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Psychical Research, Folklore and Romance

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Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the history of second sight through the prism of the late nineteenth-century romance revival in British fiction and the founding of the Folklore Society and the Society for Psychical Research. Centred on the Scottish polymath Andrew Lang, it considers second sight as subject for and producer of the popular romance. Making use of Lang’s extensive and varied writing on the topic of second sight—he covers it in works on anthropology, folklore and Scottish history—Richardson explores the narrative components and generic framing of previsionary narratives. Examining the intersections between literary and psychological theory, this chapter looks at how narratives of second sight, romance and national identity contributed to evolving psychological understandings of the imagination.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, An Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the Most Part) Invisible People, Heretofore Going Under the Name of Elves, Fauns and Fairies [1691], with comment by Andrew Lang and an introduction by R.B. Cunninghame Graham (Enemas MacKay: Stirling, 1893). (Kirk 1893a).

  2. 2.

    See The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies: A Study in Folklore and Psychical Research (1691) ed. Andrew Lang (London: David Nutt, 1893). Another edition of the treatise was published in 1933 by Enemas MacKay of Stirling, which featured a new introduction by the Scottish politician Robert Bontine Cunningham Green alongside a reprinting of Lang’s opening remarks.

  3. 3.

    Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft addressed to J. G. Lockhart Esq. (London: Murray, 1830), p. 14. (Scott 1830).

  4. 4.

    Kirk, p. 24.

  5. 5.

    There are a couple of full-length studies: Eleanor de Selms Langstaff, Andrew Lang (Boston: Twayne, 1978). (Eleanor de Selms Langstaff 1978) and Roger Lancelyn Green Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography with a Short-Title Bibliography of the Works of Andrew Lang (London: Edmund Ward, 1946). (Lancelyn Green 1946).

  6. 6.

    Robert Steele, ‘Andrew Lang and His Work’, The Academy (July 27, 1912), 117–118 (118). (Steele 1912).

  7. 7.

    ‘Andrew Lang’, The Athenaeum (July 27, 1912) 92–93 (92) and The Academy (May 17, 1913), 628–629 (628).

  8. 8.

    Lang to Donald Hay Fleming, April 11 1912, St. Andrews ms. dept. 113-22-26d-26d.

  9. 9.

    ‘Objects of the Society’, PSPR 1 (1882–1883), 3.

  10. 10.

    Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 77. (Oppenheim 1998).

  11. 11.

    Exceptions to this include Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (2002) and Alan Gauld, Andrew Lang as Psychical Researcher (London: Society for Psychical Research, 1983). (Gauld 1983).

  12. 12.

    This has shifted with the publication of The Selected Works of Andrew Lang eds. Andrew Teverson, Alexandra Warwick and Leigh Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). (‘The Selected Works of…’ 2015).

  13. 13.

    Marie Corelli, ‘A Word about “Ouida”’, Belgravia: A London Magazine, April 1890, 362–371 (367). (Corelli 1890).

  14. 14.

    Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1896), p. 94. (Corelli 1896). In this moral fable set in the London literary scene, Lang makes an appearance as ‘David McWhig’ an unscrupulous and powerful critic.

  15. 15.

    International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, Papers and Transactions ed. Joseph Jacobs and Alfred Nutt (London 1892), p. 3. (‘International Folk-Lore…’ 1892).

  16. 16.

    Lang, ‘Introduction’ The Secret Commonwealth, pp. 23–24.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., p. 23.

  18. 18.

    Lang, ‘Realism and Romance’, Contemporary Review 49 (1886), 689. (Lang 1886). See also ‘Romance and the Reverse’, St. James Gazette (7 November 1888) 3–4, (‘Romance and the…’ 1888) ‘The Reading Public’, Cornhill Magazine 11.66 (December 1902) (‘The Reading Public’…1902) and ‘The Evolution of Literary Decency’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1900) 363–370. (‘The Evolution of…’ 1900).

  19. 19.

