ABSTRACT

After attending a series of spiritualist séances in December 1872, a baffled writer for the London Times concluded that it was ‘strange indeed’ that ‘in a generation which boasts of itself to be one of exact science and plain matter-of-fact belief’ the ‘epidemic’ of spiritualism had gained an estimated twenty million ‘adherents’. It was evident that ‘in this matter our scientific men have signally failed to do their duty by the public, which looks to them for its facts’.2 For this writer, the relationship between science and spiritualism seemed to be one of opposition and the only sense in which spiritualism could become scientific was if it was investigated by professional scientists. This argument informed countless other Victorian commentaries and criticisms of spiritualism and later historical analyses of the so-called movement. Frank Podmore’s critical Modern Spiritualism (1902) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s sympathetic History of Spiritualism (1926) may have disagreed sharply on what histories of spiritualism could say about the genuineness of mediumship and spirit manifestations, but they both identified the scientific ‘aspect’ of the subject with the investigations of such scientific practitioners as William Crookes, Michael Faraday, E. Ray Lankester and Alfred Russel Wallace.3 The trend continued well into the later twentieth century, especially by historians looking for precursors to

those young sciences of psychical research and parapsychology.4 The studies of American and British spiritualism by R. Laurence Moore and Janet Oppenheim respectively, however, signalled the beginnings of a historiography that was at once more sensitive to the ways in which spiritualistic claims and practices were shaped by possibilities and uncertainties in sciences of the period, and to the independent scientific identity of spiritualist cultures.5