Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture by Simone Natale (review)

Thirty years ago, scholarly study of spiritualism was decidedly marginal to Victorian studies, an area of eccentric belief and pseudoscience that was considered an embarrassment at best. Janet Oppenheim's breakthrough study The Other World (1985), which examined spiritualism, theosophy, and psychical research, remained symptomatic in beginning from the premise that it needed to be explained how substantial numbers of intelligent men and women came to believe in such self-evidently false beliefs. Oppenheim opened the field to more mainstream cultural historians. The next generation, though, did not prejudge these beliefs, but offered contextualization from religion, science, and culture, investigating how eminent men of science such as Alfred Russell Wallace could simultaneously sustain a rigorous materialism and an affirmation of the spirit world. New methods from the history of science that did not prejudge the truth and falsity of historical phases when multiple, competing theories circulated to explain anomalous phenomena proved very helpful, as did an understanding of how new technologies and magical thinking have always been intertwined. The sociology of occultism and new religious movements were important resources, and feminist historians since Alex Owen's The Darkened Room (1989) have also examined spiritualism for its subtle play with gender paradigms. The scholarly floodgates have really opened, and I sometimes wonder if the nineteenth century has been made far more spooky and psychical by scholars than it ever actually was. This probably says more about us than the Victorians (as Natale himself hints in his conclusion).

Simone Natale's Supernatural Entertainments book has to fight hard to find space to say something new in this area. Even in his own field of media and communication studies, there have been major works on how the interplay of tele-technologies and the supernatural was key, from John Durham Peters's Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999) to Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000) and many in between. That Natale has managed to produce an engrossing and informative book is a testament to his work in the archives, although that anxious first monograph rhetoric of clearing the ground to stake out new territory is sometimes exaggerated and sometimes rather distorts the record.

Natale's basic premise is that studies of spiritualism have been too concerned to justify the movement as a serious field of legitimate study. Historians have studied spiritualism as a po-faced theology and underplayed the extent to which it was thoroughly imbued with the emerging "modern entertainment industry." Across six chapters, Natale explores the theatricality and showmanship of public séances from the very beginning of the movement in 1848 (Chapter 1); to the link between family séance circles and the culture of parlor games and evening entertainments at home (Chapter 2); the imbrication of mediumistic performances with the emergence of mass journalism, advertising, and popular theater culture (Chapter 3); the way in which "star mediums" like the Fox Sisters and the notorious Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino joined an emergent celebrity culture, often managed by theatrical impresarios who actively courted controversy to generate sales (Chapter 4); the rise of spiritualism as coincident with the emergence of a democratic, mass print culture and its technologies of automated dissemination (Chapter 5); and finally, the way in which spiritualists latched on to the new technology of photography in the 1860s to generate spectacular images of ghosts captured in the chemicals, further illustrating the symbiotic relationship between articulations of the spirit world with modern mass technology (Chapter 6).

Every chapter contains rich and absorbing material: how P. T. Barnum actively generated controversy for his displays by sowing doubt about his own claims in the press; how the Ouija Board was marketed first as a parlor game and only latterly became the...