Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 71)

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Ghos t-Se e r s, De t ec t i v e s, a nd Spi r i t ua l is ts

This is an original study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century  – ghost stories and detective stories  – and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we “see” is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge. srdjan smajić is an independent scholar living in New Orleans.

c a mbr i dge stu di es i n ni nete e n th- ce n tury l i ter atu re and culture General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Kate Flint, Rutgers University Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as “background,” feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed.

A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

Ghos t-Se e r s, De t ec t i v e s, a nd Spi r i t ua l is ts Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Sr dja n Sm aj ić

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521191883 © Srdjan Smajic 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010

ISBN-13

978-0-521-19188-3

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of my father, Emir Smajić

Contents

Acknowledgments List of abbreviations

page ix x

Introduction

1

Pa r t I Ou t e r v i s ion, i n n e r v i s ion:  g ho s t- s e e i ng a n d g ho s t s t or i e s

9

1 Contextualizing the ghost story

11

2  The rise of optical apparitions

20

3 Inner vision and spiritual optics

34

4  “Betwixt ancient faith and modern incredulity”

45

Pa r t II S e e i ng i s r e a di ng: v i s ion, l a nguag e , a n d de t e c t i v e f ic t ion

65

5  Visual learning: sight and Victorian epistemology

67

6  Scopophilia and scopophobia: Poe’s readerly flâneur

94

7  Stains, smears, and visual language in The Moonstone

108

8  Semiotics v. encyclopedism: the case of Sherlock Holmes

119

Pa r t III I n t o t h e i n v i s i bl e : s c i e nc e , s pi r i t ua l i s m, a n d o c c u lt de t e c t ion

129

9  Detective fiction’s uncanny

131

10 Light, ether, and the invisible world

137

vii

viii

Contents

11 Inner vision and occult detection: Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius

150

12  Other dimensions, other worlds

157

13 Psychic sleuths and soul doctors

181

Coda

200

Notes Bibliography Index

204 238 256

Acknowledgments

Many people have had a hand in the making of this book, some directly, others in more subtle but equally important ways. For their help, guidance, and friendship, I wish to thank Rima Abunasser; Darin Bradley; Jennifer Chapman; Victoria Chevalier; Richard and Leigh Collins; Stanley Crowe and my other colleagues at Furman; Chase and Jessan Hager; Geoffrey Harpham; Emil Kerenji; James Kilroy; Anne Kouri; David Lee; Shannon Reilly; Molly Rothenberg; Emir, Vera, and Maja Smajić; Roger Sneed; and Robb Turner. I am indebted to the infinitely resourceful librarians at Tulane University and Furman University. A Research and Professional Growth grant from Furman enabled me to have Odilon Redon’s “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity” reproduced on the cover, by permission of The Museum of Modern Art. A different version of Chapters 1–4 appeared as “The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing:  Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story” in English Literary History 70 (2003).

ix

Abbreviations

“AS” Algernon Blackwood, “Ancient Sorceries” “CD” Algernon Blackwood, “The Camp of the Dog” “CI” Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity” “F” Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, “The Familiar” “FO” Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Five Orange Pips” “GM” William Hope Hodgson, “The Gateway of   the Monster” “GT” Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, “Green Tea” HB Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles “HI” William Hope Hodgson, “The Horse of the Invisible” “HL” William Hope Hodgson, “The House Among   the Laurels” “JH” Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, “Mr Justice Harbottle” LDW Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft M Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone “MC” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” “MR” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” “NF” Algernon Blackwood, “The Nemesis of Fire” NN Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature “OM” Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Origin and Meaning   of Geometrical Axioms” “PI” Algernon Blackwood, “A Psychical Invasion” PIS William Whewell, The Philosophy of the   Inductive Sciences “PL” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” PLM George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind “RL” Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Red-headed League” “RM” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” “SB” Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” x

List of abbreviations

xi

“SE” William Hope Hodgson, “The Searcher of the End House” SF Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four SL John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic “SMI” Victoria Welby, “Sense, Meaning and Interpretation” SR Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus SS Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet “SV” Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the   Sussex Vampire” “TC” Walter Scott, “The Tapestried Chamber” “TI” William Hope Hodgson, “The Thing Invisible” “VHS” Algernon Blackwood, “A Victim of Higher Space” “WR” William Hope Hodgson, “The Whistling Room”

Introduction

Mrs. Ferguson is a vampire. There should be no doubt about this:  two reliable eyewitnesses have observed her, on separate occasions, sucking blood from the neck of her infant son. “On one occasion … this child had been left by its nurse for a few minutes. A loud cry from the baby, as of pain, called the nurse back. As she ran into the room she saw her employer, the lady, leaning over the baby and apparently biting his neck.” Apparently? Surely more than that: “There was a small wound in the neck from which a stream of blood had escaped.”1 The mother bribes the nurse to keep quiet about what she has seen, a gesture difficult to interpret otherwise than as an admission of guilt. From then on the nurse closely watches the mother, the mother closely watches the nurse, and both closely watch the baby. “Day and night the nurse covered the child, and day and night the silent, watchful mother seemed to be lying in wait as a wolf waits for a lamb” (“SV,” p. 537). Or as a vampire waits for her prey. Fearing for the child’s life, the nurse confesses everything to Mr. Ferguson. Convinced that his wife is as devoted a mother as she is a loving spouse, and outraged by the nurse’s scandalous accusation, he scornfully tells her “that she was dreaming, that her suspicions were those of a lunatic, and that such libels upon her mistress were not to be tolerated” (“SV,” p. 537). Moments later, however, the evidence of his own eyes leaves him no choice but to believe the nurse’s wild story. “While they were talking a sudden cry of pain was heard. Nurse and master rushed together to the nursery. Imagine his feelings, Mr. Holmes,” says Mr. Ferguson (speaking of himself in the third person), “as he saw his wife rise from a kneeling position beside the cot and saw blood upon the child’s exposed neck and upon the sheet. With a cry of horror, he turned his wife’s face to the light and saw blood all round her lips. It was she – she beyond all question – who had drunk the poor baby’s blood” (“SV,” pp. 537–8). Seeing is believing. Mrs. Ferguson is a vampire. 1

2

Ghost-seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists

But we know that this cannot be the case, that what the nurse and the husband saw, all appearance to the contrary, must have been something that only looks like vampirism. We know this not because we have read the ending first, as some of us (myself included) are tempted to do with mysteries, but because we are reading a Sherlock Holmes story – and in Holmes’s world there are no such things as vampires. “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish!” Holmes exclaims in one of the rare moments when he loses his temper. “What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.” Watson does not disagree. He proposes, however, that “the vampire [is] not necessarily a dead man,” and that “[a] living person might have the habit.” He recalls having read somewhere of the legend “of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth.” Although Watson does not expressly say so, the legend provides a template for understanding how behaviors regarded as socially deviant may be perceived as unnatural – how the unusual is discursively transfigured into the unnatural or supernatural, and how transformations of this kind are always contingent upon who has power and authority to judge behaviors as normal or abnormal, and upon when and where this power is exercised. To ascribe this level of sociological insight to Watson is perhaps to give him too much credit. Holmes, in any case, is not interested in theories of othering or cultural criticism. To him the story of the aged drinking the blood of the young smacks of the kind of gory sensationalism and superstition-ridden hearsay where the odd gives way to the occult and the supernatural is permitted to sneak in through the back door. He insists that “[t]his agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply” (“SV,” p. 535). Indeed, vampires, ghosts, and similar agencies cannot, must not apply in detective fiction. For if Holmes were seriously to consider that Mrs. Ferguson may be a vampire, and consequently that what he had always regarded as “rubbish” and “pure lunacy” may have some truth to it after all, then what we are reading – regardless of whether or not the mystery turns out to have a rational (i.e. non-supernatural) solution – is not the sort of detective story we are used to. In fact, it may not be a detective story at all but something that only resembles one: a mischievous simulacrum of a detective story, maybe, that preserves the superficial features of the genre while stretching its epistemological and ontological coordinates out of shape, expanding the range of plausible theories, legitimate inferences, and lawful deductions, so that what ought to be rejected without a second thought (vampires, ghosts, and similar “rubbish”) turns out

Introduction

3

to be very much applicable. And if applicable in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” one of Doyle’s later stories, in what previous adventures as well? Might the favored rational solution always have been a reactionary oversimplification of a larger cosmic riddle (to be deliberately vague about it) whose troublesome loose ends are in detective fiction tucked out of sight, systematically censored because they challenge the detective’s “flatfooted” understanding of the world? Holmes’s sarcastic “dry chuckle” at a case that he suspects will be “a mixture of the modern and the mediaeval, of the practical and of the wildly fanciful” (“SV,” p. 534) is haunted by anxiety about the consequences of this unlawful mixing, whereby what is denied entrance into the genre manages to insinuate itself into it. The mere mention of the supernatural, even if it is immediately dismissed as inapplicable, is enough to make the detective feel displaced, not just historically (has he been teleported into the Middle Ages?) but also genre-wise:  “[B]ut really we seem to have been switched on to a Grimms’ fairy tale” (“SV,” p. 535), he peevishly complains to Watson. Holmes’s complaint reflects a persistent metatextual concern in detective fiction: the anxiety that generic purity is unattainable; that the supposedly rational genre in which the supposedly rational Holmes feels at home is everywhere contaminated by the supernatural, occult, or irrational; that the epistemological principles and investigative procedures that define detective fiction’s characteristic modality are deeply implicated in what the genre insists on condescendingly treating as “rubbish” and “pure lunacy.” “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” foreshadows how this book will end: with a look at the “switch,” to use Holmes’s word, between ghost and detective fiction – or their hybridization, as I want to represent it. While literary genres are always impure, this particular hybridization occurs prominently toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth century, and Doyle’s vampire/detective story, published in 1924, is a convenient bookend to the historical itinerary I will chart out. More importantly, Doyle’s story, with its foregrounded tension between faith in and skepticism about the evidence of one’s eyes, its conflicted endorsement and dismissal of the notion that seeing is believing, corrob­ orates Kate Flint’s remark that “though the visual was … of paramount importance to the Victorians, it was a heavily problematized category.”2 My contribution to our understanding of this problematic category will be to examine the ways in which ghost and detective fiction are structured by and in conversation with contemporary philosophical and scientific work on visual perception – what these genres have to tell us about Victorian theories of vision, and how these theories are represented in literature and

4

Ghost-seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists

help shape its form and content. At times I contend that there are direct lines of influence to be traced between science and literature, as in the case of physiological optics and ghost fiction. In other places I make no such claims, and instead position philosophico-scientific and literary texts side by side to examine how different forms of discourse address the same issue, as in the shared concern of Victorian epistemologists and detective fiction writers with problems of inference and interpretation. I contend throughout that ghost and detective fiction either implicitly or explicitly articulate the notion that vision, bluntly put, is a messy affair – that “[t]he facts of vision,” as William James remarked, “form a jungle of intricacy.”3 Indeed, what exactly the facts are is precisely the issue. Is the “seat” of vision in the eye or in the mind? How do optical illusions work? What is the difference between sensation and perception? Are we hardwired, as it were, to see things in a particular way or is seeing a matter of contingent experience, practice, and habit? And are there modes of perception not encompassed by the five bodily senses? Can we train ourselves to see in four dimensions? The answers to these and related questions, as we shall see, depend on whom we ask. I open Part I by considering some of the ways in which we can (or ought to) read Victorian ghost fiction, and the interpretive challenges presented by this genre, especially to historicist readings. I then propose that nineteenth-century debates on ghost-seeing enable us to approach contemporary ghost stories from a contextualist perspective. Popular ghost-debunking works such as Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) and David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic (1832) argued that ghost sightings can effectively be explained in physiological terms, namely as optical illusions. The organ of sight, Scott and Brewster claimed, often deceives us about the shape, nature, and even existence of perceived objects. Ghosts are exemplars of things that look real enough but exist only in the deceived or diseased eye of the beholder. The optical theory exerted a formative influence on the nineteenth-century ghost story. Scott’s own ghost story “The Tapestried Chamber” (1828) inaugurates the trend of drawing upon the optical explanation to undermine the notion that seeing ghosts is believing in ghosts. Yet the ghost’s unique ontology places it in a distinct class of perceived objects. What is at stake in believing one’s eyes where apparitions are concerned is not just the obvious issue of the reliability of sight (under spectral or any other circumstances), but also emotionally loaded concerns about death and the afterlife. Scott’s Letters are dismissive of ghost sightings and so-called “authentic” ghost

Introduction

5

stories, yet his own ghost story does not unequivocally dismiss the ghost as an illusion. Rather, “The Tapestried Chamber” exemplifies a consistent feature of the genre: it leaves this question unresolved. But what kind of seeing are we talking about? A broader perspective of nineteenth-century visual culture (though, of course, not broad enough to encompass this culture in its entirety) suggests that the Victorians understood sight as physiological, corporeal, retinal – and as something more than that:  something else entirely. Thomas Carlyle’s and John Ruskin’s protests against the impact of scientific materialism on the culture at large often involved advocating a different way of seeing, and a different way of thinking about seeing – what Carlyle calls “inward eyesight”4 and Ruskin terms “the soul of the eye.”5 Victorian spiritualists shared this impatience with mechanistic models of the observer. If one hopes to see a ghost, or the inhabitant of a higher plane of existence, many spiritualists and psychic researchers argued, one must rely on the inner, intuitive, spiritual eye rather than the limited corporeal organ. Yet the perceptual alternatives provided by a burgeoning discourse on the interior senses, sight in particular, are largely absent from Victorian ghost stories. I conclude Part I by proposing that the reasons for this absence have to do with the genre’s unique aesthetic considerations and its positivist preference for the evidence of the bodily senses over other kinds of perception and proof. In Part II I show how problems of visual perception proved to be more complicated than Scott and Brewster had assumed. Physiological descriptions of vision, it came to be argued, failed to address another, more critical, set of issues and concerns. As Thomas Reid had already observed in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), the “common error of the philosophers, to account the senses fallacious,” arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of the perceptual process. The senses, Reid explained, are merely passive conduits of sense data. As such they are neither deceptive nor truthful:  “If they are not judging faculties, no judgment can be imputed to them, whether false or true.”6 Errors do occur, of course, but they are results of incorrect inferences rather than of physiological malfunctions. Ghosts, George Henry Lewes argued, are not optical illusions but products of erroneous inferences: “[W]hen a man avers that he has ‘seen a ghost,’ he is passing far beyond the limits of visible facts, into that of inference. He saw something which he supposed to be a ghost.”7 This conceptualizing of vision in inferential terms, popular among Victorian epistemologists from the 1840s on, can be traced back to George Berkeley’s An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), where the observer is imagined as a reader and interpreter. “[V]isible objects are

6

Ghost-seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists

only in the mind,” Berkeley declares, and do not “suggest ought external, whether distance or magnitude, otherwise than by habitual connexion as words do things.”8 Berkeley’s theory anticipates Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that the relation between a signifier and its signified is arbitrary, a matter of “habitual connexion” rather than innate correspondence. In Berkeley’s theory the epistemological ramifications of this arbitrariness are held in check by religious convictions: “[T]he voice of the Author of Nature, which speaks to our eyes, is not liable to that misinterpretation and ambiguity that languages of human contrivance are unavoidably subject to.”9 When his empirico-associationist theory of vision is appropriated by Victorian epistemologists, it is largely stripped of its religious underpinnings. The secularization of Berkeley’s theory is part of the push in contemporary scientific naturalism and Comtean positivism to expel all traces of metaphysics and intuitionism from the philosophy of science. Yet proponents of these epistemologies conceded, sometimes implicitly and at other times openly, that restructuring the seeing-is-reading model in this fashion raises the worrisome specters of relativism and subjectivism. With the “voice of the Author of Nature” muted, the observer is bereft of divine guidance in reading the world-text. Making inferences is the only way to understand this text, but it is also the path to misreadings and misinterpretations. These developments were conterminous with the rise of detective fiction, and the seeing-is-reading paradigm is central to the construction of the fictional detective as an adroit reader of clues and codes. In the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the detective is a master-semiotician, an expert interpreter of a textualized visual world. At the same time all three writers recoil from the relativism that seems inextricable from the secularized linguistic model. They counter the interpretive uncertainties that inhere in this model by retaining the element of certitude in Berkeley’s conceptualization of the observer, or by extolling ratiocinative procedures that isolate the work of detection from the ambiguous text of the sensuous world. In an uneasy and complicated dialectic of faith and skepticism in the observer’s readerly inferences, detective fiction writers both privilege vision in the work of detection and use various strategies of containment to prevent it from compromising the genre’s commitment to the discovery of truth. While the rationalist protocols of nineteenth-century detective fiction ostensibly preclude non-rational forms of knowledge and, even more so, supernatural occurrences, the genre consistently displays signs of affinity with clairvoyance and telepathy, intuitionism and spiritualism. Doyle is

Introduction

7

anxious to distinguish Holmes’s ratiocinative genius from intuition – the detective’s “rapid deductions [are] as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis”10 – precisely because the two have so much in common. If one of Collins’s characters in The Moonstone must insist that “[w]e have nothing whatever to do with clairvoyance, or with mesmerism, or with anything else that is hard of belief to a practical man, in the inquiry that we are now pursuing” (M, p. 332), this is because the genre in which this pronouncement is made is contaminated at its source: it is everywhere haunted by what it attempts – and fails – to repress. Part III opens with a reading of Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2), in which Holmes’s investigative procedures suspiciously resemble the practices of spiritualist mediums. Holmes even confesses at one point that he is ready to be “convert[ed] … to the doctrine of reincarnation” (HB, p. 121). The Hound’s merger of epistemes reflects a larger epistemological and ontological restructuring in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. I follow the progress of this restructuring in vision-related developments in physics, optics, and mathematics, specifically the momentous shift from the particle (corpuscular) to the wave (undulatory) theory of light, and the rise and popularization of non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometries. The wave theory of light resuscitated previous speculations on the ether, and proved immensely useful in constructing scientifically buttressed claims for the existence of invisible spirits and higher intelligences. That the omnipresent, all-permeating ether was not available to direct observation and measurement was a point which spiritualists used to their advantage: seeing (or hearing or touching) is not a prerequisite for believing. If the ether is real, and if it channels light and other kinds of wave, who is to say that it does not also mediate occult communications? As the sciences extended their reach into the invisible world by means of bold hypotheses, they inadvertently encouraged, and even seemed to lend credibility to, spiritualist projects that stressed the intellectual myopia of materialism and the need to reconceptualize the relationship between the natural and the supernatural realms. If space has more than three dimensions, and if spirits exist on some higher spatio-ontological plane, then the extra dimension must be their natural abode – an extension of the threedimensional space and natural world known to us through our five senses. But are we constitutionally forever barred from other kinds of sensation and perception? The idea that there are more than five senses, and that the most important sense is precisely the one that has been neglected, is a common feature of spiritualist literature throughout the Victorian era. It is voiced most forcefully in the closing decades of the century, when it

8

Ghost-seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists

serves to bring science and spiritualism into conversation with each other. For instance, in Charles William Wooldridge’s The Missing Sense, and the Hidden Things Which It Might Reveal (1887), the sixth sense, which Wooldridge maintains is closest to our sense of sight, facilitates the construction of “a rationalist’s faith” that closes the gap traditionally dividing “two great schools, materialists and spiritualists.”11 I conclude with a look at occult detective fiction, an unfairly neglected sub-genre which owes much to the late-Victorian fascination with the ether and the new geometries. Originating in the 1870s in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s stories featuring the metaphysical physician Martin Hesselius, occult detection operates on the boundary between the natural and the supernatural worlds  – and questions the separation of the two. Occult detectives blend ratiocination with intuition, corporeal-sense observation with clairvoyance and telepathy, and effect a reconciliation of metaphysical and materialist paradigms, and also foreground the affinities between two ostensibly divergent and antagonistic literary genres: ghost and detective fiction. Before I move on I shall give away the ending – two endings, actually. First, the ending of this book. In the Coda I confess to having omitted or suppressed something important: the other senses. How would I have read the same ghost and detective stories, for instance, or the same scientific and philosophical texts, had I been thinking about hearing (or touching or tasting or smelling) instead of seeing? How much did my reading for vision contribute to my blindness to other kinds of reading? As for “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” Holmes is right. Seeing is not believing. Mrs. Ferguson is not a vampire. Her husband’s nine-year-old son from a previous marriage, jealous of his father’s affection for the infant, had been poisoning his sibling, and the mother had sucked not blood but poison from the baby’s neck. Wishing to spare her husband the painful truth about his murderous son, the “vampire” had taken the blame on herself. What looked like an act of cruelty and perversion was actually an act of devotion and sacrifice. As Holmes had predicted, the “agency stands flat-footed upon the ground.” At least for the time being.

Part I

Outer vision, inner vision: ghost-seeing and ghost stories

Chapter 1

Contextualizing the ghost story

Despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century, evidenced by their pervasiveness in the most widely circulating periodicals of the time, it appears that we are as unlikely to see new critical assessments of the genre as we are to see an actual ghost. Although the ghost story, as Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert remind us, was “as typically part of the cultural and literary fabric of the age as imperial confidence or the novel of social realism,”1 Nina Auerbach is right to observe that, while anthologies such as Cox and Gilbert’s The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories are abundant, “serious scholarship on ghosts in fiction and film is … surprisingly sparse.”2 This lack of attention is no doubt due in part to the preference among literary scholars for realist fiction, which is to say the sort of writing that embraces the mandate to grapple with pressing social, economic, and political issues, and is committed, in George Eliot’s memorable words, to “the faithful representing of commonplace things” instead of “things as they never have been and never will be.”3 Compared to realism’s ambitious social-reformist agenda, its imperative to address and (as much as it is in literature’s power) to redress the wrongs suffered by “real breathing men and women,”4 narratives dealing with ghosts, fairies, or incubi can come off as a form of unconscionable escapism, an irresponsible flight from what is real and what really matters. By twisting reality out of shape and often insinuating the existence of a happier Elsewhere, tales of the supernatural are, in Marxist terms, a dangerous opiate that dulls critical thinking about the Here and Now.5 Contrasting fantasy and realism, Terry Eagleton argues that fantasy “is at root a wayward individualism which insists on carving up the world as it pleases. It refuses to acknowledge what realism insists upon most:  the recalcitrance of reality to our desires, the sheer stubborn inertia with which it baffles our designs upon it. Anti-realists are those who cannot get outside their own heads. It is a sort of moral astigmatism.”6 The natural outcome of such judgmental assessments is 11

12

Outer vision, inner vision

the critical privileging of more “serious” forms of cultural expression and the marginalization of what is implicitly or, in Eagleton’s case, explicitly discounted as frivolous, naïve, or ideologically insidious – a position that arguably not just reflects the politics of the individual critic, but also replicates and validates the attitude of literary realism itself toward its allegedly trivial Others. As Patricia Coughlan argues: “Realism sees itself exclusively as the form which confronts and holds the mirror up to actual social conditions, and aims to marginalize all other kinds of narrative and treat them as fantasy and decoration: the folktale as a toy for children, the ghost or horror story as mere entertainment.”7 Realism’s mimetic mirror, Eliot admits, “is doubtless defective,” and the world’s “reflection” in it is often “faint or confused.” Yet realism’s self-appointed task to speak the truth and avoid falsehood, or as Eliot phrases it, “to draw a real unexaggerated lion” and resist the temptation of “drawing a griffin,”8 continues widely to be regarded as literature’s strongest claim to socially responsible and politically consequential modes of artistic expression. The dearth of scholarship on the ghost story, however, can also in part be attributed to the exasperatingly elusive character of a genre infamous for being, as Julia Briggs describes it, “at once vast, amorphous, and notoriously difficult to define.”9 Indeed, the question “What is a ghost story?” has proven to be as difficult to answer as the question “What is a ghost?” or “Are ghosts real?” The ghost story, Briggs remarks, is a “tricky genre,” and she judiciously opts for avoiding definitions altogether, using the term ghost story to “denote not only stories about ghosts, but about possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead, including ghouls, vampires, werewolves, the ‘swarths’ of living men and the ‘ghostsoul’ or Doppelgänger.”10 Yet Briggs’s comment about the ­definition-defying amorphousness of the ghost story is just as applicable to any literary genre; the realist novel is perhaps even more amorphous than the ghost story, even more difficult to grasp as a thematically, stylistically, or ideologically cohesive body of texts. Nor have poststructuralist arguments about the instability of all generic categories (such as Jacques Derrida’s contention that it is “impossible not to mix genres” because “lodged within the heart of the law [of genre]” is a counter-law “of impurity or a principle of contamination”)11 discredited the usefulness of genre theory for critics who endeavor to read genres as textual and historical realities rather than mere wishful projections of our compartmentalizing imaginations. On the contrary, it may be argued that while genres are difficult or even impossible to define and are never found in pure form, they are nonetheless indispensable to historicist projects. Fredric Jameson, for instance, has insisted that

Contextualizing the ghost story

13

“a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message”12 shaped by the ideological forces at work in the historical moment of its production. More recently, Stephen Heath has argued that [t]o look at literature through genres is to grasp the former historically inasmuch as the latter are precisely not ‘natural’ forms or abstract categories, but specific socio-historical operations of language by speakers and listeners, writers and readers:  orders of discourse that change, shift, travel, lose force, come and go over time and cultures. That there may be no statically enclosing is definition of a genre does not leave it as some nominalist fancy, just some arbitrary grouping of texts by literary critics.13

Yet the most daunting challenge to reading the Victorian ghost story as an expression of culturally and historically specific concerns, beliefs, or values is perhaps neither the resistance to genre theory14 nor the ideologically driven dismissal of supernaturalism as escapist entertainment, but rather an embarrassment of ghostly riches in British and other litera­ tures: the ghost’s resistance to the contextualist demand that it deliver a historically conditioned, culturally idiosyncratic socio-symbolic ­message. As Dorothy Scarborough remarked in one of the earliest twentiethcentury treatments of the ghost story genre, the ghost “is absolutely indestructible … He appears as unapologetically at home in twentiethcentury fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology, medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion. He is the really permanent citizen of this earth, for mortals, at best, are but transients.”15 To be sure, the textual traditions that Scarborough lists have historically traceable genealogies and metamorphoses. But while it would be possible to trace a spectral lineage from, say, Lucian16 to Ann Radcliffe, or M. R. James to Stephen King, and where the individual ghosts would be subjected to rigorous historicist interrogation, the fact that ghost stories, as Briggs notes, “are as old and older than literature,”17 and that ghosts refuse to be confined to the precincts of geographic, historical, and national boundaries, means that the study of ghosts and stories about them can (and perhaps should) escalate into a project with an ever-retreating horizon. The ghost’s disrespect for spatial and temporal barriers was a matter of common knowledge to Victorian anthropologists and folklorists. Writing in 1885, Andrew Lang remarks that “[w]e seem to need a name for a new branch of the science of Man, the Comparative Study of Ghost Stories.”18 One of the chief tasks of this new science, as Lang imagines it, would be to investigate the reasons for the striking similarities between ghost stories from different cultures and epochs. For instance, “the well-known savage

14

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belief that the spirits of the dead reappear in the form of the lower animals, often of that animal which is the totem or ancestral friend and guardian of the kinship,” may not be the “kind of ghost story one … hears in drawingrooms, but it is the prevalent and fashionable kind among the peasantry, for example, in Shropshire.” Similarly, spirits “which come ‘when you do call them,’ behave in much the same manner, and perform the same sorts of antics or miracles, in Australian gunyehs, in Maori pahs, and at the exhibition of Mr. Sludge, or the esoteric Buddhists.” The reasons for these and many other resemblances are for Lang still a matter of speculation: “Apparently there is either some internal groundwork of fact at the bottom of a belief which savages share with Fellows of the Royal Society, or liability to certain recurring hallucinations must be inherited by civilised man from his untutored ancestors, or the mythopœic faculty, to use no harder term, is common to all stages of culture.”19 Lang seems aware that his proposal for a Comparative Ghostology, as he might have called it, is possibly an invitation to an overly ambitious project that could dead-end in the predictable, prosaic discovery “that there is a good deal of human nature in man,” and that people everywhere share “coincident beliefs or delusions.”20 The ghost story, he suggests, is fundamentally inimical to efforts to read it as the expression of a specific culture or period. It is as if the ghost thrives in a territory where the contextualist rule of literature’s deep socio-historical embeddedness is to some degree suspended, the otherwise conspicuous differences between societies and eras rendered insubstantial, barely visible, spectral. Another problem faced by ghostologists is that of terminology. As Lang remarks elsewhere: “What are we to answer now when people ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ No reply can be made (except by a downright sceptic) till we have defined the term ‘ghost’.”21 This difficulty has been amplified over the past several decades by the contribution of critical theory, poststructuralism in particular, to the semantic instability of terms indispensable to the study of ghost stories. As Peter Buse and Andrew Stott write: “The relevance of a trope of spectrality to deconstruction is clear. Ghosts are neither dead nor alive, neither corporeal objects nor stern absences. As such, they are the stock-in-trade of the Derridean enterprise, standing in defiance of binary oppositions such as presence and absence, body and spirit, past and present, life and death.”22 Following the lead of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Julian Wolfreys argues that “ghosts cannot be either contained or explained by one particular genre or medium, such as Gothic narratives. They exceed any single narrative modality, genre or textual manifestation. It is this which makes them ghostly and which announces the power of haunting.”23 The reasons for this textual and generic uncontainability

Contextualizing the ghost story

15

have less to do with the omnipresence of the ghost in world literatures and cultures, than with the way in which Wolfreys uses terms such as ghost, haunting, and spectrality. He argues, for instance, that “spectrality resists conceptualization and one cannot form a coherent theory of the spectral without that which is spectral having always already exceeded any definition … The idea of the spectre, spectrality itself, escapes even as its apparitional instance arrives from some other place, as a figure of otherness which traverses and blurs any neat analytical distinction.”24 If a specter is just that which cannot be pinned down by a definition, that which blurs conventional boundaries and invalidates distinctions grounded in binary logic, then it is possible to argue, as Wolfreys does, that spectrality is present wherever there is a text – and not just a text featuring apparitions of the dead. Rather, every text is haunted, every story is a ghost story, in the sense that all texts are haunted by the ghostly echoes of their predecessors, by “voices [that] are the others of the very texts we read in any given moment.”25 All texts are ghostly because, like ghosts, they are at once present and absent, here and elsewhere, material and phantasmic: The question of the text therefore, like the question of spectres, reconfigures the question of the limit between the living and the dead, which everywhere, in every textual encounter, presents itself. It is not that the text is haunted by its author, or simply by the historical moment of its production. Rather, it is the text itself which haunts and which is haunted by the traces which come together in this structure we call textual, which is phantomatic or phantasmic in nature while, paradoxically, having an undeniably real or material effect, if not presence.26

Texts are present as themselves, and they mediate the presence of spectral absences. All storytelling – whether it takes realist, supernaturalist, or some intermediate form – is a mystical incantation, an occult channeling: “[T]o tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns, although never as a presence or to the present.” Wolfreys’s treatment of spectrality is exemplary of what Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell, the editors of a recent collection of essays on the Victorian supernatural, identify as “the metaphorical supernatural that suffuses recent literary and cultural theory.”27 To their list of authors who metaphorize the supernatural, including Derrida, Jean Michel Rabaté, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok,28 I would add Avery F. Gordon, whose Ghostly Matters:  Haunting and the Sociological Imagination takes an expansive approach to spectrality in order to construct a fitting sociological vocabulary for describing the traumatic effects of subjugation, loss, and absence. “The ghost,” Gordon writes, “is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can

