A Victorian inquiry into Spiritualism

In this piece, we will look at an interesting but little-studied episode in the Victorian occult revival – a formal inquiry into Spiritualism which was undertaken by a group of London-based intellectuals in 1869-71.

This was the first inquiry of its kind in Britain: the first attempt to mount an organised public investigation of Spiritualism.

The episode perhaps tells us more about Victorian upper-middle-class culture than it does about the existence of spirits of the dead.

Background

In the mid-Victorian period, Spiritualism became an established presence in British society. Tens of thousands of people were what one might call active Spiritualists, while many more had some level of interest in the subject. It is said that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert personally took part in séances.

While spiritualistic phenomena met with belief from some people, they prompted doubt and questions from others. What was behind the strange sounds, movements and writings that mediums were calling forth? Could they be proven to be genuinely supernatural, and if so how?

Investigating paranormal phenomena was nothing new. Since the seventeenth century, writers in Britain had been collecting and analysing stories of the supernatural. The ghost book is a surprisingly old genre. Yet these treatments tended to come from a confessional Christian perspective. What was new in the mid-Victorian period was an increasing confidence in methods of scientific and rational inquiry. It was only a matter of time before such methods were applied to the supernatural world.

Already in 1848, the writer Catherine Crowe had appealed for scientific investigations of this sort in her book, The Night-Side of Nature, in which she collected and discussed claims regarding paranormal phenomena (drawing to a large extent on German sources). Shortly afterwards, around 1850, a society seems to have been formed at Cambridge University to investigate ghosts and related matters. The Ghost Club, which remains in existence today, may have been founded in its first iteration circa 1862 to scrutinise alleged spiritual manifestations, although its early activities remain largely obscure. Several people attempted to investigate Spiritualism in a private capacity, including the scientists William Crookes and William Benjamin Carpenter.

Yet it is hard to find evidence of formal, organised inquiries into Spiritualism being attempted before 1869. The nearest thing seems to have been a committee based in Norwood in south London which was reportedly formed to investigate the subject by six established sceptics (including two editors of local newspapers). It is said that the committee members’ scepticism was challenged by what they experienced. It is difficult to know what to make of this episode, however, as the committee’s activities seem not have been recorded.

The London Dialectical Society

The inquiry that we are concerned with was undertaken by the London Dialectical Society (LDS), which was essentially an upper-middle-class debating club.

The LDS was established in 1867 by the Liberal politician and banker Sir John Lubbock. Somewhat unusually for the time, it was open to women. The LDS was ideologically uncommitted, and its method of operation owed nothing to religious authority. Indeed, it seems to have been a self-consciously iconoclastic body.

In 1868-69, at around the time that the inquiry began, the LDS had a total of 105 members. These included PhDs, medical doctors, barristers, civil servants and clergymen; and their religious affiliations varied between Christian, Jewish and atheist. The subjects that they discussed included capital punishment; women’s suffrage; the historical and moral value of the Bible; prostitution; Irish politics; utilitarian morality; and trade unions. The members of the LDS were not generally specialists in the subjects that they discussed. It was assumed that a certain combination of education, professional accomplishment and social respectability equipped them to push forward the frontiers of human understanding on any topic.

At to the broader context, debating clubs like the LDS had been part of British culture since the eighteenth century. On one level, they were a form of entertainment; but they were also bound up with the intellectual project of advancing humanity through rational inquiry. Civil discussion on formally neutral terms within the structures of a stable social club was seen as being a suitable method for tackling challenging and important subjects. There was an optimism here; and also a degree of self-satisfaction. There is something typically Victorian, in the ‘bad’ sense, about the idea that civilised exchanges between self-selecting groups of people – largely affluent and largely male – could generate insights into difficult unsolved problems.

If the LDS was the product of a characteristically Victorian conviction that free debate among good chaps (and ladies) in a civilised forum could yield answers to intractable questions of worldview and belief, the society’s inquiry into Spiritualism was to prove how naïve that premise was.

The inquiry begins

It was on 6 January 1869, at one of its regular meetings, that the LDS turned its attention to the subject of Spiritualism. A discussion developed which was described as ‘animated’ and ‘acrimonious’. It continued for some considerable time. One sceptic, Dr James Edmunds, expressed the view that Spiritualism was a fraud and that those who believed in it were a ‘crop of fools’. Other speakers took a similarly sceptical stance; one said that he would believe in the spirits when they predicted the movements of the stock market. Dr Edmunds ended up proposing that a Committee be appointed to enquire into the subject.

