Spiritualism, 1840-1930

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Since its advent in the 1840s, modern spiritualism has been a topic of popular interest and critical scrutiny. Spiritualism gained increasing prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century, and developed as a religious movement with no defining creeds or formal doctrines, beyond the belief that the dead survived in spirit form and could communicate with the living. Scholars have noted its philosophical origins in the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg; considered its rise against the backdrop of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the accompanying crisis in faith; examined the fascination of celebrated believers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William James, and Arthur Conan Doyle; explored its potential in the context of gender and sexuality; charted its investigation by the Society for Psychical Research; and identified key periods that mark a rise in spiritualist activity. The history of spiritualist belief and practice has been the subject of extensive debate (see, for example, Routledge’s eight-volume collection, The Rise of Victorian Spiritualism (2001) (978-0-415-23640-9), edited by Bob Gilbert). Similarly, considerable research has been devoted to the question of Spiritualism and gender (explored in the Routledge/Edition Synapse two-volume collection, Women, Spiritualism, and Madness (2003) (978-0-415-27633-7), edited by Bridget Bennett, Helen Nicholson, and Roy Porter).

Complementing those earlier collections, this new four-volume set demonstrates spiritualism’s hugely significant—but hitherto often neglected—contemporary engagement with questions of race, eugenics, and the body, and with anti-spiritualist critique. Moreover, as spiritualism is commonly identified as a predominantly Victorian—and western—phenomenon, little has been done better to understand spiritualism in its global and temporal contexts. Furthermore, while numerous studies of spiritualism in canonical Victorian literature exist, the movement’s own rich literary output and its relationship with the non-spiritualist gothic remain underexplored. Indeed, despite the explosion of scholarly interest in modern spiritualism across a wide range of disciplines, almost none of the movement’s key philosophical, literary, political, and medical texts are currently in print.

The learned editors of this collection have remedied these imbalances and Spiritualism, 1840–1930 offers access to a wide range of materials from an important period in spiritualism’s history, including previously unpublished material relating to Arthur Conan Doyle’s investment in spiritualism and transcriptions of the Henri Louis Rey séances in New Orleans (the only entirely African-American nineteenth-century...read more...