    Lang, Realism and Romance, 688.

  20. 20.

    Lang, Adventures Among Books (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1905), p. 5. (Lang 1905).

  21. 21.

    Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Longman’s Magazine 5 (1884), 139–147. (Louis Stevenson 1884).

  22. 22.

    ‘Superstition and Fact’, The Contemporary Review (Dec. 1893), 882–892. and Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies with comment by Andrew Lang and an introduction by R.B. Cunninghame Graham (Eneas MacKay: Stirling, 1893), p. 55. (Kirk 1893b).

  23. 23.

    Lang to Edward B. Tylor, 23 March 1894., Tylor Collection Pitt Rivers, Lang II.

  24. 24.

    Lang to Tylor, 6 October n.d., Tylor Collection Pitt Rivers, Lang II.

  25. 25.

    Lang to Tylor, 18 March 1897, Tylor Collection Pitt Rivers, Lang II.

  26. 26.

    Lang ‘Edward Burnett Tylor’, Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of his 75th Birthday ed. Northcote Whitridge Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907) pp. 1–16 (1). (Lang 1907).

  27. 27.

    For a detailed account of the argument between Müller and Lang, see Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 115–118. (Wheeler-Barclay 2010).

  28. 28.

    Lang, ‘Mythology and Fairy Tales’, Fortnightly Review (May 1873) 618–631 (622). (Lang 1873). The folklorist William A. Clouston provides another contemporary critique of solar mythology in Popular Tales and Fictions: their Migrations and Transformations (1887).

  29. 29.

    Richard M. Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968) pp. 180–220. (Dorson 1968).

  30. 30.

    Lang, The Making of Religion [1898] (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library, 2007), p. 30 (Lang 1898) and The British Folklorists: A History, p. 216.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 101.

  32. 32.

    Lang, ‘Superstition and Fact’, Contemporary Review (December 1893), 882–892 (884). (Lang 1893d).

  33. 33.

    Lang, ‘The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories’, The Nineteenth Century 17 (1885), 623–632 (624). (Lang 1885).

  34. 34.

    ‘Objects of the Society’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 1(1882–1883), 3 (‘Objects of the Society’ 1882–1883).

  35. 35.

    Henry Maudsley, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 3rd edn. (London: Kegan Paul, 1897), p. 73. (Maudsley 1897).

  36. 36.

    On the establishing of the SPR see, Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968). (Gauld 1968) and Reneé Haynes, The Society for Psychical Research 1882–1982: A History (London: MacDonald & Co., 1982) (Haynes 1982) and Adam Crabtree Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism and Psychical Research 1766–1925 (New York: Krus International Publications, 1988). (Crabtree 1988).

  37. 37.

    Elizabeth Sutherland provides a useful account of the legend in Ravens and Black Rain: The Story of Highland Second Sight (1985).

  38. 38.

    See Alex Sutherland’s The Brahan Seer: The Making of a Legend (Bern: International Academic Publishers, 2009). (Sutherland 2009).

  39. 39.

    I could find on one pre-MacKenzie account of the Brahan Seer: Sir Bernard Burke, ‘The Fate of Seaforth’, Vicissitudes of Families Vol. III (London 1863), pp. 266–228. (Burke 1863).

  40. 40.

    Lang, ‘The Brahan Seer and Second Sight’ in Alexander Mackenzie, The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer (Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche), (Stirling: Cook & Wylie, 1899), p. x. (Lang 1899).

  41. 41.

    Ibid., viii.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., vi.

  43. 43.

    ‘Protest of a Psycho-Folklorist’, Folk Lore 6 (Sept.1895), 236–248 (247)..

  44. 44.

    Edward Clodd, ‘A Reply to the Foregoing ‘Protest’’, Folk-Lore (October 1895), 248–258 (258). (Clodd 1895).

  45. 45.

    Edward Clodd, ‘Presidential Address’, Folk Lore 6 (Sept. 1895) 80. (Clodd 1895).

  46. 46.

    Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Profession Ideologies of Scientists’, American Sociological Review 48.6 (December, 1983) 781–795 (782). (Gieryn 1983).

  47. 47.

    The Making of Religion, p. 75.

  48. 48.

    Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 22 and ‘Protest of a Folklorist’, 243.

  49. 49.

    Frederic Myers to Lord Acton, n.d. in Alan Gauld, ‘Appendix C’ Founders of Psychical Research (London: Keagan Paul, 1968) pp. 364–367. (Frederic Myers to Lord Acton 1968).

  50. 50.

    Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense (London: Longman & Green, 1894), p. 224. (Lang 1894).

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Shane McCorristine. Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-seeing in England, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 106. (McCorristine 2010).

  53. 53.

    Frederic Myers is credited with having coined the term from the Greek ‘tele’ (distant) and ‘patheia’ (feeling), ‘First Report of the Literary Committee’, PSPR 1 (1882–1883), 105.

  54. 54.

    ‘Circular No. 1‘, PSPR 1 (1884), 272–273.

  55. 55.

    JSPR 1 (July 1885), 496–498.

  56. 56.

    JSPR 1 (September 1884), 151–152.

  57. 57.

    Eleanor Sidgwick, ‘On Evidence for Premonitions’, PSPR 5 (1887), 288–354 (288–289). (Sidgwick 1887).

  58. 58.

    Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, p. 56.

  59. 59.

    Lang to Tylor, 6 October n.d., Tylor Collection Pitt Rivers, Lang II.

  60. 60.

    JSPR 2 (June, 1886), 334–335 and JSPR 2 (September, 1885), 43–45.

  61. 61.

    William F. Barrett, A. P. Perceval Keep, C. C. Massey et al., ‘First Report of the Committee on Haunted Houses’, PSPR 1 (1882–1883), 118. (Barrett 1882–1883).

  62. 62.

    Lang, ‘Comparative Psychical Research’, Contemporary Review (September 1893) (Lang 1893a).

  63. 63.

    Cock Lane and Common Sense, p. 94. This complaint is repeated in The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897), in which Lang contrasts the purposeless modern ghost to older ghosts who ‘knew what they wanted, asked for it, and saw they got it’ (110).

  64. 64.

    Lang, ‘Superstition and Fact’, Contemporary Review (December 1893) 882–892 (886). (Lang 1893d).

  65. 65.

    Lang, ‘Ghosts up to Date’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 155 (January 1894), 47–58 (56–57). (Lang 1894).

  66. 66.

    Frank Podmore, ‘Review of The Making of Religion’, PSPR 14 (1898), 128–139 (131). (Podmore 1898).

  67. 67.

    Critiqued here is Lang’s avowed lack of interest in Richard Hodgson’s ‘A Further Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance’, PSPR 13 (1897–1898), in which Hodgson had admitted himself to be ‘fully convinced that there has been such actual communication through Mrs. Piper’s trance’ (357).

  68. 68.

    Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London: Walter Scott, 1892), pp. 7–8. (Pearson 1892).

  69. 69.

    The Making of Religion, p. 30.

  70. 70.

    Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2010), p. 127. (Wheeler-Barclay 2010).

  71. 71.

    George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (London: Athlone Press, 1995), p. 52. (Stocking 1995).

  72. 72.

    Richard Dorson counts 136 out of a possible 241 devoted to folkloric subjects, and at my count roughly 40 of these pertain specifically to Scottish instances, ‘Andrew Lang’s Folklore Interests as Revealed in ‘At the Sign of a Ship’, Western Folklore 11.1 (January, 1952) pp. 1–19 (16–19). (Lang 1952).

  73. 73.

    Lang, ‘At the Sign of a Ship’, Longmans June 1893, April 1894, August 1890 and December 1897.

  74. 74.

    William A. Craigie, ‘The Norwegian ‘Vardögr’, Blackwood’s Magazine (March 1912) 304–315 (304). (Craigie 1912).

