GHOST, VAMPIRE, AND SCIENTIFIC NATURALISM: OBSERVATION AND EVIDENCE IN THE SUPERNATURAL FICTION OF GRANT ALLEN, BRAM STOKER AND

Shang-jen Li

Still, it must be borne in mind that unless an apparition had been sci- entifically observed as we two independent witnesses observed this one, the grounds for believing in its existence would have been next to none. And even after the clear evidence which we obtained of its immaterial nature, we yet remain entirely in the dark as to its objective reality, and we have not the faintest reason for believing it to have been a genuine unadulterated ghost. At the best we can only say that we saw and heard Something, and that this Something differed very widely from almost any other object we had ever seen and heard before. To leap at the con- clusion that the Something was therefore a ghost, would be, I venture humbly to submit, without offence to the Psychical Research Society, a most unscientific and illogical specimen of that peculiar fallacy known as Begging the Question. —“Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost,” Grant Allen1 Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain. —Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker2 In this paper I investigate the relationship between literary imagination and scientific investigations of the supernatural in the context of the rise of scientific naturalism and popular religious revival in Victorian Britain.3 I analyse supernatural stories by Bram Stoker (1847–1912),

1 Grant Allen, Strange Stories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1885, 2nd Ed.), p. 340. 2 Bram Stoker, Dracula, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 246. 3 On the complicated relations between scientific naturalism and Christian revival in Victorian Britain, see Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reac- tion to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974). 184 shang-jen li

Grant Allen (1848–1899) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) and argue that they can be read as an expression and discussion of the epis- temological difficulties encountered in scientific research on spiritual phenomena. The choice of Allen, Doyle, and Stoker is not arbitrary. All three had scientific backgrounds. Allen was a popular science author with the aspiration of becoming a scientist yet he never fulfilled his dream;4 Stoker studied mathematics at Trinity College, ;5 and Doyle received M.B. and MD degrees from Edinburgh University and had been a practicing ophthalmologist before becoming a full time writer.6 Their attitudes towards scientific naturalism and Spiritualism differed from each other, but Allen, Doyle, and Stoker were all interested in the occult. Doyle was an outspoken supporter of Spiritualism and had com- posed unabashedly apologist writings in defence of spirit photography.7 Allen was a popularizer of Darwin’s theory of . He had recourse to ’s evolutionary philosophy to provide naturalistic accounts of the origins of religious sentiments and aesthetic feelings.8 But Allen was also interested in the occult and had attended, with the biologist Edwin Ray Lankester, the businessman Andrew Carnegie and the writers Edmund Gosse and Oscar Wilde, the telepathic performance of the famous thought-reader Stewart Cumberland.9 Although Stoker was not directly associated with Spiritualism, supernatural stories occupied a large proportion of his oeuvre. He was interested in folklore

4 Peter Morgan, “The Busiest Man in England”: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900 (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 5 Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jona- than Cape, 2004), p. 33. 6 See the entry on Arthur Conan Doyle in Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). 7 Arthur Conan Doyle, A History of Spiritualism (New York: Arno Press, 1975) [originally published in 1926]; idem, Case for Spirit Photography (New York, NY: George H. Doran Co., 1923). On Victorian spirit photography, see Jennifer Tucker, “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Imposter: Visual Representation in Victorian Science,” in Bernard Lightman ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 378–408, on pp. 395–402. 8 Grant Allen, (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885); Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry into the Origins of Religions(Lon- don: Grant Richards, 1897); Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877). 9 “Muscle-Reading by Mr. Stuart Cumberland: A Reception at the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ Office,” Pall Mall Gazette (24 May 1884), p. 2, cited by Roger Luckhurst in idem, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 64–65.