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Second Sight in Victorian Culture, 1830-1910

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Second Sight in Victorian Culture, 1830-1910 EXTRAORDINARY POWERS OF PERCEPTION: SECOND SIGHT IN VICTORIAN CULTURE, 1830-1910 ELSA RICHARDSON SCHOOL OF HISTORY QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PhD September 2013 1 DECLARATION I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Signed by Elsa Catherine Richardson (30, September, 2013) …………………………………………………………. 2 ABSTRACT OF THESIS EXTRAORDINARY POWERS OF PERCEPTION: SCOTTISH SECOND SIGHT IN VICTORIAN CULTURE 1840-1910 In the mid-1890s the London based Society for Psychical Research dispatched researchers to the Scottish Highlands and Islands to investigate an extraordinary power of prophecy said to be peculiar to the residents of these remote regions. Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, and given in English as ‘second sight’, the phenomenon was most commonly associated with the vision of future events: the death of neighbour, the arrival of strangers into the community, the success or failure of a fishing trip and so forth. The SPR were not the first to take an interest in this pre-visionary faculty, rather they joined a legion of scientists, travel writers, antiquarians, poets and artists who had made enquires into the topic from the end of the seventeenth century. This thesis examines the remarkably prominent position enjoyed by Scottish second sight in the Victorian popular imagination. In seeking to appreciate why a strange visionary ability was able to make claims upon the attention of the whole nation where other folk motifs were consigned to the realms of specialist interest only, this project charts its migration through a series of nineteenth-century cultural sites: mesmerism and phrenology, modern spiritualism and anthropology, romance literature and folklorism, and finally psychical research and Celtic mysticism. Binding these individual case studies together is a cast of shared actors - Walter Scott, Catherine Crowe, William Howitt, Marie Corelli, Andrew Lang and Ada Goodrich Freer - and a focus on their common investigative and creative cultures. My interest is with how the power of second sight, once defined as a supernatural occurrence tied to the geographically distant and mysterious Scottish Highlands, comes to be transformed by the close of the nineteenth century, into a supra-normal facet of the psyche, potentially accessible and exploitable by all. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 9 1. Scholarly Contexts 18 2. Chapter Outline 25 CHAPTER ONE SECOND SIGHT AND THE CREATION OF THE HIGHLANDS, 1660-1830 30 1.1 Second Sight and History 35 1.2 Highland Geographies 49 1.3 Visionary Imagination 61 CHAPTER TWO CLEAR SEEING AND SPIRIT BODIES: CATHERINE CROWE AND MESMERISM, 1830-1860 74 2.1 Supernatural Debunkers and the Spiritual Eye 84 2.2 Highland Seers and Lowland Scientists 96 2.3 Mesmeric Tricks and Religious Visionaries 112 CHAPTER THREE PRIMITIVE SPIRITUALISM: SECOND SIGHT AND ORIGIN MYTHS, 1860-1880 129 3.1 Textual Evidence and Empirical Proofs 141 3.2 Survivals and History Making 158 3.3 Scottish Ancestors and Spiritualist Futures 170 CHAPTER FOUR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, FOLKLORE AND ROMANCE, 1880-1910 183 4.1 Andrew Lang and ‘Psycho-Folklore’ 194 4.2 Marie Corelli and Scientific Romance 211 4.3 The Mythopoetic Imagination 220 4 CHAPTER FIVE RESEARCH IN THE FIELD: ADA GOODRICH FREER AND FIONA MACLEOD, 1890-1910 231 5.1 The Ideal Fieldworker and the ‘Only’ Highland Novelist 238 5.2 Myths of Nationhood and the Re-Making of the Celt 254 5.3 The Occult Celt 263 CONCLUSION 281 BIBLIOGRAPHY 287 Archives 287 Primary Printed Sources 287 Secondary Sources 300 Digital Databases 316 5 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. ‘The Egyptian Hall or The London Museum’, Wellcome Images 109 2. ‘Spirit Photograph of William Howitt (in the flesh and granddaughter (in the spirit)’, Pitt Rivers Museum Collection 141 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I must thank Rhodri Hayward and Thomas Dixon for granting my membership to the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary. As an English literature student with itchy feat and interdisciplinary tendencies, it was a relief to find myself among similarly the afflicted, and the Centre has provided a hugely stimulating environment to work in. Very special thanks to Rhodri, to whom I now owe a substantial intellectual debt. It has been a pleasure to have this research supervised by such a generous scholar, whose criticisms, multiple read-throughs and countless acts of kindness have proved invaluable to this project. To find my own wildly diverse interests not only matched, but also bested by my supervisor seems like a remarkable stroke of luck. Thanks also to Johanna Cohen for her clear-headed guidance during my upgrade; to Catherine