Magnetic Science and the Sensation Novel: Stimulating Bodies, Senses and Souls

Abstract

The Woman in White, one of the earliest sensation novels, partly produced its startling effects through detailed descriptions of intense stimulations of the bodies and senses of its characters. This attention to physical reactions probably inspired reviewers to theorize the genre through the language of physiology. One of the ways that Collins enhanced these effects was to draw on his own experience and knowledge of mesmerism, a science that theorized trances where senses intermingled and consciousness departed from the physical body. Mesmerism experienced a revival of press attention in the early 1850s and this was due to the arrival of spiritualism in London, a practice that employed similar trance states, sensual experiences and departures from the physical body. From the beginning, scientific writers, whether they advocated the practices or not, generally aligned them due to their presumed reliance on the same type of powerful, invisible influence, termed animal magnetism, zoistic force or magnetic fluid, that allowed the practitioner to achieve trance states and startling results in their subjects. In the popular press, mesmerism and spiritualism were also aligned as elements of the supernatural, and this was not lost on sensation novel reviewers. In 1863, the Dublin University Magazine argued in a review of popular novels that ‘superstition is a good basis for sensation, and contemporary society is singularly superstitious’.¹