Discussion Post: The Sussex Vampire
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Sussex Vampire and the chosen topic is Victorian Interest in the Supernatural.
A few facts:
👻 The 19th century is routinely thought about as the era of secularisation, a period when the disciplines and institutions of modern science were founded… [But] the Victorian period is also… a period of deep and sustained religious revival… It was a golden age of belief in supernatural forces and energies, ghost stories, weird transmissions and spooky phenomena… In fact, it is much easier to grasp the religious and scientific strands of the century as closely intertwined. Every scientific and technological advance encouraged a kind of magical thinking and was accompanied by a shadow discourse of the occult… Because the advances in science were so rapid, the natural and the supernatural often became blurred in popular thinking, at least for a time. [Roger Luckhurst]
👻 In the 1830s and 1840s… there was a craze for Mesmerism, in which miraculous medical cures could be affected by manipulating the invisible flows of ‘animal magnetism’ that passed through and between bodies. The Mesmerist would throw his subject into a trance, allowing the passage of energy into the weaker body of his patient, as if literally recharging their battery. This had been first theorized by Franz Anton Mesmer in the feverish atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary Paris, and although discredited by a team of Academy scientists (who privately expressed alarm about the risk of sexual exploitation too) it became a popular medical treatment. Associated with trance were spectacular supernatural powers: gifts of cure, visions of the future, heightened senses, and a merging of minds… [Roger Luckhurst]
👻 ...many Victorians were prone to the paranormal, supernatural and occult, of which the most popular forms in the late Victorian period included mesmerism, clairvoyance, electro-biology, crystal-gazing, thought-reading, and above all, Spiritualism… Spiritualism, the belief that the dead communicate with the living, became a fad throughout America and Europe during the 1850s… It is generally agreed that the modern Spiritualist movement began on April 1, 1848, in the village of Hydesville, New York, when two teenaged sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, claimed that they had communicated with the ghost of a man murdered at the house years before their family moved in… [Andrzej Diniejko]
👻 Victorian Spiritualism, also known as the Spiritualism movement, emerged in the late nineteenth century and attracted people from different social classes, including Queen Victoria. It should be noted that Victorian Spiritualism was particularly attractive to women because they were regarded as more spiritual than men. A female medium was often considered a better communicator than a male medium because she had allegedly a better predisposition to spiritual perfectability. Interestingly, spiritualists were concerned with the Woman Question and called for the recognition of women's rights...
In the 1860s, Spiritualism became part of Victorian subculture with its mediums, specialist newspapers, pamphlets, treatises, societies, private and public séances which included table rapping, table tipping, automatic writing, levitation, and other communications with spirits. [Andrzej Diniejko]
👻 “One important and often overlooked aspect of Victorian mediumship is that it could be enormous fun,” says Alex Owen in The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. This is the picture that emerges when one looks particularly at the “star mediums” of the 1870’s, who were known for performing theatrical, full-body materializations for eager audiences.
In a dim seance room, the medium would enter a closed cabinet wherein she would tap the mysterious psychical forces that would allow her to manifest one of her spirit familiars. This familiar would then emerge… from behind the curtain to entertain the assembled sitters. Each medium had her own repertoire of otherworldly entities at her command, each with his or her own distinct personality, speech patterns, favored tricks and antics. They could be gallant, flirtatious, aggressive, or playful, as suited them… Based upon photographs, these spirits seem to have borne an uncanny resemblance to their [female, white British] mediums, and yet sitters came away wholly convinced that they had conversed with men, children, or dark-skinned foreigners; a fact which attests to the theatrical talents of the mediums themselves, as well as the power of suggestion. Not everyone, however, was convinced, and as a result mediums often found themselves tied up and bound inside their manifestation cabinets, or otherwise subjected to innumerable test conditions… [Walter Luke]
👻 It was an essential rule of the dark séance that the gas lamps should not be turned up again until the ghostly figure had returned to the cabinet. The apparition, it was explained, was constructed from the essence of the medium’s body, and a sudden light would cause this material to rush back so violently that it could kill her. There were also strict orders not to seize hold of the apparition, as this, too could result in the death of the medium. Some sitters, determined to expose deception, ignored that rule, and grasped the supposed ghost. No mediums died, but many were shown to be frauds...