Maxwell for her advice at a formative stage of this project; and to Tiffany Watt-Smith for her friendship and keen insight. I am grateful for the Carnegie Trust’s generous financial support: as well as part funding my doctoral studies, this approachable and endlessly charitable organisation also backed my Masters in Victorian Literature in 2009, and without this help it is doubtful I would have been able to carry on my studies. The Wellcome Trust, in addition to kindly contributing further funding to this research, has also provided me with a quiet and well-stocked library to work in; and I am particularly grateful to the Collection’s Ross MacFarlane for pointing me in the direction of useful material. On a similar note, I am indebted to the archivists at Senate House for helping me to steer a path through the supernatural vastness that is the Harry Price Collection. Thank you to Mum for her endless encouragement and to Dad for his proof-reading skills and infectious passion for Scottish history. I am also indebted to my friends and housemates for keeping me sane and socialised. Particular thanks the wonderful Elaine Tierney for her editorial prowess and scholarly enthusiasm. Finally, all my love and gratitude to Laura Edith Guy, my levelled-headed partner in crime whose wit and kindness, have sustained me throughout. 7 NOTE Papers based on Chapter Four have been given as 'Spiritualism and the Imagination', MLA Convention, April 2011 and 'Popular Fiction and the Unconscious', at Women of the Fin de Siècle (Institute of English Studies) 8 INTRODUCTION On August 23 1894, the Dundee Courier printed a short report detailing a ‘tour’ being taken through the West Highlands and Islands by several members of a London- based organisation called the ‘Society for Psychical Research’ (SPR). The purpose of their trip, we are told, concerned ‘that peculiar faculty said to be possessed by many people, especially in the Highlands, and popularly known as ‘‘second sight’’’. Accompanied by a small white terrier dog, ‘two of the lady members’ were making their way through the small fishing villages and farming communities of Tiree, Iona, Eriskay, Barra and Portree, in search of ‘people reputed to have some experience in the matter’.1 In Cock Lane and Commonsense (1894) Andrew Lang, an anthropologist and a prominent member of the SPR, described the hallmarks of this special Scottish vision: In second sight the percipient beholds events occurring at a distance, sees people whom he never saw with the bodily eye, and who afterwards arrive in his neighbourhood; or foresees events approaching but still remote in time. The chief peculiarity of second sight is, that the visions often, though not always, are of symbolical character. A shroud is observed around the living man who is doomed; boding animals, mostly black dogs, vex the seer; funerals are witnessed before they occur, and ‘corpse-candles’ (some sort of light) are watched flitting above the road whereby a burial procession is to take its way2 Known in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or the ‘two sights’, this species of prophetic or superadded seeing was one largely associated with the customs and supernatural lore of the Highlands. It was the alleged topographical, cultural and linguistic specificity of this peculiar visionary faculty that tempted several inquisitive members of the SPR northwards at the close of the nineteenth century. The Society for Psychical Research was established at Cambridge University in 1882 by a group of eminent scientists and philosophers, and it dedicated itself to the investigation of ‘the large group of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and Spiritualistic’.3 Derided by its critics as a society for 1 ‘‘Second Sight’” in the Highlands’, Dundee Courier & Argus, 24 August 1894 2 Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense (London: Longman & Green, 1894), p. 228 3 ‘Objects of the Society’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882-3), 3 9 ‘ghost-seers and ghost-seekers’ and hailed by its supporters as the first ‘organised and systematic’ attempt to understand the unexplainable, this remarkable organisation expresses something of the curious intermixture of science and the supernatural so characteristic of the Victorians. Intrigued by strange mesmeric energies, table-turning spirits and apparitions, and fascinated by Eastern philosophy, ancient religions and Christian mysticism, many people in the nineteenth century were dazzled by the draw of transformative hidden wisdom and unseen forces. On an average day in fin de siècle London, one might enquire into joining the Theosophical Society or pick up a copy of the journal Lucifer to learn of recent developments in esoteric philosophy, attend a meeting of SPR, call up the dead at a spiritualist séance, before rushing home to read the latest supernatural fiction. In their excavation
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