16

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lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course.”29 Narratives that deal with the various practices and effects of marginalization, othering, and subjugation are ghost stories – and stories that tell us that ghosts are very real: “To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories. To write ghost stories implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material effects.”30 If “all stories are, more or less, ghost stories,”31 as Wolfreys claims, and if, as Gordon maintains, “[h]aunting is a constituent element of modern social life,”32 then it follows that discussing ghosts and narratives about them means nothing less than grappling with some of the very basic features of literature and society. I have taken the time to outline, although briefly and incompletely, the broad features of the critical discourse on ghosts and ghost stories, especially the methodological challenges (but also opportunities) that present themselves to modern-day ghostologists, in order to accentuate from the start the inevitable limitations of any ghostological project.33 I will not say nearly as much about ghosts and ghost fiction as I would like to because mine is only in part a ghostological study, and also because I am wary of purportedly definitive and exhaustive treatments of any subject. My aim in this first portion of the book is to propose one way in which the Victorian ghost story, considered in relation to contemporary debates about ghosts, allows itself to be read as a Victorian ghost story (provided that we do not insist on 1837 as Year One of the Victorian era). While I do not share Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell’s impatience with metaphorical treatments of the supernatural, which, according to them, “unify and flatten out the supernatural” and “move too seamlessly over the supernatural into what it signifies,” I agree that we ought to “attend to the ways in which the supernatural signifies differently at different historical moments.”34 Despite the trans-historical and transcultural features of stories about ghosts, there are, of course, numerous possible ways to ground the Victorian variant of the genre in its historical moment and cultural environment.35 Vanessa D. Dickerson, for instance, has compellingly argued that Victorian ghost fiction ought to be read from the perspective of contemporary gender politics,36 and Eve M. Lynch has shown how the Victorian ghost story is informed by middle-class attitudes toward domestic servants.37 As my study is predominately concerned with nineteenth-century theories of vision and how these are deployed in the literature of the time,

Contextualizing the ghost story

17

I shall sacrifice other contextualizing options to argue that Victorian ghost stories are deeply immersed in contemporary debates about the relationship between vision and knowledge, seeing and believing, and that this investment becomes more apparent if we shift our critical vision to the figure of the ghost-seer. For if, as ghostologists from Lang to Briggs have argued, the specter is in many respects timeless and universal, it bears repeating that representations of the observer, practices of spectatorship, and philosophico-scientific theories and conceptual models of vision are invariably contingent upon historical and socio-cultural factors. Say what we will about the boundary-defying habits of ghosts, living human observers are always rooted in time and place. Georg Simmel’s forays into a sociology of the senses; Michael Baxandall’s work on the “period eye” in Renaissance art; Guy Debord’s critique of the modern society of the spectacle; Michel Foucault’s investigation of the role of surveillance in modern disciplinary regimes; Paul Virilio’s critique of the logistics and automation of perception from the nineteenth century onward; Martin Jay’s description of historically successive scopic regimes in Western culture; Jonathan Crary’s analysis of the dominant model of the observer in the nineteenth century; Audrey Jaffe’s study of the relationship between sympathy, spectatorship, and capitalism in Victorian fiction; and Kate Flint’s exploration of the diverse “particularities of spectatorship” in Victorian visual culture (to give only a few examples) have in different ways contributed to our understanding of how the observing and observed subject never operates as a trans-historical abstraction, but is always deeply enmeshed in “a whole matrix of cultural and social practices.”38 This matrix is much too intricate to be covered in a single study, and I shall not attempt to do justice to the diversity of observers and ways of seeing in the nineteenth century. More modestly, I shall maintain that representations of ghost-seeing in Victorian ghost fiction are in conversation with contemporary treatments of visual perception, particularly in regard to what these works had to say about the reliability of bodily sight as a channel for knowledge about the world – and the world after this one. I emphasize ghost-seeing not because encounters between the flesh-andblood living and the spectral dead in nineteenth-century ghost fiction are exclusively ocular, but because when it comes to ghosts, seeing is the critical prerequisite for believing. As one Victorian commentator on the subject succinctly puts it, “to believe in supernatural phenomena, a man must see them himself.” What others have seen, or claim to have seen, is another matter, and “no amount of evidence will satisfy the sceptic.”39 “Nobody ever quite believes them,” Lang remarks of ghost-seers, “and the seers do

18

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not like to be only half or quarter believed, to be scouted as ‘imaginative,’ or ‘bilious,’ or victims … of visual hallucinations, ‘suggested’ by rats, or the wind in the casement.”40 This is not to say that prior to the nineteenth century ghost-seers were regarded as more credible witnesses, only that their credibility, from the early 1800s on, was radically problematized by statements from physicians and scientists about the consistent failures of corporeal sight and the subjective nature of visual perception. In using the term subjective I follow Crary’s argument in Techniques of the Observer that the 1820s and 1830s witnessed a paradigmatic shift in conceptualizations of the observer, occasioned by advances in the field of physiological optics. Crary demonstrates how the chief seventeenth- and eighteenth-century model of vision – embodied by the camera obscura, a device that widely operated as a metaphor for a scopic regime in which vision was discursively decorporealized and the field of vision conceived as an orderly, rational space – was supplanted in the early nineteenth century by a very different model: one that accentuated the physiological aspects of vision and the messy corporeality of the observer. As Crary writes: Vision, rather than a privileged form of knowing, becomes itself an object of knowledge, of observation. From the beginning of the nineteenth century a science of vision will tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of the physiological makeup of the human subject, rather than the mechanics of light and optical transmission. It is a moment when the visible escapes from the timeless order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body.41

Nineteenth-century scientific treatments of ghosts  – or ghost-seeing, rather – are a case in point. Physicians and physiologists frequently rationalized away the specter as a subjective optical effect and portrayed the ghost-seer as a subject suffering from a visual disorder or disease. Yet the deployment of physiological optics in ghost fiction is more complicated than that. Rather than serving to discredit the ghost-seer’s testimony on scientific grounds, the optical explanation contributes to an epistemological double bind:  vision is at once the most reliable and least trustworthy source of evidence for the existence of ghosts – seeing both is and is not believing. The genre prominently manifests the tension between ocularcentric faith and anti-ocularcentric skepticism that defines much of Victorian thinking about vision.42 Whereas Crary’s exclusive focus on physiology enables him to isolate a dominant model of the observer grounded in “corporeal subjectivity,”43 I propose that the discourse on vision in this period is better understood as a contentious field and a spectrum of models and theories.44 For there

Contextualizing the ghost story

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existed in the nineteenth century an alternate discourse on sight and ghostseeing whose proponents contrasted the limited capabilities and built-in flaws of the corporeal eye with the more reliable and valuable insights of inner, intuitive, spiritual seeing: a kind of vision that enables one to apprehend a more permanent – less illusory – order of truth. This alternate way of seeing and believing, however, is markedly absent from Victorian ghost fiction, and I shall finally offer some speculations on why ghosts in literature are typically seen (if they are seen, that is) with the corporeal rather than the spiritual eye. As to how many examples of a given genre one must consult in order to reach a conclusion about one or several of its features, I side with Tzvetan Todorov’s assertion that in genre criticism we “deal with a relatively limited number of cases, from them we deduce a general hypothesis, and we verify this hypothesis by other cases, correcting (or rejecting) it as need be.” While I shall not hesitate to make broad hypotheses about nineteenth­century ghost and detective fiction, it should be understood that such statements are open to correction. As Todorov writes: “Whatever the number of phenomena (of literary works, in this case) studied, we are never justified in extrapolating universal laws from them; it is not the quantity of observations, but the logical coherence of a theory that finally matters.”45

Chapter 2

The rise of optical apparitions

Published in The Keepsake for 1829,1 Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Cham­ ber, or the Lady in the Sacque” concerns the eerie nocturnal experience of one General Richard Browne, retired from military service, whose tour of the English countryside accidentally leads him to the ancestral mansion of his long-lost friend Lord Frank Woodville. Browne accepts Woodville’s invitation to stay for the night, but the following morning appears much disturbed and informs his host that he must leave on urgent business. Pressed by Woodville to explain himself, he reluctantly admits that the real reason for his departure is that he has been visited by an apparition, a spectral woman with, as he describes her, a “diabolical countenance” and “a grin which seemed to intimate the malice and the derision of an incarnate fiend” (“TC,” pp. 136–7).2 As the other rooms had already been occupied before Browne’s arrival, Woodville had had no choice but to put his guest in the haunted chamber. Yet Browne’s unexpected visit, the nobleman confesses, also “seemed the most favourable opportunity of removing the unpleasant rumours which attached to the room.” Browne, it turns out, had been the unwitting guinea pig of an impromptu experiment, the ideal candidate for assisting Woodville in an exorcism – not of a ghost, that is, but merely of the embarrassing rumours concerning the notorious room  – as his “courage was indubitable, and … mind free of any preoccupation on the subject” (“TC,” p. 139). Unfortunately for the proprietor of Woodville Castle, the rumors appear to be true after all, and are promoted to something more credible than superstitious gossip. Before taking his leave, Browne visits the Woodville gallery of family portraits, where in one painting he instantly recognizes his spectral visitor: “‘There she is!’ he exclaimed, ‘there she is, in form and features, though inferior in demoniac expression to, the accursed hag who visited me last night’” (“TC,” p. 141). Until that moment “a complete sceptic on the subject of supernatural appearances” (“TC,” p. 140), Woodville is instantly converted into a believer; he is convinced (though not exactly 20

The rise of optical apparitions

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thrilled) that “there can remain no longer any doubt of the horrible reality of your apparition. That is the picture of a wretched ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter-chest.” The narrative concludes with Browne’s hasty departure and Woodville’s well-advised decision to reseal the haunted chamber and “restore it to the solitude to which the better judgment of those who preceded [him] had consigned it” (“TC,” pp. 141–2). Ill-treated by both ghost and host, Browne, one suspects, will not be paying another visit to Woodville Castle any time soon. Seeing is believing, Scott’s narrator unambiguously seems to suggest. But this suggestion is more equivocal than it appears, and the story is not, as Briggs describes it, a “straightforward tale of a miserable night spent in a haunted room.”3 In his essay “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” published in 1827 in the Foreign Quarterly Review, Scott explains that “[t]he marvellous, more than any other attribute of fictitious narrative, loses its effect by being brought much into view. The imagination of the reader is to be excited if possible, without being gratified.”4 Since “the first touch of the supernatural is always the most effective,” Scott recommends that “the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative … be rare, brief, indistinct”; the narrative gains nothing and loses much “by exaggerated and laborious description.”5 Effective supernatural fiction is teasingly provocative rather than bluntly explanatory. What descriptive language brings “into view” ought to be barely visible: a tantalizing textual and visual striptease that leaves the most delicate (or delectable) details to the reader’s aroused imagination. In “The Tapestried Chamber” Scott follows his own advice by carefully sustaining ambiguity concerning the most important facts. Key descriptions are purposely vague. The tantalized reader is left to speculate what the spectral woman’s “diabolical countenance” or the wicked “grin which seemed to intimate the malice and the derision of an incarnate fiend” (“TC,” pp. 136–7) might actually look like. The most captivating image in the story, that of the ghost herself, is strategically indistinct; the visual description at once makes much of the ghost’s expression and cloaks it in obscurity:  “Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived” (“TC,” p. 136).6 The traces of certain unmentionable passions have become accentuated in the afterlife and are indelibly imprinted upon the ghost’s cadaverous face, but the impact of these traces on the ghost-seer is lost on the reader who is denied access to visual details. Nor can Woodville, looking at the painting, appreciate the

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full horror of what Browne has witnessed in a private viewing. The painting is true to life but untrue to the afterlife: while its “form and features” accurately depict what Woodville’s ancestress looked like when she was alive, it is “inferior in demoniac expression” (“TC,” p. 141) to how she appears now. The painting accentuates, by virtue of what it does not show, the incommunicability of the ghost-seer’s experience. Like these sites of visual opaqueness, the narrative itself is organized around a lack of clarification on a key matter. What abominable deeds did Woodville’s ancestress, doomed to revisit the scene of her past crimes, commit in the ill-fated chamber? The brief mention of “incest, and unnatural murder” (“TC,” p. 142) whets the reader’s appetite for gory and salacious detail: a literary Rorschach test, one might say, where the reader’s imagination, his or her desires and perversions, anxieties and nightmares, color in the narrative’s blank spaces. The chest containing a full account of these “vilest and most hideous passions” remains under lock and key – a portion of the story that, for reasons of decorum, Woodville declines to share with his guest, or rather Scott, for reasons of dramatic effect, with his reader. Yet the story’s ambiguity regarding the most important question – did Browne really see a ghost? – is sustained throughout not only by withholding information but also by presenting a number of rational explanations for spectral appearances that, regardless of how convinced Browne and Woodville are that the rumors are true, make this conviction highly suspect. Scott had published a prior, much shorter version of the story in 1818 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine under the nondescript title “Story of an Apparition,” signed with the initials “A. B.”7 In rewriting it for The Keepsake a decade later, he changed the characters’ names (Browne was Colonel D., Woodville was Mr. N.) and the year of the event (we jump from 1737 to the end of the American Revolutionary War), and made the story in some sense more literary than it was in its previous anecdotal form by fleshing out the characters and developing the elements of mystery and suspense. More significantly for our purposes, the Keepsake version includes an interjection on the narrator’s part that, brief though it is, offers a direct link to contemporary theories of ghost-seeing: “Lord Woodville never once asked [Browne] if he was sure he did not dream of the apparition, or suggested any of the possibilities by which it is fashionable to explain apparitions, – wild vagaries of the fancy, or deception of the optic nerves.” Browne, we are told, “spoke with such a deep air of conviction” about his nightmarish vision, “that it cut short all the usual commentaries which are made on such stories” (“TC,” p. 138). Although both versions conclude with Browne’s identification of the spectral woman from a

The rise of optical apparitions

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portrait, the suggestion that Browne therefore must have seen a real ghost is rendered more questionable in “The Tapestried Chamber,” where the reader is invited to consider an assortment of fashionable theories:  the ghost might have been a vivid dream, a fanciful construct of Browne’s excited imagination, or an optical illusion. All three theories would have sounded plausible to Scott’s readers. As Terry Castle has shown, by the second half of the eighteenth century it became common practice to regard ghosts as “figments, or phantasmata, produced by a disordered or overwrought brain,” and Scott’s mention of the ghostproducing fancy lends support to her argument for the popularity of the “psychological paradigm”8 in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ghostdebunking literature. Castle acknowledges the emergence of “the new ‘optical’ argument” for the nonexistence of ghosts, but downplays its cultural prevalence to accentuate the “displacement of ghosts into the realm of psychology.”9 Yet ghost-debunking literature, from the early nineteenth century on, was more invested in the optical argument than Castle allows. Scott’s reference to a “deception of the optic nerves” is indicative of the preoccupation with optics among writers on the supernatural, especially skeptics on the subject of ghosts. Compared to theories that attributed ghosts to “wild vagaries of the fancy” and various forms of mental illness, the optical approach had the advantage of being able to explain how ghosts could appear to persons of sound mind – and even sound vision, since optical illusions are a regular feature of one’s visual experience of the world: the physiological makeup of the eye is such that occasional (and sometimes prolonged) “ghost” sightings are unavoidable.10 In his pioneering 1813 work on this subject, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions, the English physician John Ferriar explains that, while “spectral delusions” may sometimes be attributed to “certain diseases of the brain, such as delirium and insanity,” they are often experienced by healthy persons under circumstances favorable to the “renewal of external impressions.”11 Ferriar’s professional opinion is that apparitions are occasional re-visions of things previously seen, sense impressions that have temporarily been brought back to life and superimposed themselves over the field of vision. If so, this means that, although ghosts are not supernatural, they are more than just particularly vivid visual memories. The reanimated impression, Ferriar claims, affects the visual nerves in exactly the same way it had in the past, so that even though the apparitional image does not correspond to anything present in front of the observer’s eyes, he or she nevertheless really sees something. This optical phenomenon, combined

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with our natural capacity for “recalling images by an art of memory” (the latter frequently aided by “peculiar circumstances of time and place”), furnishes an explanation for “beholding spectral objects.”12 Ferriar concludes by arguing that “the unaffected accounts of spectral visions should engage the attention of the philosopher, as well as of the physician,” and ought to be investigated from both the physiological and psychological points of view, so as to determine “their exact relation to the state of the brain, and of the external senses.” Were this to be accomplished, he is confident that “the appearance of a ghost would be regarded in its true light, as a symptom of bodily distemper, and of little more consequence than the head-ach and shivering attending a common catarrh.”13 But while belief in ghosts is a kind of disease, from which patients can be cured by perusing ghost-debunking works such as Ferriar’s, the “disease of spectral vision,”14 as he calls it, is apparently incurable: ghosts will continue to be seen, since there is nothing to be done about the anatomical peculiarities of the organ of sight and the role of memory in the production of unreal images. In Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; or, an Attempt to Trace Such Illusions to Their Physical Causes (1824), Samuel Hibbert, another physician, discriminates more subtly than his predecessor between external and internal impressions, the two being critical in his opinion for distinguishing between sensations and ideas, but reaches the same general conclusion. Since an idea is nothing more than a past feeling renovated with a diminution of vividness proportional to the intensity of the original impression, we are justified in entertaining the suspicion, that the susceptibility of the mind to sensations and ideas ought to refer to similar circumstances of corporeal structure. Accordingly, there can be little doubt … that organs of sense are the actual medium through which past feelings are renovated; or, that when, from strong mental excitements, ideas have become more vivid than actual impressions, this intensity is induced by an absolute affection of those particular parts of the organic tissue on which sensations depend.15

The corporeal senses, in other words, are not merely passive receptors of external impressions, as it had previously been believed, since “the retina may be shewn, when subjected to strong excitements, to be no less the organ of ideas than of sensations.”16 Following Ferriar’s lead, Hibbert maintains that “[a]n apparition is, in a strict sense, a past feeling, renovated with a degree of vividness, equalling, or exceeding, an actual impression,” an effect that occurs both in the mind and the eye, yet does not correspond to anything physically present at the moment when it is experienced. From a psycho-physiological perspective it is no mystery that people see

The rise of optical apparitions

25

and hear ghosts more frequently than they touch them: tactile impressions are “seldom so proportionately vivid as renovated feelings of vision or of hearing.”17 With the publication of David Brewster’s influential Letters on Natural Magic (1832), the figure of the apparition becomes integral to the physiological study of vision as the quintessential example of how seeing can go awry. Brewster, who made significant contributions to the study of polarized light and, putting his optical research into practice, invented the kaleidoscope and designed an improved stereoscope, found the ghost to be a valuable asset in defending his claim that the retina is the “seat” of vision. Whereas Hibbert, as Brewster reports, claims that ghosts are pictures which appear in the mind’s eye – “that spectral apparitions are nothing more than ideas or the recollected images of the mind, which in certain states of bodily indisposition have been rendered more vivid than actual impressions,” and that vision is hence as much mental as it is retinal – Brewster responds with the assertion that “the ‘mind’s eye’ is actually the body’s eye, and that the retina is the common tablet on which both classes of impressions are painted, and by means of which they receive their visual existence according to the same optical laws.”18 To speak of something as intangible and vague as the mind’s eye unnecessarily complicates matters that can be elucidated in optical terms; “the pictures of the mind and spectral illusions are equally impressions upon the retina.”19 Brewster’s elated pronouncement that “[t]his wonderful organ may be considered as the sentinel which guards the pass between the worlds of matter and of spirit, and through which all their communications are interchanged,”20 seems to promise a more ambiguous take on ghost-seeing than Ferriar’s and Hibbert’s. He quickly clarifies, however, that this communication is the effect of a sensory deception: the watchful sentinel at times performs its appointed duty inadequately. The eye is consequently the principal seat of the supernatural. When the indications of the marvellous are addressed to us through the ear, the mind may be startled without being deceived, and reason may succeed in suggesting some probable source of the illusion by which we have been alarmed: but when the eye in solitude sees before it the forms of life, fresh in their colours and vivid in their outline; when distant or departed friends are suddenly presented to its view; when visible bodies disappear and reappear without any intelligible cause; and when it beholds objects, whether real or imaginary, for whose presence no cause can be assigned, the conviction of supernatural agency becomes under ordinary circumstances unavoidable.21

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These convictions are misguided, Brewster insists, and because “[o]f all the organs by which we acquire a knowledge of external nature the eye is the most remarkable and most important,” it is especially urgent to shed light on “those illusions which have their origin in the eye, whether they are general, or only occasionally exhibited in particular persons, and under particular circumstances.”22 To explain ghost sightings in non-supernatural terms one need only consider what comes naturally to the eye (and the impressionable mind) under circumstances conducive to superstitious beliefs: When the eye dimly descries an inanimate object whose different parts reflect different degrees of light, its brighter parts may enable the spectator to keep up a continued view of it; but the disappearance and reappearance of its fainter parts, and the change of shape which ensues, will necessarily give it the semblance of a living form, and if it occupies a position which is unapproachable, and where animate objects cannot find their way, the mind will soon transfer to it a supernatural existence. In like manner a human figure shadowed forth in a feeble twilight may undergo similar changes, and after being distinctly seen while it is in a situation favourable for receiving and reflecting light, it may suddenly disappear in a position fully before, and within the reach, of the observer’s eye; and if this evanescence takes place in a path or road where there was no side-way by which the figure could escape, it is not easy for an ordinary mind to efface the impression which it cannot fail to receive.23

As long as one remains ignorant of certain physiological facts and optical phenomena – such as the blind spot, peripheral vision, after-images, and “ocular spectra, or accidental colours,” the last of which “often show themselves without any effort on our part, and even without our knowledge,” and are a common cause of “illusions which originate in the eye” – the “truth of the maxim that ‘seeing is believing’” will remain unquestioned, as it is one of those truths “too universally admitted, and too deeply rooted in our nature, to admit on any occasion of a single exception.”24 The ghostseer is pressed into irrational belief by applying indiscriminately the seeingis-believing rule to all visual experiences. What in most other cases constitutes a solid foundation for knowledge becomes that which disables rational judgment and lends credibility to superstition. Like Ferriar and Hibbert, Brewster knows that, given the anatomical features of the eye, ghost sightings will continue to occur, but like them expresses hope that apparitions will eventually be purged of supernatural attributes and come to be regarded simply as perceptual curiosities. “Although it is not probable,” he reluctantly admits, “that we shall ever be able to understand the actual manner in which a person of sound mind beholds spectral

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apparitions in the broad light of day, yet we may arrive at such a degree of knowledge on the subject as to satisfy rational curiosity, and to strip the phenomena of every attribute of the marvellous.”25 For his retinal explanation of ghost sightings Brewster was as much indebted to current work in optics as to Scott’s 1830 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. (Brewster in fact addressed his own Letters to Scott. In the introductory remarks he reminds Scott that “it was at your suggestion that I undertook to draw up a popular account of those prodigies of the material world which have received the appellation of Natural Magic,” and says that he hopes to have written “an appropriate supplement to your valuable work.”26) Writing with the authority of one who has done his research on the pathology of irrational belief and “travelled a good deal in the twilight regions of superstitious disquisitions,” Scott observes that it “is now universally known and admitted” that “there certainly exists more than one disorder known to professional men, of which one important symptom is a disposition to see apparitions” (LDW, pp. 2, 16). This disorder, as Scott conceives it, “is not properly insanity, although it is somewhat allied to that most horrible of maladies,” the difference being that “in cases of insanity, the mind of the patient is principally affected, while the senses, or organic system, offer in vain to the lunatic their decided testimony against the fantasy of a deranged imagination” (LDW, p. 16). Scott is here rehearsing previous efforts to distinguish the insane from those who merely see things that are not there. As another early nineteenth-century ghost-debunker, John Alderson, explains, in the latter instance “there is no point on which the patients can be said to be irrational; they merely state that they perceive objects, where we know, and where they can very easily convince themselves, that they do not exist.”27 While it is true, Alderson observes, that “great mental anxiety, inordinate ambition, and guilt, may produce similar effects,” the ghost sightings that he describes “owe their origin entirely to a disordered state of the bodily organs.”28 Scott too distinguishes between deranged senses and deranged minds, and acknowledges the deleterious effects of “the excited imagination acting upon the half-waking senses” (LDW, p. 9). Blending physiology and psychology, he notes that the “imagination, favoured by circumstances, has power to summon up to the organ of sight, spectres which only exist in the mind of those by whom their apparition seems to be witnessed” (LDW, p. 6). The ghost-producing disorder that interests him more, however, is entirely of a bodily character, and consists principally in a disease of the visual organs, which present to the patient a set of spectres or appearances, which have no actual existence. It is a disease of the same nature, which renders many men

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incapable of distinguishing colours; only the patients go a step further, and pervert the external form of objects. In their case, therefore, contrary to that of the maniac, it is not the mind, or rather the imagination, which imposes upon, and overpowers, the evidence of the senses, but the sense of seeing (or hearing) which betrays its duty, and conveys false ideas to a sane intellect. (LDW, p. 18)

The ghost-inducing optical disease has various physiological and chemical causes, among them the abuse of alcohol, opium, and nitrous oxide, as well as “a deranged state of the blood, or nervous system” (LDW, p. 21), any of which can occasion temporary or long-term ghost-seeing episodes. Nodding at the authoritative contributions of Ferriar and Hibbert, Scott concludes that the external organs may, from various causes, become so much deranged, as to make false representations to the mind; and that, in such cases, men, in the literal sense, really see the empty and false forms, and hear the ideal sounds, which, in a more primitive state of society, are naturally enough referred to the action of demons or disembodied spirits. In such unhappy cases, the patient is intellectually in the condition of a general whose spies have been bribed by the enemy, and who must engage himself in the difficult and delicate task of examining and correcting, by his own powers of argument, the probability of the reports which are too inconsistent to be trusted to. (LDW, p. 34)

Scott’s politico-military idiom (the war-time drama of civic and soldierly duties of the sensorium, the betrayals of “bribed” eyes), which Brewster adopts when he imagines the eye as an unreliable sentinel, blends with the language of medical pathology (the deceived general is in the condition of a seriously ill patient, and vice versa) and expresses Scott’s militant attitude toward specters, but also suggests that seeing, whether ghosts or anything else, is always a shaky foundation for believing. Like double spies, the eyes must be closely monitored, their reports meticulously examined and corrected by “powers of argument.” One example of faulty vision and corrective reasoning often cited in the ghost-debunking literature of the time, and which Scott does not fail to mention, is the case of Nicolai,29 a Berlin bookseller whose “state of health brought on the disposition to see phantasmata, who visited, or it may be more properly said frequented, the apartments of the learned bookseller, presenting crowds of persons who moved and acted before him, nay, even spoke to and addressed him.” Yet these apparitional visitors, Scott reports, “afforded nothing unpleasant to the imagination of the visionary either in sight or expression.” The imperturbable, level-headed Nicolai “was possessed of too much firmness to be otherwise affected by their presence than with a species of curiosity, as he remained convinced, from the beginning

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to the end of the disorder, that these singular effects were merely symptoms of the state of his health” (LDW, p. 22). Yet the notion that the ghost-seer ought to be treated as a patient suffering from a reality-distorting disease is complicated by Scott’s awareness that the line between normal and abnormal vision is very fine indeed. After describing a particularly severe ghostseeing case, he observes that “[t]he same species of organic derangement which, as a continued habit of his deranged vision, presented the subject of our last tale with the successive apparitions of his cat, his gentlemanusher, and the fatal skeleton, may occupy, for a brief or almost momentary space, the vision of men who are otherwise perfectly clear-sighted.” “Transitory deceptions” (LDW, p. 34), ghosts that vanish into thin air as suddenly as they appear, are particularly worrisome to Scott because they corroborate the common belief that we are allowed only fleeting glances of things to come: “[I]t is more difficult to bring such momentary impressions back to their real sphere of optical illusions, since they accord much better with our idea of glimpses of the future world than those in which the vision is continued or repeated for hours, days, and months, affording opportunities of discovering, from other circumstances, that the symptom originates in deranged health” (LDW, pp. 39–40).30 One may stop believing in ghosts, then, having understood how and why they appear, but this does not mean that one can stop seeing them: ghost-dispelling “powers of argument” (LDW, p. 34) are impotent to rid the eye of the ghost-seeing disease. Ghosts, it seems, can be conjured up in the blink of an eye, and the notion that the eye is to blame for keeping superstition alive was rehearsed throughout the nineteenth century by sundry experts on the supernatural. When in Fiends, Ghosts, and Sprites (1854) John Netten Radcliffe declares that ghosts are “figments of degenerated and Christianised mythology,” and “may be accounted for without having recourse to the doctrine of supernatural interposition,” he is covering well-trodden ground. “Illusions arising from a disordered condition of the eye, prompting the imagination,” he comments in familiar fashion, “are a prolific source of ghost-seeing.”31 But the theory of optical disorders and diseases – the tendency to treat the ghost-seer as physiologically deranged  – was complicated from the start by acknowledging, as Scott does, that “the vision of men who are otherwise perfectly clear-sighted” (LDW, p. 34) is vulnerable to illusions, and that efforts to distinguish normal from abnormal vision are to some degree misguided because they tend to obscure the essential subjectivity of vision. This became particularly evident when the German physiologist Johannes Müller presented his doctrine of specific nerve­­

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energies (spezifische Sinnesenergien) in his 1833 Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen. Müller’s major contribution to the nineteenth-century science of vision was to show that the senses have physiologically different nerves, and that one kind of physical cause can occasion different sensations – what the eye registers as light, for instance, the skin registers as warmth – as well as that different causes can produce the same type of sensation: chemical, mechanical, electrical, and other influences can produce the sensation of light. As Crary explains, Müller’s is “an account of a body with an innate capacity, one might even say a transcendental faculty, to misperceive.”32 With Müller, as with the physiologists who preceded him, “our physiological apparatus is again and again shown to be defective, inconsistent, prey to illusion, and, in a crucial manner, susceptible to external procedures of manipulation and stimulation that have the essential capacity to produce experience for the subject.”33 In keeping with Müller’s work, Radcliffe remarks that “[i]llusions arising from the production of the sensation of light, whether by pressure, mental emotion, or a disordered state of health, have been a most prolific source of ghosts.”34 The figure of the apparition was the chief target of attacks on superstition because belief in ghosts in the nineteenth century was more widespread than belief in, say, demons or witches, and because apparitions could effectively be explained away by physiology – the eye was demonstrably an unreliable informant, a sleepy sentinel. To give another example:  in Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions. Showing Ghosts Everywhere, and of Any Colour (1864), another Victorian ghost-debunker, J. H. Brown, sought to expose “the absurd follies of spiritualism”35 and at the same time turn a neat profit from the public’s fascination with the subject. Brown’s book includes illustrations, designed by himself (cloaked skeletons and other hooded figures predominate, but he also throws in an occasional witch and angel), which, when viewed in a certain way, produce specterlike images. He gives very specific directions to his readers and tells them what to expect: To see the spectres, it is only necessary to look steadily at the dot, or asterisk, which is to be found on each of the plates, for about a quarter of a minute, or while counting about twenty, the plate being well illuminated by either artificial or day light. Then turning the eyes to the ceiling, the wall, the sky, or better still to a white sheet hung on the wall of a darkened room (not totally dark), and looking rather steadily at any one point, the spectre will soon begin to make its appearance, increasing in intensity, and then gradually vanishing, to reappear and again vanish; it will continue to do so several times in succession, each

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reappearance being fainter than the one preceding. Winking the eyes, or passing a finger rapidly to and fro before them, will frequently hasten the appearance of the spectre, especially if the plate has been strongly illuminated.36

