- The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing by Hilary Grimes
By my estimate, cultural historians of the Victorian supernatural are in their third generation. The breakthrough works of Frank Turner, Janet Oppenheim, and Alex Owen in the 1970s and 1980s treated Victorian intellectuals and practitioners of spiritualism and psychical research seriously and contextually, unpacking the ways in which their theories of the supernatural shadowed and cunningly reappropriated the new findings and cultural authority of scientific naturalism. A second generation followed, offering a gentle corrective to Oppenheim’s sense that the only thing to explain was how clever people could have believed such pseudo-scientific guff. The very inability to [End Page 350] demarcate the boundary between science and pseudo-science provided the habitat for the scientized supernatural developed in energy physics, the New Psychology, and electrical technologies, in work by John Durham Peters, Richard Noakes, and Pamela Thurschwell, research to which my own book on telepathy was indebted. Recently, alongside remarkable growth in gothic studies has been a veritable explosion of work on the Victorian supernatural and spectrality, following in the wake of Owen’s groundbreaking study of the odd, compromised power spiritualism could assign to the woman medium, and related books by Jill Nicole Galvan, Tatiana Kontou, Marlene Tromp, and Sarah A. Willburn. It is a crowded market. One wonders if we have started over-super-naturalizing the long nineteenth century and perhaps now need an empiricist or positivist correction.
Hilary Grimes has a tall order to find new material or arguments in this terrain, and despite some involving passages and striking readings of individual texts there is an awful lot of received wisdom in The Late Victorian Gothic. The book consistently finds things more supernatural or uncanny than you might expect, including the new dynamic psychology (chapter 1); photographic plates meant to record faithfully the real, yet from which spirits emerge (chapter 2); the new scientific hypnotism still haunted by the old supernatural mesmerism (chapter 3); the discourse of feminine sensitivity in non-canonical women writers (chapter 4); the attempts of Vernon Lee to keep aestheticism separate from the vulgar gothic (chapter 5); or the political commitment to naturalism of New Woman writers that in fact hides a recurrent exploration of strange psychical states (chapter 6).
A good proportion of this work has been done before, as Grimes mostly dutifully acknowledges while offering slight shifts of emphasis or polite disagreements. Because of this, I wasn’t entirely convinced that another reading of Henry James’s In the Cage (1898) with Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” (1902) was needed, given how carefully Thurschwell and others have teased out the imbrication of subjectivity, wireless communication, and telegraphy. If Grimes claims to give greater focus to the technological, her reading does not extend to the histories of communication that have thoroughly covered this spooky hook-up, whether Peters’s Speaking into the Air (1999) or Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2000). The radical anti-subjectivist implications of Friedrich Kittler’s media theory are not rigorously explored, yet these are difficult to reconcile with the default gothic Freudianism that gently envelops the readings in the book. The paradoxes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s commitment both to the ratiocination of Sherlock Holmes and to spiritualism, the cultural pervasion of Trilbymania in the 1890s, the tensions in Lee’s writing, and the conflicting tugs of agency and passive sensitivity in the New Woman have all been exhaustively explored elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with how Grimes reads and exposits these fields: the work is often lucid, smart, and concise. It’s just that this is not very fresh.
The chance for innovation comes in the fourth chapter, which claims to recover forgotten gothic women writers of the late Victorian period. Grimes covers some excellent illustrative stories by Mary Louisa Molesworth, Charlotte Riddell, and others. The chapter starts with an exploration of the gendered language of W. T. Stead in Real Ghost Stories (1891), which offers the striking analogy that...