We might think the Victorians were gullible but they were being confronted by sights that were beyond their experience, with no accurate means of recording events for later study. They were the victims of fleeting impressions, fallible memory and a need to believe. [Linda Stratmann]
👻 Spiritualism saturates Victorian literary culture… It is the background for the obsession with ghost stories… Although Dickens ridiculed Spiritualism…[he did believe in Mesmerism however], his popular journals helped establish the Christmas ghost story, a tradition that was sustained as a ritual as late as the Edwardian M. R. James. [The assumed] Female sensitivity to the spirit-world also helped establish the supernatural tale as the reserve of women writers… [Roger Luckhurst]
👻 It was the Victorian era, of course, when ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction – as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room seances… What had raised all these apparitions from the dead? The most straightforward explanation is the rise of the periodical press, says Ruth Robbins, professor of English literature at Leeds Metropolitan University. Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill – short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length… Lighting was often provided by gas lamps, which have also been implicated in the rise of the ghost story; the carbon monoxide they emitted could provoke hallucinations…
In the 19th century, people were increasingly able to communicate at a distance, in disembodied fashion. The telegraph allowed messages to be tapped out in code over long distances… and the ability to communicate first with other cities, then countries, eventually to transmit messages across the Atlantic, was brilliant and alarming. "If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away," says Robbins, "words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, 'There's a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'" [Kira Cochrane]
👻 [Bram] Stoker [in his novel ‘Dracula’, 1897] uses the figure of the vampire as thinly-veiled shorthand for many of the fears that haunted the Victorian fin de siècle…
Dracula’s forays into London, for example, and his ability to move unnoticed through the crowded streets while carrying the potential to afflict all in his path with the stain of vampirism, play upon late-Victorian fears of untrammelled immigration. The latter was feared as leading to increased levels of crime and the rise of ghetto communities…
The act of vampirism itself, with its notion of tainted blood, suggests the fear of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and, more generally, the fear of physical and moral decay that was believed by many commentators to be afflicting society…
Victorian literature tends to present the vampire myth as a sexual allegory in which English female virtue is menaced by foreign predators. For example Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story ‘Carmilla’ (1872) places the virtuous English girl Laura at the mercy of the predatory East European vampire of the title…
During the course of [Stoker’s] book Dracula attacks both Mina and Lucy; but Mina, due to the traditional Victorian qualities of determination and loyalty towards her husband is able to resist his advances. The rather more free-spirited Lucy is not so lucky. Some critics have argued that Stoker uses the character of Lucy to attack the concept of the New Woman – a term coined towards the end of the Victorian era to describe women who were taking advantage of newly available educational and employment opportunities to break free from the intellectual and social restraints imposed upon them by a male-dominated society. Those who took a hostile attitude towards the New Woman saw her either as a mannish intellectual or, going to the opposite extreme, an over-sexed vamp. [Greg Buzwell]
👻 In 1882, a group of earnest intellectuals founded the Society for Psychical Research. They aimed to investigate the claims of Mesmerism, Spiritualism and authenticated ‘true’ ghost stories. They did so by developing an extraordinary jargon of ‘psychical research’ that fused the latest advances in the physical and psychological sciences with their hopes for proof of a supermondane [transcendent or unearthly, variant of ‘supermundane’ as far as I can tell] world. [Roger Luckhurst] [The society] still exists today. [Linda Stratmann]
👻 Crystal gazing, palmistry, and other forms of fortune-telling were quite popular during the nineteenth century…
An 1853 edition of the Eclectic Magazine describes crystal gazing (or Crystallomancy) as “the art of divining by figures which appear on the surface of a Crystal Ball”...
One of the most common forms of fortune-telling during the nineteenth century involved using a deck of playing cards. Known as cartomancy, it involved assigning attributes to each of the cards in the deck and then using them, either when dealt in a particular fashion or when chosen at random, to foretell the future…
Palmistry was another common method of nineteenth-century fortune-telling. One did not have to be a gifted occultist to indulge, since cards and diagrams of hands with the meanings of various lines were readily available. The 1886 book Social Amusements even includes palmistry among their selection of parlor games, tricks, and charades…
For the middle and upper classes, crystal gazing, cartomancy, and palmistry were diverting drawing room entertainments. For the fraudsters and charlatans — and all too frequently for the poor — the same practices could end with the perpetrator being prosecuted for fortune-telling under the Vagrancy Act. [Mimi Matthews]
Some useful resources:
The Victorian supernatural By Roger Luckhurst, on the British Library website.
