Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920 ed. by Shane McCorristine (review)

Cultural and intellectual historians have recently displayed a revitalized interest in the nineteenth-century fascination with occultism, spiritualism, and mesmerism as crucial components in understanding the period. This interest has been demonstrated in examinations of specific fields in precise geographical regions such as Corinna Treitel’s A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (2004), Alison Winter’s Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998), Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (1989), Owen Davies’s Ghosts: A Social History (2010), and my own Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition (2011). This increasing attention has also prompted the publication of a growing number of research guides including The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, edited by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Wilburn (2012); Routledge’s collection of primary sources Spiritualism, 1840–1930, edited by Patricia Pulham, Christine Ferguson, Rosario Arias, and Tatiana Kontou (2014); and Christopher Moreman’s three-volume edition The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and Around the World (2013). Building on this more specialized research, interdisciplinary historian Shane McCorristine broadens the scope of such studies with his excellent edition of primary sources on mesmerism, spiritualism, hallucinations, telepathy, dreams, and other such phenomena. McCorristine has scoured the relevant libraries in creating this unusual and useful collection which spans the period 1800 to 1920. McCorristine’s inclusion of material from both western Europe and North America presents a most comprehensive and genuinely representative edition—an accurate picture of the very real and rich transatlantic cultural dialogue that occurred at this time. This wide-ranging scope is one of the main achievements of McCorristine’s edition. The collection aptly portrays the very real flow of ideas, people, and phenomena across the Atlantic. McCorristine’s thematic reach is broad and his geographic stretch is vast. As such, this collection stands as a valuable research aid to scholars of the myriad subjects covered within.

The editor’s purpose in crafting this collection is to present a diverse range of rare and significant primary sources to chart the varied network of debate and dialogue concerning that which was questionably supernatural. In undertaking this task, McCorristine reveals how this dialogue attempted to reshape the natural world, challenge scientific doctrine, and redefine human mental abilities. These sources depict a grander movement, larger than its parts, driven to establish the “supernatural” as “preternatural,” as “a realm of undiscovered principles, or [to provide] evidence that there were ‘more things in heaven and earth’ than dreamt of by nineteenth-century science” (1:x).

Which brings us to the parts of this grander movement, for McCorristine houses a great range of subjects under the general title of Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult. This title is problematic, as the editor acknowledges in his general introduction. The numerous discrepancies between the histories, methodologies, techniques, and goals of these three disparate movements would appear to resist such a general lumping together. However, one of the strengths of McCorristine’s edition is in the way in which he demonstrates, through his choice of sources, that these interests overlapped in both their relationships with the cultural authorities of the day and in their predominance in cultural and intellectual dialogue. Through careful subdivision and selection, the organization and content demonstrate and argue for common ground in the discourse and debates of the day, in particular regarding the interaction of each movement with influential scientific theories and with public reception. His collection is organized thematically in an attempt to categorize his sources around the critical deliberations of the period. McCorristine provides a general introduction to the entire edition as well as further introductions for each volume which provide crucial historical contextualization for the accompanying texts. There are seventy-five texts in all, many of them from manuscript sources and all of them somewhat rare.

The first volume deals with the world...