SPIRITS OF THE AGE: GHOST STORIES AND THE VICTORIAN PSYCHE Jen Cadwallader A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: Laurie Langbauer Jeanne Moskal Thomas Reinert Beverly Taylor James Thompson © 2009 Jen Cadwallader ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT JEN CADWALLADER: Spirits of the Age: Ghost Stories and the Victorian Psyche (Under the direction of Beverly Taylor) “Spirits of the Age: Ghost Stories and the Victorian Psyche” situates the ghost as a central figure in an on-going debate between nascent psychology and theology over the province of the psyche. Early in the nineteenth century, physiologists such as Samuel Hibbert, John Ferriar and William Newnham posited theories that sought to trace spiritual experiences to physical causes, a move that participated in the more general “attack on faith” lamented by intellectuals of the Victorian period. By mid-century, various of these theories – from ghosts as a form of “sunspot” to ghost- seeing as a result of strong drink – had disseminated widely across popular culture, and, I argue, had become a key feature of the period’s ghost fiction. Fictional ghosts provided an access point for questions regarding the origins and nature of experience: Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, must decide if he is being visited by his former business partner or a particularly nasty stomach disorder. The answer to this question, here and in ghost fiction across the period, points toward the shifting dynamic between spiritual and scientific epistemologies. As I demonstrate, Victorian ghost stories reveal an intellectual climate wherein writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu reject the rigid binary in which the meaning of experience is dictated by either religious or scientific thought; instead, by drawing on the very psychological theories which sought to dismiss the divine nature of the supernatural, these writers argue for a greater degree of human agency in determining experience’s spiritual value. iii Ghost stories thus represent a countercurrent in the trend toward increased secularism in the Victorian period. By employing the theories and methodologies of the psychologist, ghost story writers reimagined the mind’s ability to access the divine. In each of the ghost stories I examine, I argue that a new faith in the power of the mind reinvigorated Victorian spiritual faith. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES........................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 Chapter I. PHYSIOLOGY, PHARMACOLOGY AND THE GHOST STORIES OF J. S. LE FANU.................................................................................................12 II. TIME, PSYCHOLOGY, AND DICKENS’S SPIRITS OF CHRISTMAS...........53 III. THE ANATOMY OF DESIRE: MADNESS, MESMERISM AND THE SPECTERS OF FEMALE SEXUALITY..............................................................97 IV. SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE VICTORIAN CULTURE OF MOURNING……………………………………………………………….......139 WORKS CITED……………………………..............................................................................175 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Anonymous, “Mr. Mesmer’s Tub”……………………………................................132 2. William H. Mumler, “Mrs. French of Boston with her son’s spirit”………….…....149 3. Frederick Hudson, “Lady Helena Newenham and the Spirit of her Daughter”…....150 4. Harper’s Weekly …………………………………………………………………....156 5. Punch …………………………………………………………………………….....161 vi Introduction The familiar story about the nineteenth century, and particularly the Victorian period, is a story of eroding faith, of growing doubt. It was a time of “living without God in the world” (Miller 1). John Ruskin famously wrote in an 1851 letter to a friend, “You speak of the Flimsiness of your own faith. Mine, which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold leaf, and flutters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms . If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses” (qtd in Alexander 72). Ruskin, at least, was still reading his Bible. Fifty years later, Thomas Hardy reflected nostalgically, “How sweet it was in years far hied /To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer, /To lie down liegely at the eventide /And feel a blest assurance he was there!” (41-44). This, from a poem called “God’s Funeral.” In Hardy’s estimation, God was a “man-projected Figure” created when we once needed solace, destroyed now in our new understanding of the world (21). What Hardy and Ruskin both hint at is the other half of this familiar story of the “age of doubt”: while people’s faith was cast as the tragically doomed hero, the villain of the story is science. From the geologists mentioned by Ruskin who helped discountenance belief in Biblical time, to astronomers who extended the size of the universe and thereby shrunk Victorians’ place within it, to naturalists such as Darwin and Spenser whose evolutionary theory recast the orderly, God-controlled world as a messy, disorganized chaos where chance ruled supreme, science, in its many forms, was blamed for Christianity’s dwindling following. “Spirits of the Age: Ghost Stories and the Victorian Psyche” is situated in this context. Once exclusively the property of religion, the ghost was appropriated by science early in the nineteenth century and became a much-contested figure during the Victorian period. Through an examination of the treatment of ghosts in the nineteenth century, I would like to suggest a new way to read the old familiar story of the conflict between science and religion. My dissertation is divided into three parts: in this introduction, I will outline some theories for ghost-seeing which brought the ghost into the conflicted space between scientific and religious thought; in my chapters on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, and Margaret Oliphant and Rhoda Broughton I will discuss ghost stories that, as a reaction to the debate over ghost-seeing, helped create a more hopeful model for interactions between these two types of thought; and in my final dissertation chapter I will discuss the Spiritualist Movement and the ways in which, out of initial conflict, we see Victorians adapting scientific thinking to a new form of faith. Scientific rationalizations for ghost-seeing began appearing early in the nineteenth century. First among them was Manchester physician John Ferriar’s 1813 Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions . Ferriar’s theory, which depends on Erasmus Darwin’s research on vision, 1 likens ghosts to sunspots: both are impressions left on the eye which appear visible after the actual object has left the field of vision. A deceased relative might seem to appear to the living because the image of the deceased had been imprinted 1 See Darwin’s Zoonomia , Section XL. “On the Ocular Spectra of Light and Colours,” pp. 605-608 particularly. 2 on the brain. In certain states of excitement, that mental impression may transmit itself once more the eye, creating the appearance of a ghost. Ferriar’s work was based on his extensive treatment of the mentally ill in the Manchester Infirmary’s lunatic hospital. Antiquarian and geologist Samuel Hibbert lacked Ferriar’s medical credentials, yet his 1824 Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions was rather popular, going on to a second edition within a year of being published. Hibbert takes a different approach than Ferriar’s work, and instead of relying solely on optics to explain ghost-seeing (though his text does refer to Ferriar’s argument), Hibbert traces these visions to the circulatory system. He elaborates on “certain states of the sanguineous system, in which a remarkable connexion between such states and an undue vividness of mental feelings appears to be established” (10). For example, too much or too little blood, or missing one’s regularly scheduled blood-letting, could result in a taxation of the mind which in turn could cause spectral illusions to appear. Yet another theory is propounded in William Newnham’s 1830 Essay on Superstition . Newnham, a general medical practitioner who specialized in obstetrics and gynecology, argues that ghost-seeing is based on what he terms the “extensive sympathy” of the brain. He explains, “It is, however, accepted in the present discussion, that the brain stands so closely related to other organs of the body, that it possesses the capacity of suffering with them whenever they are in a state of irritation; and also, of reflecting upon them its own morbid actions, which they in their turn oftentimes assume, and then become secondary irritants to the brain” (75). Thus any bodily illness, like indigestion, for example, can cause a “cerebral disorder” which in turn might produce spectral illusions (119). 3 Finally, drawing on the work of his predecessors, the famed optician Sir David Brewster’s Natural Magic argues “In a state of indisposition, the phosphorescence of the retina appears in new and more alarming forms. When the stomach is under a temporary derangement accompanied with headache, the pressure of the blood-vessels upon the retina shows itself, in total