Victorian Spiritualism By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
Victorian Spiritualism — Proponents and Opponents By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Victorian Spiritualism By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
The Lighter Side of Victorian Spiritualism By Walter Luke on Victorian Gothic.
Punch on spiritualism: Last News from the Spirit World A cartoon from Punch dated 10th June 1876.
“Spiritualism” — a review of William Howitt’s History of the Supernatural [in] The Reader (1863) On the Victorian Web.
A review of D.D. Home's Incidents in My Life in The Reader (1863) On the Victorian Web.
Spiritualism On Wikipedia.
Spiritualism, Science, and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain By Richard Noakes. An academic essay in PDF form.
Nineteenth Century Fortune-Telling: From the Drawing Room to the Court Room By Mimi Matthews, on the Victorian Web.
Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them By Kira Cochrane, on the Guardian website.
Introduction to The Victorian Gothic By Charlotte Barrett, on Great Writers Inspire.
The Macabre Victorians By Lauren Donnelly, on Reframing the Victorians.
A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural, British Library, review By Thomas Marks, on the Telegraph website.
10 Classic Victorian Ghost Stories Everyone Should Read On Interesting Literature. With links to the actual stories.
Why Can’t Ghosts Let Go of the Victorian Era? By Dan Nosowitz, on Atlas Obscura.
Professor Ruth Robbins - 'The Victorian Ghost' Posted by Leeds Beckett University. A short talk of 3 mins 33 seconds.
Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural By Vanessa D. Dickerson. This is a preview on Google Books, so may or may not work for you.
Dracula: vampires, perversity and Victorian anxieties By Greg Buzwell, on the British Library website.
Vampires: the Victorian Era By Jordan L. Hawk, on their website.
Vampire literature: Nineteenth century On Wikipedia.
Werewolf fiction: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Mesmerism. Ancient and Modern By Ray Dyer, on the Victorian Web.
William Hughes, That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination A review by Karl Bell, on The British Society for Literature and Science.
Séance On Wikipedia.
12 Weird Vintage Pictures From Séances By Erin McCarthy, on Mental Floss. Most of the photographs date from the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
The Victorian Séance A guest blog by Linda Stratmann, on Geri Walton’s website.
The psychology of spiritualism: science and seances By David Derbyshire, on the Guardian website.
Ouija On Wikipedia.
The Ouija board (a very Victorian pastime) On Recollections. Only brief.
Supernatural Victorian Era On Victorian-Era.org
The Victorian Supernatural Edited by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett & Pamela Thurschwell. On Google Books. If you scroll down, there should (hopefully) be some links to previews of a selection of the chapters.
Superstitious Beliefs of Victorian Society By Alexandra Corbella, on Classroom.
Victorian perspectives on the supernatural: The imaginary versus the real in two Brontë novels By Crystal Sidell, University of South Florida. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Florida. Keywords: fairies, folklore, ghosts, gothic literature, nineteenth-century, occult phenomena, psychological realism
A Victorian Halloween Party By Mimi Matthews, on her website.
The Traditions of Halloween... By Essie Fox, on the Virtual Victorian.
Three Victorian Ghost Stories for a Spooky Christmas By Nick Ostdick, on Books Tell You Why.
A Dickens of a Good Ghost Story By Bryan Kozlowski, on Historic UK.
Ghost: Victorian/Edwardian (1840 to 1920) On Wikipedia.