All these ghostly illusions, Brown explains, “are founded on two wellknown facts; namely, the persistency of impressions, and the production of complementary colours, on the retina.”37 His statement of purpose neatly sums up the aim of the campaign against spiritualism launched in the second half of the century by adherents of the anti-ghost camp: “One thing we hope in some measure to further in the following pages, is the extinction of the superstitious belief that apparitions are actual spirits, by showing some of the many ways in which our senses may be deceived, and that, in fact, no so-called ghost has ever appeared, without its being referable either to mental or physiological deception.”38 Spiritualism, however, was in full swing in Britain and America in the 1860s, and ghosts were arguably never farther from extinction than in the mid-Victorian period. Yet physiologists and physicians put ghost-seers and those who believed them on the defensive. Due to the popularity of spiritualism on the one hand, and advances in the science of vision on the other, ghosts were at once the most culturally pervasive and ontologically unstable of all supernatural figures in the nineteenth century. It is important to note at this point that mobilizing science to construct anti-ghost and anti-superstition arguments did not always imply hostility to religion. As Bernard Lightman has shown, the complex relationship between religion and science in the nineteenth century cannot adequately be grasped by the “conflict thesis,” which conceptualizes this relationship in bluntly antagonistic terms. “If a conflict took place,” Lightman argues, “it was not just between scientists on the one side and defenders of the Christian faith on the other. The debate also took place between opposing groups of scientists, who put forward different conceptions of how science and religion could peacefully coexist, and who disagreed on whether or not the cognitive content of scientific theory should be shaped by religious belief.”39 Nor does the related “secularization thesis,” according to which science supplanted religious authority, and which “remains the only master narrative of religion in modern history,”40 offer a fair representation of the historical facts. For although scientific naturalists such as Thomas Henry Huxley advocated the segregation of science and religion into nonoverlapping spheres,41 this does not mean that they all aspired to discredit religious doctrine; in fact, as in Huxley’s case, they often held complicated agnostic views that should not be confused with atheism. Lightman points out that “many prominent intellectuals and scientists fought to

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retain a place for religious belief in Victorian science in the face of the growing power of scientific naturalism.”42 Moreover, not all Victorian scientists were supporters of scientific naturalism and the separate spheres arrangement. Nineteenth-century proponents of William Paley’s design argument from his influential Natural Theology (1802) forged strong bonds of alliance between science and religion that, as John Hedley Brooke has shown, proved extremely resilient, especially in Britain, owing to a favorable social, political, and intellectual climate. Indeed, as Brooke demonstrates, in “the period from 1800 to 1850 it is more accurate to say that science prompted the diversification of natural theology rather than its demise.”43 The anti-ghost authors I have discussed either declared deference to the authority of the Anglican Church or carefully framed their arguments in such a way so as to avoid theological dispute altogether. Ferriar remarks that “[w]hat methods may have been employed by Providence, on extraordinary occasions, to communicate with men, I do not presume to investigate,” and restricts his observations “to profane history, and to the delusions of individuals only.”44 Hibbert too is anxious to clarify that he is launching an attack on superstition, not religion: “Concerning the manner in which the Deity, for signal purposes, has formerly chosen to hold an immediate communion with the human race, it would be irrelevant to offer any observations.” Ghost sightings recorded in the Bible are irrelevant to Hibbert’s argument, he explains, not because they are substantially different from modern cases, but because he has no intention of questioning the truth of scriptural evidence. However, “there will be no hesitation on my part,” he then states, “to proceed on the hypothesis, that all the subsequent visitations of this nature which have been recorded, deserve a medical rather than a theological investigation.”45 Brewster is less concerned about making doctrinal transgressions, as he imagines his work to be a seamless conjoining of the Enlightenment anti-ghost agenda and religious piety: the same science that exposes apparitions for what they are – not miraculous phenomena but mundane illusions – should “be regarded as one vast miracle, whether we view it in relation to the Almighty Being by whom its objects and its laws were formed, or the feeble intellect of man, by which its depths have been sounded, and its mysteries explored.”46 Where, then, does this leave us in regard to the fallibility of the eye? Ghost-debunkers from Ferriar to Scott seem to want to have it both ways:  the eye at once is and is not the most perfect of the senses. The case of Brewster is exemplary. In the Letters he remarks that the eye is the work of a “Divine Artificer,”47 and in A Treatise on Optics (1831) calls

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it “a masterpiece of divine mechanism.”48 In doing so he echoes Paley’s assertion that a study of the anatomy of the eye offers incontrovertible evidence for the design argument. Comparing the eye to a telescope, which obviously has a designer behind it, Paley contends that the eye’s adaptation to different intensities of light and distances of perceived objects is no accident, and nor can it be explained by referring to some impersonal law of nature.49 Rather, “the examination of the eye [i]s a cure for atheism.” The eye’s marvelous structure demonstrates the intervention of a benevolent artificer, who is obviously familiar with “[t]he most secret laws of optics.”50 And if Paley’s reader should wonder why the omnipotent deity chose not to give human beings and animals “the faculty of vision at once,” but instead by “a circuitous perception” requiring complex physiological operations, the answer is that “it is only by the display of contrivance, that the existence, the agency, the wisdom of the Deity, could be testified to his rational creatures.”51 Brewster’s views on the ontology of sight are in line with Paley’s, yet in the Letters he makes explicit his intention to make a study of the failings of this divinely designed mechanism: “[O]ur attention will be particularly called to those singular illusions of sense by which the most perfect organs either cease to perform their functions, or perform them faithlessly; and where the efforts and the creations of the mind predominate over the direct perceptions of external nature.”52 But if the organ of sight is the most perfect of the senses, how can it be marred by imperfections? Brewster solves this conundrum by proposing that whatever flaws are inherent in the structure of eye, they are corrected by anatomical virtues. This is evident in the case of the blind spot: “Though the base of the optic nerve is insensible to light that falls directly upon it, yet it has been made susceptible of receiving luminous impressions from the parts which surround it.” For Brewster, this is proof that the Artificer “has not left his work thus imperfect,”53 though he does not try to explain why this Artificer did not make the base of the optic nerve sensitive to light in the first place.

Chapter 3

Inner vision and spiritual optics

My discussion of the role of physiological optics in Victorian anti-ghost treatises might seem to imply not only that visual evidence was regarded as deeply problematic when it came to ghosts, but that sight in Victorian culture was generally construed as a corporeal sense. Whether or not seeing is believing, that is, believability, appears to hinge on the correspondence (or lack thereof) between what is retinally registered and what actually exists out there to be perceived. Yet many contemporaries considered retinal vision as an obstacle to developing or recovering a different way of seeing – a truer, because more primal, intuitive, and spiritual, vision. The high stakes in the contest between these different conceptualizations of vision are powerfully articulated in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–4), where Diogenes Teufelsdröckh commits the near-fatal error of forsaking his divine gift of spiritual sight for the blinkered vision of the bodily eyes. Teufelsdröckh’s despairing question, “where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him?” (SR, p. 122) sums up for Carlyle the distressingly common error of seeking evidence of spiritual existence with the corporeal senses. “Till the eye have vision,” the misguided Professor of Things in General eventually learns, “the whole members are in bonds” (SR, p. 143). Things eventually improve for Teufelsdröckh both visually and spiritually. With the re-opening of his sealed inner sight, Teufelsdröckh “becomes a Seer” in what Carlyle believes is the true and original meaning of this misunderstood word: “[H]e has looked fixedly on Existence, till, one after the other, its earthly hulls and garnitures have all melted away; and now, to his rapt vision, the interior celestial Holy of Holies lies disclosed” (SR, p. 184). A vision of “the interior,” of the everlasting kernel of truth, is available only to “rapt vision,” and only in the aftermath of a scopic purging, the removal of the “hulls and garnitures” obstructing one’s view of what really matters: the “celestial Holy of Holies.” As a result of Teufelsdröckh’s reclamation of his spiritual vision, which marks the turning point in his soul-searching journey and the commencement of “his apostolic work” 34

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(SR, p. 134), he perceives that physical matter is ephemeral, the body a mere apparition: Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English [Samuel] Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side.1 (SR, p. 191)

Ghosts do exist, then, and are everywhere to be seen. They walk the streets in human form, vainly look for specters in church vaults and haunted houses, and fail to see that it is they who are the real ghosts. “Are we not Spirits,” Carlyle rhetorically asks, “that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?” (SR, p. 191). What remains after the physical body has faded away is something one should not expect to see with the bodily eye, yet nonetheless something more real and substantial – less apparitional – than the flesh-andblood suit of clothes we wear during our brief tenure in this world. To look for ghosts, and to look to ghosts for evidence of immortality, is a futile endeavor. The bodily eye is forever blind to things it was never meant to perceive. “How to paint to the sensual eye,” the reformed Teufelsdröckh asks, “what passes in the Holy-of-Holies of Man’s Soul; in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?” (SR, p. 135). If one wishes to catch a “glimpse of IMMORTALITY” and “glance into the Eternal,” one must learn to regard the universe with different eyes. Otherwise, Carlyle cautions, “the white Tomb of our Loved One, who died from our arms” will become, like the optical ghost, nothing more than “a pale spectral Illusion!” (SR, p. 189). Carlyle’s mention of spectral illusions suggests familiarity with optical theories of ghost-seeing. But the optical reference turns out to be a rhetorically problematic gesture, for while it facilitates a hierarchizing comparison and contrast between two ways of seeing and knowing  – one truthful and the other illusory – it also frustrates Carlyle’s effort to dissociate the spiritual from the “sensual eye.” This is especially evident in “Spiritual Optics,” an unfinished essay composed in 1852 and published posthumously, where Carlyle adopts the camera obscura as a metaphor for grand-scale intellectual, scientific, and spiritual revolutions that have corrected, and must continue to correct, erroneous perceptions and judgments.2

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“The effects of optics,” he writes, “in this strange camera obscura of our existence, are most of all singular! The grand centre of the modern revolution of ideas is even this – we begin to have a notion that all this is the effect of optics, and that the intrinsic fact is very different from our old conception of it.”3 To live inside a camera obscura is not just to have a faulty perception of reality, but to be unable to detect that there is anything wrong with the picture:  not just the image but the viewer too is inverted, turned upside down. The most needful revolutions are those that put things in true perspective by revealing the “real relation”4 between the subject and the world, the seer and the thing seen: During how many ages and æons, for example, did not the sun and the moon and the stars go all swashing in their tremendously rapid revolution every ­t wenty-four hours round this little indolent earth of ours, and were evidently seen to do it by all creatures, till at length the Galileo appeared, and the Newtons in the rear of him. The experience necessary to correct that erroneous impression of the eyesight was not so easy of attainment. No. It lay far apart from the common businesses, and was of a kind that quite escaped the duller eye.5

This geocentric and anthropocentric illusion is comparable to the more harmless one experienced by a passenger on a speeding train, around whom objects “seem to be madly careering at the top of their speed” while he believes himself to be “locked into dead quiescence! And again, if he is really sitting still in his railway carriage at some station when an opposite train is getting under way, his eye informs him at once that he is at length setting out and leaving his poor friends in a stagnant state.” Seeing is believing oneself to be what one is not, “to misinterpret the said motion and impute it to the wrong party.”6 But the eye-opening heliocentric turn was only one spin cycle in a revolution that has yet to be completed – a spiritual realignment and correction of perspective. For just as there are illusions of the bodily eye, so are there illusions of the inner, spiritual eye: [W]ith the inward eyesight and the spiritual universe there is always, and has always, been the same game going on. Precisely a similar game, to infer motion of your own when it is the object seen that moves; and rest of your own with maenadic storming of all the gods and demons; while it is yourself with the devilish and divine impulses that you have, that are going at express train speed! I say the Galileo of this, many small Galileos of this, have appeared some time ago – having at length likewise collected (with what infinitely greater labour, sorrow, and endurance than your material Galileo needed) the experience necessary for correcting such illusions of the inner eyesight in its turn – a crowning discovery, as I sometimes call it, the essence and summary of all the sad struggles and wrestlings of these last three centuries.7

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Carlyle regarded himself as one such spiritual Galileo, chastising his Teufelsdröckhian readers into critical introspection and administering a cure against “sham belief” rooted in egotism and hypocrisy: “Except thy own eye have got to see it, except thy own soul have victoriously struggled to clear vision and belief of it, what is the thing seen and the thing believed by another or by never so many others?”8 “Till the eye have vision,” he might have repeated, “the whole members are in bonds” (SR, p. 143), held hostage to “world-devouring armies of illusions and of foul realities” that “will disappear at last wholly from our field of vision, and leave a serener veritable world for us” only after “deluges of spiritual water, which is light, which is clear, pious vision and conviction, will have washed our inner world clean … with truly celestial results for us.”9 Both outer and inner vision, then, are sorely in need of cleansing and correcting. And while seeing and believing oneself to be stationary, when it is in fact one’s own train that is leaving the station, is an optical illusion “of the outward eye” corrected by “the experience of each man … in the common businesses and locomotions of this world,”10 to perceive oneself as the center of the universe, the one fixed point in a cosmic train ride, is an illusion at once more difficult to detect and more urgent to correct. It is one thing to be mistaken about one’s position in physical space; it is quite another to be in error about the direction and progress of one’s spiritual journey. For all their ingenuity, the controlling camera obscura metaphor and the extended analogy between corporeal and spiritual optics attest to Carlyle’s failure to conceptualize spiritual vision in non-corporeal terms. Because physiological optics furnishes the coordinates for his discussion of inner vision, and because to describe the illusions of the inner eye he must have recourse to the familiar illusions of outer sight, the spiritual eye comes off as an immaterial version of the corporeal organ. As George Levine argues, part of Carlyle’s problem in this regard stems from his desire to negotiate a place in his epistemology for the body and its senses, neither downplaying them in the fashion of Descartes, nor accepting them as the sole condition for knowledge. The central paradox of Carlyle’s thought, Levine explains, is that, while “the absolute only manifests itself in the limits of the material,” it is nonetheless imperative to try to see beyond this epistemological barrier:  “At the limits of the body, of perspective, of moral limitation, only unscientific intuition can open glimmers of the possibility of universal truth.”11 What Carlyle needs, I am suggesting, is a way to write about inner sight in a manner that underscores its fundamental difference from outer sight. What he ends up doing is confessing that the “celestial Holy of Holies” cannot be clothed in language and is accessible only to

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“rapt vision,” but also that the comparative assessment of inner and outer vision obfuscates the real problem, namely the challenge of constructing a visionary theology free from the trappings of sensual “Appearance[s].” Finally, the idea that spiritual vision too can be obstructed or clouded, that it often gives us an inverted picture of things, hardly promotes confidence in its truth-discerning powers. If Carlyle’s reader were prudently to trust the inner over the outer eye, he or she would apparently still need to keep this vision in check and be wary of “world-devouring armies of illusions” that are more difficult to correct than the comparatively harmless optical illusions experienced by train passengers. Scott suggests that the body’s “spies” (i.e. eyes) must be watched closely, their reports checked and double-checked by the distrustful “powers of argument.” Carlyle maintains that the inner eye too is in need of a supervising agency, some clearsighted overseer (such as Carlyle himself) who might catch the viewer looking in the wrong direction, mistaking spiritual motion for spiritual stasis or vice versa. But guidance can take the seer only so far, as it is “thy own eye” and “thy own soul” that must see things aright. The struggle “to clear vision” is one each seer must undertake alone. Carlyle wrote his essay at a time when spiritualism was beginning to take hold of the cultural imagination in Britain and America, and while “Spiritual Optics” is not about spiritualism at all, its investment in establishing a hierarchy of ways of seeing resonates with contemporary spiritualist claims about the differences between outer and inner senses. This is already apparent in one of the inaugural texts of Victorian spiritualism and, for decades to come, most widely read collections of allegedly true ghost stories, Catherine Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (1848).12 Crowe claims that her purpose is not to convince her readers of the existence of ghosts, but simply to open the question to meticulous and unbiased inquiry: “[T]o induce a suspicion that we are not quite so wise as we think ourselves” (NN, pp. 206–7). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that “we” does not include Crowe, whose agenda is to deride the prejudices of materialism and offer a corrective: “The pharisaical scepticism which denies without investigation, is quite as perilous, and much more contemptible, than the blind credulity which accepts all that it is taught without inquiry; it is, indeed, another form of ignorance assuming to be knowledge” (NN, p. 9). Scorning the ghost-debunking works of Ferriar, Hibbert, and other ­physicians, she insists that “the present theory of spectral illusions” does not do justice to ghosts: the biased physicians “arrange the facts to their theory, not their theory to the facts.” Starting from a foregone conclusion (i.e. ghosts are optical illusions), their

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treatises cannot “claim to be considered as anything more than essays on a special disease; they have no pretence whatever to the character of investigations” (NN, p. 18). Yet what precisely Crowe means by investigation is not clear. Her vacillation on the matter is indicative of the methodological complications of her project. Initially, Crowe emphasizes that “slow, modest, pains-taking examination” (NN, p. 9) entails the cooperation of two modes of investigation and channels of knowledge, one empirical, the other intuitive, which she groups together to imply their compatibility:  “[E]xperience, observation, and intuition, must be our principal if not our only guides” (NN, p. 8). Because her target audience are readers who are more likely to be persuaded by empirical evidence than by appeals to the Bible, Crowe strategically downplays “such hints as the Scripture here and there gives us” (NN, p. 10), but also temporarily drops intuition from the list of investigative methods, asserting that “observation and experience can alone guide us in such an inquiry; for, though most people have a more or less intuitive sense of their own immortality, intuition is silent as to the mode of it” (NN, p. 17). Yet Crowe is reluctant to dismiss intuition entirely. One should not, she advises, “reject any evidence that may be offered to us, till it has been thoroughly sifted, and proved to be fallacious” (NN, p. 10). The problem is that the two kinds of evidence Crowe is determined to integrate, intuitive and empirical, or what she calls “evidence from within and evidence from without” (NN, p. 13), are not quite like two sides of the same coin, which one flips this way or that as circumstances dictate. Moreover, the question of evidential sufficiency – how many well-authenticated ghost sightings are necessary to demonstrate that ghosts are real – cannot be answered without first coming to an agreement on what counts as evidence, and what kind of vision is involved in ghost-seeing. Crowe is aware that only “evidence from without,” gathered through the bodily senses, will get a hearing among skeptics, yet insists that such evidence is impotent to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts, whose unique ontology calls for a different way of seeing: In the spirit or soul, or rather in both conjoined, dwells, also, the power of spiritual seeing, or intuitive knowing; for, as there is a spiritual body, there is a spiritual eye, and a spiritual ear, and so forth; or, to speak more correctly, all these sensuous functions are comprised in one universal sense, which does not need the aid of the bodily organs; but, on the contrary, is most efficient when most freed from them. (NN, p. 20)

Crowe reminds her readers that “what we call seeing is merely the function of an organ constructed for that purpose in relation to the external world;

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and so limited are its powers, that we are surrounded by many things in that world which we can not see without the aid of artificial appliances, and many other things which we can not see even with them.” The question “whether … apparitions are subjective, or objective, that is, whether they are the mere phenomena of a disease, or real out-standing appearances” (NN, pp. 21–2) is solved by distinguishing spiritual from corporeal sight, and treating ghost sightings as experiences that fall under the domain of “this universal sense, latent within us,” an order of “perceptions which are not comprised within the functions of our bodily organs” (NN, p. 23). An echo of Carlyle’s claim that the “sensual eye” is an obstacle to more penetrating vision, Crowe’s assertion that the efficiency of spiritual sight largely hinges on its dissociation from the bodily senses was adopted by later champions of spiritualism. In The History of the Supernatural (1863), for instance, William Howitt confidently declares that “we are constantly surrounded by the people of the spiritual world, and should see them, were not our spiritual eyes closed by fleshly and worldly obstruction.”13 This obstruction is particularly pronounced among “the scientific,” by which Howitt means followers of “the atheistic and materialistic school of the French Revolution,” whose “education has sealed up their spiritual eye, and left them only their physical one.”14 Howitt’s aim, like Crowe’s, is to dismantle the claims of materialist science on the grounds that it is incapable of dealing objectively with questions pertaining to “the Supernatural,” which is to say “the operation of those higher and more recondite laws of God with which being yet but most imperfectly acquainted, we either denominate their effects miraculous, or, shutting our eyes firmly, deny their existence altogether.”15 The ocular idiom is not accidental, as much of what Howitt has to say about atheism and materialism (the two being synonymous for him) has to do with limitations of vision, either metaphorically or literally. In his discussion of the supernatural in the Bible, he cites several passages as evidence of “the opening up of the inner senses through the outward ones; so that those thus affected could see spiritual objects, and hear spiritual sounds.” Moses, we are told, “was in such a condition normally.”16 Such arguments quickly found their way into the Victorian popular press. The author of an 1856 article for Tait’s, titled “The Lost Faculty, or Sixth Sense,” explains that the sixth sense is a vestigial spiritual power. It was the privilege of prelapsarian, sinless humanity to enjoy a “personal and familiar intercourse with their Creator, and … habitual fellowship with … angelic and spiritual beings.”17 This intercourse being of a spiritual nature, the author reasons that it must have been mediated by spiritual rather than corporeal channels:

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This spiritual intercourse with beings of another world, involves the question, by what agency was it conducted? Was it by a corporeal or mental sense or faculty that the perception of spiritual beings was communicated to the mind? To this, we reply, that a spiritual communion requires a spiritual medium or perception; a faculty distinct from our ordinary sensual organs. The bodily eye cannot ‘discern spirits’ any more than the hands can feel them. The very nature of spirits forbids this; for if it were otherwise, we should see ourselves continually surrounded with spiritual beings, which … are employed by infinite wisdom in the fullfilment of His high commands in this lower world. We are warranted, both by Scripture and reason, in believing that a faculty distinct from the ordinary corporeal senses we now possess, was the agent by which this spiritual intercourse was held by our parents. This faculty, or sixth sense, consisted in the power of perceiving, by the “mind’s eye,” spiritual beings, with the same ordinary facility with which the corporeal eye perceives material substances.18

These “powers and faculties have been weakened, suspended, or altogether withdrawn” over time, and “nothing remains to us [of them] but short and transient glimpses.” This explains why “their short and occasional revivals [in the form of ghost sightings] are the sources of wonder, curiosity, and even terror, to the masses, rather than of reflective examination or analogical comparison.” Nearly extinct as a consequence of the corruption of humanity by sin, the sixth sense is “occasionally and temporarily restored or imparted to individuals, for special purposes.”19 But the logic here is suspiciously circular: ghosts offer proof of scriptural truths, and the latter offer evidence that ghosts exist. The prerequisite for believing in a spiritseeing sixth sense is the belief in “the presence amongst us of spiritual beings. If we believe this – and none but confirmed infidels and materialists call it in question – the subject then resolves itself into the possibility of these beings becoming visible to us.”20 The claim that only inveterate infidels and materialists will doubt the reality of spiritual beings, or the sixth sense used to perceive them, is evocative of a similar move in Crowe’s text. Questions about the existence of ghosts, she claims, can be settled only by appealing to a universal spiritual sense, and although the existence of this channel of inter-worldly communication remains hypothetical, it is nonetheless “an hypothesis which whoever believes that we are immortal spirits, incorporated for a season in a material body, can scarcely reject” (NN, p. 23). While she argues that “in both the moral and the physical world, there is a chain of uninterrupted connection” (NN, p. 16), and that ghosts are “the results of physical laws” (NN, p. 177), the bonds that Crowe tries to forge between the worlds of matter and spirit, physics and metaphysics, appear rather fragile, and were perceived as such

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by many contemporaries – Dickens, as we shall see, was unimpressed by Crowe’s logic and evidence. One of the many well-authenticated ghost stories Crowe cites concludes with the ghost-seer’s assertion that “it is impossible for me ever to doubt or to deny that which I know I saw” (NN, p. 204). But if ghost sightings are to convince the skeptic that there is a world parallel to or beyond the one accessible to the five bodily senses, then the modality of observations evidencing this truth should not itself demand a leap of faith. The challenge of distinguishing between two ways of seeing, and two ways of thinking about vision, remained a central concern for writers who criticized the myopic worldview of materialist science. For a final example I turn to John Ruskin, whose statements on vision are indispensable to our understanding of Victorian visual culture. Since I cannot here do justice to the complexity and significance of Ruskin’s ideas about vision21 (all of his writings on art, architecture, and nature are at least implicitly discussions of how we see, or how Ruskin thinks we ought to see), and since I have been pursuing a rather particular strand in Victorian theories of vision, I will limit myself to two short texts. In an 1872 lecture, “The Relation to Art of the Science of Light,” Ruskin asks his audience to remember “that the words ‘fiat lux’ mean indeed ‘fiat anima,’ because even the power of the eye itself, as such, is in its animation. You do not see with the lens of the eye. You see through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.”22 Responding to Huxley’s assertion “that sight was ‘altogether mechanical’,” Ruskin caustically suggests that “[t]he words simply meant, if they meant anything, that all his physiology had never taught him the difference between eyes and telescopes. Sight is an absolutely spiritual phenomenon; accurately, and only, to be so defined.”23 Rightly understood, sight is “no mechanical vision,” and “clearness of sight” has less to do with the “mathematical power in the eye” (acuity of retinal vision) than with a “moral power.” Mathematical and moral faculties, Ruskin explains, are unequally distributed between human beings and animals. Animals are more adept at discerning visual details at great distances. He proposes to his audience that they try out the following experiment: “When next you are travelling by express sixty miles an hour, past a grass bank, try to see a grasshopper, and you will get some idea of an eagle’s optical business, if it takes only the line of ground underneath it. Does it take more?”24 We cannot know, not being eagle-eyed. But extreme scopic prowess does not imply moral comprehension; in fact, the general rule seems to be that the two are inversely proportional: “A cat may look at a king; – yes; but can it see a king when it looks at him? The beasts of prey never seem to me to

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look, in our sense, at all.” As in Crowe and Howitt, one kind of seeing is enhanced at the cost of another. If “the science of optics is an essential one to us,” this is chiefly because it shows us that “exactly according to these infinitely grotesque directions and multiplications of instrument you have correspondent, not only intellectual but moral, faculty in the soul of the creatures. Literally, if the eye be pure, the body is pure; but, if the light of the body be but darkness, how great is that darkness!”25 In “The Three Æras,” a lecture delivered in 1875, Ruskin again turns his attention to vision, this time to deride the fondness of modern scientists for optical instruments. He observes that “the prevailing habit of learned men is now to take interest only in objects which cannot be seen without the aid of instruments,” and sarcastically remarks that many of his scientist friends, if they had the option, “would give themselves heads like wasps’, with three microscopic eyes in the middle of their foreheads, and two ears at the ends of their antennae.”26 The lecture is, among other things, an occasion for Ruskin to lament the loss of visual “innocence,” as he famously calls it in The Elements of Drawing,27 and to voice his preference for the naked-eye vision of the artist (“who sees with his Eyes, hears with his Ears, and labours with his Body, as God constructed them”)28 over the artificially enhanced vision of the scientist. It seems, then, that Ruskin is reiterating his previous point regarding the distinction between mathematical and moral vision. The word sense, he reminds his audience, once signified in both Latin and English “not only the bodily sense, but the moral one. If a man heard, saw, and tasted rightly, we used to say he had his bodily senses perfect. If he judged, wished, and felt rightly, we used to say he had his moral senses perfect, or was a man ‘in his senses’.”29 Ruskin’s diatribe against scientists and their false vision continues as he proceeds to challenge contemporary geologists, specifically Charles Lyell’s theory that the action of glaciers and running water erodes the landscape. You have all heard, a thousand times over, the common statements of the school of Sir Charles Lyell. You know all about alluviums and gravels; and what torrents do, and what rivers do, and what ocean currents do; and when you see a muddy stream coming down in a flood, or even the yellow gutter more rampant by the roadside in a thunder-shower, you think, of course, that all the Alps are to be accounted for by aqueous erosion, and that it’s a wonder any Alps are still left.30

As much as he respects the recently late Lyell, Ruskin must point to the evident absurdity of his theory. Examining the same physical evidence, he sees signs of intransience where Lyell thought he saw change and progressive deterioration. To anyone who cares to observe nature attentively, he asserts, the shape of the landscape will appear “[u]nchanged, or so softly

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modified that eye can scarcely trace, or memory measure, the work of time.”31 One need only pay attention to the permanence of the landscape’s contours, then, to see that Lyell is mistaken. “I cannot name,” Ruskin declares, “a single spot in which, during my lifetime spent among the mountains, I have seen a peak made grander, a watercourse cut deeper, or a mountain pool made larger and purer.”32 But if seeing is believing, if seeing suffices to dismantle an improbable (or just ideologically unpalatable) scientific theory, it is not clear that this kind of seeing, attentive to the minutest physical features of the landscape, is in any way distinct from eagle-eyed “metric vision” with its privileging of the “faculty of measurement” over the more important faculty of moral comprehension. If anything, the latter becomes a function of the former. “[C]learness of sight,”33 in the moral sense, is achieved by seeing metrically. Ruskin thus ends up advocating the exercise of a double vision, as it were: the observer who wishes to see things in their true light must switch back and forth between two ways of seeing  – or rely on both at once, looking at things simultaneously with “the lens of the eye” and “the soul of the eye,” with the faculty of measurement and the faculty of moral discernment.