  75. 75.

    Lang to William Craigie, 4 March 1912, Andrew Lang Collection St. Andrews MS 6912.

  76. 76.

    Lang to Craigie, 29 February 1912 MS 36911 and 8 March 1912 ms36914 Andrew Lang Collection St. Andrews MS36914.

  77. 77.

    Lang, John Knox and the Reformation (1905), The Portrait and Jewels of Mary Stuart (1906), Pickle and the Spy; or, the Incognito of Prince Charles (1897), The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (1896), Sir Walter Scott and the Border Mintrelsy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910) (Lang 1910) and The Life of Sire Walter Scott (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1906). (Lang 1906).

  78. 78.

    Lang, ‘Cinderella and the Diffusion of Tales’, Folklore 4 (1893). (Lang 1893c).

  79. 79.

    ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine (November 1886) 109.

  80. 80.

    The British Folklorists, p. 219.

  81. 81.

    Lang, Custom and Myth (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1884), p. 22. (Lang 1884).

  82. 82.

    Lang, ‘The Celtic Renascence’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (February 1897), 181–191 (187). (Lang 1897).

  83. 83.

    ‘The Celtic Renascence’, 188.

  84. 84.

    Lang, History of Scotland published in 4 vol. 1900–1909, p. 130.

  85. 85.

    Lang, Historical Mysteries (1904), (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1905), pp. 75–98. (Lang 1904).

  86. 86.

    Historical Mysteries, p. 80.

  87. 87.

    Lang quoted in Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography, p. 7.

  88. 88.

    Sara M. Hines, ‘Narrating Scotland: Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Book Collection, The Gold of Fairnilee, and ‘A Creefull of Celtic Stories’ in Folklore and Nationalism During the Long Nineteenth Century eds. Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2012) pp. 207–226 (209). (Hines 2012).

  89. 89.

    Lang, ‘The Fairy Minster’ in The Poetical Works of Andrew Lang Vol. III (Longmans, Green and Co.: London, 1923), pp. 95–96. (Lang 1923).

  90. 90.

    Lang, Adventures Among Books (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1905), p. 116. (Lang 1905).

  91. 91.

    Lang, ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine (March 1887a), 554.(Lang, 1887a)

  92. 92.

    Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 142–143. (Fielding 1996).

  93. 93.

    Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Anaho, Marquesas’ in Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings ed. Robert Robertson (Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2004) 23–27 (25). (Louis Stevenson 2004).

  94. 94.

    ‘Anaho, Marquesas’, p. 26.

  95. 95.

    Lang, Magic and Religion (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1901) p. 58. (Lang 1901).

  96. 96.

    Lang, ‘At the Sign of a Ship’, Longman’s Magazine (Nov. 1886), 105–112 (107–108).

  97. 97.

    Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1867), p. 154, 155, vii, viii. (Arnold 1867).

  98. 98.

    ‘At the Sign of a Ship’, (Nov. 1886), 108 (Lang 1986b).

  99. 99.

    Lang, ‘At the Sign of a Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 16 (1890) 234–240 (236).

  100. 100.

    ‘Realism and Romance’, Contemporary Review 49 (1886), 689.

  101. 101.

    See Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) (Brantlinger 1998) and Norman Feltes, Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) (Feltes 1993).

  102. 102.

    Christine Ferguson, Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle: The Brutal Tongue (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 51. (Ferguson 2006).

  103. 103.

    Lang, Adventures Among Books (London: Longmans, 1905) p. 37.

  104. 104.

    Lang, ‘The Art of Mark Twain’, Illustrated London News 14 February 1891. (Lang 1891).

  105. 105.

    Margaret Beetham, ‘The Agony Aunt, the Romancing Uncle and the Family of Empire: Defining the Sixpenny Reading Public in the 1890s’ in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) p. 263 (Beetham 2002)and Julia Reid, ‘’King Romance’ in Longman’s Magazine: Andrew Lang and Literary Populism’, Victorian Periodicals Review 44.4 (Winter, 2011) 354–376. (Reid 2011).