The Committee was duly formed. It consisted mostly of professional people from the middle to upper classes of Victorian society. Their ages ranged from the 20s to the 60s, with a seeming bias towards the 30s and 40s. Several of the members were public figures. It seems that there were 33 Committee members in all, of whom 32 remained at the conclusion of the inquiry.

From a present-day perspective, a key weakness of the inquiry was that the members of the Committee failed to acknowledge and declare the biases that they brought to their investigation. It may seem obvious to us that, faced with a subject like Spiritualism, most or all of the people concerned must have had prejudices of some sort, conscious or otherwise. Yet they evidently did not perceive this to be a problem. As it happens, the metaphysical beliefs (or lack of beliefs) of most of the Committee members remain unknown. Of those whose views are known, those sympathetic to Spiritualism appear to have outnumbered sceptics.

Meetings and evidence

The inquiry extended across 27 formal meetings of the Committee, which were held between February 1869 and August 1870. The Committee heard 33 witnesses and received 31 written statements; but it admitted that it ‘almost wholly failed’ to obtain evidence from sceptics. The witnesses included significant figures in the Victorian esoteric subculture, such as the mediums Daniel Dunglas Home and Emma Hardinge (soon to be Emma Hardinge Britten); the occultist Frederick Hockley; the writer Anna Blackwell; and the pioneering psychical researcher Cromwell Varley.

The newspaper coverage of the inquiry suggests that it was not in general taken seriously by the wider public. The meetings at which evidence was heard were attended by journalists and were reported in the press. The coverage was fairly consistently unsympathetic.

The evidence given to the Committee was remarkable. Witness after witness testified to apparent supernatural occurrences. The witnesses talked repeatedly about the celebrity psychics of the day: D. D. Home, the Marshalls, the Davenports and Elisabeth Guppy. They laid out the full range of high-Victorian paranormal phenomena: physical objects moving; musical instruments being played without human assistance; messages being transmitted by raps and table movements; spirit hands appearing; supernatural lights; spirits writing and drawing; and mediums engaging in automatic writing. In some cases, the witnesses reported that the spirits had passed on truthful information which seemingly ruled out fraud or delusion.

There was very little mention in the testimony of Christian religious concepts: neither the Committee members nor the witnesses seemed to have much interest in God, Jesus or the Devil. Very few witnesses interpreted spiritualistic phenomena through the lenses of traditional religious belief. The inquiry was a self-conscious exercise in rational investigation, its ethos being scientific and legal rather than theological.

Outside the formal meetings of the Committee, there seem to have been additional informal sessions. One of these took the form of a séance with the younger Mrs Mary Marshall (who was one of two well-known mediums of that name). It was something of a public event and was attended by 50-60 people, including journalists. The Committee chairman – our friend Dr Edmunds – thought that Marshall was a fraud. He reported that the spirits gave incorrect answers to questions: for example, wrongly guessing the middle name of a Jewish man as ‘Joseph’. This vignette from his account gives some flavour of what happened at events of this kind:

….Mrs. Marshall went to the piano… and some powerful raps followed. Mr. Coleman, on that, challenged me to speak out if I had any misgiving, and I at once pointed out that Mrs. Marshall’s dress was in contact with the outer front castor of the piano, and that her foot would cause precisely such sounds. I suggested that she should produce the same sounds when standing at the arch of the piano. She at once moved to the arch, but the piano obstinately refused to reproduce the sounds, and Mr. Coleman appeared convinced that I had frightened the spirit away by my scepticism.

The séances

The most remarkable feature of the inquiry was that it involved direct experimentation with the unseen world. The Committee created six Sub-Committees which attempted to investigate spirit phenomena by holding séances.

Not all of these Sub-Committees met with success. At the meetings of two of them – numbers 4 and 6 – nothing of note happened. Another two encountered only modest results. Sub-Committee 5 attempted to investigate D. D. Home but elicited only ‘trifling’ and ‘feeble’ raps and table movements. Sub-Committee 3 likewise reported raps and table movements, together with supposed spirit messages. The messages seem to have been inconsequential, and their contents are largely unrecorded.

