View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository SCIENCE, MAGIC AND ANCIENT EGYPT IN LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LITERATURE by ELEANOR DOBSON A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of M.A. by Research Department of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham September 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This thesis investigates the ways in which science and magic were brought together in fiction of the fin de siècle concerning ancient Egypt, in the works of popular including Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli. Notions of authenticity and artifice, fact and fiction, antiquity and modernity collided in the late nineteenth- century metropolis, where London’s academic institutions, occult organisations and theatrical exhibits of Egyptiana sat side by side. Writers who lived in this central hub are examined in relation to this unique geographical space that encouraged a sense of intimacy between these concepts. The influence of scientific discoveries demonstrated in the city’s lecture halls, including remarkable electrical phenomena, and occult undertakings such as Spiritualist séances, are traced within literature. Ancient Egypt, in this fiction, encourages a fusion of the two, lending an air of legitimacy to depictions of the supernatural, while projecting a sense of the alchemical and magical onto representations of cutting-edge science, including X-rays and radiation. In this way, literature with ancient Egyptian themes often reveals much about late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas of fantasy and reality, as well as the present’s relationship to the past. Acknowledgements Firstly, for his unwavering patience, I must thank my supervisor, Jim Mussell. His guidance has been a constant source of inspiration and support, and for this I am deeply indebted to him. This thesis has also benefited from the suggestions of Deborah Longworth, who kindly agreed to critique it in its final stages. David Gange has often pointed me in the direction of invaluable resources, and I am particularly grateful for his generosity in entrusting me with his unpublished work. He, Hugh Adlington and Nathan Waddell have advised me at various stages of my research into ancient Egypt, critiquing countless research proposals including the original plan for this project. I am also glad to acknowledge my gratitude to William Hughes, who was kind enough to send me the transcript of one of his conference papers, and for advising me on one of my own. My heartfelt thanks also go to Rosalind Fursland, for reading suggestions and endless encouragement. Finally, I remain ever thankful to Reza Khorasanee, Jan Paget and to Georgia, Mike and Cleo Dobson, for their constant love and reassurance. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1. ARTEFACTS AND ARTIFICE: ANCIENT EGYPT IN THE MODERN CITY 10 H. Rider Haggard’s She, London’s Artefacts and the Ironic Imagination 31 Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars and Cryptic Geography 43 London, the Real and the Fantastic 54 2. GHOSTLY IMAGES: MAGIC, ILLUSION AND TECHNOLOGY 57 The Séance and Stage Magic 65 The Spirit Photograph and the Moving Picture 75 Accessing the Past through Modern Technologies 90 3. WEIRD PHYSICS: VISIBLE LIGHT, INVISIBLE FORCES AND THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM 93 Electricity, Illumination and Visible Light as Spectacle 99 X-Rays and Radioactivity 118 Scientists and Gods 125 4. OCCULT PSYCHOLOGY: DREAMS, TRANCE AND TELEPATHY 128 Uncanny Eyes and Prophetic Dreams 138 Bodies and Machines 149 Degeneration and Evolution 155 CONCLUSION 160 BIBLIOGRAPHY 165 List of Illustrations 1.1. Select map of significant occult, scientific and Egyptian-themed sites 10 1.2. The Egyptian Hall at 170-1 Piccadilly, photographed in 1895 14 1.3. North Transept of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham 16 1.4. Wedding scene from Amāsis 24 1.5. The two facsimiles of the Sherd of Amenartas 40 1.6. Front and reverse details of the scarab from The Jewel of Seven Stars 45 1.7. Detail of the sphinx 56 2.1. Programme for one of Maskelyne and Cooke’s shows at the Egyptian Hall 63 2.2. Nineteenth-century engraving ‘Magic Lantern projecting a scene of Ancient Egypt’ 77 2.3. Cabinet card souvenir photograph (c. 1885) 79 2.4. Harmachis’s vision 87 2.5. Harmachis summoning ghosts 88 3.1. Lantern slide ‘View 082: Egypt - Shepherd's [sic] Hotel, the Hall, Cairo’ 101 3.2. Engraving ‘Electric Lighting of the British Museum’ depicting a private viewing of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery 103 3.3. Illustration by Henry Sumner