10 Creepy Victorian Monsters By Elliot, Nitro Genius.
9 Terrifying Urban Legends From Victorian London By Alan White, on BuzzFeed.
Varney the Vampire; Or, the Feast of Blood By James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Preskett Prest. [1847] Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
Carmilla By Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. [1872] Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
John Barrington Cowles By Arthur Conan Doyle. [1884] A short story from the collection The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales. Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
The Were-Wolf By Clemence Housman. [1896] Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
👻 The 19th century is routinely thought about as the era of secularisation, a period when the disciplines and institutions of modern science were founded… [But] the Victorian period is also… a period of deep and sustained religious revival… It was a golden age of belief in supernatural forces and energies, ghost stories, weird transmissions and spooky phenomena… In fact, it is much easier to grasp the religious and scientific strands of the century as closely intertwined. Every scientific and technological advance encouraged a kind of magical thinking and was accompanied by a shadow discourse of the occult… Because the advances in science were so rapid, the natural and the supernatural often became blurred in popular thinking, at least for a time. [Roger Luckhurst]
👻 In the 1830s and 1840s… there was a craze for Mesmerism, in which miraculous medical cures could be affected by manipulating the invisible flows of ‘animal magnetism’ that passed through and between bodies. The Mesmerist would throw his subject into a trance, allowing the passage of energy into the weaker body of his patient, as if literally recharging their battery. This had been first theorized by Franz Anton Mesmer in the feverish atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary Paris, and although discredited by a team of Academy scientists (who privately expressed alarm about the risk of sexual exploitation too) it became a popular medical treatment. Associated with trance were spectacular supernatural powers: gifts of cure, visions of the future, heightened senses, and a merging of minds… [Roger Luckhurst]
👻 ...many Victorians were prone to the paranormal, supernatural and occult, of which the most popular forms in the late Victorian period included mesmerism, clairvoyance, electro-biology, crystal-gazing, thought-reading, and above all, Spiritualism… Spiritualism, the belief that the dead communicate with the living, became a fad throughout America and Europe during the 1850s… It is generally agreed that the modern Spiritualist movement began on April 1, 1848, in the village of Hydesville, New York, when two teenaged sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, claimed that they had communicated with the ghost of a man murdered at the house years before their family moved in… [Andrzej Diniejko]
👻 Victorian Spiritualism, also known as the Spiritualism movement, emerged in the late nineteenth century and attracted people from different social classes, including Queen Victoria. It should be noted that Victorian Spiritualism was particularly attractive to women because they were regarded as more spiritual than men. A female medium was often considered a better communicator than a male medium because she had allegedly a better predisposition to spiritual perfectability. Interestingly, spiritualists were concerned with the Woman Question and called for the recognition of women's rights...
In the 1860s, Spiritualism became part of Victorian subculture with its mediums, specialist newspapers, pamphlets, treatises, societies, private and public séances which included table rapping, table tipping, automatic writing, levitation, and other communications with spirits. [Andrzej Diniejko]
👻 “One important and often overlooked aspect of Victorian mediumship is that it could be enormous fun,” says Alex Owen in The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. This is the picture that emerges when one looks particularly at the “star mediums” of the 1870’s, who were known for performing theatrical, full-body materializations for eager audiences.
In a dim seance room, the medium would enter a closed cabinet wherein she would tap the mysterious psychical forces that would allow her to manifest one of her spirit familiars. This familiar would then emerge… from behind the curtain to entertain the assembled sitters. Each medium had her own repertoire of otherworldly entities at her command, each with his or her own distinct personality, speech patterns, favored tricks and antics. They could be gallant, flirtatious, aggressive, or playful, as suited them… Based upon photographs, these spirits seem to have borne an uncanny resemblance to their [female, white British] mediums, and yet sitters came away wholly convinced that they had conversed with men, children, or dark-skinned foreigners; a fact which attests to the theatrical talents of the mediums themselves, as well as the power of suggestion. Not everyone, however, was convinced, and as a result mediums often found themselves tied up and bound inside their manifestation cabinets, or otherwise subjected to innumerable test conditions… [Walter Luke]
👻 It was an essential rule of the dark séance that the gas lamps should not be turned up again until the ghostly figure had returned to the cabinet. The apparition, it was explained, was constructed from the essence of the medium’s body, and a sudden light would cause this material to rush back so violently that it could kill her. There were also strict orders not to seize hold of the apparition, as this, too could result in the death of the medium. Some sitters, determined to expose deception, ignored that rule, and grasped the supposed ghost. No mediums died, but many were shown to be frauds...