The remaining two Sub-Committees were a different matter. Sub-Committee 1 held a total of 40 meetings, at 34 of which paranormal phenomena were reported. Four-fifths of the members were said to have been converted from a position of scepticism: they were satisfied that an intelligent force was able to move objects and to produce raps and other sounds. The messages received by the Sub-Committee varied in nature. One read: ‘This is a great work; it demands your life, your soul, your all; go on friends, God prosper your work.’ Another read: ‘You stupify everybody with your nonsense.’

The most striking communications were reported by Sub-Committee 2. We may give a couple of examples, starting with this one:

….[O]ne of us asked another spirit… whether it had sufficient power to move the table. The alphabet was asked for, and the words spelt out were ‘unlink hands.’ We had scarcely obeyed this instruction when the table lurched round suddenly, and violently forcing some of the party out of their chairs. This spirit claimed to be that of an acquaintance… who, when living, was of a sportive disposition, and fond of feats of strength. He first announced his presence at our séances by a somewhat unparliamentary term of badinage that he and his companions had been in the habit of using towards each other…. He objected to making original communications, but being urged for one, at last replied by giving the message, ‘Tell my brother J— I have visited you,’ it being somewhat singular that the brother in question a few days previously had much ridiculed the phenomena.

Another communication, in true Victorian style, referred to a servant of a Sub-Committee member:

We several times asked this spirit whether it would tell us its name, and received in reply two dull thuds from the table, and it was only after much perseverance that we at last obtained an affirmative answer, followed up by heavy lumpish raps at the following letters. ‘J E M C L A R K E.’ ‘Would Jem Clarke tell us why he has visited us?’ we asked. ‘No.’ ‘Would he make any communication to us?’ ‘No.’ ‘Would he answer any questions?’ ‘Doubtful.’…. [T]he lady in whose house we were assembled, exclaimed ‘Clarke! Clarke! why, that is the name of my house-maid, who is about to leave me. Perhaps the spirit is some relative of hers.’ Three thuds from the table. ‘Have you come to see her?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘She appears unhappy. Do you know why she is going away?’ No response. ‘Are you her guardian spirit?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Perhaps an ancestor of hers?’ Three more thuds, given as if with difficulty, and Mr. James Clarke had evidently left us.

The results of the more successful Sub-Committees’ sessions are extraordinary, and would undoubtedly have made a deep impression on the members. Precisely what they prove is another question. The meetings were not conducted under modern scientific protocols; and the records of them are incomplete and contain inconsistencies. Nevertheless, the investigators made some effort to record their experiences accurately and in detail. Their notes show that they were mindful of the need to try to exclude the possibility that the phenomena that they encountered had a mundane origin; and they were not unaware of the importance of controlled conditions. On the whole, the activities of the Sub-Committees attest to the willingness of Victorian intellectuals to use experimental investigation as a tool for probing the secrets of nature and supernature.

The report

The Committee spent six of its meetings (plus part of a seventh) discussing its report. There was controversy among the members as to what conclusions they ought to endorse. The Committee had before it what looked like reasonable evidence for the reality of spiritualistic phenomena. But maybe evidence was not enough.

The historian Peter Lamont has written of a ‘crisis of evidence’ in the mid-Victorian period provoked by testimony of supernatural occurrences. Discussing the case of D. D. Home, Lamont notes that the evidence for seemingly impossible behaviour was scrutinised by the apparent experts in such matters – stage magicians and scientists – and that these were unable convincingly to refute it. What happens when a commitment to following the evidence, as interpreted by competent individuals, leads to a conclusion which is ruled out a priori as impossible? This question was avoided by Victorian society rather than answered; and the LDS inquiry provides an example of that avoidance.

Some members of the Committee were clearly prepared to accept the reality of spiritualistic phenomena. But there was resistance from other Committee members to publishing a document which found Spiritualist claims to be proven. At one point, the sceptical chairman Dr Edmunds declared that he was going to produce his own minority report. The Committee members seem to have eventually agreed to unite behind a vague and non-committal conclusion that ‘the subject is worthy of more serious attention and careful investigation than it has hitherto received’.

The divisions within the Committee are clearly apparent in the published version of its report. The members effectively used the document to continue to argue with each other after the inquiry was concluded. Prominent place was given to a letter from Dr Edmunds which effectively amounted to the minority report that he had threatened to issue. The letter was a document of orthodox scientific rationalism. Edmunds held forth for page after page on the follies of Spiritualism. If he had been hoping to have the last word, he was disappointed: the report’s Editing Committee took the opportunity to argue with him at various points in the footnotes. Edmunds duly argued back in a PS to the letter.

