 74, 81, 82, 133–4, 137, 179; see also intelligence ghost story, 17, 70, 172–3, 180–2, 191, 197n; see also gothic, spiritualist responses to Gibson, Mary, 150, 166, 170n, 171n Gilliam, E.W., 123–4 Gilman, Susan Kay, 115 Gilroy, Paul, 115, 138 Gomel, Elana, 3 Gostick, Jesse, The Employment of the Dead, 91 gothic, spiritualist responses to, 16, 106, 182, 185 Green, Mabel Corelli, Life in the Summerland, 113 Gull, William, 170n Gurney, Edmund, 55n, 160 Gusdorf, George, 42, 57n Gutierrez, Cathy, 19n, 22, 31, 86, 109, 146, 156 Haggard, H. Rider, 183 ‘About Fiction’, 197n Cleopatra, 182 She, 183 Hall, Samuel Carter, 42–3 Halliwell, Martin, 21, 22, 62, 83n Hammack, Brenda Mann, 37 Handley, Sasha, 173, 196n Hangman, 146 Hare, Robert, 75, 83n harmonial philosophy, 32, 116, 121, 124, 138, 149; see also Davis, Andrew Jackson Harris, Thomas Lake, 113n, 174, 185, 196n Hatch, Cora L.V., 174 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 174 Hay, John, The Breadwinners, 175 Hayden, Mrs (Maria B), 6, 25 Hazelgrove, Jenny, 6–7 heaven in Christian thought, 82, 86–7, 88–90, 91, 93, 111n

FERGUSON 9780748639656 PRINT.indd 224

in popular culture, 112n in Victorian literature, 91 see also afterlife fiction; afterlife, spiritualist views on Heelas, Paul, 201 hell, 92, 156 Hennique, Léon, 191 Herald of Progress, 33 heredity, 10, 11, 14, 19n, 20n, 22n, 23, 42, 54n, 57n, 69, 164, 187, 197–8n; see also hereditarianism; mediumship, as hereditary endowment ‘Heredity and its Workings’, 56n hereditarianism, 19–20n, 31, 62 in nineteenth-century psychiatric thought, 62–4, 82n in spiritualist thought, 2–3, 8, 13, 14, 25, 30, 38, 40, 48–9, 53, 56n, 64, 94, 201–2 see also Galton, Francis; heredity; mediumship: as hereditary endowment Hibbard, Whitney S., 169n Himmel, Ernst Von see Petersilea, Carlyle historiography, spiritualist, 5–7, 18n Hoddle, Glen, 84n Holmes, Mr and Mrs (mediums), 61 Home, Daniel Dunglas, 9, 11, 19n, 40, 41, 59, 195 Incidents in My Life, 40 Hood, Roger and Carolyn Hoyle, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective, 155, 171n Horn, David, 170n Houdini, Harry, 77, 84n Howells, William Dean, 174, 197n The Undiscovered Country, 59 Howitt, William, The History of the Supernatural in All Ages and Nations, 67–8, 83n, 178 Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 91 Human Nature, 56n, 156, 171n Huysmans, J.K., 191 hybridity, 122, 125–6, 129, 138, 139n; see also miscegenation Hydesville Rappings, 17, 18n, 22, 96, 116, 199 idiocy, 12, 13, 14, 21, 60, 62, 68, 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 83n, 84n, 137, 140–1n

