Abstract

Over the last few decades, scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have uncovered a rich interplay between the phantasmal and the technological. As we now know, for many modern spiritualists, psychical researchers, and the writers who depicted their pursuits, mediumistic contacts were of a piece with the communication technology innovations of the day. Kate and Margaret Fox set off the transatlantic séance trend when they heard the ‘rappings’ of a spirit in their New York home, and it has become scholarly lore that these remote, tapping communications were instantly compared to those of the recently invented electric telegraph. ¹ 1

See, for example, Werner Sollors, ‘Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celestial Telegraph, or Indian Blessings to Gas-Lit American Drawing Rooms’, American Quarterly, 35 (1983): 459–80; Lawrence Rainey, ‘Taking Dictation: Collage Poetics, Pathology, and Poetics’, Modernism/Modernity, 5.2 (1998): 123–53; Richard J. Noakes, ‘Telegraphy is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World’, British Journal for the History of Science, 32 (1999): 421–59; Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, 2000), pp. 21–58. For a comprehensive look at technology and the occult in the Victorian period and beyond, see Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford, 2006).

For believers in spirit photography, the camera could capture images of ghosts that were otherwise invisible to the human eye. ² 2

Tom Gunning, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny’, in Patrice Petro (ed), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington, 1995), pp. 42–71; Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, 1996), pp. 227–34; Allen W. Grove, ‘Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-Rays, and the Victorian Imagination’, Literature and Medicine, 16 (1997): 141–73; Clément Chéroux et al. (eds), The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, 2005).

Typists paralleled spirit mediums, and indeed some women took ‘dictations’ in both the office and the séance. ³ 3

Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, 1999), pp. 184–218; Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 86–114; Christopher Keep, ‘Blinded by the Type: Gender and Information Technology at the Turn of the Century’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 23 (2001): 149–73; Bette London, ‘Secretary to the Stars: Mediums and the Agency of Authorship’, in Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 91–110; Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca, 2010).