Reviews

Antiono Melechi Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind (London: Arrow Books, 2009). Paperback, with black-and-white illustrations. Pp. 292. £8.99. ISBN: 978-0-099-47886-7.

In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, when the Victorian craze for the séance was at its height, an eclectic assortment of widely different personalities emerged as mesmerism and spiritualism’s proponents, practitioners, investigators, and opponents. Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural describes the Victorian fascination with mesmerism and spiritualism through an examination of some of these key personalities.

Aimed at the general reader with a general working knowledge of the Victorian period, this is not intended to be a comprehensive appraisal of the mesmerist and spiritualist movements, although it does chart their origins and much of their history. Instead, the book aims to be ‘a gallery of contrasting thumbnail portraits’ of people whom Melechi sees as ‘servants of the supernatural’. While these portraits include well-known names like Franz Anton Mesmer, James Braid, and Daniel Dunglas Home, they are often relatively underexplored figures: Alexis Didier, Henry Slade, and many others, whose widely different stories reflect the many facets of the production and reception of trance and séance phenomena.

Claiming that recent scholarship tends to ‘suspend judgement’ on the veracity of séance phenomena, Melechi also aims to explore some of the mechanisms of fraudulent phenomena production, which makes Chapter Nine, ‘Conjurors in Disguise’, one of the most compelling sections of the book. The book also aims to consider the ‘psychology of mediumship’, a key context for the ways in which both fraudulent and faithful mediums and mesmerists performed as well as for the ways believers and sceptics received and judged these experiences.

The first two chapters explore the rise of mesmerism, or rather its uneven rising and falling in different parts of Europe and Britain, describing how Mesmer’s largely discredited healing force of ‘animal magnetism’ nevertheless retained its appeal to later practitioners such as Baron Dupotet, and, more significantly, John Elliotson, who introduced treatment by animal magnetism into his hospital. Elliotson, who grew to believe strongly in the efficacy of animal magnetism, conducted a series of experiments on housemaids Elizabeth and Jane Okey. Melechi suggests that the sisters were ‘neither outright impostors nor mesmeric automatons’, but driven by a combination of psychological pressures and a desire to elude a return to domestic drudgery. Elliotson went on to show that mesmerism, or hypnosis, could be used to alleviate pain and that he was able to conduct painless operations without anaesthesia. These discoveries coincided with the discovery and use of anaesthetic gases in surgery, which rapidly became the dominant method and ‘dealt the first decisive blow to mesmerism’s medical ambitions’, pushing it back to the margins.

However, mesmerism, phrenology, and related fads like electrobiology were gaining cultural ground by the 1840s and chapter four, ‘Lecture Mania’, describes how Victorian Britain embraced the public performance and demonstration of mesmeric phenomena, not least, Melechi suggests, because of the public controversy between ‘advocates of the new science’ and ‘sceptical experts’. Among the prominent converts to the powers of mesmerism was writer and activist Harriet Martineau. She attributed the cure of her long illness to mesmerism, although, as Melechi describes, circumstances suggest the chief benefits were psychological and coincidental.

The clairvoyant aspects of mesmeric phenomena, thought by some to be attributed to communication with the deceased, formed one of the preliminary conditions for the rise of spiritualism with which the remaining chapters are concerned. Where mesmerism proposed a physical magnetic ‘fluid’ as the agent of healing and clairvoyance, spiritualism proposed the existence of a spirit world and communication with the dead. For this reason, Melechi notes, after chemical anaesthesia, spiritualism dealt another blow to mesmerism’s scientific credibility. By the mid-1850s, mesmerism’s ‘materialist credo’ had fallen by the wayside and spiritualists turned to the mediums of the séance to prove the existence of the spirit world. Early investigators included Michael Faraday, whose exposure of the mechanisms of ‘table tipping’ in fact did little to curb popular enthusiasm.

Chapter eight explores Daniel Dunglas Home, one of the most successful mediums, famous for his ability to levitate, whose adroitness in determining his sitters and séance conditions meant that, unusually among mediums, he was never exposed in fraud. Chapter nine shows the spiritualist craze from the perspective of the professional magicians such as John Maskelyne, who used their knowledge of trickery to expose mediums and perform their phenomena as stage magic and entertainment. Maskelyne used his knowledge to influence the trial of Henry Slade, the first medium to be prosecuted for fraud after the investigations of Darwinist Edwin Lankester exposed his slate-writing deceptions.