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Index in the afterlife, 72, 81 see also mental disability ignorance, 60, 74–82 in the afterlife, 80 as desired quality in mediums, 14, 75, 84n, 124n as performance, 41, 57n, 74–5 immortality evolutionary origins of, 136 selective, 128–9, 140–1n imperialism, spiritualist attitudes towards, 1, 117 incest as eugenic strategy, 15, 104–5 individualism liberal, 25 in New Age thought, 201 in spiritualist thought, 9, 17, 18, 33–4, 39, 40, 46, 48, 53, 80, 90–1, 113n, 195 see also agency inequality, natural, 25, 27, 127, 134, 141n, 194 insanity, 14, 62–3, 66, 83n, 150, 152, 167 as cause and product of spiritualist belief, 9–10, 58–9, 61 and lunacy legislation, 14 in spiritualist thought, 14, 60, 61, 63–5, 68, 69, 72, 83n, 84n inspiration, spiritualist theories of, 16, 52, 74, 76, 177–9, 191–5, 196n intelligence, 14, 60, 71, 74, 75, 78, 82; see also genius International Congress of Spiritualists, 12 Irving, Henry, 147 Jack the Ripper, 48, 148, 154, 168, 170n, 171n Jackson, J.W., ‘Capital Punishment’, 171n Jackson, Mark, 62 Jackson, Rebecca, 116 Jacobs, Harriet, 117 Jalland, Pat, 86 James, Henry, 5 The Bostonians, 83n Jastrow, Joseph, 82n Jerome, Jerome K., 197n John the Revelator, 90 Jones, Tom, spirit, 158–9 Jukes family, 8, 9, 10, 19n Kardec, Allan (H.L.D. Rivail), 73

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225

Kelly, Datus, 96 Kerr, Howard, 18n, 174–5 Kevles, Daniel Jo, 19n, 20n Kimura, Motoo, 56n Kipling, Rudyard, 5 Knight, Stephen, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, 170n Knox, Robert, The Races of Man, 122 Kucich, John, 18n, 117 Lamarckism, 11, 19, 28, 32, 37, 151, 152; see also environmentalist approaches to social problems Lamont, John, 56n Lamont, Peter, 79 Landow, George, 42, 57n Lang, Andrew, 82n language learning after death, 77–8 as medium, 5 universal, 176 see also xenoglossia Laveau, Marie, 126 ‘The Law of Heredity’, 56n Lee, Vernon Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, 180 Miss Brown, 59 Lees, Robert James, 148, 170n Lehman, Amy, 117 Leighton, Mary-Elizabeth, 198n Lenning, Alkeline Van, 113 Levingston, William, 50 Life Beyond the Grave, 171n, 196n Light, 113, 139n, 148, 151, 157, 158, 179, 182, 183, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 197n, 198n Lincoln, Abraham, 126 Linton, Eliza Lynn, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, 59–60 literary criticism, in the Spiritualist Press, 5, 16, 17, 169, 175, 177, 179, 182–3, 189–93, 195 Lodge, Oliver, 6, 94–5, 113n Lombroso, Cesare, 16, 20n, 75, 144–5, 148–51, 165–9, 170n–1n, 175 London Spiritualist Alliance, 8 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 178 Lowe, Louisa, 19n, 60, 83n Lowell, James Russell, 174 Lucian, 99 Luckhurst, Roger, 18n lyceums, spiritualist, 188, 198n Lyell, Charles, 126

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226

Determined Spirits

Lyon, S.S., 50 Lyons, Arthur, 169n, 170n machine, nature as, 32, 63–4 McGarry, Molly, 118, 140n McKim, W.D., 149 MacLeod, Kristen, 198n madness see insanity Magnot, Adèle, 119 Manach, Marie de, 146–7 Mansfield, John V., 174 Marcus, Laura, 54n Markham, Della E., 57n Markley, John, 34 marital happiness, eugenic effects of, 47, 51 marriage, 21 in the afterlife, 72, 86–8, 89, 93, 99–105, 110 consanguineous, 21, 187 dysgenic, 72, 73, 84n, 98, 100, 106–7 interracial, 123, 127, 139n in phrenological thought, 27–8, 29 restrictions on unfit, 50–1, 66, 202 spiritualist theories of, 35, 110–1, 132 see also affinity, spiritualist concept of; spiritualism: and eugenic matchmaking Marryat, Florence, 105, 113n, 147, 178 The Blood of the Vampire, 164 The Dead Man’s Message, 15, 87, 88, 95, 105–110 The Spirit World, 196n The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs, 162–4 Marsh, Richard, The Beetle, 185 Marshall, John, 56n Marshall, Peter, 196n Marten, Maria, 142 Martin, John, 90 Martinez, Liz, 169n Mary (Theobald family servant), 78 Massachusetts Society for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, 146 Massey, Gerald, 11, 20n, 56n Materializations, 6 materialism, 40, 67 maternal impressions, 29, 37–8, 49, 56n, 131, 146; see also prenatal conditions Matthew, Gospel of, 86