Chapter 4

“Betwixt ancient faith and modern incredulity”

My grouping of Carlyle, Crowe, and Ruskin in the previous chapter is not meant to suggest that their statements about vision are cast from the same mold. Rather, I wanted to draw attention to a few facets of an alternate, counter-retinal way of conceptualizing vision, and a model of the observer whose proponents, in various ways, resisted the reduction of vision to physiological terms. This alternate model, I have suggested, had its problems, not least of which was its entanglement in corporeality. Carlyle’s reliance on optics to describe moral and spiritual disorientation implies that the conceptual framework for discussions about vision, whether it be inner or outer, spiritual or corporeal, rests on the sciences of the body: spiritual optics is a version of physiological optics. Similarly, Ruskin’s claim that sight is a “spiritual phenomenon,” and only secondarily a physiological one, is compromised by his foregrounding of corporeality: “the soul of the eye” has no other access to the visible world than through the bodily organ with its metric vision. Crowe downplays the evidential contributions of the bodily senses, yet is unwilling to sacrifice all empirical “evidence from without” for the metaphysics of interiority and intuition. “[T]he power of spiritual seeing, or intuitive knowing” (NN, p. 20) must be supplemented with evidence gathered through the exterior senses. Yet reports of even the most credible eyewitnesses were unlikely to convert skeptics who, when considering “whether … apparitions are subjective, or objective” (NN, p. 23), had reasons to prefer the former if they had some knowledge of contemporary anti-ghost treatises. But it was not necessary for Victorian readers to peruse the works of Hibbert, Brewster, or Müller to be exposed to the gist of their arguments. Starting with Scott (if not sooner), ghost-story writers made the optical theory of apparitions a staple of the genre. The most emphatic example is Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1862 novel of the supernatural, A Strange Story, where an entire chapter is devoted to a discussion between a ghost-seer and a skeptic on the probable causes of ghost sightings. Bulwer-Lytton infuses 45

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the conversation with references to well-known authorities on ghosts and optics, whose theories he expounds upon in scholarly footnotes that make the novel operate dually as a work of fiction and a treatise on apparitions: “[T]here are grounds for the suspicion” (says Dr. Hibbert, philosophy of Apparition [sic], p. 250), “that when ideas of vision are vivified to the height of sensation, a corresponding affection of the optic nerve accompanies the illusion.” Müller (Physiology of the Senses, p. 1392, Baley’s translation) states the same opinion still more strongly, and Sir David Brewster, quoted by Dr. Hibbert (p. 251) says: “In examining these mental impressions, I have found that they follow the motions of the eyeball exactly like spectral impressions of luminous objects, and that they resemble them also in their apparent immobility when the eye is displaced by an external force. If this result (which I state with much diffidence, from having only my own experience in its favour) shall be found generally true by others, it will follow that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly as external objects, and will occupy the same local position in the axis of vision, as if they had been formed by the agency of light.” Hence the impression of an image once conveyed to the senses, no matter how, whether by actual or illusory vision, is liable to renewal, “independently of any renewed application of the cause which had originally excited it,” and the image can be seen in that renewal “as distinctly as external objects,” for indeed “the revival of the fantastic figure really does affect those points of the retina which had been previously impressed.”1

As opposed to sprawling “ghost novels” such as Bulwer-Lytton’s, ghost stories are shorter, tighter compositions, in which the optical explanation is mentioned only once or twice, and then very briefly. In “The Yellow Gown” (1858), G. J. Whyte Melville mimics (or plagiarizes) Scott in a story about a traumatic overnight stay in a room apparently haunted by a Scottish noblewoman with blood on her hands and the unpleasant nocturnal habit of climbing down from her portrait to scare unsuspecting visitors. The narrator is struck by “the strange optical delusion” that makes the eyes of the painted woman seem as if they were watching him, and is convinced he is on the brink of “some discovery in optics which would delight Sir D. Brewster.”2 Amelia B. Edwards’s “No. 5 Branch Line: The Engineer” (1866) ends with the narrator’s anticipation of popular explanations for ghost sightings, the first of which is the optical one: “I expect, as a matter of course, to be told that this was an optical illusion, or that I was suffering from pressure on the brain, or even that I laboured under an attack of temporary insanity. I have heard all these arguments before, and, if I may be forgiven for saying so, I have no desire to hear them again.”3 Similarly, in Louisa Molesworth’s “The Story of the Rippling Train” (1887), the ghost-seer is told that there is a rational, non-supernatural explanation

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for what she saw, or thinks she saw: “[I]t was strange, but … such things did happen sometimes, and were classed by the wise under the head of ‘optical delusions’.”4 The very brevity of these references to optical illusions might suggest their relative insignificance to our understanding of the stories in which they appear. It ought to be obvious by now that I maintain otherwise. While it is difficult to gauge the full impact of popular ghost-debunking treatises on cultural attitudes toward ghosts, it is reasonable to assume that the efficiency with which optical illusions are handled in ghost fiction – such as Melville’s brief reference to Brewster – points to an awareness of the optical theory among contemporary audiences. Moreover, if we assume, as I think we should, a general cultural awareness of ghostdebunking explanations such as Brewster’s and Scott’s, it becomes possible to read them into ghost stories, as well as other literary texts, that do not explicitly mention them  – in the way in which the impact of imperialism and colonialism on Victorian culture, for instance, is often persuasively read into contemporary works of literature that do not explicitly make mention of the Empire or its colonies. When Melville’s “The Yellow Gown,” first published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1858, was reprinted the following year in the Eclectic Magazine, it was retitled “Optical Delusion of the Yellow Gown.”5 The change is indicative of something more than editorial preference – it is a synecdoche of a general opticizing of the apparition in the nineteenth century. Also noteworthy about this and the other examples I have just cited is that they do not attempt to decorporealize the senses and turn to some of the available models of inner vision as a means of settling the question of the ghost’s existence. If seeing is to offer solid grounds for believing, and especially believing in something as questionable as ghosts, sight, it seems, must be corporeal – the kind of sight that we all know we have, rather than the kind that has not been sufficiently explored, or whose existence is quite possibly a myth. It is difficult at this point to avoid the “secularization thesis,” and I will not try to. Ghost stories are narratives about people who cannot see otherwise than with their bodily eyes, and who invoke science more often than religion when they see something unexpected, something possibly not of this world. Though often susceptible to conversion to the pro-ghost camp, protagonists of ghost stories cannot believe what they see with their own eyes, or, if some other person in the story is the ghost-seer, trust the eyes of another, or, least of all, put their trust in some different way of seeing – a sixth sense that, as Crowe believes, everyone has but not everyone makes use of.

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Yet the invocation of the optical theory in ghost stories does not suffice to discredit the pro-ghost position: it presents a reason for doubt rather than outright dismissal of the supernatural as illusory, unreal. Ghost stories are far from simple dramatizations of how certain physiological defects produce false visions. The mention of medical explanations in Edwards’s “The Engineer,” for instance, is as significant as their rejection by a narrator who is at once thoroughly familiar with and utterly unconvinced by them. One important reason for this rejection lies in the genre’s distinctive aesthetic of ambiguity – the kind of aesthetic that precludes definitive answers and that, as Scott argues, is most suitable to literary treatments of the supernatural. The most successful supernaturalist writer, Scott maintains, will eschew settling the matter one way or the other  – as opposed to Ann Radcliffe’s mode of the “explained supernatural.”6 Scott saw much to commend in Radcliffe’s popular Gothic romances; he comments, for instance, that “the praise may be claimed for Mrs. Radcliffe of having been the first to introduce into her prose fictions a tone of fanciful description and impressive narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry.”7 Yet Scott was critical of “the rule which the author imposed upon herself, that all the circumstances of her narrative, however mysterious and apparently superhuman, were to be accounted for on natural principles at the winding up of the story.”8 The conclusions to Radcliffe’s novels are disappointing, anticlimactic because “the imagination has been kept in suspense, and is at length imperfectly gratified by an explanation falling short of what the reader has expected.” The vast machinery Radcliffe sets in motion in her novels is in each instance disassembled in the conclusion, when the complicated orchestrations of plot collapse like a house of cards, or like flimsy stage scenery: “[T]he reader feels tricked, and, like a child who has once seen the scenes of a theatre too nearly, the idea of pasteboard, cords, and pulleys destroys forever the illusion with which they were first seen from the proper point of view.”9 Tuned into contemporary literary trends, Scott was aware that he was not alone in embracing a counter-aesthetic of ambiguity. He contrasts Radcliffe’s strategy to that of some modern authors … who have endeavoured, ingeniously enough, to compound betwixt ancient faith and modern incredulity. They have exhibited phantoms and narrated prophecies strangely accomplished, without giving a defined or absolute opinion whether these are to be referred to supernatural agency, or whether the apparitions were produced (no uncommon case) by an overheated imagination, and the accompanying presages by a casual, though singular, co­incidence of circumstances.10

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Such narratives, Scott believes, exemplify a radically different approach to the supernatural; indeed, they belong to an altogether different genre of fiction, where ambiguity is sustained throughout and no “defined or absolute opinion” is offered. In “The Tapestried Chamber” it is not the ghost-­producing fancy or imagination, however, but the dubious veracity of sight – the possibility of a “deception of the optic nerves” – that makes it difficult for the reader to second Woodville’s pronouncement: “[T]here can remain no longer any doubt of the horrible reality of your apparition” (“TC,” p. 141). Scott admits that, when it comes to taking a firm intellectual position on the supernatural, the anti-Radcliffean approach leads to “an evasion of the difficulty, not a solution,” but nevertheless believes that, upon the whole, this is the most artful mode of terminating such a tale of wonder, as it forms the means of compounding with the taste of two different classes of readers; those who, like children, demand that each particular circumstance and incident of the narrative shall be fully accounted for; and the more imaginative class, who, resembling men that walk for pleasure through a moonlight landscape, are more teased than edified by the intrusive minuteness with which some well-meaning companion disturbs their reveries, divesting stock and stone of the shadowy semblances in which fancy had dressed them, and pertinaciously restoring to them the ordinary forms and commonplace meanness of reality.11

If not with his “Story of an Apparition,” which appeared pseudonymously, then certainly after the publication of “The Tapestried Chamber,” Scott would have had to include himself in this group of “artful” and distinctly modern writers of ghost fiction, who appeal to both skeptics and believers by courting rational explanations and drawing upon contemporary scientific theories, only to imply that these do not suffice to discredit belief in the supernatural. Indeed, as I shall finally suggest, this ambiguity or vacillation is also a feature of Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Despite my premise that the optical theory can legitimately be read into ghost stories that make no explicit mention of it, it is useful and necessary to look at some concrete examples of where this theory does come up. A fine example of a ghost story in the ambiguous, Scottian vein is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House in Aungier-Street” (1853). Two cousins, Tom and Dick, take up residence in an old Dublin house with a “mysterious and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing.”12 One of its previous residents, they learn, was an infamous hanging judge who, ironically, had hanged himself over the bannisters with a child’s skipping rope. It does not take long for Dick, the more superstitious of the two cousins, to have his night’s rest disturbed

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by a “dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion,” specifically a flying portrait that fixes itself on one of the bedroom’s windows: “The picture thus mysteriously glued to the windowpanes, was the portrait of an old man, in a crimson flowered silk dressing gown … with a countenance embodying a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality, and power, but withal sinister and full of malignant omen.”13 Dick tries to take comfort in the likely possibility that the apparition may be “an ocular delusion,” and that the ghost is “subjective (to borrow the technical slang of the day) and not the palpable aggression and intrusion of an external agent.”14 The ghost returns, as ghosts have the habit of doing, but when Dick’s nocturnal investigations lead him to the discovery of an enormous rat, the mystery appears to be solved without recourse to supernatural agency: “I felt it then, and know it now, the infernal gaze and the accursed countenance of my old friend in the portrait, transfused into the visage of the bloated vermin before me.”15 In the meantime, Tom, who had unexpectedly left the house for a few days, returns to confess that he had been scared off by an apparition. He divulges that he had seen the portrait’s original several times and in vain had tried to talk himself into believing “the theories of spectral illusions.”16 On the occasion of its final appearance, the ghost stands near the bannisters with a noose around its neck, threatening to loop the other end of the rope around Tom’s. The housemaid later informs the cousins that the judge, whose ghost is said to haunt the house, had committed suicide by hanging himself over the bannisters with a skipping rope, and that several other residents of the house have had similar experiences. Given what the two cousins witnessed – what they saw independently of each other – it would seem that the “alleged spectral visitations”17 recounted by the maid are more than just rumors, and that the spectral illusion theory does not hold water. Like the skeptic-turned-believer in Scott’s story, Tom is converted, or at the very least deeply shaken in his convictions: “Dick, Dick, a shadow has passed over me – a chill has crossed my blood and marrow, and I will never be the same again – never, Dick – never!”18 Evidence for the pro-ghost camp is suggestive yet can hardly be said to be conclusive. Further investigation into the matter is unfeasible, since the (possibly) haunted house burned down two years after these events occurred. In Charles Dickens’s “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman” (1866), which appeared with Edwards’s “The Engineer” in the 1866 Christmas number of All the Year Round, the ghost-seer is the titular signalman who on two occasions sees an apparition standing at the mouth of a railroad tunnel close to his box. The ghost gesticulates to the signalman and also delivers a verbal warning: “The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried,

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‘Look out! Look out!’ And then again ‘Halloa! Below there! Look out!’ ” The signalman acts out the ghost’s gesture for the benefit of the narrator, in whose mind this arm-waving suggests the following words: “For God’s sake clear the way!”19 Sensing in him a sympathetic audience, the signalman divulges to the narrator further details: his first encounter with the ghost was shortly followed by a train wreck on the line, the second by the sudden death of a female passenger in a passing train. The ghost has now appeared to him for the third time. The signalman suspects a calamity is coming, but of what sort and when? “What is the danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging, somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be doubted this third time, after what has gone before. But surely this is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do?”20 The narrator tries to talk sense into the spooked man – and reassure himself: Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I showed him how that this figure [of the ghost] must be a deception of his sense of sight, and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves.21

The narrator is less convinced by the optical disease theory after the signalman is mowed down by a train, and he learns that the engine driver had shouted the following warning to the unlucky man:  “Below there! Look out! Look out! For God’s sake clear the way!” The engine driver’s warning “included, not only the words which the unfortunate Signal-man had repeated to me as haunting him, but also the words which I myself – not he – had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the [ghost’s] gesticulation he had imitated.”22 In another story by Edwards, “The New Pass” (1872), the narrator, Frank Legrice, is similarly confronted by a cautioning apparition. Refusing to trust the evidence of his senses, Legrice believes that he “labored under some kind of optical illusion.”23 His eyes, however, seem to be in good working order, as he is able to describe the figure in considerable detail. His companion, Egerton Wolfe, apparently has good reason to insist on the reality of what Legrice has seen: “‘Legrice,’ he said, very calm, but with a white, awe-struck look in his face, ‘you described my brother Lawrence – age, height, dress, every thing; even to the Scotch cap he always wore, and the silver badge my uncle Horace gave him on his birthday. He got that scar in a cricket-match at Harrowgate’.” Unperturbed, the ghost-seer decides that he did not see a real ghost: “Well – I would never disbelieve

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in hallucinations again. To that I made up my mind; but as for ghosts … pshaw! how could a man – above all, such a man as Egerton Wolfe – believe in ghosts?” Having consulted “with more than one eminent physician on this very subject,” and familiar with “the famous case of Nicolai, the bookseller of Berlin; not to mention many others, equally well attested,”24 Legrice sticks to the illusion theory, dismisses coincidences, and implicitly invites the reader to regard his companion’s follow-up corroboration as the expression of a desire to be reunited with his brother. That the ghost appears just before Legrice, after snubbing his superstitious friend, enters a perilous mountain pass, which soon after collapses from the pressure of subterranean waters that almost drown him, does nothing to change his mind. Drenched to the bone and infuriated at the poor engineering of the pass, he credits his narrow escape to “the delay consequent upon [his] illusion.”25 We may briefly pause to observe that Legrice’s dismissive response echoes Scott’s distrust “of what are called real ghost stories” (LDW, p. 355), where, as Scott objects, “the evidence with respect to such apparitions is very seldom accurately or distinctly questioned.” While the evidential minutiae in real ghost stories seem to settle the matter in favor of the proghost argument (seeing, in Legrice’s case as well as Browne’s, ought to be believing), Scott maintains that it is more than likely that the storyteller, after being asked “some unimportant question with respect to the apparition,” had on the spot provided “a feature of minute evidence which was before wanting, and this with perfect unconsciousness on his own part” (LDW, p. 356). Eyewitness testimony, Scott is suggesting, is a highly unreliable form of evidence, not just because the alleged ghost-seer may have unwittingly or deliberately fabricated parts of the story to lend it credibility, but because the organ of sight is so habitually deceived that the testimony should always be taken with a grain of salt: “It is easy to suppose the visionary has been imposed upon by a lively dream, the excitation of a powerful imagination, or the misrepresentation of a diseased organ of sight” (LDW, p. 355). In “The New Pass” the sequencing of events leads to the supposition that Legrice did in fact see a ghost, since the real evidence comes from Wolfe’s follow-up remark: Legrice had described Wolfe’s dead brother, whom he had never met. Were this a “real” (or “authentic,” as it is often called) ghost story, the Scottian response would likely be that the fabrication comes not from the ghost-seer but from Wolfe, who desperately needs to believe in a life after this one, and perhaps for this reason misremembers what kind of cap his brother used to wear and whether or not he carried a scar.

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Ellen Price’s “Reality, or Delusion?” (1868) captures in its title the persistent quandary: what, if anything at all, counts as sufficient evidence when it comes to proving the reality of ghosts? While it entertains the possibility of conclusive proof, the story predictably leaves the question unanswered. The ghost of Daniel Ferrar (who has committed suicide because he could not bear to live with a thief’s bad conscience) is spotted by his fiancée, Maria Lease. Lease is a particularly good witness for the pro-ghost camp. She has no apparent motive for inventing the story, she is unaware that she has seen a ghost rather than the flesh-and-blood Ferrar, and, before being informed of Ferrar’s death, provides details about his appearance that give her testimony impressive weight. “‘Sure!’ she returned in surprise at the doubt. ‘You don’t think I could mistake him, Master Johnny, do you? He wore that ugly seal-skin winter-cap of his tied over the ears, and his thick grey coat was buttoned up’.”26 The narrator, Johnny Ludlow, poses the titular question: “Was it reality or delusion? That is … did her eyes see a real, spectral Daniel Ferrar, or were they deceived by some imagination of the brain? Opinions were divided. Nothing can shake her own steadfast belief in its reality; to her it remains an awful certainty, true and sure as heaven.” Ludlow has his doubts, or rather is unwilling to side with Maria for fear of being called a fool: “If I say that I believe in it too, I shall be called a muff and a double muff.” And yet he is forced to admit that “there’s one stumbling-block difficult to get over. Ferrar, when found, was wearing the seal-skin cap tied over the ears and the thick gray coat buttoned up round him, just as Maria Lease described them to me; and he had never put them on since the previous winter, or got them out of the chest where they were kept.”27 Like the ghost of Le Fanu’s hanging judge, the ghost of Ferrar (who also ends his life at the end of a rope) is unfit for a blissful Christian afterlife. Neither ghost utters a word, but the message they relay is clear enough: death is not the end. Ghosts in these stories are clearly a very serious matter. But while the Victorians were genuinely concerned with finding ways to confirm or refute the existence of ghosts, they often, as Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell observe, “mocked their own fascination with the supernatural in satires and skits directed at the earnest foolishness of believers in supernatural phenomena.”28 By the 1860s the strategy of providing suggestive evidence in support of the ghost-seer’s vision, yet leaving the question of the ghost’s existence undecided, was familiar and predictable – and open to parody. In an 1862 article for Once a Week, one anonymous author offers practical advice to aspiring ghost-story writers in the form of a condensed mockexample of the genre. The ghost of a relative appears before you one night,

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the creative writing instructor proposes to the would-be author. The exact time of the visitation is a quarter to 12.45 a.m., for when it comes to ghosts time “is often of the last importance.”29 You observe that he has a white handkerchief tied round his left calf. You perceive, for nothing escapes you, the initials A. J. (not his initials) in one corner of the handkerchief, and you see that on one foot is a slipper, while the other wears a boot. When you can articulate, you gasp out, “Why, George! what is the meaning of this? How did you get here?” The spirit shakes its head solemnly, points to the handkerchief, rises from the sofa, gazing at you fixedly all the time, and disappears. Now, if you understand ghosts – as everyone ought to do by this time – you grieve for your friend at once, and prepare your mourning.30

As ghost-savvy Victorian readers could have predicted at this point, the ill-fated George had passed away that very night. Upon being bitten in the left leg by a poisonous snake (in other variants of what is basically the same story, “[h]e has been drowned, hanged, poisoned, killed by tigers, killed by horses, killed by mad dogs”), he was nursed by a friend, an “Alfred Johns, or rather Johnston … (that accounts for the handkerchief) … as he was preparing to retire for the night (that accounts for the boot and the slipper).” A. J.’s heroic efforts to save George are in vain: “Your unfortunate relative died, regretted by all who knew him, at 12:45 a.m. (time to a minute).”31 Stripped of what the author deems extraneous literary baggage (which allows the apprentice-writer to assemble his or her own story out of test-proven components), and with its exaggerated emphasis on coincidences, this parody suggests that, certainly by this time, Victorian readers and writers of ghost stories shared an awareness of the genre’s basic narrative strategies and formulaic evidential complications. Generalizing about Victorian attitudes toward ghosts is a risky business. What can be inferred on this point from a select number of ghost stories, anti-ghost works, and pro-ghost arguments may in the end seem as inconclusive as the evidence for the existence of ghosts. It is nonetheless safe to say that the ghost in nineteenth-century culture operates as a nexus at which conflicting intellectual positions and emotional responses cross paths. On the one hand, the ghost is an aberration, an anomaly that inspires anxiety and often terror. Jack Sullivan has argued that ghost stories articulate fears about the chaotic and irrational nature of the universe: the ghost story “begins by assuming that life is rational and morally ordered, then begins to worry about that assumption when something inexplicably threatening creeps in.” Ghosts in fiction tend to be terrifying, Sullivan explains, because they embody the supernatural “not as a force

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grounded in a coherent theology, but as an unaccountably destructive force which makes its own rules and chooses its own victims.”32 For this reason it is often unproductive to insist on separating ghost from horror stories: both foreground inscrutability and “sabotage the relationship between cause and effect,” and “[u]ncertainty is a reliable conjurer of fear.”33 If we are to believe Lang, “Scott had actually seen a phantasm for which he could not account … Yet he persuaded himself to publish statements of the most thoroughly unbelieving kind, and throughout his life endeavoured to regard himself as a true unbeliever in the abnormal. The other way lay madness, he thought; for two of his friends, who had believed in ghostly experiences of their own, lost their reason many years later.”34 Like so many ghost stories, Lang’s anecdote is of dubious veracity. But Scott’s ghost story, at least, accords with Sullivan’s argument:  the ghost is “an incarnate fiend” (“TC,” p. 137) who does not just disturb one’s sleep, but, more traumatically, exposes the frailty of one’s convictions about the fabric of the universe. According to this view, the ghost’s fiendishness is in large part a function of the shock it delivers to the believer in Enlightenment rationality. On the other hand, however, there can be little doubt that ghosts in the Victorian era also channel a dissatisfaction with mechanistic models of the universe and the displacement of intuition- and faith-based forms of knowledge by materialism and scientific naturalism – a dissatisfaction that, as Frank Miller Turner has shown, also permeated nineteenth-century scientific culture. Scientific naturalism was intellectually and emotionally unpalatable to a number of prominent Victorian philosophers and scientists, who “would not tolerate the curtailment of curiosity and the limitation of moral horizon that acceptance of scientific naturalism seemed to require,” and who “sought to preserve … ancient hopes outside the context of Christianity and within a broadly construed scientific framework or at least an intellectual framework that was not wholly incompatible with scientific knowledge.”35 Spiritualism, which I shall discuss in more detail later on, offered one avenue for exploring ontological alternatives. As Janet Oppenheim observes, “the special task of the spiritualists in Victorian and Edwardian Britain” was “to deplore and combat the materialism that they perceived as all too rampant in their time.”36 Ghost stories contributed to this resistance to materialism by suggesting that scientific explanations, convincing as they may be, are not necessarily the right ones. Seeing ghosts is very often startling and unpleasant, but to believe that they are real is to believe in a morally ordered universe: an implacable, divine system of rewards and punishments, providential signals and warnings (Dickens,

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Edwards), signs that someone has failed to live a life in accordance with Christian virtues (Scott, Le Fanu). For Lease, in Edwards’s story, what she saw is “true and sure as heaven,” and a confirmation of her faith in a life after this one. Yet to believe in ghosts also means to be a “muff” whose reason and common sense have yielded to superstitious credulity. Scott’s remarks on the considerable aesthetic difference between Radcliffe’s inept handling of the supernatural and its more successful, because more ambiguous, treatment at the hands of some modern writers, suggest that, in approaching the nineteenth-century ghost story with an eye for the ways in which it represents ghosts and ghost-seers, we ought to be sensitive to the particular aesthetic modality of this genre of fiction. Doing so, in fact, might enable us to come up with a tentative, vision-oriented definition: a ghost story is that kind of fictional narrative in which ocular evidence is at once the most compelling and most questionable form of evidence for the existence of ghosts. The first and final arbiter of truth is the same eye that demonstrably plays tricks on us. Yet to propose this as a definition of a genre of fiction is to overlook a serious complication, namely that the category of fiction is in ghost stories rendered unstable by the convention of asserting that the narrative is factual. “It is every word true,”37 claims Price’s narrator. “Mine is a real ghost-story,”38 insists Melville’s. Scott’s story opens with a denial of fictionality: The following narrative is given from the pen, so far as memory permits, in the same character in which it was presented to the author’s ear; nor has he claim to further praise, or to be more deeply censured, than in proportion to the good or bad judgment which he has employed in selecting his materials, as he has studiously avoided any attempt at ornament which might interfere with the simplicity of the tale. (“TC,” p. 123)

The narrative’s lack of “ornament” and its “simplicity”  – a jocular way, perhaps, of referring to its questionable literary quality – is the result of it being not the narrator’s story at all but the story of another, whose words the narrator has attempted to reproduce as exactly as possible. Yet what the narrator heard, and reported as truthfully “as memory permits,” may be nothing but a tall tale, or one of those stories that circulates under the banner of fact and seems credible enough, but, for one reason or another, cannot be corroborated. To ward off suspicion that he made up the story, the narrator divulges that he “heard [it] … related, more than twenty years since, by the celebrated Miss Seward, of Lichfield, who, to her numerous accomplishments, added, in a remarkable degree, the power of narrative in private conversation” (“TC,” pp. 123–4).39 The celebrated storyteller, however, is herself at a remove from the events in her story, and which turns

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out to be the story of some third, unnamed party: “Miss Seward always affirmed that she had derived her information from an authentic source, although she suppressed the names of the two persons chiefly concerned.” Because all this may not be enough to dispel doubt in the story’s authenticity, the narrator ends his prefatory comments with another assertion of truthfulness: “I will not avail myself of any particulars I may have since received concerning the localities of the detail, but suffer them to rest under the same general description in which they were first related to me” (“TC,” p. 124). The point, of course, is that although The Keepsake is a literary annual, what we are reading is not literature (not fiction) but a true story passed on from one credible storyteller to another, finally to be written down, published, and signed “by the author of Waverley.” Scott enjoyed the public’s guessing game concerning his identity, but by 1828 the secret was out (he admitted authorship of the Waverley novels in 1827), and the signature under the story’s title is perhaps a nod to his old manner of signing his works.40 Whereas The Keepsake’s table of contents credits “The Tapestried Chamber” to the “author of Waverley,” Scott’s full name is the very first printed in the list of contributors on the facing page. Yet this does not resolve the problem of the narrative’s ambiguity regarding its source. The voice which tells us that the story is not fiction – or at least that Scott did not make it up  – may either be his own or that of a fictitious narrator who, conveniently enough, chooses not to divulge the “particulars” he has acquired about some of its details. And even if we decide that Scott himself is the narrator, the question remains whether “memory permits” him to recall the story correctly, and whether he might have slipped in a detail or two of his own – something that, he argues in the Letters, often happens with such stories. If the events that purportedly occurred in Woodville Castle (not its real name) could be confirmed, that is to say if Browne (not his real name) really experienced some nocturnal unpleasantnesses in a room said to be haunted, then at least some aspects of the narrative would be shown to have grounding in fact. We could be certain, that is, that a person, without prior knowledge of the rumors, thought he had seen a ghost. As it happens, the whole thing may have been made up by “the author of Waverley,” or his source, or her source. “[T]he slippage between fiction and alleged fact,” remarks John Potts, “is a defining characteristic of the discourse on ghosts.”41 It is also a defining feature of Victorian ghost stories. In “A String of Ghost Stories,” published in All the Year Round in 1870, the anonymous author prefaces a series of vignette-sized stories by confessing to a “great curiosity in all

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matters connected with the supernatural” and “cultivat[ing] a mind in abeyance, ready to believe what is supernatural, on the same proofs, and with the same faith, as what is natural.” But this fascination with all things supernatural has not clouded the author’s judgment: “Direct ocular evidence, or the strongest circumstantial evidence, being the rule in courts of law, nothing is hereafter stated on the warrant of the writer that would not be considered good legal evidence.” The author is in fact merely an editor: “The facts come direct from the witnesses themselves, and were by them related to the writer.”42 Whether the author/editor is relaying information acquired from reliable witnesses and is genuinely interested in exploring the possible veracity of such narratives, or is merely simulating well-authenticated ghost stories, it is safe to say that, to a reader who believes in ghosts, as many Victorians did, such stories, and those I have discussed above, could be as “realistic” as, say, Adam Bede or Hard Times. To declare that “[a]nti-realists are those who cannot get outside their own heads”43 is prematurely to dismiss some perceptions of reality as less accurate (and the expressions of these perceptions as less “realistic”) than others. One does not have to believe in ghosts to oppose such pronouncements on philosophical grounds – which is the closest I will come to answering the question that might fairly be asked of any ghostologist: “But do you believe such things can be?” As Lang observes, ghost-seers rarely choose to make their experiences public for fear of being disbelieved and ridiculed. Crowe knew this too. “[N]obody chooses to confess, in print,” she remarks in the preface to another of her ghost-story collections, that he or anybody belonging to him, has seen a ghost, or believes that he has seen one. There is a sort of odium attached to the imputation, that scarcely anyone seems equal to encounter; and no wonder, when wise people listen to the avowal with such strange incredulity, and pronounce you at the best a superstitious fool, or a patient afflicted with spectral illusions.44

Dickens’s position on ghosts and stories about them is illustrative of the ambiguities that colored Victorian attitudes on the issue. In an 1848 review of Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature, he raises concerns about the veracity of narratives collected in that volume and the evidence that they purportedly provide. The problem with ghosts, he remarks, is that they always elude us. Doubtful and scant of proof at first, doubtful and scant of proof still, mankind’s experience of them is, that their alleged appearances have been, in all ages, marvellous, exceptional, and resting on imperfect grounds of proof; that in vast numbers of cases they are known to be delusions superinduced by a well understood, and by no means uncommon disease; and that, in a multitude

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of others, they are often asserted to be seen, even on Mrs Crowe’s own showing, in that imperfect state of perception, between sleeping and waking, than which there is hardly any less reliable incidental to our nature.45

Dickens was partial to the idea that ghosts are by-products of nervous disorders that can be cured by animal magnetism, or mesmerism. Deeply impressed by Dr. John Elliotson’s mesmeric demonstrations at University College Hospital in 1838, Dickens put his own mesmeric powers to practical, ghost-debunking use in 1844–5 when he attempted to cure Augusta de la Rue, the wife of his friend Emile, of a psychosomatic illness.46 Mesmerism, however, is not just a cure for ghost-seeing but also one of its causes: under certain conditions it is possible for one mind to communicate impressions to another at a distance, a capacity Dickens regarded not as an occult, supernatural power, but a mental faculty explicable in physiological terms and providing a “philosophical explanation of many ghost stories.”47 The embodiment of Augusta de la Rue’s illness, Dickens believed, was a dark male figure, a “bad phantom”48 whom de la Rue would vividly see in mesmeric sleep induced by Dickens – the doctor serving as a spiritualist medium in reverse, as it were, since the phantom he was able to summon was “a false thing – an unreal creation; a lie of her eyes and ears.”49 Dickens continued to voice his skepticism of purportedly true ghost stories, and his theory of inter-mental communication cropped up regularly in articles published under his editorship in Household Words and All the Year Round. Upon being rebuked by Howitt that his thoughttransference hypothesis was antagonistic to the supernatural theory of ghosts, he responded in a letter dated September 6, 1859: My own mind is perfectly unprejudiced and impressible on the subject. I do not in the least pretend that such things are not. But I positively object, on most matters, to be thought for, or – if I may use the odd expression – asserted down. And I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me, or that had not the noticeable peculiarity in it – that the alteration of some slight circumstance would bring it within the range of common natural probabilities. I have always had a strong interest in the subject, and never knowingly lost an opportunity of pursuing it. But I think the testimony which I cannot cross-examine, sufficiently loose, to justify me in requiring to see and hear the modern witnesses with my own senses, and then to be reasonably sure that they were not suffering under a disordered condition of the nerves or senses, which is known to be a common disease of many phases. Don’t suppose that I am so bold and arrogant as to settle what can and what cannot be, after death. The truth is not so at all.50

Dickens’s position is clear: he has no objection to being convinced of the reality of ghosts, but to be converted into a believer he would need to hear

