Visions of an Unseen World Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England by Sasha Handley (review)

93 opean owners gives way to a careful appeasement of those owners’ concerns that evangelism among their slaves would lead to their freedom. As practiced in Caribbean colonies and the southern US, Anglican theology comes to argue that conversion makes the slaves’ souls equal to their masters’ while their persons must remain enslaved : slavery is justified as an opportunity for conversion to Christianity. Despite some uneasiness about slavery itself voiced by some Anglicans as early as the 1740s, the church largely continued to preach a policy of amelioration of the slaves’ condition—not abolition —and considered that the slaves themselves ‘‘lacked an ethical awareness ’’ even while the Anglican Church’s plantation possessions failed to become models of benevolent Christian rule. Mr. Strong logically, if implicitly, concludes that missionary experience in the New World shaped imperial practice and moved Anglican theology away from the Enlightenment principles with which it began. Shannon Hartling University of Waterloo SASHA HANDLEY. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England. London : Pickering & Chatto, 2007. Pp. ix ⫹ 287. £60; $99. Like Rabelais’s ‘‘Lantern’’ guiding we mere faggots ‘‘with legs of wood,’’ Ms. Handley lights the reader’s way through a maze of ghost stories from the Restoration to the year 1750. Methodically and painstakingly, she examines their evolution from a predominant oral tradition to print formats, concluding that ‘‘ghost stories’’ were the collective expression of beliefs and practices in Georgian England. Whereas she could have investigated ways in which her eighteenth-century ‘‘hierarchy of the supernatural’’ had been modeled after earlier celestial hierarchies—a welldeveloped topic—Ms. Handley observes simply that this ‘‘strictly ordered hierarchy . . . emerged by the close of the eighteenth century.’’ She appropriates the ‘‘supernatural’’ vocabulary of the era, clothing her ghosts, specters, and souls in such terms as ‘‘preternatural’’ and ‘‘apparition.’’ In Chapter 1, tantalizingly entitled ‘‘Restoration Hauntings,’’ Ms. Handley continues to employ mystifying wordimages such as ‘‘spirit world,’’ ‘‘wishes of the dead,’’ ‘‘the wandering dead,’’ ‘‘a guiding spiritual light within,’’ ‘‘visions of the dead,’’ and ‘‘ghostly appearances .’’ Readers of the Scriblerian might have an ear for the aura of mystery surrounding eighteenth-century esoteric studies. Ms. Handley’s terminology certainly captures it. Chapter 1 investigates the Restoration ’s radical reaction to Calvinist psychological torment. Theologian Henry More, a Calvinist by upbringing, ‘‘was plagued by fears of damnation as a young boy.’’ In the Calvinist scheme of salvation, the doctrine of double predestination mandated that no good works or faith could change the fate God had ordained for the individual, resulting in severe emotional anxiety. Fierce antiCalvinist controversies over the nature of life after death fueled promotion of ghost stories by Anglican clergy, polemicists , and natural philosophers. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, Ms. Handley details popular culture’s truck with ghosts in socially stratified forms of print, some more fashionable or acceptable in polite company, and clothes her 94 arguments of the permeability between spoken and written ghost stories in plausible garb. Virtually every form of written and enacted production was employed during the eighteenth century for distributing ghost stories. Ms. Handley discusses, for example, ballads, chapbooks , almanacs, jestbooks, rumor and gossip, oral and musical performance, theatrical enactments, letters, interactive periodicals, essay periodicals, and general magazines. Written ghost stories, clothed in dialogue , image, and circumstantial detail dramatized not only real events, but also the emotions and interior worlds of people —much like ourselves I point out— both skeptical of and intensely curious about the existence of their own souls after death. Ms. Handley attributes the shift in ghost imagery—evolving from the more concrete winding-sheet, faggot -bearing ghosts into the more poetic, ethereal visions—to technological advances in the sciences of optics and astronomy , whereby people could see within and beyond what had before been impermeable. Given that currentday readers will hang expectantly on each of her wordily retold stories, their expectancy of visual rewards that illustrate or portray these ‘‘visions’’ is left as unfinished business, since the stories are accompanied by a mere four illustrations . Nonetheless, Ms. Handley convinces us that Georgian England is the time and place when marvelous ghost stories happened and were told, stories worthy of studying and rereading. Kathryn LaFevers...