The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology and the ‘Direct Voice’

Abstract

It is routinely claimed that Victorian spiritualism is the expression of a widespread dissatisfaction with the materialism of nineteenth-century science, industry and social and political thought, an assertion of the transcendence of spirit, as a principle of moral, religious and even political renewal, in an objectified world of inert things and blindly mechanical processes. ‘No group of people more zealously threw their energies into the effort to discredit materialism than the men and women who endorsed spiritualism in the second half of the nineteenth century’, writes Janet Oppenheim.¹ And yet few commentators on spiritualism, whether in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, have failed to notice the odd and sometimes rather grotesque mimicry of materialist language and modes of thought that characterizes not only Victorian spiritualism but perhaps also Victorian supernaturalism in general. For the Victorians as well as for us, spiritualism became stubbornly indissociable from its vulgar repertoire of apparitions and phenomena: rappings, ringings and other unexplained sounds and voices, waftings of fragrance, tilting and rotating tables and similarly vagrant furnishings, ‘apports’, or the telekinetic transport of objects, through to the various forms of materialization, in the ectoplasmic extrusions of spirit hands, spirit fingerprints and, finally, the ‘full materialization’, of spirit-figures who walked about the room, socialized and sometimes even flirted with the members of the séance; there were also the more spectacular coups de théâtre associated with mediums like Daniel Dunglas Home, such as the famous Ashley House levitation, in which witnesses swore that Home floated out of the window of a room overlooking Victoria Street and back in again through an adjacent window.