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much more than what ghost stories typically have to offer in terms of evidence, and to assure himself that the seer was not suffering from a sensory or neurological disorder. Given his skepticism about well-authenticated ghost stories, it makes a certain amount of sense to assume that Dickens’s ghost stories would reflect his incredulity. Louise Henson, for instance, argues that “Dickens consistently created dramatic effect in his ghost stories by exploiting the accepted idea that volitional control over the mind must necessarily cease in certain states of consciousness, thus subordinating rational understanding to the automatic ideational faculty, and problematising the objective status of the apparition.” But to say that “Dickens’s position in the ghost controversy can thus be identified as a naturalistic one”51 (since he was of the opinion that mesmerism is a psycho-physiological fact), or that he regarded his own ghost stories as a venue for expounding anti-supernaturalist views, is to overlook some of the complexities of his ghost fiction, where, as in other examples of the genre, the question of whether the apparition is supernatural or not is emphatically not settled by the invocation of a rational, naturalistic explanation. Dickens’s often-reprinted ghost story “To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt,” published in All the Year Round in 1865, opens with a discussion of the nature and general reception of all such stories. The narrator foregrounds the lack of firm evidence in ghost-sighting cases, because of the reticence of those who have experienced something unusual:  “Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at.” As a result, “the general stock of experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect.”52 The narrator proposes to help amend matters by relating one such experience: In what I am going to relate I have no intention of setting up, opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It may be necessary to state as to this last that the sufferer (a lady) was in no degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken assumption on that head, might suggest an explanation of a part of my own case – but only a part – which would be wholly without foundation. It cannot be referred to my inheritance of any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at all similar experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience since.53

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The “I” who knows about Nicolai’s ghosts and has studied Brewster’s Letters is Dickens – or someone very much like him, since he helped cure a certain lady of spectral illusions. But the voice who then confesses to having had a similar experience (which, he insists, cannot be attributed to a hereditary nervous disorder) is a bachelor bank clerk who, selected for jury duty in a murder trial, finds himself visited by the apparition of the murdered man – not Dickens, that is, but a fictitious persona who relates an experience that never took place. Dickens’s call for more accurate and reliable knowledge in the matter of ghosts and other apparently supernatural phenomena is thus met by a story that, as a work of fiction that simulates true ghost stories, does little to help distinguish the real thing from a fake. Nor is the mention of conclusively discredited ghosts (such as Nicolai’s) necessarily the key to interpreting the narrator’s visions. The narrator warns the reader not to jump to conclusions – to be suspicious, that is, of the sorts of naturalistic theory that Dickens himself publically espoused. Ambiguity and undecidability, I have been arguing, are critical features of the Victorian ghost story, and Dickens’s is no exception. “To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt” is not supportive of the ghost-debunking literature I have discussed any more than it is an affirmation of spiritualist claims about ghosts. Rather, it is an expression of two equally powerful currents in contemporary attitudes: desire and reluctance to believe that ghosts are more than optical illusions or mental projections. Scott’s preference for narratives that straddle the boundary “betwixt ancient faith and modern incredulity” and so keep the reader guessing – not only until the end, but also after the end of the story – is partially a matter of specific formal and aesthetic requirements, and partially a reflection of a complex vacillation between cynical skepticism and readiness to be converted by evidence that played itself out in nineteenth-century culture. Dickens is exemplary in this regard. In a letter (dated September 12, 1867) to a contributor who has submitted ghost stories to All the Year Round with the claim that they are authentic (not fiction, that is, but fact), Dickens writes that he is rejecting them because, if they are to be read as factual accounts, the evidence they offer for the existence of ghosts is unsatisfactory, and, if read as fiction, they are transparent rip-offs: “If I were to put in those stories with your claim attached, I should be deservedly pounded upon. If I were to put them in without your claim, I should be merely republishing a stereotyped set of tales.”54 Yet he goes on to confess that he is far from certain that ghosts are not real, and even hints that he is no stranger to apparitions himself: My state of mind on the general subject is yours exactly. I do not set myself up to pretend to know what the Almighty’s laws are, as to disembodied spirits. I do

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not profess to be free from disagreeable impressions and apprehensions, even. But these are no reasons for calling that, evidence, which is no evidence at all, or for taking for granted what cannot be taken for granted.55

It difficult to estimate to what extent Victorian readers were stimulated by fictional ghost stories to consider the possible veracity of so-called authentic ones. The invitation to do so, however, is arguably embedded in every ghost story, and is sometimes expressed very deliberately, as in Wilkie Collins’s “Mrs. Zant and the Ghost” (1887): “The record of this event will of necessity produce conflicting impressions. It will raise, in some minds, the doubt which reason asserts; it will invigorate, in other minds, the hope which faith justifies; and it will leave the terrible question of the destinies of man, where centuries of vain investigation have left it – in the dark.”56 Finally, even Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, with its dismissive position on ghosts, is a far more ambiguous text than Scott wants to make it out to be. For while he looks forward to “a more advanced state of society” when superstition will be rooted out by “philosophers [who will] … challenge the possibility of a separate appearance of a disembodied spirit” (LDW, p. 4), Scott admits not only that the general population will always lag behind philosophers in intellectual dexterity (and that ghost-debunking works such as his can have only a limited impact), but that Christianity will always need its ghosts and stories about them: Unaided by revelation, it cannot be hoped that mere earthly reason should be able to form any rational or precise conjecture concerning the destination of the soul when parted from the body; but the conviction that such an indestructible essence exists … must infer the existence of many millions of spirits, who have not been annihilated, though they have become invisible to mortals who still see, hear, and perceive, only by means of the imperfect organs of humanity. (LDW, p. 4)

The crux of the problem is not belief in the spirit but belief in the ghost. “The abstract idea of a spirit certainly implies, that it has neither substance, form, shape, voice, or any thing which can render its presence visible or sensible to human faculties.” But to “the multitude” this abstraction is not enough: “The more numerous part of mankind cannot form in their mind the idea of the spirit of the deceased existing, without possessing or having power to assume the appearance which their acquaintance bore during his life” (LDW, p. 5). The belief in ghosts, then, is indispensable to the preservation of Christianity, in so far as the ability to imagine the afterlife hinges for most people on believing in ghosts.

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These are rather pragmatic considerations, but Scott also suggests that the belief in ghosts is less a matter of the dissemination of superstition, say via ghost stories, than of an intuitive understanding which cannot be questioned: It is, I think, conclusive, that mankind, from a very early period, have their minds prepared for such events [i.e. ghost sightings] by the consciousness of the existence of a spiritual world, inferring in the general proposition the undeniable truth, that each man, from the monarch to the beggar, who has once acted his part on the stage, continues to exist, and may again, even in a disembodied state, if such is the pleasure of Heaven, for aught that we know to the contrary, be permitted or ordained to mingle amongst those who yet remain in the body. The abstract possibility of apparitions must be admitted by every one who believes in a Deity, and His superintending omnipotence. (LDW, p. 47)

In “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition” he expresses a similar view. The belief in things supernatural is common to all classes of mankind … The belief itself, though easily capable of being pushed into superstition and absurdity, has its origin not only in the facts upon which our holy religion is founded, but upon the principles of our nature, which teach us that while we are probationers in this sublunary state, we are neighbours to, and encompassed by the shadowy world, of which our mental faculties are too obscure to comprehend the laws, our corporeal organs too coarse and gross to perceive the inhabitants.57

Reasons for believing in ghosts are many – pragmatic, religious, natural. What, then, are the reasons for disbelief? A general increase in human knowledge has gradually dispelled belief in the supernatural: Men cannot but remark that (since the scriptural miracles have ceased,) the belief in prodigies and supernatural events has gradually declined in proportion to the advancement of human knowledge; and that since the age has become enlightened, the occurrence of tolerably well attested anecdotes of the supernatural character are so few, as to render it more probable that the witnesses have laboured under some strange and temporary delusion, rather than that the laws of nature have been suspended.58

One should note the way in which Scott presents the relationship between the Enlightenment and the supernatural here. It is difficult to tell from his language (perhaps because Scott himself is undecided on this issue) whether the Age of Reason has sufficiently demonstrated that there can be no such things as ghosts, or whether it has simply succeeded in marginalizing the competition. Are we unlikely to believe in ghosts because we now know that such things cannot be, or because we have allowed ourselves

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to be swayed by the rhetorical force and weight of professional authority with which anti-ghost arguments are being articulated? To “render” one explanation “more probable” than another, Scott implies, is not the same as demonstrating the truth of the first and falsity of the second. It is simply to make a stronger, or louder, case than the other side.

Part II

Seeing is reading: vision, language, and detective fiction

Chapter 5

Visual learning: sight and Victorian epistemology

Research in physiological optics retained throughout the nineteenth century a prominent role in philosophical and scientific descriptions of vision and the observer. The perceptual theories of the influential and versatile German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, whom we shall encounter in this chapter and again later on, were heavily informed by his physio­logical studies. Yet Helmholtz’s physiological researches were for him often a stepping stone for broader epistemological considerations. In this regard his work on vision was part of a general trend: to construct psychologically grounded theories of perception and knowledge (the two being virtually the same thing for an empiricist such as Helmholtz) that were by and large less concerned with how the organ of sight reacts to stimuli than with how sense data are processed by the mind of the observer. One immediate consequence of this discursive reorganization was the adamant rejection of the notion that a flawed organ of sight is the epicenter of misperception, confusion, and doubt. For Victorian epistemologists and philosophers of science such as John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Herbert Spencer, and George Henry Lewes, the question of what happens when we misperceive is one that only tangentially concerns optics. Rather, they maintained, the problem has to do with inference, that is to say with the interpretation of sensation. Ghosts, as we have seen, were regularly treated by nineteenth-century physiologists as illustrations of everything that can go wrong with or in the eye. To give yet another example:  in his popular textbook Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical, first published in 1856 and by 1865 in its seventh edition, the American chemist, historian, and pioneer of photography, John William Draper, explains apparitions in what by then were very familiar terms. “The simplest form of apparition,” he writes, “is that known among physicians as muscae volitantes. These are dark specks, like flies, which seem to be floating in a devious course in the air. They are owing to disturbances or changes in the retina.” From these “it is but a 67

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step to the intercalation of simple or even grotesque images among the real objects at which we are looking.”1 Yet retinal physiology tells only half the story about ghosts, or perhaps even less than that. For while many ghost sightings can be attributed to what Draper calls “insanity of the retina”2 (a phrase that ascribes consciousness to the eye in order to pathologize it), he also asserts that “[a]pparitions are the result of a false interpretation of impressions contemporaneously made on the retina.”3 This, claimed the psychological epistemologists, was the right way to go about explaining how we perceive and misperceive things. Because physiologists of Brewster’s persuasion had presumed the seat of vision to be the organ of sight rather than the mind, they had neglected to address a fundamental issue, namely how much of what is ordinarily said to be seen is actually seen, and how much of it is in fact only inferred by the observer. Vision, it came to be argued, is largely a matter of making inferences from visual cues by means of habitual associations – filling in the blanks, as it were, and mentally constructing a rich visual world from the rudimentary building blocks of light and color. From this perspective, optical illusions, such as those experienced by ghost-seers, are to be regarded neither as the result of a defective physiology, nor as transient reanimations of images stored in the mind’s visual database; rather, they are the effects of mistaken inferences, fallacious judgments. The organ of sight is entirely blameless – and in this sense seeing is believing, as Lewes declares in the title of an 1860 article on the delusions of contemporary spiritualism. Seeing is believing; and he that distrusts the evidence of his own sight, will find a difficulty in bringing forward evidence more convincing. The fallacy lies in confounding vision with inference, – in supposing that facts are seen which are only inferred. There can be no mistake in trusting to the evidence of sense, so far as that goes. The mistake is in supposing it to go much further than it does.4

Ghost sightings are exemplary not of optical illusions, then, but of erroneous interpretations of sensations: “[W]hen a man avers that he has ‘seen a ghost,’ he is passing far beyond the limits of visible fact, into that of inference. He saw something which he supposed to be a ghost.”5 This restructuring of thinking about vision to foreground inference and cognition is partly the result of the rise of psychology as a science in the second half of the nineteenth century,6 and partly a consequence of the favorable reception of Auguste Comte’s positivist method,7 which in Britain was constituent of a larger project (not always strictly Comtean) to articulate an empiricist and inductivist theory of knowledge. One is tempted to look for a clean break, a moment of paradigm-shifting proportions comparable to what we shall see in the case of non-Euclidean geometry. Yet the shift

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I am describing does not occur at once. The ground was laid, in the first place, by George Berkeley’s work on vision, which I shall get to presently, and then toward the end of the eighteenth century by Immanuel Kant and Thomas Reid. In an early work, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated Through Dreams of Metaphysics (1766), in which he lambasts the mystical writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Kant at one point attributes ghost sightings to “that type of disturbance of the soul that one calls deludedness,” in which “the confused person transposes mere objects of his imagination outside himself and takes them to be things that are actually present before him.” This transposition, he argues, is the result of a sensory defect: “[S]ince the sickness of the visionary does not really concern the understanding but rather the deception of the senses, the unfortunate one cannot remove his illusion through subtle reasoning, since the true or illusory sensation of the senses itself comes before all judgment of the understanding and has an immediate evidence that surpasses all other persuasion.”8 But by 1781, in Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was asserting something very different. It is not that the senses trick us, but that we make false judgments from their reports:  “[T]he senses never err, not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all. Truth therefore and error, and consequently illusory appearance also, as the cause of error, exist in our judgments only, that is, in the relation of an object to our understanding.”9 Reid expressed a similar opinion shortly after in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785). “Upon the whole, it seems to have been a common error of philosophers, to account the senses fallacious … If the senses testify nothing,” as Reid believes to be the case, then “they cannot give false testimony. If they are not judging faculties, no judgment can be imputed to them, whether true or false.”10 The confusion stems from “confound[ing] the organs of perception with the being that perceives,” Reid explains. “Perception must be the act of some being that perceives. The eye is not that which sees; it is only the organ by which we see.”11 Vision must be reconceptualized, Reid suggests, so as to distinguish very precisely between physiological and psychological (or what he calls “intellectual”) processes: “The organ serves only as a medium, by which an impression is made on the nerve; and the nerve serves as a medium to make an impression upon the brain. Here the material part ends; at least we can trace it no further; the rest is all intellectual.”12 Sense impressions are the domain of anatomy and physiology; perception, however, is “solely an act of the mind.”13 The role of the eye is simply that of a passive optical instrument: A man cannot see the satellites of Jupiter but by a telescope. Does he conclude from this, that it is the telescope that sees those stars? By no means; such a

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conclusion would be absurd. It is no less absurd to conclude, that it is the eye that sees, or the ear that hears. The telescope is an artificial organ of sight, but it sees not. The eye is a natural organ of sight, by which we see; but the natural organ sees as little as the artificial. The eye is a machine most admirably contrived for refracting the rays of light, and forming a distinct picture of objects upon the retina; but it sees neither the object nor the picture. It can form the picture after it is taken out of the head; but no vision ensues. Even when it is in its proper place, and perfectly sound, it is well known that an obstruction in the optic nerve takes away vision, though the eye has performed all that belongs to it.14

Reid’s reorganization of vision focuses on distinguishing between the pictures that form on the retina (even the retina of a disembodied eyeball, we are told for emphasis), and the mental processing of these images by another entity – a thinking and feeling “being that perceives.” Vision, understood as perception rather than sensation, happens not to an eye but to an observer. This must be the case, Reid reasons, for “if the faculty of seeing were in the eye, that of hearing in the ear, and so of the other senses, the necessary consequence of this would be, that the thinking principle, which I call myself, is not one, but many. But this is contrary to the irresistible conviction of every man.”15 Yet to maintain, as Reid does, that the eye is a light-refracting machine is not necessarily to go so far as to espouse that rigidly mechanistic definition of sight against which Ruskin would later protest, regarding it as constituent of a materialist (and ultimately atheist) worldview. For Reid supplies us with an additional reason for holding the senses above suspicion. Were the skeptics, from Democritus to Descartes, right to doubt the trustworthiness of the senses, “the natural conclusion … might seem to be, that the senses are given to us by some malignant demon on purpose to delude us, rather than that they are formed by the wise and beneficent Author of nature, to give us true information of things necessary to our preservation and happiness.”16 To presume that “God has given fallacious powers to any of his creatures,” especially a power so critical as vision, would mean “to think dishonourably of our Maker, and would lay a foundation for universal scepticism.”17 The divinely designed senses are never at fault. “[I]f we distinguish accurately between what our senses really and naturally testify, and the conclusions which we draw from their testimony, by reasoning, we shall find many of the errors, called fallacies of the senses, to be no fallacy of the senses, but rash judgments, which are not to be imputed to our senses.”18 The senses, “formed by the wise and beneficent Author of nature,” are falsely judged to be imperfect – an error itself indicative of the fact that

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any imperfections involved ought to be ascribed to limited human judgment and understanding: we reason falsely from and about the testimony of the senses.19 This inference-oriented way of thinking about perception, I shall argue, helps us understand how Victorian detective fiction positions itself toward the vision-knowledge nexus. It is indisputable (and so I shall not rehearse this thesis at length) that detective fiction, at least in the nineteenth century, is profoundly invested in a fantasy of state omniscience and a disciplinary ideology  – it is centrally concerned with crime because it is centrally concerned with social regulation.20 In its favoring of the status quo over social change, the genre is by and large diagnostic, prescriptive, and corrective: all transgressions of the law are predictably followed by the restitution of social order. But just as generic and predictable is the effort to present the detective as the protagonist of a coherent and plausible (a materially, socially, psychologically, and in other ways realistic) epistemological adventure in which sense perception leads to knowledge of the truth – not just the truth behind this or that mystery, but Truth as a conceptual abstraction, an intellectual and ethical ideal. Otherwise than in the ghost story, the question of the reliability of the eye is rarely articulated. Like a supporting infrastructure that is never seen yet holds the entire edifice in place, faith in the eye as an error-free, non-interfering conduit of sensations is built into the foundation of every scene in which the detective puts to good use his or her exceptional powers of observation. Yet these are not just scenes of seeing but reading as well, or rather seeing as reading. The visible world is a text, the detective its astute observer and expert reader.21 Critics have remarked on the readerly character of detective work as often as they have drawn attention to “the detective’s extraordinary power of vision,”22 as D. A. Miller does in The Novel and the Police. “Invariably,” Ronald R. Thomas writes, “the mangled corpse the literary detective scrutinizes reveals a code that his trained eye is uniquely capable of reading; or, alternately, the body of the suspect betrays its own guilt in some visible signs that are legible only to the eyes of the detective.”23 Bodies, dead or alive, are perfectly legible, unambiguous texts, but so are all other objects that enter the detective’s field of vision. As Richard Alewyn puts it, “things that say nothing to an ordinary person, that have absolutely no significance in ordinary life … for the detective become the signs of a secret writing whose deciphering solves the riddle.”24 For the fictional detective, to see is to read  – and to read is instantly to know, and know beyond

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a shadow of doubt.25 The failure of various Watsonian sidekicks to read the writing and solve the riddle, to see what the detective sees when he or she inspects a crime scene, say, or the physical appearance of a client, is not a failure of sight, but a demonstration of the sidekick’s inability to understand the most basic rule: everything in one’s field of vision operates as a text, a code that cracks itself if one just looks at it from the right point of view. For those who know how to observe – who know, first of all, that observation is a form of reading – the secret behind the writing is revealed at a glance. But things, of course, are not as simple as that. While Victorian detective fiction generally does not engage with those uncertainties of perception that physiologists (and ghost-story writers) ascribe to the organ of sight, the genre’s seeing-is-reading model, its construct of the ideal observer as an ideal reader, conjures up a different set of problems. For if the code or text requires readerly intervention, it inevitably holds out the possibility of misreadings and misinterpretations. And interpretation, as Paul de Man writes, and as fictional detectives know yet rarely choose to admit, “is nothing but the possibility of error.”26 As a way of neutralizing the disturbing epistemological implications of this irrepressible possibility  – the always present chance that seeing will not yield the truth (or Truth), that the reading will be inaccurate, that absolute certainty is never part of the epistemological equation  – the detective regularly fashions himself as a reluctant observer, someone who prefers to arrive at the truth by iron-clad deductive reasoning performed in a ratiocinative vacuum rather than take the more perilous route of hands-on observation. There is a consistent inconsistency at work here. Alewyn and Thomas are certainly right to underscore the importance of empirical observation in nineteenth-century fictional representations of detection. But Susan R. Horton is just as correct to point out that “[t]he mystery plots of nineteenth-century detective novels … rely on readers’ accepting without question the fallibility of empirical vision”27 (if by this one means the fallibility of the inference-making observer rather than the organ of sight, that is). Nor is the detective immune to this fallibility or unaware of it. On the contrary, as Joan Copjec argues, “the detective is one who withdraws from the world of the senses, of which he remains infinitely suspicious, in order to become more attentive to the clear and distinct prescriptions of a priori ideas.”28 Although Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are in many ways ideal observers, expert clue-readers­ for whom visibility and knowability amount to the same thing, the genre in which they perform their readings and feats of reasoning treats vision as an unreliable – yet necessary – supplement to ratiocination. This

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vacillation between ocularcentrism and anti-ocularcentrism is constituent of a broader reconfiguration of the discourse on vision, to which Victorian detective-fiction writers contributed as much (if such things can be measured) as contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of science. Before we get to detective fiction, however, we should acquaint ourselves with some key non-literary statements on this subject, starting with Berkeley’s An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), the touchstone for empiricist theories of vision in the nineteenth century.29 Berkeley’s seminal contribution was to depart from the geometric, tactilebased model of visual perception popular in the seventeenth century (what René Descartes in La Dioptrique [1637] calls the “natural geometry”30 of vision), and substitute it with a linguistic model.31 Berkeley sets out to show “that there is no necessary connexion between visible [ideas] and tangible ideas suggested by them,”32 and that any such connection, though it seems very natural, is in fact the result of experience and habitual association. The information we receive through the organ of sight is rather limited – sight must be educated or instructed by touch. What we really mean when we say, for example, that we “see” a tree at some distance from us is that we are associating certain sensations of touch with certain sensations of sight: “[N] either distance nor things placed at a distance are themselves, or their ideas, truly perceived by sight.”33 Let us, Berkeley proposes, imagine a blind man who is made to see for the first time, and place him in front of another man. Would the ex-blind man be able to tell simply by looking that the other one is standing erect with his feet on the ground? He would not, Berkeley answers, because erect and inverted, feet and ground, are ideas which he had acquired exclusively through touch, and tangible ideas have no necessary relation to visible ones: “Hence a man at first view would not denominate anything he saw earth, or head, or foot; and consequently he could not tell by the mere act of vision whether the head or feet were nearest the earth; nor, indeed, would we have thereby any thought of earth or man, erect or inverse, at all.”34 Berkeley discovers in language an apt analogy of the way vision does its work:  “[W]hat we immediately and properly see are only lights and colours in sundry situations and shades and degrees of faintness and clearness, confusion and distinctness. All which visible objects are only in the mind, nor do they suggest ought external, whether distance or magnitude, otherwise than by habitual connexion as words do things.”35 He proposes a model of perception and understanding that anticipates Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the arbitrariness of linguistic signifiers and, one might say, makes the latter’s intervention seem less innovative than is generally

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assumed. Seeing is like reading, Berkeley argues, and reading is a skill gained only through experience. Since the habitual connections between sensations of sight and touch are made effortlessly and often unconsciously (we perceive, say, a surface as being rough because we associate some of its visual aspects with the tactile sensation of roughness), it is easy to confuse what one really sees with what is only inferred: “So swift and sudden and unperceived is the transition from visible to tangible ideas that we can scarce forbear thinking them equally the immediate object of vision.”36 One learns to “see” the distance, size, and form of objects in much the same way that one learns to speak and read. Because recognizing the meaning of tree, and recognizing a tree when we see one, requires no conscious exertion once the association becomes habitual, the pairing of signifiers and signifieds is often mistakenly regarded as an innate semiotic reflex rather than what it really is, the result of practice and habit. Importantly, Berkeley does not intend the analogy between seeing and reading to function merely as a convenient simile relating two unlike things for the sake of illustration. For Berkeley seeing is a form of reading, an exercise in deciphering and interpreting visual cues, just as reading is a process that begins with the perception of an image (a letter, a word, a punctuation mark) whose semiotic value, as Berkeley discovered long before de Saussure, is not fixed but historically and culturally contingent: semiotics presumes semantics, one might say. But compared to the artificial and arbitrary languages of human origin, the language of vision is semantically more stable, and less vulnerable to misinterpret­ation, because it is “an universal language of the Author of Nature.”37 There is indeed this difference between the signification of tangible figures by visible figures, and of ideas by words: that whereas the latter is variable and uncertain, depending altogether on the arbitrary appointment of men, the former is fixed and immutably the same in all times and places. A visible square, for instance, suggests to the mind the same tangible figure in Europe that it doth in America. Hence it is that the voice of the Author of Nature, which speaks to our eyes, is not liable to that misinterpretation and ambiguity that languages of human contrivance are unavoidably subject to.38

The theological underpinnings of Berkeley’s linguistic turn are more evident in his The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (1733), where the doctrine of arbitrary signification is explained in terms of a variant of the design argument. “[H]ow comes it to pass,” Berkeley asks, “that a set of ideas, altogether different from tangible ideas, should nevertheless suggest them to us, there being no necessary connexion between them? To which the proper answer is, that this is done in virtue of an arbitrary connexion,

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instituted by the Author of nature.”39 Once more Berkeley emphasizes the similarity as well as the discrepancy between human languages and the language of vision:  “A great number of arbitrary signs, various and apposite, do constitute a language. If such arbitrary connexion be instituted by men, it is an artificial language; if by the Author of Nature, it is a natural language.”40 Berkeley’s argument, especially in this latter text, is comparable to Descartes’s in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).41 Just as Descartes sought to rationalize belief in the trustworthiness of the senses by invoking a benevolent deity incapable of stooping to the level of a malignant trickster, Berkeley’s theory of vision is driven to affirm the deity as a semiotic guarantor, a linguistic law-maker who can always be trusted. The significations of the language of vision are arbitrary, Berkeley argues, but this arbitrariness is in some sense merely nominal; differently than with human languages, the factor of semiotic arbitrariness is neutralized by a universal, unchanging visual grammar. If Berkeley may thus be credited with having established the coordinates for future empiricist theories of vision, one must keep in mind that his empiricist epistemology is inseparable from a theological program. The partnership of science, philosophy, and religion that characterizes Berkeley’s work appealed to Victorian philosophers of science who tried to negotiate a compromise between empiricist, inductivist epistemology coupled with scientific naturalism on the one hand, and intuitionism, metaphysics, and religion on the other. The most successful and influential in this endeavor was William Whewell. In The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) Whewell sets for himself the ambitious task of reforming inductive philosophy by constructing a middle ground between what he regarded as two erroneous extremes, Kant’s intuitionism and Locke’s sensationalism, with the aim of showing that proper inductive reasoning is a hybrid of these positions – that such reasoning is based on a Fundamental Antithesis, as he calls it, of Ideas and Sensations, “in the union of which … all knowledge consists” (PIS i, p. 27). We see and hear and touch external things, and thus perceive them by our senses; but in perceiving them, we connect the impressions of sense according to relations of space, time, number, likeness, cause, &c. Now some at least of these kinds of connexion, as space, time, number, may be contemplated distinct from the things to which they are applied; and so contemplated, I term them Ideas. And the other element, the impressions upon our senses which they connect, are called Sensations. (PIS i, p. 25)

In the section titled “Man the Interpreter of Nature” Whewell makes apparent his debt to Berkeley’s linguistic turn: “Nature is the Book, and

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Man is the Interpreter. The facts of the external world are marks, in which man discovers a meaning, and so reads them” (PIS i, p. 37). Importantly, these external-world marks are meaningless without the reader’s interpretive contribution to the text. This often-overlooked fact becomes more evident, Whewell argues, when our reading is in some way obstructed and slowed down, for instance when we try to interpret a fragment of a text written in an unfamiliar language: For if the inscription were entire and plain, in a language with which we were familiar, we should be unconscious of any mental act in reading it. We should seem to collect its meaning by the sight alone. But if we had to decipher an ancient inscription, of which only imperfect marks remained, with a few entire letters among them, we should probably make several suppositions as to the mode of reading it, before we found any mode which was quite successful; and thus, our guesses, being separate from the observed facts, and at first not fully in agreement with them, we should be clearly aware that the conjectured meaning, on the one hand, and the observed marks on the other, were distinct things, though these two things would become united as elements of one act of knowledge when we had hit upon the right conjecture. (PIS i, p. 38)

The discovery of meaning requires the active participation of the mind, which supplements the observed marks with something that does not belong to them and in this way transforms them into meaningful signs: “Signs and Meaning are Ideas, supplied by the mind, and added to all that sensation can disclose in any collection of visible marks” (PIS i, p. 38). This supplementing occurs through inference, and Whewell is anxious to “distinguish the inference from the appearance” (PIS i, p. 41), which is to say the subjective from the objective components of knowledge:  “[W]hen we see the motions of a needle towards a magnet, we do not see the attraction or force which produces the effects; but we infer the force, by having in our minds the Idea of Cause. Such acts of thought, such Ideas, enter into our perceptions of external things” (PIS i, p. 25). Like Berkeley before him, Whewell stresses that although it is difficult to tell the difference between Sensations and Ideas once they “become united as elements of one act of knowledge when we … hit upon the right conjecture,” it is important to maintain a distinction, both in philosophical discussion and logical practice, between “the conjectured meaning, on the one hand, and the observed marks on the other” (PIS i, p. 38), that is between what is objectively out there and what the mind, endowed with Fundamental Ideas, conjectures or infers. But even if one is at all times sensitive to the objective–subjective dichotomy and wary of the pitfalls of “unconscious interpretations” (PIS i, p. 41), how does one distinguish correct from incorrect inferences, true from false readings, if meaning is something that is projected from within and

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imposed upon objects of perception? Laura J. Snyder observes (and Whewell himself recognized) that one consequence of this epistemological setup “is that we cannot easily separate in our perceptions of things the element that our mind contributes and the element that comes from outside our mind. Indeed, it is impossible to do so.”42 How can we be sure that we are not misreading this or that passage in the Book of Nature? “We are perpetually interpreting … the language of the visible world,” from simple inferences regarding form and distance to the far more complex interpretations of scientific hypotheses. “The right interpretation” in all these cases, Whewell argues, “is gradually learned” (PIS i, p. 113). In this progressive and developmental scheme, one must have faith that mistaken inferences will be corrected by more accurate observations and interpretations, as happens, for example, through dialog between scientists. But one should have faith in more than just this. For where do the Fundamental Ideas that form the basis of the intuitionist half of this dialectical epistemology come from? According to Whewell, they come from God. Snyder remarks that “although Whewell was not motivated to write about science by his theological interests … it is certainly the case that his mature view of science rested upon a theological foundation.”43 This is particularly evident in the concluding pages of the first volume of The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, where Whewell makes a blatantly antiComtean move. According to Comte, the defining feature of the “positive state,” as he calls it, is that the human mind, recognizing the impossibility of obtaining absolute truth, gives up the search after the origin and hidden causes of the universe and a knowledge of the final causes of phenomena. It endeavours now only to discover, by a wellcombined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena – that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness.44

Whewell asserts that, on the contrary, this search is at once a logical extension of scientific investigation of the laws of causality, and an intellectual necessity:  “[M]en are impelled by an intellectual necessity” to inquire into “the Origin of Things” (PIS i, p. 702); “our minds cannot be satisfied with a series of successive, dependent, causes and effects, without something first and independent” (PIS i, p. 703). “This Something is the First Cause: it is God” (PIS i, p. 702). Study of paleontological sciences such as “Geology, Glossology or Comparative Philology, and Comparative Archæology,” whose object is “not merely to ascertain what the series of events has been, as in the common forms of History, but also how it has been brought about” (PIS i, p. 637), culminates in Berkeleian revelations about vision, language, and the soul:

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[T]hat the First Cause which produced light produced also eyes; that the First Cause which produced air and organs of articulation produced also language and the faculties by which language is rendered possible: and if those faculties, then also all man’s other faculties; – the powers by which … he discerns right and wrong, and recognizes a providential as well as a natural course of things. (PIS i, p. 707)

