Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death (review)

As Trevor Hamilton notes in the introduction to his valuable new study of Victorian classicist, poet, and psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers, an extended biography of Myers is long overdue. While the lives of other early members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), such as Henry Sidgwick and William James, have been carefully and amply documented, Myers remains overlooked. Hamilton convincingly attributes this neglect to the suppression of key documents by Myers’s overly doting and possessive wife Eveleen, and, perhaps less persuasively, to an enduring academic prejudice against the psychical studies to which he devoted much of his personal and professional life. Pondering the factual errors in several general historical overviews of Myers’s life, Hamilton wonders if “there may be a greater unconscious bias towards error in such works, whenever psychical research is touched on, because the author, no doubt an admirable scholar in other respects, feels the subject beneath him or somehow dubious, even bogus” (2). Even were this claim true, it seems odd to propose, as Hamilton goes on to, that a horror of paranormal studies has caused such fairly banal factual errors as the misidentification of Myers’s alma mater as Oxford rather than Cambridge. Excellent in its fresh perspective on Myers and his work, Hamilton’s study nonetheless suffers here and elsewhere in its curiously anachronistic insistence on the scholarly neglect and academic marginality of Victorian spiritualism and psychical research. Given the explosion of academic books on these topics in the last few decades—Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (1985), Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (1989), Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy (2002), and Pamela Thurschwell’s Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (2001), to name just a few—surely no one can argue that they continue to be underrepresented or derided as being beneath scholarly notice. I could not help but feel that Immortal Longings might have benefited from recognizing itself, not simply as an isolated work battling against a tide of factual error, condescension, and amnesia, but as part of an increasingly large and vital vein of nineteenth-century historical and literary scholarship.

This relatively minor quibble aside, there is much to praise in Hamilton’s lively and impressively researched biography. We follow Myers from his boyhood introduction to the evangelical concepts of hell and damnation that later fuelled his quest for a kinder alternative theology through to his precocious achievements as a poet and classicist in the 1860s. Later, and most substantially, Hamilton addresses Myers’s considerable fin-de-siècle contributions to the then-twinned fields of psychical research and abnormal psychology. Myers is perhaps best known for founding the concept of the subliminal self, a secondary consciousness that existed “beneath the threshold” of normal consciousness while remaining in constant communication with it (Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death [Longmans, Green, & Co., 1903] 14). In this obscure and barely understood region of the human mind, he believed, lay the supranormal capacities for telepathy and clairvoyance evinced most clearly in mediums but dormant in most or all humans. In his posthumously published, and provocatively titled, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1902), Myers argued that the subliminal self had the potential to function independently of the body and exist, even after death, as “the central and potent current [of man’s being], the most truly identifiable with man himself” (205).

Hamilton is quick and careful to distinguish Myers’s subliminal self from the Freudian concept of the unconscious with which it sometimes was confused. Essentially, if we see Sigmund Freud’s theory as accounting for the Mr. Hyde side of human personality, Myers’s hypothesis focuses on the persistence of the Dr. Jekyll one. Where the Freudian unconscious acts as the shadowy region of the primitive desires...