  106. 106.

    See Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (1855) (Spencer 1855) and James Sully, ‘The Undefinable in Art’, Cornhill Magazine 38 (1878) 559–572 (Sully 1878) and ‘Poetic Imagination and Primitive Conception’, Cornhill Magazine 34 (1876) 2940–2306. (‘Poetic Imagination…’ 1876).

  107. 107.

    See Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siécle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). (Reid 2006).

  108. 108.

    Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson 10 July 1886, in Dear Stevenson: Letters from Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson ed. Marysa Demoor (Ustgevorst: Peeters, 1990). (Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson 1990).

  109. 109.

    Making of Religion, p.

  110. 110.

    Primitive Culture vol. 1, p. 27. See also Julia Reid, ‘King Romance in Longman’s Magazine: Andrew Lang and Literary Populism’, Victorian Periodicals Review 44.4 (Winter 2011) 354–376. (Reid 2011).

  111. 111.

    Linda Dryden, Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 2. (Dryden 2000).

  112. 112.

    Realism and Romance, 688.

  113. 113.

    Walter Besant, The Art of Fiction (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1884), p. 42 (Besant 1884) and Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 54. (Beer 1970).

  114. 114.

    Lang’s Introduction to Walter Scott, Waverley or ‘tis Sixty Years Since (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. cii.

  115. 115.

    Harold Orel, Victorian Literary Critics: George Henry Lewes, Walter Bagehot, Richard Holt Hutton, Leslie Stephen, Andrew Lang, George Saintsbury and Edmund Gosse (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 137. (Orel 1984).

  116. 116.

    Lang, ‘At the Sign of a Ship’, Longman’s Magazine (October, 1887), 659. (Lang 1887b).

  117. 117.

    Lang, ‘The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories’, Nineteenth Century 17 (1885), 623–632 (624). (Lang 1885).

  118. 118.

    Cock Lane and Commonsense, p. 34. See also his discussion of the ‘uniformity of belief [in phantasms and apparitions] in such widely-separated peoples and ages’ in ‘At the Sign of a Ship’, Longman’s Magazine (January 1887), 330.

  119. 119.

    Lang, ‘Ghosts up to Date’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 155 (1894) 47. (Lang 1894a).

  120. 120.

    Borderland: A Quarterly Review and Index of Psychic Phenomena, 4 (January 1897), 117. (Stead 1897)

  121. 121.

    Rolfe Arnold Scott-James, Modernism and Romance (London: John Lane, 1908), pp. 237–238. (Scott-James 1908).

  122. 122.

    Myers, Human Personality, p. 58–59.

  123. 123.

    Henri F. Ellenberger notes that the ‘mythopoetic’ is the most disappointingly underdeveloped aspect of the Myersian schema, see The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Fontana Press, 1970) (Ellenberger 1970).

  124. 124.

    Frederic Myers, Science and a Future Life: With Other Essays (London: MacMillan, 1893), p. 129. (Myers 1893).

  125. 125.

    Ibid.

  126. 126.

    Myers, William Wordsworth (London: Macmillan, 1881), p. 31 and Human Personality, p. 65. (Myers 1881).

  127. 127.

    The Making of Religion, p. 30.

  128. 128.

    ‘Realism and Romance’, 689.

  129. 129.

    Lang introduction to Walter Scott, Waverley or ‘tis Sixty Years Since (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. xxiii. (Lang 1910).

  130. 130.

    Myers, ‘The Subliminal Consciousness’, PSPR 7 (1891–1892), p. 306. (Myers 1891).

  131. 131.

    Phantasms of the Living, pp. 534–535.

  132. 132.

    Lang, ‘The Supernatural in Fiction’ in Adventures Among Books, pp. 271–280 (279).

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  1. Strathclyde University, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Elsa Richardson

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Richardson, E. (2017). Psychical Research, Folklore and Romance. In: Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51970-2_5

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