Knowledge of the physiology and psychology of vision pales in comparison to an appreciation of those modes of seeing and knowing that materialism had unsuccessfully tried to expurgate from science. Not only is this demystification doomed to fail, since we are hardwired to ask questions about causes and origins, but it is materialist science itself, ironically, that takes us to a place where we can appreciate the futility of its anti-theological project: “Thus we are led, by our material sciences … to the borders of a higher region, and to a point of view from which we have a prospect of other provinces of knowledge, in which other faculties of man are concerned besides his intellectual, other interests involved besides those of speculation” (PIS i, p. 708).45 By mid-century Berkeley’s empirico-associationist theory of vision had become so widely accepted in Britain that Mill, one of its most ardent Victorian devotees, could confidently declare that it “has remained, almost from its first promulgation, one of the least disputed doctrines in the most disputed and most disputable of all sciences,  – the science of man.”46 In A System of Logic (1843) Mill confirms Berkeley’s argument that “[t]he perception of distance by the eye, which seems so like intuition, is thus, in reality, an inference grounded on experience” (SL vii, p. 8), and even attempts to quantify the relative ratios of sensation and inference in perception: “What we are said to perceive is usually a compound result, of which one-tenth may be observation, and the remaining nine-tenths inference” (SL viii, p. 642). Mill does not limit the term perception to sight, but implies that sight constitutes a special case among the senses because it is here that one is most likely to overlook the fact that the product of perception is always a “compound result” in which inference dominates over observation. Sight is also of special importance for Mill’s empiricist epistemology because Mill regards it as having a kind of colonizing influence over the other senses. As he explains in his work on William Hamilton, sight has a commanding influence … which, though it has no greater variety of original impressions than our other special senses, yet owing to the two properties, of being able to receive a great number of its impressions at once, and to receive them from all distances, takes the lead altogether from the sense of touch: and is

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not only the organ by which we read countless possibilities of tactual and muscular sensations which can never, to us, become realities, but substitutes itself for our touch and our muscles even where we can use them – causes their actual use as avenues of knowledge, to become, in many cases, obsolete, – the sensations themselves to be little heeded and very indistinctly remembered, – and communicates its own prerogative of simultaneousness to impressions and conceptions originating in other senses, which it could never have given, but only suggests, through visible marks associated with them by experience.47

Experience is what enables us to make associations and inferences, and when the latter lead to error instead of truth, the important thing to remember is that it is not that the sense has malfunctioned but that we have made an error in judgment: “Innumerable instances might be given … of what are vulgarly called errors of sense. There are none of them properly errors of sense; they are erroneous inferences from sense” (SL viii, p. 642). In this regard Mill’s thinking is very much in line with Berkeley’s. But in other ways he is overtly anti-Berkeleian. In Mill’s philosophy the deity as the Author of the world-text disappears as a valid object of philosophical inquiry. This is also one significant way in which Mill differs from Whewell, with whom he engaged in an extensive and now famous debate on matters of induction.48 Whereas Whewell’s discussion of induction is faithful to the theological agenda of Berkeley’s theory of vision – the sciences lead us to “a higher region” (PIS i, p. 708), to the first cause and the origin of all things – Mill remained skeptical about extending logical inquiry to include metaphysical questions. Yet he was careful not to suggest that all talk of metaphysics and the supernatural must be banned from philosophy and science. In Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), he remarks that “[t]he Positive mode of thought is not necessarily a denial of the supernatural.” For instance, when it comes to the theological argument from design, “[t]he Positive philosopher is free to form his opinion on the subject, according to the weight he attaches to the analogies which are called marks of design, and to the general traditions of the human race. The value of these evidences is indeed a question for Positive philosophy, but it is not one upon which Positive philosophers must necessarily be agreed.”49 It is not Mill’s intention, then, in A System of Logic or elsewhere, to expose the fallacies of the design argument or disprove the existence of a first cause, but instead to clarify the proper scope of logical and inductive­ inquiry. “[I]t is almost universally allowed,” he explains, “that the existence of matter or of spirit, of space or of time, is in its nature unsusceptible of being proved; and that if anything is known of them, it must be by immediate intuition” (SL vii, p. 9). Truths of intuition, by which

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Mill means truths of the “primitive data” (SL vii, p. 7) of sensation,50 are beyond “[t]he province of logic,” which concerns itself only with “that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; whether those antecedent data be general propositions, or particular observations and perceptions. Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence.” Logic cedes to metaphysics authority over questions such as: “Whether God, and duty, are realities, the existence of which is manifest to us a priori by the constitution of our rational faculty; or whether our ideas of them are acquired notions, the origin of which we are able to trace and explain; and the reality of the objects themselves a question not of consciousness or intuition, but of evidence and reasoning.” That said, the province of logic is more extensive than that of metaphysics: “By far the greatest portion of our knowledge, whether of general truths or of particular facts, being avowedly matters of inference, nearly the whole, not only of science, but of human conduct, is amenable to the authority of logic” (SL vii, p. 9). Mill had clearly read Berkeley with selective vision: there is no room in his scheme for the Berkeleian Author of Nature, only for human observers and readers. He was also anxious to purge epistemology of intuitionist concepts, and embroiled himself in a heated debate with Whewell concerning the proper way to define induction. For Whewell, Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars is an exemplary case of Fundamental Ideas working together with empirical observations to produce scientific explanations. Whewell maintains that Kepler would not have been able to come up with the discovery had he not possessed an innate Idea of space, upon which is based the more particular concept of an ellipsis. Genuine scientific discoveries are made by drawing new connections – colligation of facts, Whewell terms it – between related empirical data, and such connections require not just careful observation and rigorous training in science, but also mental acts involving a priori ideas. “[S]pace, time, cause &c., [are] Ideas,” Whewell explains, “because they are general relations among our sensations, apprehended by an act of the mind, not by the senses simply. These relations involve something beyond what the senses alone could furnish” (PIS i, p. 25). Simple observation does not suffice:  “[I]n every inference by Induction, there is some Conception superinduced upon the facts” (PIS ii, p. 50) working as a bonding agent for the series of otherwise unincorporated observations. “The pearls are there,” as Whewell famously phrases it, “but they will not hang together till some one provides the String” (PIS ii, p. 48). The inductively discovered whole is greater than the sum of the observed parts.

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For Mill, Kepler’s discovery is not an instance of induction proper, as he defines the term: induction, he argues, entails moving by inference from the particular to the general case, and from the known to the unknown, and this is not what Kepler had accomplished. Kepler connected the dots on the planet’s ellipsis, as it were, but in doing so he merely described or summed up a number of observed phenomena rather than made an inductive inference. As for Whewell’s claim that Kepler must have worked from an intuited concept derived from a Fundamental Idea, Mill is of the contrary opinion: “A conception implies, and corresponds to, something conceived: and though the conception itself is not in the facts, but in our mind, yet if it is to convey any knowledge relating to them, it must be a conception of something which really is in the facts, some property which they actually possess, and which they would manifest to our senses, if our senses were able to take cognizance of it” (SL vii, p. 295). For Mill, anxious to expel the Kantian, intuitionist a priori, the discovered whole is exactly equal to the sum of the parts; the “String” is not the product of mental activity but inheres in the facts under observation. He agrees that there is more to an inference than meets the eye – literally, since we infer things we cannot see. “But it by no means follows that the conception is necessarily preexistent, or constructed by the mind out of its own materials.” Rather, the conception, as in the case of Kepler’s discovery, is a faithful “copy” of the facts of reality, “and which if we cannot directly perceive, it is because of the limited power of our organs, and not because the thing itself is not there” (SL vii, p. 296).51 Descriptions of perception as inferential dominate statements on the psych­ ology of perception in the second half of the century. In The Principles of Psychology (1855) Herbert Spencer observes that there is a marked contrast between the perception that some surface touched by the finger is hard, and the perception that a building under whose walls we stand is a particular cathedral. The one piece of knowledge is almost immediate: the other is mediate in a double, a triple, a quadruple, and even in a still higher degree – mediate inasmuch as the solidity of the building is inferential; inasmuch as its proximity is inferential; inasmuch as its position, its size, its shape, are inferential; inasmuch as its artificial origin, its material, its hollowness, are inferential; inasmuch as its ecclesiastical purpose is an inference from these inferences; and inasmuch as the identification of it as a particular cathedral, is yet a still more remote inference resulting from the union of these inferences with those various others through which the locality is recognised.52

This layering and interweaving of inferences makes it hard to determine where one perception ends and another begins: “[T]he state of consciousness

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which we call a perception, cannot be rigorously marked out and separated … it merges insensibly into others of its own kind, both synchronous and successive, and into others which we class as of different kinds, both superior and inferior. It passes at the one extreme into reasoning; and at the other borders upon sensation.”53 That perception constitutes a spectrum of inferences shading off into sensation on the one side and reasoning on the other does not mean that one therefore cannot distinguish sensation from perception. It is a distinction that Mill and Whewell, their differences aside, agree must be made, and that Spencer too is keen to enforce. Sensation is more rudimentary than perception: it is “an undecomposable state of consciousness” that cannot be broken down into simpler elements. Perception proper, on the other hand, is “a decomposable state of consciousness” in which one apprehends relations: “While in apprehending a sensation, the mind is occupied with a single subjective affection; in apprehending the external something producing it, the mind is occupied with the relation or relations between that affection and others, either past or present.” But Spencer adds an important caveat:  “[P]er­ception cannot be correctly defined as ‘an apprehension of the relations of sensations to each other’; for that in most perceptions some of the elements are not presented but represented in consciousness.”54 For instance, when gazing at some one object, it will be found that objects on the outskirts of the field of view, are recognised more by representation than by presentation. If, without moving his eyes, the observer asks himself what he actually perceives of these outlying objects, he will find that they impress him simply as ill-defined patches of colour; that were it not for his previous experiences, he would not know the meanings of these patches; and that in perceiving what the objects are, he ekes out the vaguely presented impressions with some comparatively distinct represented ones. And what thus manifestly happens with perceptions of this order, happens in one form or other with all perceptions.55

It follows that “[f]rom its simplest to its most complex forms, perception is essentially a diagnosis,”56 as it involves a lot of filling in of gaps with inferences. Spencer’s caveat underscores the strict empiricism of his theory of perception and the epistemology erected upon it, but also raises troubling questions about the correspondence between perceptions and objects of perception, the world as we experience it and as it really is. Spencer more fully considers the epistemological ramifications of this diagnostic theory of perception in the heavily revised 1872 edition of The Principles of Psychology. There he tries to demonstrate that neither AntiRealism nor Crude Realism, as he calls them, are philosophically justified, and offers what he sees as the only viable option, a Transfigured Realism. Whereas Anti-Realism is unjustified in claiming that our perceptions do

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not offer sufficient ground for assuming the objective existence of external objects, Crude Realism errs on the opposite side by assuming a full correspondence between perceptions and perceived objects: While some objective existence, manifested under some conditions, remains as the final necessity of thought, there does not remain the implication that this existence and these conditions are more to us than the unknown correlatives of our feelings and the relations among our feelings. The Realism we are committed to is one which simply asserts objective existence as separate from, and independent of, subjective existence. But it affirms neither that any one mode of this objective existence is in reality that which it seems, nor that the connexions among its modes are objectively what they seem. Thus it stands widely distinguished from Crude Realism; and to mark the distinction it may properly be called Transfigured Realism.57

Transfigured Realism takes the best parts of Anti-Realism and Crude Realism and reconciles them. It does not assume that subjective perceptions give us an objective picture of reality, but rejects the notion that they give us no picture of reality whatsoever. Even if “the effects [i.e. perceptions] are totally unlike their causes [i.e. objects of perception] … yet the two may correspond in such a way that each change in the objective reality causes in the subjective state a change exactly answering to it – so answering as to constitute a cognition of it.”58 But while such an understanding of correspondence and cognition makes it possible to reject Anti-Realism, it seems to leave Transfigured Realism with very little to say about the nature of reality. There is something out there affecting our senses, but it is impossible to say what that something is really like. We can be certain that reality exists apart from us, but for us it is an “Unknowable Reality.”59 The problem of correspondence (or lack thereof) between perceptions and objects of perception continued to vex epistemologists and philosophers of science. In Problems of Life and Mind (1874–9) Lewes acknowledges that an inferential theory of perception can easily be mistaken for an open invitation to exaggerated forms of relativism. He himself appears to sanction the extension of reasonable doubt into grand-scale epistemological uncertainty: The world is to each man as it affects him; to each a different world. Fifty spectators see fifty different rainbows in the sky, and all believe they see the same one. Nor is this unanimity delusive; for “the same” here means the similarity in their states of consciousness. Whether we affirm the objective existence of something distinct from the affection of consciousness, or affirm that this object is simply a reflection from consciousness, in each case we declare that the objective world is to each man the sum of his visionary experience, – an existence bounded on all

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sides by what he feels and thinks, – a form shaped by the reactions of his organism. The world is the sum total of phenomena, and phenomena are affections of consciousness with external signs. (PLM i, p. 185)

Yet the “principle of the Relativity of Knowledge,” illustrated by the example of fifty different apprehensions of the “same” rainbow, need not be regarded as “leading to universal scepticism” (PLM i, p. 184). Rather, Lewes claims, “[w]hat is positive may be absolutely certain and available, although it is but a small section of the circle swept by Speculation.” Science is best suited to provide positive knowledge, Lewes contends, and “those who, affecting to despise the certainty attainable through Science, because it can never transcend the relative sphere, yearn for a knowledge which is not relative, cheat themselves with phrases” (PLM i, p. 184). But when he instructs the reader to keep in mind that “[t]he aim of Science is prevision,” in the pragmatic sense of “guidance and regulation of action” (PLM i, p. 185), and that positive knowledge is simply that knowledge which efficiently guides and regulates, the problem of certainty is thereby arguably not solved so much as deflected. Yet Lewes does not intend to stop there. His ensuing subtle negotiation between the extremes of Lockeian sensationalism and Kantian (or Leibnitzian, in this case) intuitionism results in a hybrid epistemology  – a metaphysical empiricism, one might call it, or an empiricist metaphysics – and is the hallmark feature of Lewes’s idiosyncratic adaptation of Comte’s positivist method.60 Locke’s “reduction of all knowledge to a sensuous origin is absurd” (PLM i, p. 192), he maintains. “The sensational hypothesis is acceptable” only if “by Sense we understand Sensibility and its laws of operation,” that is only if we extend the term sense to include “all psychical phenomena under the rubric of Sensibility” (PLM i, pp. 191–2), not just physical sensations. On the other hand, Leibnitz’s claim (and, as we have seen, Whewell’s) that “[b] esides the materials furnished by Sense there must be taken into account the forms furnished by the Intellect” (qtd. in PLM i, p. 191) is reasonable only if by Intellect be meant the process by which many different sensations are grouped together, thus forming products unlike any of the several components; and since this process of grouping may be extended from the elements to the groups, the products will, after successive evolutions, be so far removed from all resemblance to the original sensations as to appear due to a different source

 – and which in the end is “only another and a better way of expressing the sensational doctrine” (PLM i, p. 192). Intuitionism and sensationalism both have their merits, then, but neither school has it right. Striking a middle ground, Lewes maintains that

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Laws of Thought, or, more accurately, the Mental Forms, are connate, and so far a priori. But they are as much part and parcel of Experience as any individual perception, judgment, or acquired ability can be. All that can be said to difference them is that, for the most part, they are parts of the Experience of ancestors, – the feelings registered in modifications of structure which have been transmitted from parent to child. (PLM i, p. 195)

Because “[t]he Mind is built up out of assimilated experiences, its percep­ tions being shaped by its pre-perceptions, its conceptions by its pre­conceptions” (PLM i, p. 202), perception and cognition must be understood in hereditary, historical terms. Every perceptual act adds another layer to the palimpsestic history of perceptions  – the “organism … is a product of its history; it is what it has become” (PLM i, p. 201).61 A comprehensive theory of perception must also therefore be a theory of mind. For perception is best understood as “mental vision, in which the unapparent sensibles are rendered apparent” (PLM i, p. 237), while making inferences is “‘seeing with the mind’s eye,’ – reinstating what has been, but now is not, present to Sense” (PLM i, p. 236). Lewes is aware, however, that regardless of how much experience one accumulates, the inference may be incorrect: When I say “I see an apple there,” I express an indisputable fact of feeling in terms which imply disputable inferences. The fact is that I am affected now in a way similar to that in which I was formerly affected when certain colored shapes excited my retina; and this affection reinstates the feelings which accompanied it on these occasions; the whole group of feelings being named apple, I say, “There is an apple.” The inference may be erroneous; on proceeding to verify it by redu­ cing it to sensible experiences I find that the colored object is not an apple, i.e. has not the taste, fragrance, etc., which are elements in that complex perception; the color and form which led to the inference are found to belong to a marble or wooden body; or to some other fruit resembling the apple in some respects, differing in others. (PLM i, pp. 236–7)

If inference is the root of accurate observation and understanding, it is also the root of every mistake in perception and reasoning: “With Inference begins error” (PLM i, p. 237). As to the recurring, vexing question, “Which inference is correct?”, Lewes replies that “[o]nly reduction to Sensation can decide” (PLM i, p. 238). Certainty is vouchsafed by hereditarily transmitted (and only in this restricted sense a priori) laws of thought, and by continuously checking our inferences against the corresponding sensations: “Whenever an Inference is in agreement with the positive data of Sense, whenever the Invisible is only an extension of the Visible, we pronounce it rationally certain” (PLM i, p. 240).

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Implicit everywhere in Lewes’s discussion of inferences is Berkeley’s linguistic model of vision, and Lewes does not neglect to reiterate what had by then become a standard analogy in theories of perception: [W]hat is a Sense? It is an organ which indirectly tells of the outer world, as that outer world directly affects us through it. We do not feel objects, we construct them out of feelings. Every sensation is a sign … Language has a very obvious analogy to this. The name is a sign. When it is spoken the hearer feels it as a sound, and perceives it as a sign. If to him it is merely a sound, it has only the sonorous reaction – it sets none of the neural groups oscillating which would be awakened by the sign. (PLM v, p. 346)

We should pause here to consider how the seeing-is-reading model interacts with the camera obscura model of the observer. According to Crary, the latter (which postulates a disembodied observer encountering a rationalized visual space) is in the early decades of the nineteenth century discarded in favor of a subjective model that corporealizes the observer, a transformation that Crary ascribes to an explosion in physiological research. He convincingly shows how physiology led to the understanding “that knowledge was conditioned by the physical and anatomical functioning of the body, and perhaps most importantly, the eyes,”62 and argues that this knowledge occasioned the collapse of the camera obscura model. But it would be a mistake to assume that the camera obscura is thereby rendered superfluous, whether because the model of vision predicated on it is ousted by physiology or because it is supplanted by the linguistic model. In fact, it is physiology that secured the popularity of the camera obscura – not, though, as an analogy for the observer but for the eye.63 As Whewell explains: Physiologists have very completely explained the exquisitely beautiful mechanism of the eye, considered as analogous to an optical instrument; and it is indisputable that by means of certain transparent lenses and humors, an inverted image of the objects which are looked at is formed upon the retina, or fine network of nerve, with which the back of the eye is lined. We cannot doubt that the impression thus produced on these nerves is essential to the act of vision … But we cannot with any propriety say that we perceive, or that our mind perceives, this image; for we are not conscious of it, and none but anatomists are aware of its existence: we perceive by means of it. (PIS i, p. 292)

The camera obscura does not disappear, then, but is relegated to physiology. “Regarded as an optical instrument,” writes Helmholtz, “the eye is a camera obscura.”64 But dissecting “[t]he natural camera obscura of the eye [Die natürliche Camera obscura unseres Auges]” is not how we will find answers to “questions … of fundamental importance, not only for the physiology

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of sight, but for a correct understanding of the true nature and limits of human knowledge generally.”65 The key to understanding the epistemological import of vision lies in the language-oriented “Empirical Theory, which regards all our perceptions of space as depending upon experience, and not only the qualities, but even the local signs of the sense of sight as nothing more than signs [Zeichen], the meaning of which we have to learn by experience [deren Bedeutung wir zu lesen erst lernen müssen, whose meaning we must first learn to read].”66 As Helmholtz kept on insisting, “our sensations are for us only symbols of the objects of the external world [Die Sinnesempfindungen sind uns nur Symbole für die Gegenstände der Aussenwelt], and correspond to them only in some such way as written characters or articulate words to the things they denote.”67 We should note once again the absence of the theological component of Berkeley’s theory of vision. For Helmholtz, Mill, Spencer, and Lewes, the observer is a secular reader of a secular text – a student of language, as it were, who through trial and error learns to negotiate the perceptual terrain without the benefit of a priori knowledge or divine guidance. Whewell, as we have seen, stands apart from this group by virtue of his intuitionism and theological inclinations, but anticipates Helmholtz in maintaining that inferences are in many cases made without any conscious effort – they are what Helmholtz calls unbewusste Schlüsse, “unconscious judgments.”68 Judgments of this kind are not the result of deliberate and conscious step-by-step reasoning, yet, Helmholtz argues, they follow the same operational scheme: There appears to me to be in reality only a superficial difference between the “conclusions” of logicians and those inductive conclusions of which we recognize the result in the conceptions we gain of the outer world through our sensations. The difference chiefly depends upon the former conclusions being capable of expression in words, while the latter are not; because, instead of words, they only deal with sensations and the memory of sensations. Indeed, it is just the impossibility of describing sensations, whether actual or remembered, in words, which makes it so difficult to discuss this department of psychology at all.69

That judgments dealing with sensations cannot be expressed in words does not mean, however, that they are fundamentally different in nature: “[I]t is clearly possible, by using … sensible images of memory instead of words, to produce the same kind of combination which, when expressed in words, would be called a proposition or a conclusion.” The equation also works the other way round:  “[U]niversal, as well as particular conclusions, may be expressed in terms of sensible impressions, instead of words.”70 Both sensations and words must be regarded as elements of a system of signs, which is

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not intuited a priori but acquired via experience: “There is a most striking analogy between the entire range of processes which we have been discussing, and another System of Signs [System von Zeichen], which is not given by nature but arbitrarily chosen, and which must undoubtedly be learned before it is understood. I mean the words of our mother tongue.” As Berkeley argued, and as Helmholtz repeats, the connections between signifiers and signifieds seem to come naturally because often made rapidly and without conscious deliberation: “Now this connection between Names and Objects, which demonstrably must be learnt, becomes just as firm and indestructible as that between Sensations and the Objects which produce them.”71 The empiricist analogy between perception and language is according to Helmholtz “the solution of the riddle of how it is possible to see.”72 However, there existed in the nineteenth century an alternate account of vision – the nativist position, as it is called today, or what Helmholtz terms “the Innate or Intuitive Theory of conceptions of Space.” And while he himself strongly favors the empiricist position, Helmholtz admits that proponents of the two camps are engaged in “a controversy which has not yet been decided.”73 In A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, Designed to Show the Unsoundness of That Celebrated Speculation (1842), the English economist and philosopher Samuel Bailey vehemently disagrees with Berkeley’s “false doctrine,” and specifically the notion that visual impressions suggest tactile impressions in the same way in which “words of any language suggest the ideas they are made to stand for.”74 This analogy, Bailey explains, is the root of the problem with Berkeley’s theory: We know perfectly well how the sound of the word “rose” comes to suggest or raise up in the mind the idea of the absent flower: it is (in the simplest form of the process) from the name being heard at the same time that the flower is seen. The parallel case in reference to sight and touch would be, that after we have touched an object and seen it at the same time, what is perceived by the sight comes to suggest what is perceived by the touch, and vice versa, in the absence of each other. But this is not the process which Berkeley represents as taking place, although he himself strangely enough fancied it to be so. According to him, an internal feeling and an external sensation having been experienced at the same time, the internal feeling, when it afterwards occurs, not only suggests the idea of the external object, but by so doing suggests the idea, or if I may use the figure, infuses the perception of its own externality. He thus attributes to suggestion an effect contrary to its nature, which, as in the case of language, is simply to revive in our conception what has been previously perceived by the sense. His comparison, therefore, completely fails. To make it tally, we must suppose that the aud­ ible name suggesting the visible flower becomes itself a visible object.75

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Pushed to its limits the linguistic analogy becomes incoherent. Bailey concludes that “the visual perception of external objects … cannot be derived from the sense of touch, and there is no room to suppose it otherwise than immediate and original.”76 Drawing upon reports of behavior in young animals (specifically ducks, turtles, and crocodiles), human infants, and blind persons who have surgically been enabled to see, he argues: It is manifest by the actions of many of them, that they see external objects as soon as they are born, and before they can possibly have derived any assistance from their powers of touch or muscular feeling … All these instances imply that external objects are seen to be so. There is no reason for any possible process of learning by means of any other sense. They prove, at least, the possibility that the opening of the eye may be at once followed by the perception of external objects as such, or, in other words, by the perception or sensation of outness.77

Berkeley had muddled the issue by confusing outness and distance. “Whether objects are seen to be external, or at some distance, is one question altogether distinct from the inquiry whether objects are seen by the unassist­ed vision to be at different distances from the percipient: and yet Berkeley uniformly assumes them to be the same, or at least takes it for granted that they are to be determined by the same arguments.”78 It is possible, Bailey maintains, to concede to Berkeley and his followers that the perception of metric distance (how far an object seems to be from us) is acquired through experience, and still hold on to the proposition that the perception of outness (that objects are seen as external to us) is innate and pre-experiential. Today better known than Bailey’s book (perhaps the most persuasive criticism of Berkeley in the nineteenth century) is Mill’s unfavorable review of it, published in 1842 while he was working on A System of Logic. Mill reiterates what he considers to be an indisputable fact: that “the information obtained through the eye consists of two things, – sensations, and inferences from those sensations; that the sensations are merely colors variously arranged, and changes of color; that all else is inference, the work of the intellect, not of the eye.”79 The principal cause of Bailey’s confusion in this matter, Mill explains, is his imprecise handling of the term perception. This word “has wrought almost as notable mischief in metaphysics as the word Idea,” Mill regretfully observes, and “seems made on purpose to confuse the distinction between what the eye tells us directly, and what it teaches by way of inference.”80 Since Bailey conflates simple sensation and the more complex phenomenon of perception (“[h]e cannot see, that what he calls a perception of sight is simply a judgment of the intellect, inferring from a sensation of sight the presence of an object”),

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his criticism of Berkeley is worth taking seriously, Mill implies, only in so far as it demonstrates that Berkeley’s theory offers no point of leverage for mounting a nativist assault. It remains “unshaken, and to all appearance unshakeable.”81 Mill’s dismantling of Bailey’s critique of Berkeley did not put an end to the debate between nativists and empiricists, as Mill had probably hoped it would. In Sight and Touch: An Attempt to Disprove the Received (or Berkeleian) Theory of Vision (1864), Thomas K. Abbott irritably describes Berkeley’s theory as “the shame, not the glory, of psychology,” as well as “a disgrace to philosophy,” the reason being that, whatever Berkeley’s intentions may have been, the theory has evolved into “the stronghold of scepticism” and is the gateway to idealism: “[F]or if consciousness is once proved to be delusive, there is an end to all appeals to its authority: doubt must reign supreme.”82 Citing Bailey as an example of courageous resistance to the Berkeleian doctrine, Abbott proposes to show, “1st, that the immediate perception of distance by sight is in no way impossible or anomalous; 2nd, that on the contrary, the assumed association of visual and tactual sensations does not exist, and is even impossible; and 3rd, that neither touch nor the locomotive faculty or sense is perceptive of distance.”83 All these are articles of common sense, Abbott maintains, as opposed to the improbable Berkeleian doctrine that has received so much attention yet asks us to think of sight in ways counter to our everyday experiences and deepest beliefs: At the present moment every one who has tasted philosophy, even summis labris, is firmly convinced that he sees, not persons and things of various bulk, and at divers distances, but merely a variety of colour, or at best, a flat picture of no perceptible magnitude, and at no perceptible distance. Yet the profoundest metaphysician, when he opens his bodily eyes, is mastered by the same belief as the unlearned: he cannot see what he knows he does see [i.e. mere patches of colour], and he cannot help seeing what he knows it is impossible to see [i.e. defined figures of certain size and at a certain distance from the eye]. Seeing is, for the time being, believing; but on deliberate reflection, sense is fairly overpowered by reason.84

Abbott mockingly calls this “a brilliant victory of science,” and suggests that, if we buy into it, we might as well swallow anything: “An universal persuasion that nothing really exists, would be scarcely more surprising.”85 Bailey and Abbott are more or less forgotten today, but William James is not. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James disagrees “that no retinal sensation can primitively be of volume” (i.e. that we learn to see in three dimensions), and claims instead “that all objects of sensation are

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voluminous in three dimensions.”86 While “[t]he measurement of distance is, as Berkeley truly said, a result of suggestion and experience,” Berkeley was wrong to argue that other senses must intervene in the process, since “visual experience alone is adequate to produce it.” Berkeley’s nineteenth­century disciples “seem to have gone astray like lost sheep.”87 [E]ither because they were intoxicated with the principle of association, or because in the number of details they lost their general bearings, they have forgotten, as a rule, to state under what sensible form the primitive spatial experiences are found which later became associated with so many other sensible signs. Heedless of their master Locke’s precept, that the mind can frame unto itself no one new simple idea, they seem for the most part to be trying to explain the extensive quality itself, account for it, and evolve it, by the mere association together of feelings which originally possessed it not.88

Ironically, Mill and other modern Berkeleians, regardless of their professed intolerance for all forms of intuitionism and nativism, ought really to regard themselves as unwitting Kantians or, in James’s termin­ology, “psychical stimulists.” Failing to be consistent to Locke’s tabula rasa sensationalism, their associationist theories end up implicitly endorsing the existence of some innate faculty responsible for creating associations between various sensations, which “to one who understands association as producing nothing, but only as knitting together things already produced in separate ways,” must appear rather “mystical-sounding.”89 Barring the intervention of the latecomer James, whose physiologically grounded psychology of sensation and perception falls somewhere between the empiricist and nativist camps, the nativist resistance movement was never as organized as the empiricist camp, nor was there a perceptual nativist of sufficient intellectual clout to stand up to luminaries such as Mill, Lewes, and Helmholtz.90 If there is one thing both sides could readily agree upon, however, it is Bailey’s estimation that “the subject occupies … a most important as well as interesting position, being situated on the border-land where Physiology and the Philosophy of the Human Mind meet and mingle.”91 Bailey’s metaphor is appropriate, given the nature of the issues and questions raised in the debate about vision from Reid to James. The “jungle of intricacy,”92 as James calls it, that students of vision encounter is also a borderland, in the sense of a discursive space where various disciplines come into contact, and where what is at stake is not just knowledge about vision but also knowledge about knowledge itself. We have seen that one recurrent signpost in this contentious territory keeps pointing toward the blind alley of radical doubt and relativism.

