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The Victorians were not just pioneers of science and technology. They were also, in many cases, deeply interested in the paranormal. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert personally attended séances – as did politicians, scientists, intellectuals, and numerous ordinary working-class people.

What’s more, there was an intersection between the Victorians’ faith in science and their interest in spiritual phenomena. Some people attempted to bring a scientific approach to bear on the study of the supernatural. Indeed, it was in this period that serious ‘secular’ research into the paranormal – that is, research outside of a traditional Christian theological framework – began in earnest.

In this article, we will be looking at some aspects of the fascinating story of psychical research in Victorian England.

The background

The study of the supernatural was not an entirely new project in Victorian times. The first systematic attempts to compile accounts of paranormal phenomena came in two sixteenth-century works: Ludwig Lavater’s De Spectris or Von Gespaenstern (1569) and Henning Grosse’s Magica (1597). Lavater and Grosse collected their accounts from sources ranging from antiquity to contemporary times. Their work perhaps served a useful purpose – and Lavater is said to have been a source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet – but it did not come up to the standards of what we would recognise today as academic research.

A literature on spiritual phenomena in English was already in development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This included works such as Richard Baxter’s Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), Daniel Defoe’s Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), and Edmund Jones’ Relation of Apparitions of Spirits (1780). These are the direct lineal ancestors of modern ghost books. You can read them for free online – but they are likely to appear somewhat foreign to modern eyes. They were written by devout Christians and had an apologetic or theological purpose. It is no coincidence that Baxter and Jones were both clergymen; indeed, Baxter was a prominent Nonconformist leader. The authors were interested in collecting accounts of spirits and visions, but not in investigating them in any kind of scientific way. (Incidentally, Daniel Defoe was that Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe. He helpfully gave his readers advice on what to do if they saw an apparition.)

Interest in the paranormal reached a new level in nineteenth-century England. This interest was focussed first on Mesmerism (from the 1830s) and then on Spiritualism (from the 1850s). Attempts at mounting rational inquiries into these phenomena were not slow to appear. In 1848, Catherine Crowe appealed for such investigations in her best-selling book The Night-Side of Nature, which itself included a considerable body of evidence, drawn to a large extent from German sources. Around 1850, a society seems to have been formed at Cambridge University to investigate ghosts and related matters. The Ghost Club, which still exists today, may have been founded in its first iteration around 1862 to scrutinise alleged spiritual manifestations. Several people attempted to investigate Spiritualism in a personal capacity.

The first organised public inquiry into paranormal phenomena came in 1869. In that year, a debating club called the London Dialectical Society appointed a committee to inquire into Spiritualism. The members of the committee interviewed figures from the contemporary occult subculture; gathered a few accounts of séances; and, most daringly, experimented with holding séances themselves. The work of the committee seemingly brought to light evidence of strange occurrences and what appeared to be communications from nonhuman entities. Some members were converted to Spiritualism by their experiences. Others were unmoved, and bitter divisions developed. As a result, the committee ended up adopting a vague compromise conclusion that Spiritualism merited further study.

The divisions within the committee reflected broader debates within Victorian society. Many people accepted that unexplained phenomena had or might have a supernatural explanation. Many others did not. Accordingly, the report of the Dialectical Society committee received a cool public reception when it was published in 1871. Nevertheless, interest in investigating the paranormal did not go away. Notably, an interest in telepathy developed from the mid-1870s. This was due in part to the arrival from America of a parlour game known as the ‘willing-game’, in which people attempted to communicate with each other by thought alone.

Enter the SPR

The best-known English organisation for the investigation of the paranormal, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), was founded in 1882. It is still going today.

From its foundation, the SPR was a conspicuously respectable body. Its president was the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, and its officers included scientists, doctors, MPs and a QC. By July 1883, it had around 150 full members, in addition to further associate and honorary members. The list of their names and addresses was sprinkled with academic, ecclesiastical, aristocratic and military titles; locations like Kensington, Chelsea, Belgravia, Cambridge and Oxford; and institutions like university colleges and gentlemen’s clubs. These people had serious intellectual credentials – and, in the context of class-obsessed Victorian society, they had some level of social position to lose.

As we have noted, supernatural manifestations were a controversial subject at this time. There was wide public discussion about them. Some people accepted them as genuine; others were agnostic; others again were contemptuous. In particular, there was stiff resistance from many (not all) orthodox scientists. But it is clear that the SPR’s members were not credulous buffoons. They were quite aware that seemingly inexplicable happenings could have natural explanations, including fraud. They did not see unseen powers hiding behind every corner. They showed a concern for evidence and a desire to acquire knowledge through experiment rather than accepting things on faith.