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Maudsley, Henry, 9, 14, 19n, 65 The Physiology and Pathology of Mind, 66, 83n, 152 Responsibility in Mental Disease, 63–4 Mazumdar, Pauline, 20n Medan group, 190, 191 The Medium and Daybreak, 11, 34, 36, 40, 56n, 57n, 83n, 84n, 184, 188 capsule autobiographies in, 42–6 mediums and cross-racial channelling, 15, 118 non-white, 119 recreating murders, 146–7 tests of, 78–9 see also Colville, W. J.; Conant, Mrs J.H.; Confessions of a Medium; D’Alesi, Mdme Hugo; Davenport brothers; Davis, Andrew Jackson; Desbrosses, Nelson; Dexter, George T.; Doyle, Jean; Duffey, Mrs. E.B.; Eglinton, William; Ellis, Edith; Fox sisters; Foye, Ada Hoyt; Green, Mabel Corelli; Harris, Thomas Lake; Hatch, Cora L.V.; Hayden, Mrs; Home, Daniel Dunglas; Holmes, Mr and Mrs; ignorance: as desired quality in; Kardec, Allan; Lees, Robert James; Lowe, Louisa; Magnot, Adèle; Mansfield, James V.; Mary (Theobald family servant); mediumship; Mellon, Annie Fairlamb; Morse, James J.; Moses, William Stainton; ‘Mr Sludge, Medium’; Paladino, Eusapia; Peebles, J.M.; Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Shelhamer, Mary T.; Slade, Henry; Spear, John Murray; Tappan, Cora; Tuttle, Hudson; Valmour, J.B.; Wallis, E.W. mediumship feminine characteristics of, 4, 23, 54–5n as hereditary endowment, 14, 23, 30, 44, 48, 185–6 and insanity and life writing, 23, 40, 41, 53 Mellon, Annie Fairlamb, 2 Mendel, Gregor, 10 mental disability, 12, 14, 26 spiritualist explanations of, 60, 68–74 see also idiocy; sin-disability conflation

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Index mesmerism as cure for possession, 65 in literature, 187–8 Mill, John Stuart, 41, 156 Milton, John, 178 mind-body identity, 15, 17, 22, 25, 29, 30, 68, 73, 108, 201, 202 Miscegenation, 114 miscegenation, 105, 139 anti-miscegenation laws, 114, 123 nineteenth-century American attitudes to, 114–15, 120–4 in Paschal Beverly Randolph’s thought, 15, 16 as vehicle for social progress, 20n, 114–15, 129–30, 132, 138, 203 see also blending; race ‘Miss Mina Sandeman’, 197n modernism, 1, 4, 7, 17, 18n, 175–6, 177, 181, 192, 195, 196n Moody, Dwight, 35 Moore, Alan and Eddie Campbell, From Hell, 170n Morel, Bénédict, 65 Morse, James J., 77, 118, 156–7 Leaves from My Life, 40, 76 Moses, William Stainton, 75, 94, 157, 188, 196n More Spirit Teachings, 113n ‘Mr Anderson’ (African-American Spiritualist), 116 ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’, 59, 81, 82n, 85n ‘Mrs Tappan at Cleveland Hall’, 84n Müller-Walle, Staffan, 19n, 20n Mulock, Dinah, 178 ‘A Murderer and his Victim’, 147 Myers, F.W.H., 55n, 160 Native Americans in New Age thought, 201 as spirits, 15, 116, 117, 120, 140n see also mediums: and cross-racial channelling natural selection, 10, 19n, 36, 37, 136, 170n; see also Darwinism; evolution naturalism in literature, 8, 16–17, 93, 173–4, 182, 184, 186, 189–95, 197n, 198n; see also realism in literature; spiritualism and literary realism Nell, William Cooper, 116 Neo-Platonism, 22, 97, 111