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Alexander Bain, the founder of Mind, the first English journal of psycho­ logy, bluntly puts it thus in The Senses and the Intellect (1855): There is no possible knowledge of a world except in reference to our minds. Knowledge means a state of mind; the notion of material things is a mental fact. We are incapable even of discussing the existence of an independent material world; the very act is a contradiction. We can speak only of the world presented to our own minds.93

Or as the English psychologist Henry Maudsley later put it in an 1881 ­ opular lecture on the Common Source of Error in Seeing and Believing: p Men see not the reality purely, but see it in the coloured light of the notions which they have of it. Hence no two persons see an event exactly alike; two witnesses go into the witness-box and give widely different accounts of the same transaction at which they were present together; two newspaper reporters, of different politics, believing themselves sincere and truthful, send home to their respective employers nearly opposite accounts of the same occurrences; in each case there is an individual mind behind the eye.94

The mind behind the eye (as Lewes’s example of the fifty different-yetsame rainbows also suggests) is not one but many:  there are as many points of view on reality, and as many realities, as there are individual observers. It is not just the case that “we do not see and judge rightly by instinct,”95 but that our instinct is to see and judge as our beliefs, desires, and interests dictate. The popular saying seeing is believing really ought to be understood in a double sense, Maudsley explains, “not alone in the understood sense that we believe by what we see, but also in the sense that we see by what we believe.”96 When seeing and believing switch places, the distinction between objective and subjective perception seems irrevocably blurred, and the line between sanity and insanity put into question, if not quite erased: “’Tis not true perhaps, as is sometimes said, that everybody is a little mad, but it is true that everybody makes day by day the same sort of errors in observation and reasoning as those which lead madmen to their delusions.”97 Like Lewes before him, Maudsley must find a way to hold on to the belief that, at least in some cases, seeing is believing in the traditional sense of the phrase, and that the sane and insane, while they sometimes behave in remarkably similar fashion, do not belong in the same cell. There is no going back, however, to the naïve Enlightenment fantasy of clear-sightedness and epistemological objectivity, and the most that Maudsley can do is insist on different degrees of delusion: those who see things that are not there, in whom seeing is constantly held hostage to believing, and whose beliefs one can safely categorize as irrational, “have

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only carried to an extreme pitch, to an insane height, a kind of faulty observation and reasoning which is common enough among persons who are not in the least out of their minds.”98 The itinerary I have outlined here  – from Berkeley’s linguistic model of vision and its theological investments, through the secularization of this model by Victorian epistemologists, to the nativist resistance to it – provides us with the tools we need to examine the struggle between ocularcentrism and anti-ocularcentrism in detective fiction, the dual impulse to extol and disparage the senses, sight in particular, as conduits of knowledge and truth. Adopting the seeing-is-reading premise as the conceptual foundation of its representation of detection, the genre seeks ways to neutralize the factor of semiotic uncertainty and arbitrariness at the core of the linguistic model, and, importantly, within a wholly secular epistemological paradigm. In doing so, detective fiction constructs a space where empiricist and nativist outlooks meet. The nativist theory of unmediated apprehension of outness and distance – seeing without learning to see – is appropriated and radically transformed in detective fiction into an argument for the natural readability of all objects that enter the field of vision: footprints and fingerprints, facial expressions and body gestures, cigar ashes and stained articles of clothing, are all immediately legible and eloquent, speaking the truth to the detective’s knowing eye. Mere looking, the briefest of glances, seems to be enough to know exactly what one is looking at. But looking also means inferring, and this is precisely the problem with looking – so much so that it is best not to look at all. Beginning with Poe’s Dupin stories, the genre conceptualizes observation in accordance with the vision-aslanguage theory, while rejecting the attendant notion that the meaning of linguistic signifiers is volatile, unstable – a matter of subjective interpretation, learning, and habit. If the fictional detective is a master-semiotician adept at reading visual language, this is because such an observer operates as a non-interfering conduit of messages inscribed in the visible world  – another kind of camera obscura, but one that registers meanings rather than just images. Yet this hypernativist fantasy is vexed by signs which point to its improbable assumptions, suggesting that such a fantasy must be a work of fiction – that it works only in a fictional world. It is this anxiety that generates that familiar scene in which the detective offers a detailed explanation of how the mystery was solved. It is a scene that imagines a world of visual signifiers that require readerly intervention, as well as a scene in which acts of seeing-as-reading are imagined as immune to the errors that plague other kinds of communication.

Chapter 6

Scopophilia and scopophobia:  Poe’s readerly flâneur

One of the biggest thrills available to flâneurs, voyeurs, and other watchers in Poe’s fiction – of which the Chevalier Auguste Dupin is the most notorious and voyeuristic – involves scrutinizing the outward appearances of passers-by and reading them as texts whose meaning is perfectly transparent. Dupin’s companion and chronicler reports that, at “the advent of the true Darkness,” which is to say under the cover of night, the two men sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford. At such times I could not help remarking and admiring (although from his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin. He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise – if not exactly in its display – and did not hesitate to confess the pleasure thus derived. He boasted to me, with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs of his intimate knowledge of my own. (“RM,” p. 144)

I will return to Dupin’s intimate knowledge of his companion and how he acquires it. To begin with, let us note that observation is intimately linked to pleasure. Dupin’s is the self-congratulatory chuckle of a spectator whose gaze penetrates everything and everyone, and whose scopophilia 1 is heightened by the fact that he himself is impenetrable, unreadable. Like the Man of the Crowd in Poe’s story of the same title, Dupin is opaque: he does not permit himself to be read, “er lässt sich nicht lesen” (“MC,” p. 481).2 Poe’s detective is in some ways a model of Baudelaire’s pleasure-seeking flâneur: For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and 94

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yet to remain hidden from the world … The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.3

Far from being a cold-blooded thinking machine whose “ultimate object,” as he declares at one point “is only the truth” (“RM,” p. 159), Dupin is an egotist and hedonist. As Dennis A. Foster argues, while Poe’s detective is ostensibly the exemplar of the Enlightenment subject who “think[s] with the detached clarity of a reason that depend[s] on no earthly authority,” Dupin only “impersonates such a thinker”: Poe “shows the transcendental subject to be a version of the subject of enjoyment.”4 In my reading of Poe, this enjoyment has less to do with the pursuit of truth for its own sake or the sociological knowledge that Dupin acquires by viewing others as texts, than with the exercise (the ostentatious demonstration, that is, rather than training) of his semiotic skills. Moreover, while Baudelaire’s flâneur, like a child (and like Ruskin’s observer who preserves the “innocence of the eye”)5 “sees everything in a state of newness,”6 Poe’s flâneur derives pleasure from seeing everything in a state of familiarity and semantic immutability: to look is to see again, to re-view what has been seen many times before. But to look – and here lies the problem – is also to risk exposing oneself to objects and persons that refuse to be read in the customary fashion (or read at all), and whose semantic impenetrability leads to the scopophobic denigration of vision and reactionary privileging of “blind” ratiocination as the sine qua non of detection. Dupin is a version of the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” the story that introduces the figure of the voyeuristic, readerly flâneur in Poe’s fiction, and anticipates the tension between scopophilia and scopophobia that governs his representation of detective work. Published in 1840, the year before Dupin’s first appearance in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the story prefaces the Dupin trilogy with a cautionary tale about the vicissitudes of readerly spectatorship and is close to being an anti-detective story, a perverse parody of the genre. Seated behind the window of a coffeehouse, the narrator leisurely examines the passers-by. As if from behind a two-way mirror,7 his privacy protected by the window’s “smoky panes,” he takes pleasure in his ability correctly to interpret the visual signifiers of identity. What begins as “a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing” visible beyond the window escalates into an exhilarating rush:  “At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion” (“MC,” p. 475). Yet this novelty of emotion is created not by a spectacle hitherto unobserved, but by one observed so many times that it is pleasurably registered as a semantically transparent

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text. The pedestrians taxonomize themselves into recognizable types with no apparent interpretive effort on the spectator’s part:  “noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers”; the “tribe of clerks” distinguishable into “the junior clerks of flash houses” and “the upper clerks of staunch firms”; “individuals of dashing appearance, whom I easily understood as belonging to the race of swell pick-pockets”; the “still more easily recognizable” gamblers with their “filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of the lip”; “the gentlemen who live by their wits” and “prey upon the public”; dandies with “long locks and smiles”; military men with “frogged coats and frowns”; “Jew peddlers, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility”; scowling “professional street beggars”; “feeble and ghastly invalids”;­ “modest young girls”; “the wrinkled, bejewelled, and paintbegrimed beldame”; drunkards “with bruised visage and lack-lustre eyes”; “and beside these, piemen, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibitors, and ballad-mongers; those who vended with those who sang; ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of every description, and all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye” (“MC,” pp. 476–8). If the perusal of this remarkably exhaustive catalog of urban types gives “an aching sensation to the eye” (“MC,” p. 478), this is in part because the masses are uncouth and depraved, and in part because their personal histories are so vulgarly displayed in their “figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance” (“MC,” p. 476) as to approximate nudity. Indeed, their depravity is made more offensive by their crude transparency as mere types, by what they cannot (or simply do not try to) conceal. The ocular discomfort is a corporeal sacrifice to which the flâneur submits in order to experience the pleasure of “scrutinizing the mob” – the currency, as it were, with which he pays for reading “even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (“MC,” p. 478). As in Dupin’s case, the pleasurable semiotic exercise is performed for its own sake, and is not so much an exercise in interpretation as in re-viewing what is always and everywhere legibly inscribed upon the urban body. If “it [is] not possible to mistake” (“MC,” p. 476) one class of individuals for another, this is because they are so “easily recognizable” (“MC,” pp. 477) that they make inferences superfluous. Like Poe’s detective, the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” knows exactly what to look for: tell-tale markers of identity that taxonomize the most diverse subjects into fixed, recognizable types. Presumably, this semiotic prowess derives from experience: the sort of visual learning that Berkeley and his Victorian followers argue is required

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for making inferences. But if, at least in some cases, signifiers point in the direction of their preordained signifieds, familiarizing oneself with a code is superfluous: one need not learn how and what to observe if observation comes naturally, that is to say if visual signifiers and their corresponding signifieds are bound to one another in a transcendental union. “With Inference begins error” (PLM i, p. 237), Lewes cautions, and Poe here appears to remove inferences altogether from the scene of reading. But making inferences, of course, is the most essential component of the work of detection. Like the expert whist player discussed in the opening passages of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the detective judges which cards his opponent holds by making “a host of observations and inferences.” Both detective and card shark play a game in which the “necessary knowledge is that of what to observe” in order that “every variation of face” be read as the “expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or chagrin” (“RM,” p. 142). The idea of highly specialized knowledge as a prerequisite for making correct inferences from observations – knowledge as a form of semiotic capital, as it were, that must be gained experientially before it can be exchanged for chips in the game of deduction – debunks the epistemological fantasy in which facial expressions and articles of clothing, footprints and fingerprints, speak for themselves and declare some eternal, noncontingent truth. The contradictory dual imperative – to suppress signs of learning so as to naturalize the detective’s knowledge of the semiotic code, and to imagine detection as the work of making inferences grounded in experience – is at the heart of the famous scene in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in which Dupin silently analyzes his companion’s speech and body language and concludes that he is thinking of Chantilly, the diminutive cobblerturned-thespian who changed his name when he took to the stage. His friend is flabbergasted and demands to know “the method – if method there is – by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter” (“RM,” p. 145). Dupin explains that the first link in his chain of reasoning was a word which his friend murmured to himself. I knew that you could not say to yourself “stereotomy” without being brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus; and since, when we discussed this subject not very long ago, I mentioned to you how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony, I felt that you could not avoid casting your eyes upward to the great nebula in Orion, and I certainly expected that you would do so. You did look up; and I was now assured that I had correctly followed your steps. (“RM,” p. 146)

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Dupin proceeds to remind his friend of “that bitter tirade upon Chantilly” in the press, where the columnist had quoted the Latin line “Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum,” which Dupin felt certain his friend “could not have forgotten” given “certain pungencies connected with this explanation” (“RM,” p. 146). The quote, Dupin had then pointed out, “was in reference to Orion, formerly written Urion.”8 “It was clear, therefore, that you would not fail to combine the two ideas of Orion and Chantilly. That you did combine them I saw by the character of the smile which passed over your lips” (“RM,” pp. 146–7). That Dupin could be so certain that his companion “could not say … ‘stereotomy’ without being brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus,” is not any less curious than Dupin’s confidence that “the character of the smile” on his friend’s face should indicate that he had “not fail[ed] to combine the ideas of Orion and Chantilly” – a smile as readable as a word in a familiar language and offering access to another’s unvocalized thoughts. What Dupin performs here  – and this is his, or Poe’s, real trick – is a sleight-of-hand conflation of two different theories of signification and two epistemological paradigms. On the one hand, it would seem that it is only Dupin’s familiarity with what his close friend (and not some stranger) knows, as well as familiarity with how he associates ideas and concepts, that allows Dupin to be so sure that stereotomy would occasion an association to atomies, Epicurus’ theories, and so on. Dupin’s elimination of all other possible associations fanning out from stereotomy (why not anatomies, say, instead of atomies?) is warranted by what one man has learned about the other. Dupin’s recollection of an exchange that preceded this scene, or rather Poe’s strategy of bringing this recollection to the foreground as a necessary component for the successful completion of Dupin’s semiotic exercise, positions the work of detection within a theory of contingent signification:  an upward gaze or fleeting smile can mean anything (or nothing) unless contextualized within a history of prior exchanges and communications. This need for learning and acquired familiarity is accentuated in the case of the smile. The smile is decodable as signaling an established connection between Orion and Chantilly not just because Dupin is intimate with the person he is observing, but also because the smile appears as the last link in a chain of associations that Dupin has already successfully penetrated. On the other hand, however, it is necessary for the reader to believe that any kind of prior knowledge and inductive legwork is redundant if he or she is to trust that Dupin can accomplish a similar feat when scrutinizing a face he has never seen before in order to penetrate a mind about which he knows nothing.

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Dupin leans both on a version of the nativist theory of perception, here encompassing universally valid judgments about meaning rather than spatial distance, and on the empiricist premise according to which perception is learned and interpretation possible only in the aftermath of a trial-and-error history of watching and reading. While the meaning of a gaze or smile appears penetrable only because both are observed after a conversation that occurred not long ago, the fact that a gaze or smile should instantly be perceived to have only one possible meaning suggests that, as signifiers, they possess a certain degree of autonomy (no conversation on Epicurus need have taken place). Dupin says nothing about how he learned to read the “character” of smiles, and his silence on this point, lost in the interstices of the pedantic step-by-step explanation, is exactly where Poe tricks the reader into believing he or she is being shown how the trick is done. Muddling the distinction between the two theories of meaning is tantamount to forgetting (or suppressing) the fact that, as Whewell puts it, “Signs and Meaning are Ideas, supplied by the mind” (PIS i, p. 38), and that inductive procedures must begin by “distinguish[ing] the inference from the appearance” (PIS i, p. 41), a smile from its imputed “character.” This contradiction – the necessity of acquiring the knowledge of how to look and how to interpret what one sees, and the necessity of forgetting to mention that knowledge is acquired through experience – enables Poe to have Dupin spot the purloined letter in a single glance: “No sooner had I glanced at this letter than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search” (“PL,” p. 220). But the glance merely confirms what Dupin already knows. By virtue of “an identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent” (“PL,” p. 215), possible only because of the detective’s intimacy with the mind of his adversary, Dupin rightly conjectures that “to conceal this letter, the minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all” (“PL,” p. 220).9 But the notion that the detective must think like his adversary in order to spot the cunningly concealed letter is rejected in the ensuing scene, where Dupin identifies the object simply by seeing it: In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed and re-sealed. (“PL,” p. 221)

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The discovery was sufficient, which is to say that it is the sight of chafed and broken edges that captures Dupin’s eye and instantly convinces him that he has found what he is looking for. In Whewell’s terms, Dupin “collect[s] its meaning by the sight alone” (PIS i, p. 38). What he may know about the way the Minister thinks is irrelevant: the letter announces itself, and denounces the culprit, the moment it enters the detective’s field of vision. “[C]odes,” writes Roland Barthes in a reading of another story by Poe, “are simply associative fields, a supra-textual organization of notations which impose a certain idea of structure. The occurrence of the code is for us essentially cultural: codes are certain types of déjà-vu, of already seen, already read, already made: the code is the form of this already which is constitutive of the writing of the world.”10 That the seemingly innate or intuitive knowledge of the meaning of visual cues actually develops from an acquired familiarity with a semiotic code becomes more obvious at sites of visual novelty. The flâneur who craves new, unfamiliar sights has no place in Poe’s idealized vision of the readerly spectator, for whom the appearance of something never before seen produces an epistemological shock and traumatic decentering of subjectivity. As “The Man of the Crowd” suggests, this trauma is what every flâneur risks when he allows his gaze to wander away from the familiar text. The spectator, especially in a bustling metropolis, cannot control the shape of the spectacle and it takes just a second for the coffee-house window to become a projection screen for a scene of horror: With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age) – a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression. Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before. I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retzch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend. As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense – of supreme despair. I felt singularly aroused, startled, fascinated. “How wild a history,” I said to myself, “is written within that bosom!” Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view – to know more of him. (“MC,” p. 478)

What suddenly intrudes in the narrator’s field of vision as he is contentedly “occupied in scrutinizing the mob” of recognizable types, is a living emblem of the atypical, the antithesis of the déjà vu. The spectacle of

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“the absolute idiosyncrasy” of the old man’s appearance is perceived as the incarnation of pure evil, worthy of Poe’s best tales of Gothic horror: the man is a creature “of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness.”11 Unable to make a single inference about the “wild history … written within that bosom,” the narrator’s first instinct is to criminalize the inscrutable subject for being a spectacular semiotic irregularity. If the old man is villainous, this is not because of anything that can be inferred from his facial expression, but because, having trespassed into the spectator’s field of vision and brought the pleasurable reading exercise to an abrupt halt, he intimates that the preceding catalog of urban types is founded upon questionable assumptions and inferences. The initial shock is quickly ameliorated by the supposition that the atypical must be typical after all: the old man must be “the type and the genius of deep crime” because, like Grünninger’s Hortulus Animae, “er lässt sich nicht lesen” (“MC,” p. 481). Yet it is not a type about which the narrator can say anything more. The unreadable old man is not a perversion of the norm, but the norm incarnate: a spectacular reminder that observation is largely a matter of inference, and that inference is a precondition for knowledge as well as the cause of all interpretive errors.12 It is this phobia of what is all too visible yet undecodable that drives Dupin to seek safety in books, those exemplary objects of readability.13 “Books, indeed,” we are told, “were his sole luxuries,” and it is a book, significantly, that mediates the first meeting of Dupin and his friend: “Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion” (“RM,” p. 143). The obscurity of the library and rarity of the edition in question suggest a volume that is as difficult to find as it is to read, perhaps a scarce edition of Hortulus Animae. But it is more likely, I think, that this coveted volume would be the exact opposite of Grünninger’s inscrutable text: a book that would not only allow itself to be read, but whose meaning would be so transparent and unequivocal that it cannot be misinterpreted. The pursuit of a certain kind of textual object speaks to Dupin’s desire for seclusion from the semiotically treacherous terrain of visual texts. While the scopophiliac seeks “amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford” (“RM,” p. 144), the scopophobe complains that “observation has become with me, of late, a species of necessity” (“RM,” p. 146), to which he submits reluctantly after another day’s fruitless search for a book that continues to elude him.

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Reading is generally a private affair, and Dupin’s bibliophilia accords well with his desire for seclusion. “Our seclusion was perfect,” the narrator remarks. “We admitted no visitors.” Dupin’s “time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire” (“RM,” p. 144), is a safe house of sorts, its ruinous condition and reputation of being haunted serving to discourage any inscrutable old man who might think of knocking on its door. What transpires behind closed doors in this book-lover’s retreat is no mystery: At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams – reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. (“RM,” p. 144)

While Poe’s reader is not privy to the content of these waking dreams, these “reading, writing, or conversing” sessions are less significant for what they are about than for being purely verbal: the secluded production, exchange, and consumption of writing and speech. Collectively, the dreams are threads woven into a fantasy of perfect transparency of meaning, the productions of a closed exchange that admitted no visitors, no new and strange sights. The house is illuminated by “the ghastliest and feeblest of rays,” and it is in the dark that Dupin does his best detective work. Epistemologically the most illuminating scene in “The Purloined Letter” is not the one in which Dupin spots the cleverly concealed letter, but the one in which light and sight are abandoned for ratiocination in the dark: “We had been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purposes of lighting a lamp, but sat down again … ‘If it is any point requiring reflection,’ observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the wick, ‘we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark’” (“PL,” p. 208). Seeing, even in the most familiar of environments, is inimical to the detective’s preferred method of ratiocination, as it is too closely aligned with the more hazardous route of making inferences from empirical observations. Yet it is not “The Purloined Letter,” which notoriously makes so much of the agency of words and power of letters, but “The Mystery of Marie Roget” that best exemplifies Poe’s impulse to distance his detective from situations where errors in inference are likely to occur. As we are informed in a footnote, the narrative was “composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded. Thus much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been upon the spot and visited the localities.” If Poe was at

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a distance from the scene of the crime and so could not have inspected it with his own eyes, Dupin is even further removed from it: the real mystery in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” is not the murder of the story’s titular character, but that of her real-life American counterpart, Mary Cecilia Rogers, and which took place not in Paris, Dupin’s nocturnal stomping ground, but “in the vicinity of New York,” where the Chevalier had never set foot. While Rogers’s death “occasioned an intense and long-enduring excitement,” Poe writes that nothing had come of the investigation and the “mystery … had remained unsolved at the period when the present paper was written and published (November, 1842)” (“MR,” p. 169). Rogers’s body was discovered floating in the Hudson on July 28, 1841.14 Poe vigilantly followed the press coverage of the investigation from Philadelphia, completed his story in June 1842, and published it in three installments, between November 1842 and February 1843, in The Ladies’ Companion. According to Dupin, Roget (and according to Poe, Rogers) was murdered by a jealous ex-lover. But in November 1842 new evidence surfaced to suggest that Rogers was not murdered after all but had died after an unsuccessful abortion performed at an inn, her body subsequently disposed of in the river and torn articles of her clothing planted in a nearby thicket by the innkeeper’s son in an attempt to divert suspicion. Poe did not know this when he had Dupin point to the ex-lover as the culprit, and the footnote, added when the story was republished in 1845 in Poe’s collected Tales, emphasizes that the story was written before the investigation was completed. With this addendum in place, the final version of “The Mystery of Marie Roget” is a rather curious piece of detective fiction – if fiction is what we should call it. Poe instructs us to read the narrative as a “paper” (subtitled “A Sequel to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’”), a text that only mimics the formal characteristics of the detective-story genre while in fact being something else – something more serious. Just as the fictional Marie Roget is a stand-in for the real Mary Rogers, the detective story is apparently only a simulacrum, or, in the jargon of today’s real-crime TV shows, a dramatization of events, in which the characters, including Dupin, are merely actors. The preemptive measure of placing Dupin on the other side of the Atlantic, far from the scene of the crime, entails the declaration of Dupin’s fictionality. The Dupin of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is just as much of an invention, just as much of a puppet or prop, as the Dupin of the sequel. This mimetic performance opens the door to metatextual criticism of the improbability of the genre’s epistemological claims and entails the sacrifice of the make-believe principle of literary realism: “Herein, under

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pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely paralleling the inessential, facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth; and the investigation of the truth was the object.” The events described follow the “facts” and are therefore “applicable to the truth,” yet they are also entirely fictional. Suspension of disbelief is forfeited for a noble cause: the discovery of truth about “the tragedy upon which the tale is based” (“MR,” p. 169), something for which no price is too great, not even that of admitting that Dupin is merely a marionette or ventriloquist’s dummy whose purpose is to channel Poe’s own ratiocinative performance. The actual protagonist is not the detective but the writer.15 Yet this strategy, whereby the curtain is drawn aside and the detective shown to be a mere prop, also enables Poe conveniently to position Dupin at a second remove from the scene of Mary Rogers’s murder (which, it turns out, was staged, fictitious): it is unfeasible to transport him from Paris to New York, and, more obviously, for a fictional character to investigate the scene of a real crime. Seated “in his accustomed arm-chair,” secluded from the sensuous world, Dupin solves the mystery by extracting the significant facts about the case from a mass of sensational and far-fetched journalistic speculations. The voyeuristic flâneur becomes a reader who sees everything he needs to see through the prism of words. That Dupin should need to have at his disposal “a copy of every paper in which, from first to last, had been published any decisive information in regard to this sad affair” (“MR,” p. 173) points to his distrust of other people’s observations and conjectures, as well as his reluctance to make his own observations. Instead of an observant private eye trained in (or naturally adept at) the art of reading visual clues, what we get is a critical newspaper reader who smugly draws attention to “the laughable confusion of thought” (“MR,” p. 186) and “deficiency of observation” (“MR,” p. 190) in others. His own observations have nothing to do with using his eyes. Dupin wears green spectacles that function like another two-way mirror; at one point the narrator peeks behind them to discover that Dupin had slept through the interview with the Police Prefect. But Dupin’s removal from the world of visual texts and crime scenes turns out to be counterproductive. When interrogating visual texts with one’s own eyes is abandoned for perusing verbal accounts of what other people have seen and inferred, detective work devolves into mere probabilistic speculation. Even if one “make[s] chance a matter of absolute calculation” (“MR,” p. 191), and if “chances are ten to one, that he who had once

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eloped with Marie would again propose an elopement, rather than that she to whom proposals of elopement had been made by one individual, should have them made to her by another” (“MR,” p. 193), one is finally forced to confess (as Poe does in the 1845 revision of the story or paper) that “the very Calculus of Probabilities … forbids all idea of the extension of the parallel” between the case of Mary Rogers and that of Marie Roget (i.e. between fact and fiction), and “forbids it with a positiveness strong and decided just in proportion as this parallel has already been long-drawn and exact.” The slightest of miscalculations is likely to produce “a result enormously at variance with truth” (“MR,” p. 207). The sacrifice, it seems, has been for naught. Marie Roget can never be Mary Rogers; a fictional detective cannot solve a real-life crime; neither ratiocination in the dark nor observation in daylight can bridge the gap dividing fact and fiction.16 An editorial comment (Poe’s, of course) at the end of the 1845 version of the text refers to it as “Mr. Poe’s article” (“MR,” p. 206), which suggests that the first-person narrative voice in the story is Poe’s. To further complicate matters, we are also told that the narrator of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was not some fictional character, as one might have thought, but again Poe; this text is now referenced as the first of two articles featuring Dupin. It would seem, then, that we have two Poes here, one who admits that the story is mere fiction (a “pretence,” as the footnote informs us, which should mean that Dupin too is a fictional creation), and another who demands that we treat the Chevalier on the same footing as his real-life chronicler and “friend” (“MR,” p. 170). Just as Dupin suffers from a kind of split personality disorder, going back and forth between scopophilia and scopophobia, so Poe vacillates between the narrator of a detective story who wants the reader to believe that the detective gets the facts straight and solves the mystery, and the writer of an article who, now aware that Rogers died after an unsuccessful abortion, dismisses the original hypothesis: “But let it not for a moment be supposed that … it is my covert design to hint at an extension of the parallel, or even to suggest that the measures adopted in Paris for the discovery of the assassin of a grisette, or measures founded in any similar ratiocination, would produce any similar results” (“MR,” p. 206). We may think of this bifurcation of the authorial voice as the effect of a dialogue that Poe conducts with himself in the Dupin stories, the subject matter of which is not the truth about any particular mystery, but the relative virtues of two methods of detection, one ratiocinative and deductive, the other inductive and proceeding from empirical observation. The reason why Poe cannot agree with himself is that he at once subscribes to the

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notion of a universal visual language – a code that makes visual signifiers universally legible because conceived in terms of a linguistic system – and recognizes in Dupin an inference-making observer who imputes meanings to perceived objects rather than discovers them there. Poe wants to have it both ways: to insist on the legitimacy of the parallel between Rogers and Roget for the sake of discovering the truth about the former’s murder, and to dismiss the comparison as wishful thinking on the part of a writer who thinks he can be a detective. Murder, and crime in general, is a regular feature of Poe’s fiction, and it might seem an odd oversight not to remark on how his crime-packed Gothic tales of mystery and the supernatural are linked to his detective stories – and how there are notable thematic and formal overlaps between detective and ghost fiction in the nineteenth century. My discussion of “The Man of the Crowd” – with its Gothic atmosphere, its central theme of haunting (metaphorically speaking), and its effect of putting the reader at dis-ease – is in part an implicit nod to the fact that some features characteristic of detective stories are not idiosyncratic to them. (The same goes for ghost stories, or stories of any genre). Yet it should be clear by now that I am not interested in a point-by-point comparison and contrast of ghost and detective fiction. The two genres in the nineteenth century pursued divergent paths in their problematization of the vision-knowledge nexus, and I am keeping them separate (for the time being) for the sake of convenience and emphasis. To recapitulate: whereas ghost stories are invested in examining the consequences of optical illusions, and the general unreliability of sight, on religious ideas about death and the afterlife, detective fiction is more concerned with the epistemological complications that inevitably arise when one considers the role of inferences and judgments in the movement from sensation to comprehension, from seeing to understanding and knowing. Yet Poe’s anxious effort to bridge the divide between fact and fiction in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” makes it difficult to avoid relating it to ghost stories, in so far as these stories insist, as many do, that they are “authentic” accounts rather than invented narratives. Poe’s convoluted strategy, involving metatextual footnotes and “editor’s” comments, suggests, paradoxically, that detective fiction faces a greater challenge than ghost fiction when it comes to producing a reality-effect. When ghost-story narrators declare that their stories are true, what they generally mean is that the events reported in them actually happened – but not necessarily that a ghost happened. In part because of the ambivalence they express regarding the trustworthiness of sight, and in part because of their formulaic aesthetic of ambiguity, such stories do not positively assert that such and such a person

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truly did see a ghost. (Stories that settle this central problem in one way or another do not fit my parameters of the genre – or perhaps “cease” to be ghost stories once they provide a conclusive answer to the question of the ghost’s real existence.) By contrast, Poe admits that “The Mystery of Marie Roget” is fiction, yet insists that fiction has applicability to reality:  one can solve real-world crime mysteries in works of literature. Poe’s story is exceptional in that its inspiration, and the object of the detective’s investigation, is a crime that actually occurred (although we should hesitate to call a botched-up abortion a crime). But the premise implicit in detective fiction generally is that the methods employed by the literary detective are wholly in keeping with reality. The elaborate final explanation of how the detective cracked the case, or seemingly “read the mind” of some person, is there to convince readers that the method is psychologically sound: rational and logical to the extreme and (in theory) accessible to anyone with sufficient mental discipline and skills in observation. The problem for detective fiction, as a species of literary realism, is that it cannot rid itself of the sleight-of-hand illusionism that comes with the realist territory. “The classic realist text,” Catherine Belsey argues in regard to Doyle’s detective stories, “installs itself in the space between fact and illusion through the presentation of a simulated reality which is plausible but not real. In this lies its power as myth.”17 While it is problematic to claim, as many critics have done, that Poe single-handedly invented the detective story,18 he can more assuredly be credited with being the first to make an elaborate effort to bypass the genre’s­illusionism by extending fiction into reality – or reality into fiction. That he did not succeed in solving the mystery of Mary Rogers does not prove that all such attempts are doomed to fail, but it does suggest that what works very well in fiction may not work at all in the real world. Paul de Man could have cited Poe as the exemplary case of how “the reconciliation of fact and fiction occurs itself as a mere assertion made in a text, and is thus productive of more text at the moment when it asserts its decision to escape from textual confinement.”19

Chapter 7

Stains, smears, and visual language in The Moonstone

In an 1864 article entitled “Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life,” James Fitzjames Stephen, one of the preeminent Victorian authorities on English criminal law, observes that, since the time Poe jump-started the genre in the 1840s, detective fiction had become “a well-tried, serviceable, common form which has sold a considerable number of popular novels, and which, in the natural course of things, may be expected to sell several more.”1 That quantity, however, is no indicator of quality is clear when it comes to detective fiction’s improbable epistemological claims: All these stories are open to the same criticism. Those that hide can find. The person who invented the riddle and knows the explanation is of course able to pretend to discover it by almost any steps, or by what really amount to no steps at all, and thus he can easily convey the impression of the exercise of any amount of sagacity on the part of the person who is supposed to make the discovery. In real life, and especially in the real life of policemen, such discoveries are hardly ever made; and if any one takes the trouble of comparing the actual experience of courts of law with the fictions of novelists as to the extraordinary genius displayed by the detective police, they will find that hardly anything that can be fairly described as remarkable or even peculiar ability is ever shown by the police in finding out a crime.2