We might think the Victorians were gullible but they were being confronted by sights that were beyond their experience, with no accurate means of recording events for later study. They were the victims of fleeting impressions, fallible memory and a need to believe. [Linda Stratmann]
👻 Spiritualism saturates Victorian literary culture… It is the background for the obsession with ghost stories… Although Dickens ridiculed Spiritualism…[he did believe in Mesmerism however], his popular journals helped establish the Christmas ghost story, a tradition that was sustained as a ritual as late as the Edwardian M. R. James. [The assumed] Female sensitivity to the spirit-world also helped establish the supernatural tale as the reserve of women writers… [Roger Luckhurst]
👻 It was the Victorian era, of course, when ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction – as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room seances… What had raised all these apparitions from the dead? The most straightforward explanation is the rise of the periodical press, says Ruth Robbins, professor of English literature at Leeds Metropolitan University. Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill – short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length… Lighting was often provided by gas lamps, which have also been implicated in the rise of the ghost story; the carbon monoxide they emitted could provoke hallucinations…
In the 19th century, people were increasingly able to communicate at a distance, in disembodied fashion. The telegraph allowed messages to be tapped out in code over long distances… and the ability to communicate first with other cities, then countries, eventually to transmit messages across the Atlantic, was brilliant and alarming. "If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away," says Robbins, "words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, 'There's a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'" [Kira Cochrane]
👻 [Bram] Stoker [in his novel ‘Dracula’, 1897] uses the figure of the vampire as thinly-veiled shorthand for many of the fears that haunted the Victorian fin de siècle…
Dracula’s forays into London, for example, and his ability to move unnoticed through the crowded streets while carrying the potential to afflict all in his path with the stain of vampirism, play upon late-Victorian fears of untrammelled immigration. The latter was feared as leading to increased levels of crime and the rise of ghetto communities…
The act of vampirism itself, with its notion of tainted blood, suggests the fear of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and, more generally, the fear of physical and moral decay that was believed by many commentators to be afflicting society…
Victorian literature tends to present the vampire myth as a sexual allegory in which English female virtue is menaced by foreign predators. For example Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story ‘Carmilla’ (1872) places the virtuous English girl Laura at the mercy of the predatory East European vampire of the title…
During the course of [Stoker’s] book Dracula attacks both Mina and Lucy; but Mina, due to the traditional Victorian qualities of determination and loyalty towards her husband is able to resist his advances. The rather more free-spirited Lucy is not so lucky. Some critics have argued that Stoker uses the character of Lucy to attack the concept of the New Woman – a term coined towards the end of the Victorian era to describe women who were taking advantage of newly available educational and employment opportunities to break free from the intellectual and social restraints imposed upon them by a male-dominated society. Those who took a hostile attitude towards the New Woman saw her either as a mannish intellectual or, going to the opposite extreme, an over-sexed vamp. [Greg Buzwell]
👻 In 1882, a group of earnest intellectuals founded the Society for Psychical Research. They aimed to investigate the claims of Mesmerism, Spiritualism and authenticated ‘true’ ghost stories. They did so by developing an extraordinary jargon of ‘psychical research’ that fused the latest advances in the physical and psychological sciences with their hopes for proof of a supermondane [transcendent or unearthly, variant of ‘supermundane’ as far as I can tell] world. [Roger Luckhurst] [The society] still exists today. [Linda Stratmann]
👻 Crystal gazing, palmistry, and other forms of fortune-telling were quite popular during the nineteenth century…
An 1853 edition of the Eclectic Magazine describes crystal gazing (or Crystallomancy) as “the art of divining by figures which appear on the surface of a Crystal Ball”...
One of the most common forms of fortune-telling during the nineteenth century involved using a deck of playing cards. Known as cartomancy, it involved assigning attributes to each of the cards in the deck and then using them, either when dealt in a particular fashion or when chosen at random, to foretell the future…
Palmistry was another common method of nineteenth-century fortune-telling. One did not have to be a gifted occultist to indulge, since cards and diagrams of hands with the meanings of various lines were readily available. The 1886 book Social Amusements even includes palmistry among their selection of parlor games, tricks, and charades…
For the middle and upper classes, crystal gazing, cartomancy, and palmistry were diverting drawing room entertainments. For the fraudsters and charlatans — and all too frequently for the poor — the same practices could end with the perpetrator being prosecuted for fortune-telling under the Vagrancy Act. [Mimi Matthews]
Some useful resources:
The Victorian supernatural By Roger Luckhurst, on the British Library website.
Victorian Spiritualism By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
Victorian Spiritualism — Proponents and Opponents By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Victorian Spiritualism By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
The Lighter Side of Victorian Spiritualism By Walter Luke on Victorian Gothic.
Punch on spiritualism: Last News from the Spirit World A cartoon from Punch dated 10th June 1876.