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227

new age movement, 3, 6, 84, 126, 143, 200–1, 203n New Harmony, 23New Lanark, 24, 55n ‘A New Light on Old Crimes’, 142–3 Newman, John Henry, 41 Nordau, Max, Degeneration, 83n, 99 Nott, Josiah, 122–3, 127, 128 Noyes, John Humphrey, 57n N’yongo, Tavia, 138, 139 Obama, Barack, 138 O’Brien-Hill, Georgina, 113n Oliphant, Laurence, 197n Masollam, 184–6, 192 Oliphant, Margaret, 41–2, 197n Oneida Perfectionists, 86 Oppenheim, Janet, 1, 198n orgasm, 29, 56n, 134, 136, 137 Ould, F. Fielding, The Nurseries of Heaven, 113n Owen, Alex, 1, 4, 9, 18n, 54n, 82n Owen, Robert, 6, 22, 23–6, 27, 55n, 61, 63, 176, 185 A New View of Society, 24 Robert Owen’s Millenial Gazette, 25, 55n see also Owenism Owen, Robert Dale, 5, 60, 61, 83n, 174, 182 Owenism, 3, 8, 13, 22, 26, 30, 31, 55n Oxley, William, 45–6 Paladino, Eusapia, 166–8, 171n Palmer, Susan, 203n parentage, 5, 11, 21, 27–8, 32, 35, 56n, 103–4, 153, 184; see also conception; heredity; marriage; sex Parisian Society for Psychological Studies, 146 passivity, 4, 23, 25, 33, 54, 131, 132, 192, 195, 201 Pearson, Karl, 11, 19n, 20n, 56n Peebles, J.M., 178, 196n periodicals, spiritualist see Banner of Light; Herald of Progress; Human Nature; Light; The Medium and Daybreak; Robert Owen’s Millenial Gazette; The Spiritualist; The Spiritualist Times; The Two Worlds Perrot, Rebecca, 116 Petersilea, Carlyle, The Discovered Country, 15, 88, 89, 95, 100–6, 187 Peterson, Linda, 40–1

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228

Determined Spirits

Peyrère, Issac de La, Praeadamitae, 126 Phantasms of the Living, 55n, 160 Phelps, Eliakim, 174 phrenology, 3, 13, 22, 25–30, 32, 55n, 56n and crime, 26–7, 145, 146 and race, 27 in sensation fiction, 55n see also education: phrenological physical fitness, 8, 17, 25, 31, 38–9, 67, 157; see also body plagiarism, charges against spiritualists, 8 Plato, Phaedrus, 90 Podmore, Frank, 23–4, 55n, 160, 181 ‘Poetical Inspiration’, 196n Polidoro, Massimo, 84n Polk, Patrick, 118 polygenesis, 8, 15, 122, 123, 126–8, 129–30, 138, 141n Pomeroy, Jesse, 146 Porter, Katherine H., 18n Porter, Roy, 19n, 20n, 62, 82n, 83n postmodernism, 1–2, 3, 33, 113n, 175, 201, 202 poststructuralism, 176–7 Powells, J.H., 64 Prel, Charles du, 166 prenatal conditions, 25, 30, 73, 94; see also conception; maternal impressions primitive people, innate sanity of, 66–7 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 183 progress, 55, 59, 66 in the afterlife, 13, 18, 90, 101, 146, 163 spiritualist commitment to, 1, 17–18, 24, 33, 36, 82, 116, 129, 132, 202, 203 psychic forensics, 142, 143, 145, 151, 169n, 170n psychical research, 23, 55n, 144, 145, 160, 180–1 Pulman, Bernard, 200 Pythagoras, as spirit guide, 97 race in the afterlife, 104, 119–21, 140n in phrenological thought, 27 in spiritualist thought, 2, 4, 8, 15, 32, 33, 46, 56n, 105, 116–21 see also African-Americans: as spirits; mediums and cross-racial

