Victorian Studies

A new and exciting field of Victorian studies has emerged over the course of the past decade: the Victorian supernatural. Of course, Victorianists have had an interest in the ghostly for a long while, as too many canonical writers had penned supernatural tales for the fact to go altogether unnoticed: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy—virtually anybody one can think of has a couple (if not dozens) of ghost stories to his or her name. But it was not until recently that we could count on a steady annual supply of books and articles exploring Victorian supernaturalist culture. What we have discovered is that this culture was not an aberrant offshoot divergent from dominant attitudes; on the contrary, talk of ghosts was as common as talk of weather or the health of the Empire. That talk often turned to the questionable reality of apparitions. Can there ever be enough evidence to decide the matter one way or the other? Who gets to decide the validity, the conclusiveness or inconclusiveness, of evidence? And why, if ghosts are truly among us, are they so skittish, so loath to show up, speak up, and lay the matter to rest? Only ghosts can tell.

Shane McCorristine's Spectres of the Self tells the story of scientific and quasi-scientific endeavors in the nineteenth century to prove or disprove the reality of ghosts. The book is a welcome and necessary contribution to the field—necessary because, while it covers some trodden ground, it does so with a thoroughness lacking in much other scholarship. We are reminded (rather than surprised to hear, I think) that "the dialectic of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Western Europe radically altered interpretations of ghost-seeing by relocating the ghost from the external, objective and theologically structured world to the internal, subjective and psychologically haunted world of personal experience" (31). This is more or less accepted doctrine among scholars of the supernatural, but McCorristine takes a more in-depth look at this development than have others. Texts that in other studies often get little more than a footnote—John Ferriar's pioneering An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813), for instance, or Samuel Hibbert's Sketches of a Philosophy of Apparitions (1824)—are here shown to have been as instrumental to the "psychologisation of the ghostly" as works by more illustrious contemporaries such as Immanuel Kant, David Brewster, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Arthur Schopenhauer (32). McCorristine shows the ways in [End Page 336] which the internalization of ghostliness hinged on advances in psychology and psychiatry, in particular on the changing definitions of hallucination. His treatment of the subject is the most thorough and nuanced I have yet seen.

Also useful is McCorristine's discussion of one of the most celebrated and influential cases of hallucinatory ghost-seeing in recorded history, that of Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, a Berlin bookseller whose testimony, published in England in 1803, became a touchstone in every ghost-debunking work from then on. (The entire text is conveniently reproduced in the book's appendix.) But the highlight of the first portion is undoubtedly the chapter on ghost wardrobes. Why would a ghost need a suit of clothes? In order not to catch a cold? So as not to morally outrage (or sexually arouse) the ghost-seer? And are these clothes, then, spectral in the same way as the apparition wearing them? Ghosts of trousers?

Part two is narrower in focus and chiefly concerned with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). As McCorristine tells it, the history of the Society is the story of great expectations and just as great failures. A good example is the publication of the ambitious Phantasms of the Living (1886), authored by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. The authors proposed a telepathic theory of ghost-seeing that, it was...