The SPR seem to have considered themselves to be at the start of a great work – no less a person than William Gladstone commented that their work was the most important that was going on in the world at that time. They set about their activities in an organised and systematic manner. They established half a dozen committees, which were assigned to deal with specific subjects. They were particularly interested in telepathy, which they referred to as ‘thought-transference’. A Literary Committee set about assembling accounts of telepathy with a view to writing a book on the subject. This book went on to be published in the form of the classic Phantasms of the Living (1886).

The SPR’s work was not confined to telepathy. It also extended to subjects such as hauntings and poltergeist activity. Perhaps surprisingly, its early researches did not pay much attention to Spiritualism. It is also worth emphasising that it made little or no attempt to link paranormal phenomena with Christian doctrines or ideas. Psychical research was essentially a post-Christian endeavour. It was based on the unspoken premise that the churches no longer had the answers – and yet spiritual phenomena were seemingly continuing to occur and cried out for explanation. Perhaps rational techniques of research and experimentation could fill the gap left as the intellectual authority of the clergy melted away.

Phantasms of the Living

It is worth us giving particular attention to Phantasms of the Living, the book that we mentioned above as the first to emerge from the SPR’s work. [The authors credited on the title page of the book were Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore and F. W. H. Myers. But it was mostly written by Gurney.]

When the SPR was founded, its leaders made a public appeal for accounts of supernatural occurrences. To their apparent surprise, most of the 2,000+ responses received related to cases in which a person (the ‘percipient’) claimed to have seen a vision of a living person who was in a crisis situation (the ‘agent’). In most cases, the crisis was the death of the agent.

This body of evidence ended up in Phantasms. Its two large volumes contained an extraordinary 702 narratives of crisis apparitions.

These cases were clearly different from classic ghost stories, in which the spirit of a deceased person is said to appear some time after their death – maybe even centuries later. Most of the visions recorded by the SPR researchers took place at the time of the agent’s death, or at least well within a period of 12 hours before or after it.

Oddly enough, crisis apparitions were nothing new. Daniel Defoe had already treated them as an acknowledged phenomenon. There had been public correspondence on the subject in the Telegraph in 1881. But no-one had looked at the subject with truly sustained and detailed attention until Phantasms.

What are we to make of the evidence collected in the book? Some critics would no doubt say that it is all nonsense. The episodes compiled by the SPR men did not take place under controlled conditions. At the very least, some of the hundreds of stories were surely based on misunderstandings – or were the product of delusions – or were embellished in hindsight – or were outright fabricated.

Yet the evidence in its totality is not easy to dismiss. The percipients seem to have been mostly sincere and reliable people. There is no reason to believe that they were mentally ill or that they had a propensity to see things that weren’t really there. In most of the crisis cases recorded in Phantasms, the percipient had never had any other visionary experiences. (In any event, most pathological hallucinations are auditory, while most crisis cases are visual.) Moreover, the percipients were not usually preoccupied with thinking about the agents at the time of the apparitions, so their experiences cannot be put down to the effects of overactive minds.

As for the researchers, they were serious and discerning people. They took some care to treat the evidence with caution. They were at pains to verify the cases which came to their attention and to obtain corroboration of them. They considered the possibility that coincidence could explain the accounts – perhaps X just happened to imagine seeing a vision of his friend Y at the time that Y’s ship was sinking – and they showed in some detail why this explanation was not statistically credible.

Several interesting points arose out of the evidence collected in Phantasms:

• Crises involving drowning and suffocation appeared to be disproportionately represented in the cases. There was no obvious rational reason for this.
• There was almost never any indication that the agent realised that the percipient would be seeing a vision of them.
• Occasionally, the agent was seen by more than one percipient. In such cases, the visions seen by the percipients were not necessarily identical and did not necessarily come at the same time.
• In some cases, the agent’s appearance was anachronistic, so to speak: they looked the same as they had looked at an earlier time when the percipient had known them. In other cases, the agent’s appearance had features that were correct at the time of the vision but were unknown to the percipient at that time.
• A few cases involved people who had made pacts with each other that the first of them to die would appear to the other. This was apparently a recognised practice. [These ‘compact’ cases have certain odd features. It is clear from Human Personality (the sequel to Phantasms discussed below) that there are cases in which the agent appears on the occasion of a non-fatal crisis; and cases in which the agent appears to a percipient other than the person whom they have made the compact with.]