The final chapter describes the Reverend William Stainton Moses, who discovered in himself a gift for automatic writing, and the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research, which, while initially welcomed by spiritualists, diverged from the spirit hypothesis by their investigations into scientific hypotheses such as telepathy. The final portrait with which Melechi concludes is of Leonora Piper, whose apparent clairvoyant powers and her use of several spirit controls led to a series of investigations by William James, Richard Hodgson, and Stanley Hall. As with many other lower-class female mediums, as Melechi suggests, social opportunities formed an important motivation for Piper’s ambitions. Melechi concludes that, in addition to the deliberate stage trickery and fraud perpetrated by many mediums, the phenomena of the trance and the séance are explained by a combination of feigned trance, psychological mimicry, and a small proportion of genuine trance, while the effects produced by these conditions were ‘artefacts of social interaction’ constructed out of mutual expectations. Ultimately, Melechi seems to find, many secrets of the Victorian mesmerists and spiritualists still remain ambiguous and hidden in the cracks between stage magic, hypnotic trance, and inconclusive investigations.

The strengths of this book include its readability for the general reader at which it is aimed and the primary sources used to bring these historical figures alive with personal detail. Melechi also offers an examination of mesmerism and spiritualism from different sides, showing shows the perspectives of practitioners, sponsors, and investigators. One drawback of the ‘gallery of thumbnail portraits’ approach is a somewhat disjointed effect with consistent links between the different figures (such as between Moses and Piper, who form parts of the same chapter) not always evident. Melechi suggests fascinating perspectives on the motivations of somnambulists and trance mediums, and the influence of the expectations of their supporters, but generally these are not widened into a broader social analysis, which is limited to his brief conclusion. While a strong theoretical framework or argument perhaps is not to be expected in a text written for the general reader, Melechi touches tantalisingly on some of the cultural work and implications of spiritualism (e.g. the ‘psychology of mediumship’ or the ‘liminal zone’ of the séance) too briefly to satisfy this reviewer, describing but not fully explaining ‘the night side of the Victorian mind’.

This book offers a wealth of detail on a great range of important figures and reveals many intriguing insights, especially into the relationships of well-known names like S. T. Coleridge and Charles Dickens with the mesmerist and spiritual craze. It is not an academic book to satisfy a cultural scholar fully, but is an appealing account offering a colourful picture for the general reader.

Emily Alder

Edinburgh Napier University

Em.Alder@napier.ac.uk

William Hughes, Bram Stoker: Dracula. Reader’s Guide To Essential Criticism Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), hb, 173pp. & Robert Eighteen-Bisang & Elizabeth Miller (eds) Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition (North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2008), hb, 331 pp.

The two books under review here are excellent examples of utility-focussed criticism: they are undeniably useful tools for further research and scholarship on Stoker’s most important novel and at the same time make a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Dracula from its conception in Stoker’s own notes to the extensive critical commentary in which the novel is presently contextualised.

William Hughes’s Bram Stoker: Dracula is one of the newest volumes in Palgrave’s Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism Series, which has already offered short works on other gothic themes and writers, including Angela Carter, Frankenstein, Victorian Sensation Fiction and Gothic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan have hit upon a popular and functional formulae in these guides, as is testified by the growing number of leading academics who have contributed their valuable expertise to the series. No fault can be found in the present guide on this front: William Hughes is one of the leading international scholars of the work of Bram Stoker, and a critic who has written extensively on Dracula over a number of years and in a variety of contexts. This, of course, means that he has the unenviable task of placing his own work within the broader context of nearly half a century of Dracula criticism, a task he manages with admirable, if sometimes over-meticulous, modesty.

The guide itself offers a series of five substantive chapters, each dealing with a different field of critical work. Not unexpectedly the first chapter deals with psychoanalysis and psychobiography (staples of gothic critical paradigms), beginning with Freud’s acolyte Ernest Jones, whose work on nightmare as symbolically representative of sexual guilt informed work on the gothic far beyond Dracula. Jones gives way to Maurice Richardson’s Lacanian-inflected analysis which places desire as the central metonymy of the text. Hughes has written elsewhere of his own frustration with the continuing obsession with psychoanalysis in gothic criticism, yet here he addresses their contribution very fair-mindedly, keen not to allow his own preferences to take too much hold. The second chapter considers Dracula in the context of physiological criticism; moving from the immanence of mind to the materiality of the body, and to an increasingly materialist critical perspective. The focus in this chapter is on medicine, mind and body, considering madness through Victorian physiology, and moving on to a discussion of the manifold readings of blood as metaphor for ill-health, contamination, and sexual excess.