FERGUSON 9780748639656 PRINT.indd 228

channelling; miscegenation; Native Americans: as spirits; polygenesis; Randolph, Paschal Beverly race suicide, 94 Rachlin, S., 169n raciology, 2, 115 Radcliffe, Anne, 182 Raël, 199, 200, 203n Raëlianism, 199–200 Rafter, Nicole Hahn, 149, 150, 166, 170n, 171n Rainey, Lawrence, 18n Randolph, Paschal Beverly, 13, 15–16, 47–9, 57n, 63, 76, 111, 114–15, 124–39, 143, 195 ‘The Ansairetic Mystery’, 137 The Davenport Brothers: The WorldRenowned Mediums, 14, 40, 46, 47, 48, 94, 136 Dealings with the Dead, 129 The ‘Ghostly Land’, The Medium’s Secret, 141n Love and Its Hidden History, 133, 135 on mutual orgasm, 29, 134 The Mysteries of Eulis, 127, 128, 133, 134–5, 136, 137, 140n, 141n P.B. Randolph, the ‘Learned Pundit’, and ‘Man with Two Souls’, 40, 49, 125 as a polygenesist, 126–7, 129, 138 Pre-Adamite Man, 126, 127, 128, 141n rejection of spiritualism, 140n as and on the sang mêlée, 49, 124–8, 137–9 Seership! The Magnetic Mirror, 132, 140n on sub-Saharan Africans, 128, 129, 134 on transracialisation, 134–6 The Unveiling, 124–5, 132, 140n The Wonderful Story of Ravalette, 130–2, 140n rational reproduction, 3, 11, 28; see also sex: as eugenic practice realism in literature, 16, 17, 93, 172–4, 175, 176–7, 179, 180, 181, 182–3, 189–91, 193, 195, 197n; see also naturalism in literature; spiritualism: and literary realism recidivism, 16, 146, 151, 164 red barn murder, 142

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Index rehabilitationism, 62, 144, 151, 153, 154, 158; see also thanatorehabilitationism reincarnation, 73, 200 Review of Reviews, 83n Rey, Henry Louis, 140n Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 19–20n Richardson, Angelique, 20n Richardson, Dr B.W., 57n Richet, Charles, 75, 166 Robert Owen’s Millenial Gazette, 25, 55n Rogers, Edward Dawson, 190 Rohner, C.W., 178, 196n rosicrucianism [P.B. Randolph’s version of], 15, 130, 132 Rosma, Charles B., 142 Rowell, Geoffrey, 92 Rush, Dr Benjamin, 152 Ruskin, John, 41 Russell, G. Warren, A New Heaven, 71–2, 87 Sankey, Ira, 35 Schwarzchild, Henry, 155 Scott, Redna, Under His Spell, 56–7n, 184, 186–8, 197n Scott, Walter, 178 Sears, Hal, 112 self as determined, 24–5, 53 as non-agential, 13, 22 see also agency; individualism self help, 25, 26, 52 in the afterlife, 91 sex in the afterlife, 15, 95 as eugenic practice, 95, 132 with supernatural entities, 94, 113n, 136–7 see also conception; orgasm; parentage sex magic, 15, 46, 124, 132–8, 141 sexual selection, 36, 37, 56n, 70 shakerism, 86 Shelhamer, Mary, Life and Labour in the Spirit World, 91, 94, 196n Shields, Senator James, 58 Shortt, S.E.D., 9, 82n Sinclair, Iain, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, 170n sin-disability conflation, 69–70, 73 sins of the father, 106–9, 125 Slade, Henry, 44–5 slavery, abolition of, 8, 9, 12, 33, 115, 116, 125

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229

Society for Psychical Research, 180, 181 Sollors, Werner, 139n Soloway, Richard A., 20n soul theory, 90–1, 141n Spear, Charles Murray, 146 Spear, John Murray, 15, 47, 98, 146 Spencer, Herbert, 32 ‘Spirit Communications – No.4’, 84n spiritisme, 73 spiritualism aesthetic critiques of, 59, 180–1, 196n and capital punishment, 143, 146, 148, 152, 154, 154–9, 163, 171n contemporary scholarship on, 1–2, 116–19, 174–7, 201–3 and eugenic matchmaking, 31, 36 and feminism, 1, 18n, 88 and literary realism, 173–4, 175, 176–7, 179, 180–5, 189–95 medical attitudes towards, 9–10, 14, 82n and reform, 88 and socialism, 1, 12–13, 160–1 syncretic origins, 7, 18n transatlantic diffusion, 7–8 see also aesthetic, spiritualist conceptions of the; criminals; eugenics; mediums; periodicals, spiritualist; race; spiritualist criminology The Spiritualist, 146, 189 spiritualist criminology, 142–71, 168–9, 171n The Spiritualist Times, 64, 67, 84n, 156 Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, 26, 55n, 149 Stead, William T., Real Ghost Stories, 61, 83n Steiger, Isabelle de, 157 Stern, Madeleine B., 29, 56n stirpiculture, 57n, 94, 134 stockbreeding, 11, 20n, 21 summerland, 15, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 98, 120–1; see also afterlife, spiritualist views on surrealism, 175, 176 Sutcliffe, Steven J., 6, 203n Swedenborg, Emanuel, 8, 86 Swedenborgianism, 25, 31, 97, 98, 101, 104, 119 Sword, Helen, 1, 4, 7, 18n, 175–6, 192, 196n

