| The Supernatural in the Victorian Era |
| The 19th century is routinely thought about as the era of secularisation, a period when the | Párr. 1 |
| disciplines and institutions of modern science were founded and cultural authority shifted |
| from traditional authority of religion to explanation through the scientific exposition of |
| natural laws. The emblematic figure in this narrative is Charles Darwin, the anxious amateur |
| 5 | biologist who held off publishing his theory of evolution by natural selection for years for |
| fear of the religious and social disturbance it might produce. Darwin’s Origin of |
| Species (1859) did indeed result in a crisis of faith for many in the 1860s, before his ideas |
| became embedded in British intellectual life in the last decades of the century. |
| The Victorian period is also of course a period of deep and sustained religious revival. | Párr. 2 |
| 10 | There was an evangelical revival in the Christian church but also a host of dissenting, |
| heterodox and millenarian cults. It was a golden age of belief in supernatural forces and |
| energies, ghost stories, weird transmissions and spooky phenomena. For a long time |
| historians ignored these beliefs as embarrassing errors or eccentricities, signs of the |
| perturbations produced by the speed of cultural change. In fact, it is much easier to grasp the |
| 15 | religious and scientific strands of the century as closely intertwined. |
| We can chart this effect through the century in the rise and fall of various movements | Párr. 3 |
| that emerged in this interval between science and belief. In the 1830s and 1840s, for instance, |
| there was a craze for Mesmerism, in which miraculous medical cures could be affected by |
| manipulating the invisible flows of ‘animal magnetism’ that passed through and between |
| 20 | bodies. The Mesmerist would throw his subject into a trance, allowing the passage of energy |
| into the weaker body of his patients, as if literally recharging their battery. This had been first |
| theorized by Franz Anton Mesmer in the feverish atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary Paris, |
| and although discredited by a team of Academy scientists (who privately expressed alarm |
| about the risk of sexual exploitation too) it became a popular medical treatment. Associated |
| 25 | with trance were spectacular supernatural powers: gifts of cure, visions of the future, |
| heightened senses, and a merging of minds typical of the rapport. In London, the leading |
| medic Professor John Elliotson was a passionate convert, but was fired from his post at |
| University College Hospital. One of Elliotson’s biggest defenders was Charles Dickens: the |
| writer believed himself an expert Mesmerist. |
| 30 | In 1852, the American medium Mrs Hayden came to London to conduct séances with | Párr. 4 |
| many of the great and good of London society: this was one of the bridge-heads for the spread |
| of Spiritualism to England. It found particular favour in the industrial north of England, |
| where dissenting religion was already strong. Importantly, Spiritualism contested doctrines |
| of eternal damnation for a much more liberal conception of the afterlife. Many men of science |
| 35 | were also converts, most famously the evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel Wallace, partly |
| because Spiritualism was consistently figured in terms of new magical technologies like the |
| telegraph or telephone. Spiritualism saturates Victorian literary culture, and not just through |
| its most famous converts, such as Arthur Conan Doyle. It is the background for the obsession |
| with ghost stories, gentler returns than the histrionics of the Gothic. Catherine Crowe’s best- |
| 40 | selling book, The Night-Side of Nature (1848) collected anecdotes and stories that hovered |
| somewhere between truth and thrilling tale. |
| In the turbulent, revolutionary year of 1848, a new religious movement emerged from | Párr. 5 |
| the melting pot of upstate New York. The young Fox sisters had claimed to have come into |
| contact with the unquiet spirit of a murdered man in their house, who communicated with |
| 45 | them by loud knocks on wood. This very local sensation (later shown to be a fraud) was the |
| origin point for the Spiritualist movement, which elaborated a method of communicating |
| with the dead in séances through mediums. Mediums were often women because they were |
| deemed to have more delicate, sensitive nervous systems than men. Men who were mediums |
| – such as the famous D D Home who so enraged Robert Browning that he was the source for |
| 50 | his poem ‘Mr Sludge’ – were often abjected and despised. Although communication with |
| spirits was strictly forbidden in the Bible, this became a popular form of dissenting belief, a |
| ‘proof’ of the survival of bodily death in an era that demanded empirical testing and |
| experiment. The spirits would exchange banal but comforting messages with loved ones; |
| some would elaborate extensively on the social and political institutions of the afterlife, |
| 55 | called Summerland by some. |
| In 1882, a group of earnest intellectuals founded the Society for Psychical Research. | Párr. 6 |
| They aimed to investigate the claims of Mesmerism, Spiritualism and authenticated ‘true’ |
| ghost stories. They did so by developing an extraordinary jargon of ‘psychical research’ that |
| fused the latest advances in the physical and psychological sciences with their hopes for proof |
| 60 | of a supermondane world. The Society called haunted houses ‘phantasmogenetic centres’ |
| and theorised mediumship as the result of ‘telepathy’ or ‘subliminal uprushes’ from unknown |
| psychical faculties. Although marginal, this group also had a big influence on the late |
| Victorian Gothic revival. Henry James’s late ghost stories are thoroughly psychical, not least |
| because his brother, William James, was a leading light of the Society. Writers like Robert |
| 65 | Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood have also been read in the |
| context of the SPR. |
| The 1880s swirled with other, more overtly mystical societies and a magical revival. | Párr. 7 |
| London became the home of Madame Blavatsky, the medium for dictations from the |
| Mahatmas, who provided the basis for her Theosophical Society. Those in pursuit of |
| 70 | Hermetic secrets, the lost wisdom of the ancients, could join the Hermetic Order of the |
| Golden Dawn. Their top-secret initiation rites were fought over by the poet and magus, |
| William Butler Yeats and the evil genius Aleister Crowley, poet and provocateur and self- |
| proclaimed Antichrist. |
| One of the greatest influences on the spread of supernatural theories very late in the | Párr. 8 |
| 75 | century was the journalist W T Stead. Stead, who edited the Pall Mall Gazette and founded |
| the Review of Reviews, was an ardent believer in new communication technologies, which |
| included everything from new printing presses and telephones in the office to communicating |
| with the dead and interviewing politicians telepathically. Between 1893 and 1897 he |
| published Borderland, perhaps the most eccentric journal of the century, in which news about |
| 80 | ghosts, spirit séances, astrological predictions, psychical research findings, book reviews on |
| anything occult, and news of breakthroughs in physics and chemistry were mixed together in |
| a potent cocktail of weirdness. For a man obsessed with new technology, it was inevitable he |
| wanted to travel on the Titanic in 1912. Equally, it was inevitable that Spiritualists claimed |
| that the first news of the catastrophe that night was beamed across the ocean by the spirit of |
| 85 | Stead, who had passed over but still wanted to be first to deliver the great story. |
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| Fuente: Luckhurst, R. (30 de junio de 2016). The Victorian supernatural. The British | |
| Library:Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and- | |
| 90 | victorians/articles/the-victorian-supernatural | |