“Spiritualism” — a review of William Howitt’s History of the Supernatural [in] The Reader (1863) On the Victorian Web.
A review of D.D. Home's Incidents in My Life in The Reader (1863) On the Victorian Web.
Spiritualism On Wikipedia.
Spiritualism, Science, and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain By Richard Noakes. An academic essay in PDF form.
Nineteenth Century Fortune-Telling: From the Drawing Room to the Court Room By Mimi Matthews, on the Victorian Web.
Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them By Kira Cochrane, on the Guardian website.
Introduction to The Victorian Gothic By Charlotte Barrett, on Great Writers Inspire.
The Macabre Victorians By Lauren Donnelly, on Reframing the Victorians.
A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural, British Library, review By Thomas Marks, on the Telegraph website.
10 Classic Victorian Ghost Stories Everyone Should Read On Interesting Literature. With links to the actual stories.
Why Can’t Ghosts Let Go of the Victorian Era? By Dan Nosowitz, on Atlas Obscura.
Professor Ruth Robbins - 'The Victorian Ghost' Posted by Leeds Beckett University. A short talk of 3 mins 33 seconds.
Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural By Vanessa D. Dickerson. This is a preview on Google Books, so may or may not work for you.
Dracula: vampires, perversity and Victorian anxieties By Greg Buzwell, on the British Library website.
Vampires: the Victorian Era By Jordan L. Hawk, on their website.
Vampire literature: Nineteenth century On Wikipedia.
Werewolf fiction: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Mesmerism. Ancient and Modern By Ray Dyer, on the Victorian Web.
William Hughes, That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination A review by Karl Bell, on The British Society for Literature and Science.
Séance On Wikipedia.
12 Weird Vintage Pictures From Séances By Erin McCarthy, on Mental Floss. Most of the photographs date from the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
The Victorian Séance A guest blog by Linda Stratmann, on Geri Walton’s website.
The psychology of spiritualism: science and seances By David Derbyshire, on the Guardian website.
Ouija On Wikipedia.
The Ouija board (a very Victorian pastime) On Recollections. Only brief.
Supernatural Victorian Era On Victorian-Era.org
The Victorian Supernatural Edited by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett & Pamela Thurschwell. On Google Books. If you scroll down, there should (hopefully) be some links to previews of a selection of the chapters.
Superstitious Beliefs of Victorian Society By Alexandra Corbella, on Classroom.
Victorian perspectives on the supernatural: The imaginary versus the real in two Brontë novels By Crystal Sidell, University of South Florida. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Florida. Keywords: fairies, folklore, ghosts, gothic literature, nineteenth-century, occult phenomena, psychological realism
A Victorian Halloween Party By Mimi Matthews, on her website.
The Traditions of Halloween... By Essie Fox, on the Virtual Victorian.
Three Victorian Ghost Stories for a Spooky Christmas By Nick Ostdick, on Books Tell You Why.
A Dickens of a Good Ghost Story By Bryan Kozlowski, on Historic UK.
Ghost: Victorian/Edwardian (1840 to 1920) On Wikipedia.
10 Creepy Victorian Monsters By Elliot, Nitro Genius.
9 Terrifying Urban Legends From Victorian London By Alan White, on BuzzFeed.
Varney the Vampire; Or, the Feast of Blood By James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Preskett Prest. [1847] Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
Carmilla By Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. [1872] Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
John Barrington Cowles By Arthur Conan Doyle. [1884] A short story from the collection The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales. Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
The Were-Wolf By Clemence Housman. [1896] Part of Project Gutenberg. The book can be read online, or there are several download options.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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Date: 2017-07-01 06:08 pm (UTC):: Some sitters, determined to expose deception, ignored that rule, and grasped the supposed ghost. No mediums died, but many were shown to be frauds... ::
Hee, there was a whole chapter in Land of Mist in which Challenger does just that to a medium, and Doyle-through-whoever-was-his-mouthpiece-in-that-chapter explains why of course Challenger ended up catching the medium, and why that wasn't fraud at all. See, Challenger set up such a hostile environment that the medium -- who had just finished two months of hard labour after falling victim to a police sting in an earlier chapter, and thus who was understandably a basket case of nerves -- had been under so much psychic pressure that he had been unable to produce enough ectoplasm to manifest an entire figure. So the medium had used their own person as an armature for the little bit of ectoplasm they could produce! Just because it was the medium inside the ectoplasm, helping out, didn't mean the apparition was a fraud! And by the way, Professor Smartypants, the ghostly figure was WHITE and the medium was dressed in BLACK, so where did all that white GO when your brutish henchman brutishly rugby-tackled our sensitive and already-traumatized medium to the ground, eh? DO YOU SEE ANY WHITE ANYTHING ANYWHERE? NO. BECAUSE THE WHITE WAS THE ECTOPLASM THAT WAS REABSORBED INTO THE MEDIUM'S BODY WHEN THE LIGHT WAS TURNED ON Q! E! FUCKING! D!
