Abstract
This chapter considers three alternative (but linked) approaches to supernatural accounts in the nineteenth century. The first exemplifies their treatment as the product of hallucinations or mental illness if not of fraud as exemplified by essayist Leigh Hunt. Those interested in mesmerism and then spiritualism, such as Dr John Ashburner and William Howitt, sought to harness the power of invisible forces for healing, and to foster a revitalized Christianity against materialism. For those wedded either to biblical fundamentalism or Anglo-Catholicism (such as Rev. Frederick George Lee) spiritualism was the latest manifestation of the Devil’s operations, and the Perks story illustrated the dangers of exploring a spirit world which was a kingdom of darkness.
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Notes
John Ferriar, ‘Of Popular Illusions and particularly of Medical Demonology’, Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester III (1790), 31–116
Joseph Taylor, Apparitions (1815)
John Alderson, An Essay upon Apparitions (1823); Hibbert, Sketches;
Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830).
For later Victorian medical scepticism see S.E.D. Shortt, ‘Physicians and Psychics’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 39:3 (1984), 339–55
Peter Lamont, ‘Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence’ Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 897–920.
Alison Winter, Mesmerized (1998)
Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford, 1999)
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment (Chicago, 2004)
Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science (2005)
Sarah Willburn and Tatiana Kontou (eds), Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Farnham, 2012).
Leigh Hunt, Autobiography (1891 edn), pp. 374–5; id., Table Talk (1882 edn), pp. 24–5, 94–6, 109–11.
Roe, ‘Hunt’; Gavin Budge, Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural (Basingstoke, 2012).
C.R. Woodring, Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence, Kansas, 1952), pp. 115–18, 190–9; Peter Mandler, ‘Howitt, William (1792–1879)’, ODNB 13998
Mioara Merie, ‘The “Airy Envelope of the Spirit”’, Intellectual History Review, 18:2 (2008), 189–206.
Frank Podmore, Modern Spiritualism, vol. 2 (1902), pp. 44, 163; Spiritual Magazine, n.s. 2 (1867), 325–7. Its editor Thomas Shorter supplied a comprehensive ‘bibliography of spiritualism pre-1848’ (featuring the Bedford narrative, as well as Beaumont, Bowdler, Jones, Sharp and most of the other texts discussed in this book) in 1867 (127–44).
Louise Henson, ‘Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts’ in Nicola Bown et al. (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 55–60’, id., ‘Ghosts and Science in Dickens’, All the Year Round in Henson et al. (eds), Culture, pp. 119–22.
W.C. Scholer, ‘Bulwer Lytton and the Supernatural’ (Illinois at Urbana-Champain, PhD thesis, 1976)
Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton (2003), pp. 131–50
Gavin Budge, ‘Mesmerism and Medicine in Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels of the Occult’, in Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne (ed.), Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 39–59.
Ashburner, Notes and Studies (1867), p. 64; Scholer, ‘Bulwer Lytton’, pp. 190–2, 198, 209; Schuchard, ‘Freemasonry’, p. 565; Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival (1972), p. 101
E.M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge, 1993), p. 245; id., Ritual Magic, pp. 254–7 283–93; Butler, Victorian Occultism, pp. 170–6
Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits (1986), p. 74
Janet Oppenheim, The Other World (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 221–2, 236, 239; Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, pp. 190–1
Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge, 1995), p. 228
Jennifer Ruth ‘“Gross Humbug” or “The Language of Truth”? The Case of the Zoist’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 32: 4 (Winter 1999), 299–323
Richard Noakes, ‘Spiritualism, Science, and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain’ in Bown et al. (eds), Victorian Supernatural, pp. 23–43; Antonio Melechi, Servants of the Supernatural (2008), pp. 166–8, 172–3, 176.
Information drawn from: his publications; medical directories; Frederick T Parson, Vital Magnetism (New York, 1877), pp. 16–17, 43–7, 137
William Munk, Roll of the Royal College of Physicians vol. 3 (1878), p. 181; Proceedings of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London VIII (1880), p.393; http://sueyounghistories.com/archives/2009 /09/09/ John-ashburner-1793–1878/ ‘John Ashburner 1793–1878’ by Sue Young (2009); ‘Bookplate of John Ashburner, M.D.’ at http://cardiffbookhistory.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/curop-2/. An extraordinary dispute involving a student revolt against his lectures on midwifery at St Bartholemew’s is covered in The Lancet (1835), 215, 223–4, 336, 472, 556, 566.
Cited in Melechi, Servants, pp. 166–7. See also John Ashburner, A Series of Essays (British Spiritual Telegraph, vol. 3, Supplement, 1859).
Robert Ziegler, Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-Siecle Paris (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 80–1.
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© 2013 Jonathan Barry
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Barry, J. (2013). The Nineteenth Century: Medicine, Spiritualism and Christianity. In: Raising Spirits: How a Conjuror’s Tale Was Transmitted across the Enlightenment. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378941_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378941_7
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