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(Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897) on 24 November 1838

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(Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897) on 24 November 1838 INTRODUCTION MARTIN WILLIS and CATHERINE WYNNE Elliotson has written to me to go and see some experiments on Okey at his house at 3 0 'clock tomorrow afternoon. (Charles Dickens to George Cruikshank, 1838) When my brain says "Come!" to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding. (Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897) On 24 November 1838, Charles Dickens sent a note to George Cruikshank to invite him to accompany him to John Elliotson's mesmeric experimentations. 1 The friendship between Elliotson, the professor of practical medicine at University College London, and the popular writer was created through their shared interest in mesmeric phenomena. The mesmeric and the literary converge in the careers of the Victorian period's most famous proponents of their respective practices. However, by the end of 1838 Elliotson's orthodox medical career was in ruins - he suffered devastating attacks by the Lancet for his experiments on the O'Key sisters and when University College Hospital, which he helped to found, prevented him from continuing mesmeric treatments there, he resigned on 12 December 1838.2 That evening he dined with Dickens whose literary career was beginning to flourish. 3 In many ways, the relationship between Dickens and Elliotson sets the precedent for the engagement of the mesmeric and the literary 1 Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, eds Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols, Oxford, 1965, I, 461. 2 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 98-100. 3 Dickens, The Letters, I, 480. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 2 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne throughout the nineteenth century. In the opening number of the Zoist - the monthly periodical founded by Elliotson in April 1843 to promote his new scientific interests - Elliotson invokes the literary and seizes on Dickens' observations on Nancy's humanity in Oliver Twist in a reprint of his November 1842 address to the Phrenological Society. In a tribute to Dickens' stature, Elliotson asks the society to "pardon" him for "the vanity of saying my friend Charles Dickens".4 The scientist and the writer are also united in their concern with the discovery of truth. The Zoist's attestation of 1843 proclaimed the "discovery of a new truth ... the science of MESMERISM is a new physiological truth of incalculable value and importance". This truth "presents the only avenue through which is discernible a ray of hope that the more intricate phenomena of the nervous system, - of Life, - will ever be revealed to man".5 For Dickens, Nancy's humanity is equally a truth: "It involves the best and worst shades of our common nature; much of its ugliest hues, and something of its most beautiful; it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility, but it is a Truth. ,,6 The Zoist pursued scientific truth and pronounced mesmerism a "triumph" that "quicken[s] the pulse in the bosom of humanity".7 Oliver Twist exposes social truth through its examination of power. The text is suffused with corrupt state authority, sexual power, psychological domination and the imposition of will. Dickens' influence on Elliotson is registered in the doctor's comments that "those who feel a joy and a duty in assisting to improve mankind" must understand the "absolute necessity of improving the qualities of the brain".8 Elliotson equally captivated Dickens. The author had, Fred Kaplan notes, by the late 1830s absorbed mesmerism into his "creative consciousness". The science was concomitant with the 4 "Phrenological Society", The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare, III (April 1843), 49. 5 "Prospectus", Zoist, Ill, 2. 6 Charles Dickens, "The Author's Introduction to the Third Edition", in Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, 3 vols, London, 1841, I, xi-xii. 7 "Prospectus", Zoist, Ill, 2-3. 8 Elliotson, "Dr Elliotson's Address to the Phrenological Association", Zoist, I13 (October 1843),229. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 3 discovery of the "great resources of energy and will within himself' that were so essential to his art.9 Dickens, the artist, was also Dickens the mesmerist. He first practised mesmerism on his wife Catherine in Pittsburgh in 1842 during a lecture tour of America. 10 However, his mesmeric treatment of Madame de la Rue in Genoa in 1844 was more controversial. It demonstrated the mutual need in the operator-patient relationship - a need that helped to destabilize Dickens' marriage and tapped into one of the central debates surrounding mesmeric controversy in the nineteenth century - sexual morality. Although Dickens' clinical deployment of the science substantiated his credence in its therapeutic possibilities, his final and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) explores the malevolent mesmerist, John Jasper, who penetrates Rosa Bud's mind to impose his sexual desire: He has made a slave of me with his looks .... When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes but he forces me to see them without looking at them. 11 The incomplete novel is Dickens' finest exposition of altered states of consciousness in which mesmerism's potential remains undisclosed, anticipating the science's ambiguous position in medicine and fiction in the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century when Bram Stoker published his vampire novel, mesmerism was already medically marginalized in Britain. In his fiction, Stoker, a science graduate of Trinity College Dublin, allied himself to the school of Jean-Marie Charcot. In Dracula, the French scientist, and early mentor of Freud, is referred to as "the great Charcot - alas that he is no more". 12 Frantz Anton Mesmer appears in Stoker's Famous Impostors (1910). Here Stoker endorses mesmerism but attributes its creator with imposture for 9 Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Princeton, 1975,145,138. \0 Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths: The Story ofHypnosis, Basingstoke, 2002, 190. 11 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Cardwell, Oxford, 1972, 53-54. 12 Brarn Stoker, Dracula, ed. A. N. Wilson, Oxford, 1983, 191. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 4 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne imbuing the science he created with bizarre and unnecessary ritualism and "parting the ways between earnest science and charlatanism". 13 However, mesmerism's ambiguity and its peripheral status are most famously explored in Dracula. The narrative's centrality to an understanding of the literary deployment of mesmerism incorporates the scientific and the sexual. The Count deploys mesmeric powers to satisfy his lust for blood but the occultist predisposition is scientifically reclaimed by a Dutch doctor, Van Helsing, and mesmerism becomes central in the struggle to defeat the vampire. Through an unwilling exchange of blood with the Count in the perverse marital ceremony that is conducted in her bedroom while her husband lies sleeping by her side, Mina Harker becomes, as Dracula promises, "flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin" (288). Mina's quasi-bigamous union with the Count underlines the sexual affinities of the mesmeric trance. However, her psychic connection with Dracula allows each to gain access to the other's mind. Dracula informs her: "When my brain says "Come!" to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding" (288). Under the hypnotic guidance of Van Helsing, Mina is simultaneously able to read the Count's mind as he flees England for Transylvania and this allows the vampire hunters to track his movements, trap him at his Castle and destroy him. In many ways, the ElliotsonlO'Key narrative is paralleled in the relationship between Van Helsing (who is, early in the novel, suspected of being "mad") and Mina, but with one significant difference - in the fiction mesmerism triumphs and Mina and Van Helsing save family, nation and race from the vampiric disease (204). Like Dickens, Stoker also explores the ambiguity of mesmerism in his final novel. The Lair of the White Worm (1911) focuses on Edgar Caswall whose ancestor inherited Mesmer's trunk. The trunk, according to an old retainer, "probably contains secrets which Dr Mesmer told my master. Told them to his ruin!,,14 Edgar's eyes exhibit a "remarkable will power" and one that "seems to take away from eyes that meet them all power of resistance" (18). Like Jasper, Caswall preys on a young female. For Dickens and Stoker - writers who frame the Victorian period - mesmerism simultaneously emerges as an enabling and disabling discourse. Both endorse its scientific potential and, more importantly, both deploy its ambiguous \3 Bram Stoker, Famous Impostors, London, 1910, 155. 14 Bram Stoker, The Lair o/the White Worm, London, 1911, 112. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 5 connotations in their fictions. In this study of nineteenth-century writing, we see how mesmerism's power lies in its ability to invigorate and often
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