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230

Determined Spirits

Taine, Hippolyte, 184 Tappan [Richmond], Cora, 8, 39, 56n, 73–4, 84n, 151–2 Taylor, Anne, 24, 55n Tennyson, Alfred, 178 In Memoriam, 91 thanato-rehabilitationism, 154–65, 169, 171n, 202; see also criminals: in the afterlife Theobald, Florence J., Homes and Work in the Future Life, 91 Theobald, Morell, Spirit Workers in the Home Circle, 78, 79 theosophy, 112 Thurschwell, Pamela, 18n Tien Sien Tie, spirit, 77, 118 trance speaking, 5, 8, 14, 15, 39, 41, 47, 50, 73, 119, 124, 152, 153, 184; see also inspiration, spiritualist theories of Trinius, Charles, 16 Trollope, Anthony, 42, 53 Tromp, Marlene, 2, 15, 18n, 88, 105, 117, 119 Truth, Sojourner, 116 Truzzi, Marcello, 169n, 170n Tuttle, Hudson, 88, 96, 106, 196n Arcana of Nature, 96 Scenes in the Spirit World, 15, 88–9, 95, 96–100, 101, 102, 105, 113n The Origin and Antiquity of Man, 96 Twain, Mark, 174 Two Worlds, 37, 38, 153, 154, 159, 161, 171, 194 Tyler, Imogen, 113n Tylor, E.B., 65, 82n Ulysses, 175 Underworld narratives, classical, 97 ‘Unspiritual Spiritualism’, 197n Urban, Hugh, 86, 110–11, 113n, 124, 141n Utopianism, 2, 5, 10, 11, 30, 115, 132, 165, 200 Valmour, J.B., 140 variation, human, 36–7, 72, 80, 104, 111, 126–7 Varley, Cromwell Fleetwood, 6 vivisection, 106, 109 Vorilhon, Claude see Raël

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Wakeman, George, 114, 115 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 6, 12–13, 75, 152 ‘The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’, 37, 136 Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, 79–80 Waller, John C., 20n, 22 Wallis, E.W., 153, 197n Walpole, Horace, 182 Ward, J.S.M., 112–13n A Subaltern in Spirit Land, 93 The Wasteland, 175 Weisz, Cecilia, 77 Weldon, Georgina, 19n, 60, 83n Wells, Ida B., 126 Wells, R.B.D., 57n Wheeler, Michael, 86, 90 White, Paul, 10n Whitechapel murders see Jack the Ripper ‘Why do not Spirits Detect Crime and Expose the Criminal?, 153 Wilde, Oscar ‘The Canterville Ghost’, 180–1 ‘The Decay of Lying’, 180 Wilkinson, William M, 40 Willburn, Sarah, 197n Winslow, Dr L.S. Forbes, 19n, 82n women, powerlessness in sexual reproduction, 107, 110 Wood, Roger, 20n Woodhull, Victoria, 98, 174, 176 Woolf, Virginia, 177 Wright, David, 83n Wyatt, Philip, 57n xenoglossia, 77–9, 84n, 196n Zabel, Wiliam, 123 Zola, Émile, 175, 184, 185, 186, 190–4, 197n, 198n ‘The Experimental Novel’, 184 La Rêve, 192–3 ‘A Letter to the Young People of France’, 193 Mes Haines, 188–9 Thérèse Raquin, 198n see also naturalism in literature

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