Watson 104 3.4. The Embankment and Cleopatra's Needle at Night, London by George Hyde Pownall c.1910 105 3.5. Illustration of Nikola Tesla by Walter Goble, accompanying the article ‘The New Wizard of the West’ by Chauncy Montgomery M’Govern 114 4.1. The Egyptian Fortune Teller [n. d.], by Rudolf Ernst 133 4.2. ‘The Chariot’ and ‘Wheel of Fortune’ tarot cards designed by Pamela Colman Smith (1909) 135 4.3. Pauline Frederick as Zuleika, Potiphar’s Wife, in Joseph and His Brethren (1913) 136 4.4. Aleister Crowley wearing the Eye of Horus on his hat 148 4.5. Theda Bara in a promotional photograph for Cleopatra (1917) 158 INTRODUCTION Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 sparked the beginnings of ‘Egyptomania’, the craze in the Western world, particularly in Britain and France, for all things ancient Egyptian. It also saw the beginning of innovative modern scholarship on ancient Egypt and, after Jean-François Champollion deciphered ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the birth of the science of Egyptology.1 This period of fascination for ancient Egypt extended beyond the nineteenth century, reaching a climax in 1922 with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.2 This thesis offers an analysis of ancient Egypt in literary culture in the years leading up to this zenith, presenting an insight into the fluid ways in which ideas were being exchanged between the often overlapping discourses of science and magic. In doing so, it argues for the significance of ancient Egypt in late Victorian and Edwardian popular culture, charting its influence on a variety of literary genres, as well as in theatre, art, and more serious scholarly investigations into diverse scientific subjects ranging from electricity and X- rays to trance and clairvoyance. The last decades of the nineteenth century were particularly significant in the development of scientific investigations into the paranormal and the popularisation of esoteric movements such as Spiritualism, Theosophy and Hermeticism, a 1 Jeffrey Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 16; Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 3; Michael Delahoyd, ‘The Curse of the Mummy’s Text’ (2009), <http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/mummy.article.html> [accessed 10 October 2012]. 2 David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 1. 1 fascination known collectively as the ‘occult revival’.3 Increased British imperial involvement with Egypt meant that the country was seldom out of the newspapers, while Thomas Cook revolutionised tourism at a similar time, making Egypt’s ancient monuments accessible to eager travellers and archaeological digs easier to facilitate.4 Over the course of a decade, the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society was founded in 1878, the Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 (the year Britain invaded Egypt), and 1888 saw the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the first occult society to create a rigorous programme of practical magical education.5 The occult was being explored in novel ways, with quasi-religious groups drawing upon ancient Egyptian symbolism and reviving, for both public and private performances, the civilisation’s magical rites. Furthermore, the otherworldly and the spiritual were being investigated with scientific rigour, while developments in fields as diverse as telegraphy and radioactivity were theorised to be connected to occult phenomena then fascinating society. As Dominic Montserrat notes, in the nineteenth century, ancient Egypt was considered to be ‘the beginning of everything’.6 Separated from modernity by thousands of years, ancient Egypt remained connected to the present through its association with the origins of modern science and magic. Erik Hornung’s influential division of ancient Egypt in Western cultural consciousness into objective, scholarly Egyptology and spiritual ‘Egyptosophy’, ‘the 3 Kathleen L. Spencer, ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH: English Literary History, 59.1 (1992), 197-225, (p. 203). 4 Martin Willis, Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), p. 117. 5 Alison Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2. 6 Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 154. 2 study of an imaginary Egypt viewed as the profound source of all esoteric lore’, is a useful starting point for an analysis of the ways in which ancient Egypt is and has recently been perceived.7 Certainly, his divisions are appropriate in the twenty-first century, where any overlap between scientific Egyptology and mystical Egyptosophy is immediately dismissed as nonsense.