Henry Sidgwick and the World Unseen

Not what you’re asking for, but have you read Jacques Barzun, one of his many books/revisions on “Classical, Romantic, Modern,” where he disparages spiritualism as an unsatisfying, even science-y reaction to the excesses of the Enlightenment, by people raised within the Enlightenment who didn’t know better? Old-fashioned, but possibly still influential, and probably still not too difficult to find.

Robert Cox, “Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of Spiritualism” — a fine and very well-written history,focusing largely on New England, with fine information about somnambulism and spiritualism. Might be hard to find.

Lee Eric Schmidt, “Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment” — The nexus of the telephone, Swedenborg, and spiritualism. Why spiritualists hering voices from the other side gained power from the impact of the telephone — among other things.

Drew Gilpin Faust, “This Republic of Suffering” — how spiritualism expanded after the Civil War when relatives tried to contact dead soldiers whose bodies haf never been recovered.

John Crowley, “KA: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr” pp 332-364 — a ficiton incorporating material from all three of the above, plus an immortal Crow and a fictional medium.

Allow me to suggest The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern and The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England by Alex Owen if you’re into late 19th century uncanniness.

My friend Pam Thurschwell’s Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001) is full of fascinating stuff on the Society for Psychical Research and how its influence spread throughout literary and general culture in all sorts of unexpected ways.

1897 etc was from me

Google “eugen weber philippe muray” and click on the first Google Books link.

Also: “James Webb” (“The Flight from Reason”)

Not quite late 19th Century, but these may interest you:

The accounts of Liverpool & Birmingham physicist Oliver Lodge of his believed spiritualist communications with his late son Raymond, who had died in WWI, “Raymond or Life and Death” (1916).

Annie Moberley’s account of a supposed incident of time travel at Versailles in 1901, the Ghosts of Petit Trianon. Moberley was the first Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and her fellow time-travelling companion, Eleanor Jourdain, was subsequently the second Principal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly–Jourdain_incident

The headline makes me feel like there needs to be a Hedwig and the Angry Inch joke here, but I can’t quite formulate it. Ah well.

7: Format fail. Those are 2 books, not 1 book with a ridiculously long title.

[Apologies if this is a double-post…] Possibly not quite what you’re looking for, but Jenny Davidson’s “The Explosionist” is a wonderful YA book set in an alternate-history 1939 Edinburgh where late 19th-century spiritualism is still going strong. From Kirkus:

“Adult novelist and scholarly author Davidson crafts a YA alternate-history/murder-mystery romp—and mostly pulls it off. In a world in which Napoleon won Waterloo, it’s 1939 and the Federated States of Europe and the New Hanseatic League have concluded one war but may be poised for another. Sixteen-year-old Sophie finds herself in the midst of political intrigue after a medium delivers a cryptic message and then turns up dead. The medium’s death is just the start: IRYLNS, founded by Sophie’s great-aunt and guardian, transforms girls into perfect secretaries via a sinister process; Sophie’s chemistry teacher may be masterminding suicide bombers; and spirits seem set on communication.”

And it’s only $4, apparently.

The very young Keynes’ cruel joke about Sidgwick seems relevant here: “He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true, and prove that it wasn’t, and hope that it was.” Nothing dates as fast, or seems as unnecessary to the next generation, and therefore as unsympathetic, as the halfway houses people painstakingly construct on the way out of religion.

The best bit of spiritualist SF I’ve come across in the last few years is Felix Gilman’s The Revolutions, in which a rather unpleasant Victorian occult society uses astral projection to send an expedition to a planetary-romance Mars.

Off-topic (though i enjoyed this pointed comment) — I loved “Red Plenty” and have just started on “Golden Hill”.

I can’t help wondering if it wasn’t rationality or scientific understanding but rather feminism that helped kill this kind of spiritualism. The stereotypical parlor medium is a pretty young woman in a gauzy shawl who was presumed to be incapable of faking it because she was either too innocent, too naive, or too uneducated to be the source of the “profound” words of the spirit. She was so deeply underestimated by the sophisticated gentlemen who came to watch her that even many of those who expected her to be a fraud found themselves being taken in.

The “Patience Worth” case is a good example as it seems people just couldn’t believe that a Midwestern housewife with limited formal education might still have a reasonable understanding of Shakespearean English, a ready wit, and superficially-convincing knowledge of colonial frontier life. For a certain kind of Victorian/Edwardian man, it was apparently easier to imagine that this woman was possessed by a ghost than that she was capable of deceiving him so completely.

I can’t remember where I read it now, but I’ve also seen it suggested that these intimate sessions with mediums were as much about repressed sexuality and the thrill of seeing “proper” women suddenly transgress their socially defined roles as they were about actually talking to ghosts. That certainly was a major theme of the Gothic Horror of the same era.

I am grateful for the book recommendations here. This post recalls me to some research I left off about a year ago.

I am convinced that there is a direct line from the Puritans and their competing Congregationalist/Unitarian/Calvinist heirs to “New Age” stuff. To explore:

— “professionalization” and the development of academic fields roughly as we know them today, including the elevation of STEM fields, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — cf. professional societies
— “progressive education” (cf. John Dewey), as early as the early 1900’s, ruggedly outdoorsy (cf. Teddy R., national parks, baseball, urbanization and industrialization), “experiential,” and “student-centered” (to read some of the tracts from these “academies” is to read SLAC promotional materials today). So many people founding these schools were the children or grandchildren of Congregational ministers…
— Mary Baker Eddy, the Theosophists, and phenomena like the Moral Re-Armament Movement (MRA — since renamed Initiatives of Change, this became the “cult” that Glenn Close reports she was raised in). Again, the role of ministers and ministers’ children (esp. Congregational and Presbyterian) is striking. Also, the overlap with, say, the YMCA and YWCA. Also, the interest in Hinduism and “Eastern wisdom,” and in general developing notions of many paths to “universal truth.”
— Willa Cather and the Brewsters, esp. the Brewsters (for example)

So much earnest energy! Zeal of the Land Busy.

Anecdote. My talented and distinguished NYC electrical engineering grandfather (b. 1895), though raised in a religious household, was agnostic (or pretty much atheist). Their house “in the country” (Orange County), a simple farmhouse they restored, was “haunted.” My mother well remembered the light that bounced around the room as she and her sister went to sleep as little girls. My grandfather had people from Duke come to investigate, some time in the 1930’s or 1940’s, probably. Some early “paranormal science” types, I think. The Duke guys surmised something along the lines of marsh gases. Sure enough, after they dug a new well, the light stopped appearing. My grandmother was into ouija boards in this same period. She had been raised in southwestern VA in a stern Presbyterian world/other stuff (her mother explored more tent revival stuff when she wasn’t writing poetry). All this according to my mother. I never talked with my grandmother about it. God, I wish I had. She ended up getting conned by a Methodist minister, but that’s another story.

John Crowley @ 25:

Also off topic, but I treasure your work. There isn’t a book of yours from which I haven’t learned something about how to write, and some of them (Little, Big; The Translator; Great Work of Time) are on my perpetual re-read list, to be visited at intervals forever.

Is this not a room?