Perhaps surprisingly, Phantasms does not argue in favour of Spiritualism. It does not claim that crisis apparitions are caused by a spirit of the agent which has become separated from their body at the time of death. Instead, the principal theory advanced in the book explains the apparitions as the result of telepathy: the action of the agent’s mind on the percipient’s. We have already noted that telepathy had been a matter of some interest since the mid-1870s. There had been discussion and experimentation on the subject, from which evidence emerged that persuaded the researchers that the phenomenon was real. Crisis apparitions were therefore slotted into a pre-existing theory of telepathy.

The sequel – Human Personality

Phantasms was a ground-breaking book – arguably the first attempt at a full-length scientific treatise on supernatural phenomena to appear in English. It was followed a few years later by an even more daring sequel: Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). The author, F. W. H. Myers, had been one of the co-authors of Phantasms, and the book was published posthumously; after he had gone to test out the truth of his theories.

Eccentric, detailed and medically informed, Human Personality amounted to a continuation of the project of Phantasms. It was different, however, in several respects. Most notably, while Phantasms had focussed on crisis apparitions of the living, Human Personality was framed as a scientific investigation into life after death. The ‘scientific’ element here was important, just as it had been in Phantasms. Again, there was a concern with evidence. Myers was aware of the importance of validating cases as far as possible rather than taking single testimonies on trust.

As to subject-matter, Human Personality went beyond the territory mapped out in Phantasms. In addition to apparitions, Myers discussed quite a broad range of paranormal phenomena: table-turning, automatic writing, the planchette, and spirit possession (in typical Victorian fashion, Myers was embarrassed to admit that this was associated with “primitive” peoples). He also considered classic haunting cases, in which a vision of a dead person is seen by a stranger in a particular place some time after their death.

Human Personality took a different approach from Phantasms in other ways too. The book contains a combination of modern science and religious mysticism. Long discussions of human psychology are found together with metaphysical speculation. It is not an apologia for Christianity or traditional theism, any more than Phantasms was. But, while the book is presented as a scientific production, there is also a religious or mystical aspect to it. It is more ready than Phantasms to make spiritual claims. We find statements like the following:

….it is possible by a right disposition of our own minds to draw energy from an environing world of spiritual life….

….our own spirits are part and parcel of the ultimate vitalising Power….

Myers departed from Phantasms in moving towards a theory that apparitions are caused by distinct spiritual entities rather than by telepathy between human minds. He took the view that the individual human being has a soul which is separable from the body: “man is a spirit, controlling an organism”. This model of the human person paved the way for adopting a model corresponding to the traditional belief in ghosts. Myers did accept that most of the relevant phenomena could be attributed to a living agent or a living percipient. But he believed that the material in the book had “proved by logical reasoning the existence and the persistence of a spirit in man”. At one point, for example, he observed:

We have… a considerable group of cases where a spirit seems to be aware of the impending death of a survivor. In some few of those cases the foreknowledge is entirely inexplicable by any such foresight as we mortals can imagine.

Myers also noted that it had become clear that apparitions of the living shaded in a continuous series into apparitions of the dead. Interestingly, accounts of death apparitions seem in general to start about a week before the point of the agent’s death, and then continue for about a year afterwards. The point of death is the peak, and the number falls away more or less rapidly on either side of it. (This prompts a question. If death apparitions really are caused by disembodied spirits, what happens to the dead person’s spirit after the 12 months? Does it go into another realm? Does it disintegrate?)

It is worth briefly mentioning one other issue that is raised in Human Personality: whether apparitions can be deliberately generated by conscious effort. This was an idea that had previously appeared in Phantasms; and Myers took it further. In a few intriguing cases, it appeared that sheer effort of will on the part of an agent had led to the latter appearing to a percipient.

In all, Myers had an optimistic view of the spiritual world and the future life. He noted that ghosts seem to be happy. He was also aware, as a Victorian Londoner, that he was living through a spiritually impoverished time. But he suggested that this was a temporary condition:

I see ground for hoping that we are within sight of a religious synthesis, which, although as yet provisional and rudimentary, may in the end meet more adequately than any previous synthesis the reasonable needs of men.

This new synthesis was consistent with Christianity in its present form, but would transcend it.

A dead end?

The project of bringing scientific methods to bear on the study of apparent supernatural phenomena has continued; but it has never really taken off. It is not mainstream.

Arguably, not much more has been discovered about the phenomena that our Victorian forefathers examined and experimented with since the Dialectical Society committee published its report and Phantasms and Human Personality went on sale. The psychical researchers of that time would no doubt be astonished that our society has not made greater progress in investigating and elucidating this critically important dimension of existence.

Was Victorian psychical research, then, a dead end? Were the researchers wasting their time on endeavours that most people ultimately concluded had no value? Or were they arriving at important conclusions which their contemporaries, to their discredit, were not willing to listen to? That must remain a matter of opinion.