The third chapter shifts the critical ground to postcolonial studies, shaped around the familiar conceit of Dracula as a novel dealing with invasion and empire. This chapter is well-balanced, though, between the themes of Western conquest, anti-semitism, and Balkan politics. Although it may seem odd that there is no mention of Irish cultural and political contexts here, this is simply because Hughes chooses to deal with this subject in the subsequent chapter. Starting with Joseph Valente’s claim that Dracula becomes an Irish gothic novel only when it enters the field of Irish Studies as an object-text, Hughes reveals the extent to which Irish Studies has influenced the twenty-first century critics of Stoker. Dealing in turn with Irish Studies, the Anglo-Irish, sectarianism and Irish history, this excellent chapter is one of the first to provide an overview of the Irish critical contexts to the novel. Finally, the fifth chapter revisits a topic that has existed as an undercurrent throughout – gender studies. There is a reprieve of critical work on sexuality that is quickly superseded, and rightly so, by a more focussed analysis of Dracula within gay and lesbian studies, and especially those critical works that have addressed the text’s representations of both the homosocial and homosexual.

Hughes’s guide is supplemented by a conclusion dealing with various scholarly editions of the novel itself, a very well-organised and presented bibliography (these will be the pages most-thumbed in my own copy, I am sure) and a sharp introduction that deals primarily with the novel’s emergence into the critical mainstream and the issues of biographical readings that arise from its popularity. Interestingly, Hughes chooses not to associate Dracula’s rise to prominence in the academy with the commensurate rise of gothic studies or gothic literature. I, for one, would have enjoyed reading his views on this topic, and it is perhaps the only gap in what is otherwise a hugely comprehensive volume. It only remains to note that the critical works included here come to an end in the middle of 2007, unfortunately (but entirely understandably) missing a few important contributions later in that year and in 2008.

While Hughes gives us the view from the academic reader, Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller provide the perspective of the working author. Their facsimile edition of Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula, which they have annotated and transcribed, is a tremendous addition to the bookshelf of the Stoker critic, and will be extraordinarily useful for adding value to the teaching of Dracula at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

The main body of the book comprises the various notebooks for the novel kept by Stoker from 1890, along with their transcriptions. The majority of the notes in these notebooks are handwritten, with some typed. These originals are reproduced (excellently) on each left hand page and the transcription by the editors appears on each right hand page. A series of annotations appear in footnotes, also on each right hand page. The annotations are of varying kind; some are merely factual, some offer cross-correspondences with other sections of the notebooks, some try to offer an interpretation of the notebooks. For those of us either without any access to the notebooks, or to various forms of (poor) reproduction of selected notes, this book is hugely valuable. By far its most impressive features are the ease of reading from original to transcription and the sharp quality of the reproductions. Neatly, when the transcription has had to occupy more than one page the editors have maintained the left hand page/right hand page formulae and supplied a series of contextual illustrations. These are thoughtfully chosen and include the illustration of the Invisible Giant from Stoker’s earlier collection, ‘Under The Sunset’, a much more vampiric image than the ‘official’ caricature of Dracula that was the cover of the 1901 edition.

Eighteen-Bisang and Miller conclude with a series of appendices, which do not match the utility of the volume as a whole. There are some necessary lists, such as of the correspondence between the original page numbers of the notebooks and the page numbers of the present volume, but there are too many appendices that seem little more than filler. A brief biography and bibliography, for example, simply reproduces work that the enterprising critic could find in a number of other works, and these has been entirely superseded, of course, by Hughes’s guide. Others are a little whimsical: while ‘The Novel We Could Have Read’ is fun enough, its speculation is not entirely appropriate to a scholarly volume, and would have been far better conceived as a methodical appendix on the evolution of the novel from notebooks to text.

Nevertheless, Eighteen-Bisang and Miller should be commended for their painstaking work on the notebooks, and the helpful volume they have produced as a result. Likewise, it is the aid to scholarship that stands out in Hughes’s guide to Dracula criticism. Any critic aiming to write on Dracula for an academic or student audience could do worse than have these volumes within reach when they do so.

Martin Willis

University of Glamorgan

m.willis@glam.ac.uk

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