Other members of the Committee also took the opportunity to use the report to publish personal notes setting out their views. We find a text by the Spiritualist scientist Alfred Russel Wallace addressing the credibility of supernatural claims, which he specifically asked to be published after Edmunds’ letter. This was followed by notes from two sceptical Committee members; in the latter case, the Editorial Committee again argued with the writer in the footnotes. Then came a memorandum by another member arguing with a couple of the sceptics. Then followed a note from another member again. The structure of this part of the report reflected the debating club methodology favoured by the LDS; and it also exposed its limitations. The process of interaction between adversarial positions had clearly not served to bring the Committee members closer to a commonly agreed truth. It simply provided an opportunity for the opposing sides to pursue an irresolvable argument.

Although the Committee’s report had come to a diplomatically vague conclusion, the governing Council of the LDS was not happy with it. In June 1870, the Committee resolved to forward the report to the Council with a recommendation to publish. The Council seems to have turned the recommendation down, so in August the Committee decided to publish the report on its own authority. There seems to have been further attempted negotiation with the Council, but this proved fruitless.

The report, all 412 pages of it, was finally published on Saturday 14 October 1871 by Longmans, a well-known publishing house.

The aftermath

The battle to spin the Committee’s conclusions began immediately. The day after publication, The Spiritualist journal announced that the report was ‘strongly in favour of Spiritualism’. It condemned Dr Edmunds as a self-publicist and claimed that his wife had psychic powers.

In general, however, the press was unimpressed. It is difficult to find favourable reviews of the report. At best, newspapers tended to be unconvinced by it; at worst they were actively contemptuous. The Times declared that the report was ‘nothing more than a farrago of impotent conclusions, garnished by a mass of the most monstrous rubbish it has ever been our misfortune to sit in judgment upon’. The optimism of the LDS project, which supposed that advances in knowledge could be secured by means of discussion in good faith among educated people, had come into contact with the brutal forces of journalism and public opinion.

The public response to the report was consistent with the general direction in which British society was heading. By the 1870s, scepticism about religious and spiritual matters was becoming established in a way that had no real precedent. Society was moving towards what would become a late-Victorian religious decline. In hindsight, the work of the LDS was never plausibly going to change many minds. The idea that people do not usually believe or cease to believe things because they have read evidence and argumentation in a report is, for us, a truism – even if it was not a truism in 1871.

The LDS would never shake off its association with what was widely perceived as the strange and dubious subject of Spiritualism. The Society remained in existence until around 1894, and it continued to be mentioned in the press until World War I and later – this was usually in reference to the Spiritualism inquiry, which had permanently coloured its reputation. It is ironic that a self-consciously rationalistic body became best known for its engagement with nonrational phenomena.

The LDS seems not to have returned to the subject of Spiritualism after 1871; and it seems that no similar inquiries were attempted by other organisations over the rest of the decade. Perhaps the subject was thought to have been exhausted; perhaps there was no appetite for incurring further public indifference and hostility. The project of institutional research into the paranormal was not dead, but it was paused for a few years. When it started up again – with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882 – no attempt was made to build on the findings of the LDS inquiry. The SPR was a fundamentally separate enterprise from the LDS. None of its founding officers or council members had served on the LDS Committee. And, while the SPR emerged (at least in part) from the Spiritualist milieu, its early investigations were not focussed on Spiritualism.

Nevertheless, there was a deeper continuity between the LDS investigators and the SPR. While their research interests were not closely aligned, the two bodies were sociologically and intellectually parallel. They emerged from the middle-to-upper classes of Victorian society and were committed to the same project of applying the principles of formally neutral rational inquiry to complex and elusive metaphysical questions. The LDS inquiry had exposed the limits of this project; but the temptation to persevere with it did not go away.

Conclusion

The LDS inquiry into Spiritualism revealed at least as much about human beings as it did about spiritual entities. It took place against the backdrop of a society in which traditional Christian religious belief was experiencing a decline from its zenith of cultural and material power. It was an attempt to resolve something which has still not been resolved and is perhaps irresolvable: the question of whether apparently spiritual phenomena have an objective reality. At best, it was naïve to think that this task could be accomplished. At worst, it was arrogant to think that it could be accomplished by a group of self-selected individuals, most of whom had no special capabilities beyond a certain level of education and social prestige. In any event, we are perhaps not much closer to an answer to the questions surrounding paranormal phenomena today than the LDS members were in 1871.