*ahem* Which is to say, Doyle would contest the conclusion that fraud had been committed on such flimsy evidence as someone having grasped at the supposed ghost and catching hold of the medium instead.
:: "If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away," says Robbins, "words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, 'There's a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'" ::
I was gonna say something here about Terry Pratchett's thing about people living on in the clacks, but WAIT A SECOND, the rapping-on-tables bit was supposed to be literally Morse code? How did I miss this?
:: For the fraudsters and charlatans — and all too frequently for the poor — the same practices could end with the perpetrator being prosecuted for fortune-telling under the Vagrancy Act. ::
Remember the aforementioned medium from The Land of Mist who got caught in a police sting? The core of his defense was that the Vagrancy Act was meant to catch vagrants and Roma, but he was a responsible ethnically-English person who owned a home, a fact which the policemen knew because the sting happened in his own drawing room...!!! Also, while maaaaaaaybe it would be justifiable to apply this to ethnically-English homeowners if said people actually were defrauding the public, it was a fact that these court cases were never driven by client complaints, but were always the result of police entrapment, don't the cops and courts have REAL CRIMES TO SOLVE???
(btw, this defense did not work, because -- as Doyle pointed out -- the cops always time their entrapment actions for when they can ensure that the case is heard by a biased and anti-spiritualist judge.)
From “The Lighter Side…,” the same article that points out that being a medium was fun, in that it let women transgress so many social norms when they assumed the roles of their familiars: Victorian mystics may not have running naked through Hyde Park, but they shared a kindred spirituality that was as subversive as it was fun.
That is a fascinating insight. And it probably partially explains why so many of the familiars were Chinese, or "Red Indians," or "dark-skinned foreigners." :-/
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Date: 2017-07-01 06:08 pm (UTC)From the Guardian, “Ghost Stories”: “…concealed doorways and servant's corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You've got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house."
That makes a whole lot of sense, now that I'm looking at it. I certainly know that when writing fiction about these people, I'm having a terrible time getting a sense of how many people might actually be in a house. It seems that even if one was physically present in the building, it might not be entirely clear...
Also, I was really hoping that one of the linked articles would have that one French photograph of a medium with the spirit bird-of-prey on her head that Doyle mentions, but no. (Apparently it's on p. 295 of L'Ectoplasmie et la Clairvoyance" by Gustave Géley, which I see was translated in 1927 as Clairvoyance and Materialisation... and oh, look, my library can get it, further bulletins as events warrant!) Anyway, Doyle says of that photo -- and of Pithecanthropus spirit that goes around licking people at l'Institut de Metaphysique -- that "It would take the credulity of a MacCabe to imagine that all this is imposture."
So I guess we'll see just how Scottish my credulity is!
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Date: 2017-07-02 10:29 pm (UTC)And it was something I hadn't thought about before putting together this post - that people might have been enjoying seances as a piece of theatrical entertainment, both the audience and the 'mediums'. And also using them as a way of transgressing social norms.
:: "If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away," says Robbins, "words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, 'There's a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'" ::
I was gonna say something here about Terry Pratchett's thing about people living on in the clacks, but WAIT A SECOND, the rapping-on-tables bit was supposed to be literally Morse code? How did I miss this? You know, I do remember reading that bit and finding it interesting - but it didn't quite register at the time that it was meant literally. I now wonder what exactly the interviewee meant. Were messages indeed literally passed through from the 'spirit' in Morse code? Or was the knocking thought of as being like Morse code - just a similar method of passing on information? Or is it just the modern day interviewee imagining how Victorian people might have viewed table rapping? Something to investigate...
And I look forward to your further bulletins once you locate the photograph of the medium with the spirit bird of prey on her head ^_^