If detective stories are “all framed upon the same model,” this is principally because they all “involve the same fallacy,” a disingenuous sleight of hand that condemns them “to the same criticism.”3 It is not, then, what detective stories manage to achieve, but, negatively, what they habitually fail to accomplish – to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about “the real life of policemen”4 – that provides them with their most salient generic feature. Stephen finds writers more guilty for the genre’s popularity than the legions of gullible readers who pay to be entertained by gross deformations of reality:  “[T]his detective-worship appears one of the silliest superstitions that ever were concocted by ingenious writers.”5 Although readers 108

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should not be pardoned for their blind credulity and poor literary taste, it is the disingenuous and manipulative writers who coax them into identifying fictional detectives with their far less glamorous and successful reallife counterparts. For Stephen the quintessence of such manipulation and misrepresentation is the generic, predictable scene in which the detective correctly interprets some pivotal clue simply by visually scrutinizing it. To emphasize just how far removed such a scene is from criminalistic and legal reality, Stephen refers the reader to a more obviously improbable yet comparable scenario: [T]he old Eastern fable about the man who, by observing the grass, the flies and bees, the footmarks and the twigs, along a track over the desert, was enabled to inform those whom it concerned that they had lost a camel of such and such a height and colour, laden with honey on one side and spice on the other, lame of such a foot, and forming part of such a caravan.6

Such scenes, according to Stephen, have no place in the kind of literature whose mission ought to be faithfully to represent the procedures by which clues are discovered, facts ascertained, and criminals brought to justice in the real world. “The sphere of ingenuity,” of astonishing clue readings such as the fabulous and fable-like example cited above, is actually nothing more than the sphere of “making guesses, and the whole object of English courts of law and rules of evidence is to exclude guesswork.”7 Given Stephen’s contempt for fantasy masquerading as realism, and his professional intolerance for misrepresentations of police work and the legal process, it is likely that he would have appreciated the scene in Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) in which the amicable Sergeant Cuff unabashedly confesses to Franklin Blake: “I completely mistook my case … I own that I made a mess of it. Not the first mess, Mr Blake, which has distinguished my professional career! It’s only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake” (M, p. 491). Cuff’s frank admission supports Stephen’s objection that detectives “make brilliant discoveries in novels, but in real life next to nothing is due to their sagacity,”8 and is the capstone self-reflexive moment in a detective novel that throughout pokes fun at fictional detectives  – most hilariously by infecting several of its characters with “detective-fever” (M, p. 228), a delusional state of mind in which one believes oneself to be more competent in reading clues than a professional investigator.9 The novel that T. S. Eliot regarded as “the first and greatest of English detective novels”10 is also the first, and perhaps still the greatest, parody of the genre.11 But a good parody is also a form of respectful homage and is never very far from what it

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attempts to ridicule. The parodic blueprint for a ghost story in “The Latest Thing in Ghosts” hits the mark so adroitly because it is a ghost story, albeit a tongue-in-cheek one. A parody of a detective novel must ­follow the ­protocols of the genre: it must succeed as detective fiction if it is to critique the genre from within. For although Collins effectively dismantles the genre’s ocularcentric fantasy of transparent meaning by underscoring the uncertainty of observations and inferences – so that the reader must finally concur with Blake that “one interpretation is just as likely to be right as the other” (M, p. 76) – he counteracts this move with scenes of seeing and reading where the fantasy is repeatedly, if subtly, reified. Cuff, who has apparently read enough detective fiction to be familiar with the genre’s conventions, regards himself as antithetical to the detective whose “ultimate object is only the truth” (“RM,” p. 159). He looks forward to retiring from his profession and dedicating himself to horticultural pursuits: “One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses” (M, p. 134). His chief accomplishment in The Moonstone is not solving the mystery of the diamond’s theft, but “grow[ing] the white moss rose, without budding it on the dog-rose first” (M, p. 348), a challenge he considers more formidable and rewarding than anything his vocation can offer. The physical evidence of a rose, which proves a horticultural theory, brilliantly parodies the formulaic scene in which a criminal’s confession corroborates the detective’s stunning feat of reasoning. In a more conspicuous violation of genre conventions, Cuff is more successful at his job when he relies on intuition and guess-work than when he trusts to empirical observation or ratiocination. Speculating on who might have murdered Godfrey Ablewhite, the Moonstone’s thief, Cuff reasons: “There is here, moral, if not legal, evidence, that the murder was committed by the Indians … The whole evidence points to the inference that more than one man was concerned in this crime – and the circumstances, I repeat, morally justify the conclusion that the Indians committed it” (M, pp. 505–6). Collins turns Cuff into a spokesperson for the admissibility of circumstantial evidence, a controversial topic among Victorian legal experts who sought to differentiate between unfounded and reasonable speculation. For Stephen, who insisted on the incompatibility of guess-work with “the whole object of English courts of law and rules of evidence,” circumstantial evidence is more admissible in a murder trial than on other occasions. As Alexander Welsh explains, one reason for this preference has to do with the evidential crisis in natural religion: “The essential failure of natural religion to deliver the promised circumstantial proof of

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a future life is a disappointment that, historically, was never overcome. This inherent disappointment provokes the thought that at least those who intentionally cause death can be sought out and punished.” It is the perceived “providential soundness of circumstantial evidence,” specifically in a murder case, that legitimizes Cuff’s shaky inference where hard evidence is lacking.12 Yet what makes The Moonstone, with its acknowledgment of the gap between positive and circumstantial or “moral” evidence,13 an example of the kind of detective fiction Stephen would like to see written, is precisely what highlights its orientation as a parodic anti-detective novel: the detective is not supposed to guess but to know the truth beyond a shadow of doubt. The theft of the gem is accordingly a parody of yet another of the genre’s obligatory tropes: motivated, premeditated crime. The diamond is removed (not stolen) from its hiding place by a person who has no recollection of the act, the somnambulistic Blake, and who is motivated to do so by his desire to protect the Moonstone’s new owner, Rachel Verinder, from being violated by an actual criminal. Blake’s discovery of the culprit’s identity comes to him as a horrible shock: “I had discovered Myself as the Thief ” (M, p. 359). In a further twist to this story of detection gone awry, we learn that Blake’s discovery is actually a mistake: the real criminal turns out to be the murder victim. Nowhere is it more evident that The Moonstone mounts a parodic critique of detective fiction’s epistemological claims and ocularcentric fantasies than in its two crucial scenes of clue reading, or rather misreading: Cuff’s speculations on the origin and significance of the enigmatic smear on Rachel Verinder’s freshly painted bedroom door, and Rachel’s interpretation of what she sees on the night of the Moonstone’s disappearance. Preparatory to these two scenes of readerly spectatorship, and foreshadowing the importance that smears and stains will have later on, is the one in which Betteredge, Lady Verinder’s steward, comes across a weeping Rosanna Spearman, the Verinders’ housemaid, at the edge of The Shivering Sand: “Now, tell me, my dear,” I said, “what are you crying about?” “About the years that are gone, Mr Betteredge,” says Rosanna quietly. “My past life still comes back to me sometimes.” “Come, come, my girl,” I said, “your past life is all sponged out. Why can’t you forget it?” She took me by one of the lappets of my coat … The day before, Rosanna had taken out a spot for me on the lappet of my coat, with a new composition, warranted to remove anything. The grease was gone, but there was a little dull place

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left on the nap of the cloth where the grease had been. The girl pointed to that place, and shook her head. “The stain is taken off,” she said. “But the place shows, Mr Betteredge – the place shows!” A remark which takes a man unawares by means of his own coat is not an easy remark to answer. (M, pp. 56–7)

The stain which cannot be removed, or which once removed continues to be visible – so much so that it later wrongly condemns Rosanna in Cuff’s eyes – is a metaphor for that condition of transparency in which private histories, those of a criminal or wayward nature in particular, are always in plain sight. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Rosanna is a marked woman. But while the meaning of Hester’s scarlet letter is known only to those who belong to her community (the A stitched on her dress signifies adulteress not universally but locally, although in Hester’s case the local is all that matters), Rosanna’s fatal character stain is closer to a character in Berkeley’s “universal language of the Author of Nature,”14 as it appears to rule out the possibility of faulty inference. In contrast to Mill’s assertion that perception “is usually a compound result, of which onetenth may be observation, and the remaining nine-tenths inference” (SL viii, p. 642), the transparent meaning of Rosanna’s stain reverses this ratio to make the role of inference negligible. For her, the stain is emblematic of a world of indelible, unequivocal marks: whoever sees it, she believes, “collect[s] its meaning by the sight alone” (PIS i, p. 38). The stain’s fixed, universal semantic value (no matter where she goes or what she does to atone for her past, the stain will always speak against her) is a function of the simultaneous assertion and negation of its linguistic nature. If its message must be translated into words in order to be read – whereby it enters a system in which its meaning is conditioned by subjective interpretations and communal negotiations – the stain seems to transcend the realm of subjective inferences by virtue of always telling one and the same story. It reveals, “even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (“MC,” p. 478). The curse of transparency, coupled with being wrongfully accused of the Moonstone’s theft on account of her criminal record, drives her to suicide. As she tells Betteredge at The Shivering Sand, “sometimes, Mr Betteredge, I think that my grave is waiting for me here” (M, p. 58). Yet this is a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than the consummation of a providentially ordained sequence of events,15 and the premise of universal legibility leads not to a semiotic utopia but to a tragedy which could have been avoided. First of all, the stain is visible only to those who know it is there: Betteredge does not see what he does not know about. Second, its

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meaning is far from unambiguous: it is not the kind of stain left behind, say, by a blood-soaked hand or mud-covered shoe (and from which one can safely deduce a physical presence), but a figurative character stain. To call it a stain, as Rosanna and Betteredge do independently of each other, is to code the mark in a particular way, to impose on it a moral language channeling the interpretation of the mark toward suspicion and condemnation. Lastly, the stain’s message concerning Rosanna’s past cannot be read into the present or future. Rosanna is not who Cuff thinks she is because she is no longer the same person – no longer the Rosanna whose behavior had once stained her. The short cut between seeing and knowing turns out to be a wrong turn and, in the case of the paint smear on Rachel Verinder’s bedroom door, a dead end. According to Betteredge, who reports on Cuff’s efforts to interrogate it as if it were a suspect capable of uttering a confession, the smear intimates its possible meanings only through negations and absences. The Sergeant’s next proceeding was to question me about any large dogs in the house who might have got into the room, and done the mischief with a whisk of their tails. Hearing that this was impossible, he next sent for a magnifying-glass, and tried how the smear looked, seen that way. No skin-mark (as of a human hand) printed off on the paint. All the signs visible – signs which told that the paint had been smeared by some loose article of somebody’s dress touching it in going by. That somebody (putting together Penelope’s evidence and Mr Franklin’s evidence) must have been in the room, and done the mischief, between midnight and three o’clock on the Thursday morning. (M, p. 141)

The absence of canine hairs, the absence of human fingerprints: the smear’s negative declarations end there, but there appears to be no end to what it may refuse to tell if further interrogated. Almost entirely vacant of positive content, the smear is very close to being no signifier at all – not a freefloating signifier whose meaning is contingent and variable, but one that, while proclaiming its significance as a decisive clue, places its meaning under erasure. Cuff works around this obstacle by inferring the presence of “some loose article of somebody’s dress” from the absence of traces left by canine tails and human hands. “Whenever an Inference is in agreement with the positive data of Sense,” Lewes declares, “whenever the Invisible is only an extension of the Visible, we pronounce it rationally certain” (PLM i, p. 240). Yet what “the signs visible” in this case offer in terms of positive sense data does not warrant the extension of the visible into the invisible. While Cuff’s inference turns out to be true (the sleepwalking Blake had accidentally smeared the freshly painted door with his nightgown), it is not correct: he overlooks the fact that the smear could have been produced

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by other means. To function as a clue, the smear must be coaxed into uttering something, anything at all, even if this utterance leaves much unsaid. But the forcible insertion of the smear into the world of words is precisely the moment when its interpreter begins making subjective inferences and the notion of transparent meaning shows itself to be a fantasy propped up by grandiose epistemological claims. At times, such as when Rachel watches Blake take the diamond, what seems to be absolutely certain proves to be absolutely wrong. “There are three glasses in my sitting-room,” Rachel tells Blake when he confronts her later, and when we learn what she had seen that night. “As you stood there, I saw all that you did, reflected in one of them” (M, p. 397). Rachel’s sitting room has the appearance of a hall of mirrors, a kind of domestic version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.16 But what Rachel does not see, because it cannot be reflected in any mirror, is that this sexually charged violation of her privacy,17 as well as Blake’s incursion against the law which guarantees the inviolability of private property, is motivated by his desire to protect both owner and property from actual violation. Language is the real culprit in this scene of watching and being watched, even though not a single word is spoken by either Rachel or Blake. To see something, Collins suggests, is already to put this something into words, to inscribe an object or action into the matrix of language and give it meaning. At least for Rachel (whose opinion is the only one that matters to Blake), the word thief, and all that this designation implies about his character, is as plainly inscribed on Blake’s body as Rosanna thinks her history is imprinted on hers. Apologies and declarations of innocence cannot change her mind. All that Blake can offer in his defense are words – and his word as a gentleman. But the word of a gentleman is heard as the word of a criminal inventing an alibi: Would a man hesitate at a lie, who had done what I saw you do – who had behaved about it afterwards, as I saw you behave? I tell you again, I shrank from the horror of hearing you lie, after the horror of seeing you thieve. You talk as if this was a misunderstanding which a few words might have set right! … You stole it – I saw you! You affected to help the police – I saw you! You pledged the Diamond to the money-lender in London – I am sure of it! (M, p. 402)

It is futile for Blake to insist that both of them are victims “of some monstrous delusion which has worn the mask of truth” (M, p. 394). As the lawyer Bruff explains to him, Rachel cannot be blamed “for believing you to be guilty, on the evidence of her own senses” (M, p. 405). What Rachel saw, then, was Blake take the Diamond, not steal it, yet one can hardly

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reproach her for the mistake since one act is in appearance identical to the other. Like stains and smears, gestures mean nothing except what the observer makes them mean. As Whewell warns, “the conjectured meaning, on the one hand, and the observed marks on the other, [are] distinct things, though these two things … [are] united as elements of one act of knowledge when we … hit upon the right conjecture.” The distinction between marks and meanings is more imperceptible when we know (or think we know) what we are looking at. In the case of a text written in a familiar language, for instance, “we should be unconscious of any mental act in reading it. We should seem to collect its meaning by the sight alone. But if we had to decipher an ancient inscription, of which only imperfect marks remained, with a few entire letters among them, we should probably make several suppositions as to the mode of reading it, before we found any mode which was quite successful” (PIS i, p. 38). In Rachel’s case the conjecture is automatic. She instantly concludes that she is watching a thief at work because she is convinced that the text in front of her eyes and the language in which it is written are familiar. This is exactly how thieves do what they do: they work at night; they lie; they pretend to offer help to the police to ward off suspicion. Collins enforces the idea that seeing is always immersed in languagebased inferences by introducing a second, hidden watcher, whereby it becomes clear that the same scene, perceived from a different angle and by someone else, tells a different story. Watching Rachel as she watches Blake, Ablewhite knows precisely what Rachel is thinking. “In that position,” Cuff later explains to Blake, “he not only detected you in taking the Diamond out of the drawer – he also detected Miss Verinder, silently watching you from her bedroom, through her open door. His own eyes satisfied him that she saw you take the Diamond, too” (M, p. 510). Ablewhite, to whom Blake entrusts the diamond for safekeeping, knows not only that Rachel has seen Blake but that she could not have seen him without making an inference regarding the meaning of what she observed. Not only is seeing like reading, but there can be no seeing without reading, no transformation of raw sense data into knowledge, without the intervention of language  – a mediation that is simultaneously an obstacle in the detection of plain meaning and the prerequisite for the detection of anything at all. Of course, Ablewhite could have read something in Rachel’s face that was not really there. He did not, however: one of those felicitous moments when the interpreter “hit[s] upon the right conjecture.” Ironically, it is the criminal master-mind, not the professional detective, who comes closest to being an expert clue reader.

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Observation can result in a “monstrous delusion.” Yet The Moonstone alleviates this anxiety in several ways, most directly by repeatedly reminding us that the Moonstone is a foreign object, and that the monstrous misreadings would not have occurred had the “quiet English house” not been “suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond” (M, p. 67).18 Betteredge describes the devilish Moonstone as an object of irresistible fascination. Its unwholesome power of captivating the gaze is comparable to that which attracts Poe’s flâneur to the inscrutable Man of the Crowd: When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. (M, p. 97)

The diamond’s eerie, unearthly gleam is a reflection of its defiance of the laws of physics (it not only reflects light, but also produces a light of its own, “out of the depths of its own brightness”), as well as a reflection of its disregard for the ocularcentric premise that anything can be fathomed, made meaningful, if one looks long and hard enough. “I am half inclined to think,” Betteredge remarks, “that the cursed Diamond must have cast a blight on the whole company” (M, p. 101), a blight that increasingly figures in the novel as a semiotic curse. Cuff is convinced that “to solve the mystery of the smear on the door … means [to solve] the mystery of the Diamond” (M, p. 150).19 Collins goes further than this to suggest that the unreadable smear would not have materialized on Rachel’s door had a foreign object not disturbed the order of the English household. The Moonstone is the kind of object that belongs neither in England nor in a genre in which clues are readable by virtue of being visible.20 Less conspicuous than scapegoating a foreign object by imagining it to be the host of a spreading semiotic disease, yet more efficacious in alleviating epistemological anxiety, is the novel’s commitment to the readability of faces, which are typically less important for the information they reveal than for being legible and unambiguous texts. John Herncastle, the gem’s original thief, is described by Betteredge as having “a face, handsome as it was, that looked possessed by the devil” (M, p. 64). “Mr Bruff’s distrust,” Ezra Jennings remarks, “looked at me plainly enough out of Mr Bruff’s eyes” (M, p. 465). “There was no mistaking the expression on her face,” Blake informs us about Rachel. “I inspired her with the strongest emotions of abhorrence and disgust” (M, p. 353). Statements such as “I saw his thought in his face” (M, p. 196) and “One look at her face told me that I

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could trust her” (M, p. 472) are scattered throughout The Moonstone. The speaker in the first instance is Betteredge and the face belongs to Cuff; the second quote refers to what Ezra Jennings reads in Rachel’s face on the night of the experiment which, recreating the scene of the crime, exonerates Blake. But the identities of the observers and the observed are less significant than the impression Collins gives us that these words could have been spoken by and about any character in the novel. Even Jennings, “the most remarkable-looking man that [Blake] had ever seen” (M, p. 370), and whose eyes (not unlike the Indian diamond) “took your attention captive at their will” (M, p. 371), while embodying that amalgam of Indian and English identities that ontologically links him to the unfathomable Moonstone, has a face like an open book. “Look at my face,” he invites Blake, “and let it tell for me the story of some miserable years” (M, p. 429).21 One notable exception is the two-faced Ablewhite, who masks both his identity and later, literally, his face. But while Ablewhite complicates the assumption that faces always speak the truth, he also functions as another scapegoat. His morally reprehensible act of hiding his true nature  – ­pretending to be someone he is not, or rather pretending that he is only one person, whereas there are two Ablewhites, private and public – is in accord with his criminal nature: it is to be expected that someone who would want to hide his real face should turn out to be a criminal. As Collins knew, whatever is purportedly evident in facial expressions would hardly be admissible as evidence in a court of law. Indeed, his ingenuity lies in never taking this evidence to court: the novel throughout insists on the separation of legal and moral evidence. But we are left in a predicament similar to the one we were in in “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Like Poe’s story, Collins’s novel is a dialectical text. It both demonstrates the impossibility of detective fiction living up to the high standards demanded by critics such as Stephen, and also perpetrates the epistemological sleights of hand it ostensibly rejects. One way to defuse this tension is to not take oneself too seriously and adopt a parodic, tongue-in-cheek attitude. But the problem with parody is that it is a form of homage, an affirmation couched in derision. The novel perpetrates, as it were, a series of semiotic misdemeanors that bring its characters and readers into a community bound by interpretive solidarity – a community of observers inoculated against the semiotic blight and insensitive to the idea that “[t]he world is to each man as it affects him; to each a different world” (PLM i, p. 185). Just as Jennings never stops to consider why one look at Rachel’s face unequivocally tells him that he can trust her, Collins presumes that his readers will accept statements of this variety at face value. If

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The Moonstone, then, is in many ways an anti-detective novel that exposes the flaws in the genre’s fantasy of transparency, it is also nonetheless a text that restricts the subversive parodic element to certain sites that can operate as anomalies (the unreadable smear, Blake’s sleepwalking episode, the unfathomable gem, the Janus-faced Ablewhite) rather than invalidate the rule of transparency.

Chapter 8

Semiotics v. encyclopedism: the case of Sherlock Holmes

“Nature is the Book,” Whewell writes, “and Man is the Interpreter. The facts of the external world are marks, in which man discovers a meaning, and so reads them” (PIS i, p. 37). Interpretation is the foundation of the inductive sciences, and interpretive work, such as the discovery of natural laws, is essentially a reading exercise: “To trace order and law in that which has been observed, may be considered as interpreting what nature has written down for us, and will commonly prove that we understand her alphabet,” which is to say “the meaning and structure of her language” (PIS ii, pp. 64–5). While Whewell identifies the constitutive elements of the general inductive method, at the core of every individual act of discovery there is something irreducible to a formula or set of rules: “For an Art of Discovery is not possible. At each step of the progress of science, are needed invention, sagacity, genius; – elements which no Art can give” (PIS i, p. viii). The inductive method can be taught, but “that peculiar Sagacity which belongs to the genius of a Discoverer … cannot be limited by rules, or expressed in definitions” (PIS ii, p. 40). Successful colligations of facts are more methodologically principled and structured than guesses, but they are also inspired leaps of the scientific imagination, “felicitous and inexplicable strokes of inventive talent” (PIS ii, p. 41). The conviction that a science of interpretation is possible, contrary to Whewell’s belief, emerges with early forays into modern semiology toward the end of the century. In “Sense, Meaning and Interpretation,” an article published in Mind in 1896, the English philosopher and pioneer of modern semiotics, Victoria Welby, expresses her frustration with the lack of attention psychologists had paid to interpretation as a mental faculty: “its genesis, its processes, and its developments” (“SMI,” p. 186) are a terra incognita.1 Welby admits that she cannot offer a comprehensive theory of interpretation or, for that matter, propose a working definition, in part because she is venturing into “virtually new and untrodden ground” (“SMI,” p. 201), and in part because definitions are not what is needed in 119

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this case: “There is perhaps no greater snare … than the easy and obvious one of definition. Define, define, we cry, and then all will be easy” (“SMI,” p. 194). Rather than formulate premature definitions, she poses questions that demand urgent consideration: Where does it [i.e. interpretation] begin in the ascending scale of life? How does it do its work? What are the stages of its advance? How is it related on the one hand to Attention, Perception, Memory, Imitation, Judgment, Inference, Conception, and on the other to the physiological phenomena of response to excitation? Again, to what does the process properly apply? How far is the term metaphorical and therefore only partially applicable? What is it that needs, or bears, or demands interpretation? Is it primarily simple sensation, rising to that highly complex experience, the hearing of articulately “significant” speech? Or is it from the first the “meaning” of this sensation – the “meaning” of the first touch which to the Protozoon was the signal of “food” or “danger,” to the “meaning” of the most abstract of propositions? (“SMI,” p. 186)

Evolutionary biology may provide some answers. Welby speculates that there exists a “deep and primordial impulse to ‘sensify’ – to touch with ‘meaning’ – every stimulus, excitation, imitation, impression, sensation, perception, idea, till we reach conception, which may be identical with the ‘result of interpretation,’ and is often identified with ‘meaning’” (“SMI,” p. 187). The impulse to “sensify,” to generate meaning, is possibly innate and instinctual, not only in humans but in all living creatures.2 Even a unicellular protozoon may on some rudimentary level be capable of interpreting basic signals (e.g. by reacting to its environment) and producing some form of meaning.3 Welby is less concerned with tracing “this supremely important mental activity” back to its prehistoric point of origin than with underscoring the dangers of “[t]he habit of ‘attaching’ meanings” (“SMI,” p. 187). While “the sensifying instinct” (“SMI,” p. 188) is arguably possessed by even the simplest living organism, in humans it uniquely manifests itself in the fallacious conception of meaning as something that objectively exists in the phenomenal world, whereas it is in fact always ascribed to objects and experiences through conscious or unconscious acts of interpretation. Welby maintains that the still widespread misconception of how meaning comes about, how it is generated rather than detected, can be dispelled by developing a new kind of science – which she alternately terms sensifics and significs – which would examine the psycho-physiological processes and semiotic operations by which sense data is transformed into meaning. The new science would have considerable practical benefits, namely “an appreciable diminution of mutual misunderstanding and controversy,

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together with a still greater increase of power to express and power to distinguish, to discriminate, to combine, to co-ordinate the wealth of experience” (“SMI,” p. 198). The best way to commence this ambitious project, Welby believes, is to reform the current study and use of language. Psychologists, philosophers, and linguists must first of all recognize “the need for new phrases and words,” and “rebuke the strange hopelessness, apathy and contented bondage to the outgrown and the outworn which keeps the development of adaptive expression so far behind that of invention and discovery and thus behind experience” (“SMI,” p. 191). Concomitantly, they must once and for all abandon the futile quest for “an ideal language.” “It is surely time that the fetish of a possible Plain Meaning, the same at all times and places and to all, were thoroughly exposed” (“SMI,” p. 192). The fetish feeds off the false assumption that language is fixed and stable – or that it ought to be made so by enforcing inflexible rules of grammar and syntax: By what right do we assume that Language is the one petrified, ossified, nonevolving function of humanity, doomed eternally to remain either clumsy and rude, misleading, confusing, incongruous, inconsistent, or else narrowed and crushed into a mere mechanical notion like that of arithmetic? As well say that we must for ever be condemned in the matter of musical instruments to the alternative of a primitive bagpipe or horn and an elaborate barrel-organ. (“SMI,” pp. 196–7)

The study of language demands a conceptual paradigm shift; “an organic rather than a mechanical analogy” (“SMI,” p. 197), a Darwinian, evolutionary approach that encourages development and adaptation: “Incessant variation … is indeed as vitally necessary in the world of expression as in the world of life” (“SMI,” p. 196). Once a dynamic, evolutionary model is adopted by students of significs (Welby settles for this term over sensifics), it will become more evident that “a fixed meaning, the same for all, unaffected by context of any kind, applies only, if at all, to a small proportion of ordinary words” (“SMI,” p. 194). But the effort to get rid of the fetish of Plain Meaning exposes Welby’s own fetishization of speech and writing: all meaning culminates in words, or must be translated into words to become truly meaningful. What begins as an exhortation to investigate key psychological and epistemological concepts such as sense, meaning, and interpretation in the broadest terms – to consider “Sense in the meaning sense” before delving into the particulars of various forms of signification – quickly develops into an argument about sense in the linguistic sense alone. The “‘sensifying’ process” (“SMI,” p. 189) is for Welby not only best illustrated by the example of linguistic expression, but is

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a process that reaches the apex of its evolutionary development in “that highly complex experience, the hearing of articulately ‘significant’ speech” (“SMI,” p. 186). The epistemology of nineteenth-century detective fiction relies on the same strategy: the languification of all meaningful content. One outcome of this reduction is that there is no such thing as a clue outside the realm of language, for its existence as clue is a function of its textuality, a product of the detection of the text in the perceived object. The primal scene of the work of detection is the detection of the presence of language, nor does this language manage to retain for very long some pre- or extra-verbal form. However, as we have seen in Poe and Collins, detective fiction also posits a boundary between the contingencies of word-bound subjective interpretation and the certainties of a universal visual language where meanings are self-evident, inferences under life-time warranty, and clues unambiguous in regard to the messages they convey. The fetish of plain meaning in detective fiction thus depends on a double movement: the languification of the visual signifier and the elevation of visual clues into a category of fixed meaning where they safely hover above the pitfalls of subjective inferences. Given Holmes’s “passion for definite and exact knowledge” (SS, p. 6) one would expect him to be an enthusiastic proponent of something like significs. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), where he makes his debut, he remarks to Watson: Criminal cases are continually hinging upon that one point. A man is suspected of a crime months perhaps after it has been committed. His linen or clothes are examined and brownish stains discovered upon them. Are they blood stains, or mud stains, or rust stains, or fruit stains, or what are they? That is a question which has puzzled many an expert, and why? Because there was no reliable test. Now we have the Sherlock Holmes’s test, and there will no longer be any difficulty. (SS, pp. 7–8)

The “Sherlock Holmes’s test” provides the kind of “appreciable diminution of mutual misunderstanding and controversy” (“SMI,” p. 198) that significs offers and that would, in this case, convict the guilty and exonerate the blameless: “Had this test been invented, there are hundreds of men now walking the earth who would long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes” (SS, p. 7). But otherwise than in Welby’s organic model, where expressions constantly evolve to keep up with new experiences, a stain in Holmes’s world is not a shifting or evolving signifier  – or not for long. Once Holmes’s test is applied, all semantic variations cease and the nature of the stain is determined once and for all. Holmes, then, is the antithesis

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of the ideal student of significs. His scientific method offers a mechanistic, rule-bound counterpoint to an organic, dynamic model of thought and language, and reifies the fetish of plain meaning. Yet to determine that a stain is caused by blood, say, rather than mud, rust, or fruit, is to ascertain its chemical composition rather than its meaning. To interpret it correctly – to elicit from it the information necessary to make headway in a criminal case – one must be in possession of prior information: Holmes is always reaching for encyclopedias, referring to monographs on obscure subjects, consulting his inexhaustible index. If seeing for Holmes means instantaneous knowing, this is because he makes sure (and Doyle makes sure to remind his readers) that in the work of detection knowing comes before seeing. “Now and again,” Holmes admits to Watson, echoing Dupin’s lament about being forced into observation, “a case turns up which is a little more complex. Then I have to bustle about and see things with my own eyes.” That seeing things with his own eyes will invariably result in seeing what others have missed is guaranteed by the detective’s vast encyclopedic knowledge and skills in storing and retrieving information. “You see,” he confides to Watson, “I have a lot of special knowledge which I apply to the problem, and which facilitates matters wonderfully” (SS, p. 16). Holmes “can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand either of cigar or of tobacco” (SS, p. 28) because he has made it his “business to know things” (“CI,” p. 254). In this business, training is supremely important. “To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato,” as anyone who has read Holmes’s definitive monograph “Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos” would know (SF, p. 110). “I have trained myself to see what others overlook” (“CI,” p. 254), Holmes remarks to one of his clients. It is important not to overlook the point that it is not sight but the seer that Holmes has subjected to rigorous training: his stunning feats of deductive reasoning would be impossible without highly developed skills of data storage and retrieval. The critical distinction between observing and seeing that Holmes repeatedly points out to Watson – “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear”; “You have not observed. And yet you have seen … I have both seen and observed” (“SB,” p. 211) – is thus not a matter of looking carefully or carelessly, but looking with or without knowing what to look for and what one is looking at. Michel Foucault has described more eloquently than anyone “the discovery of a new imaginative space in the nineteenth century”4 in libraries

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and archives. The fantastic, visionary imagination in the nineteenth century, Foucault tells us, was increasingly populated by books rather than ghosts: This domain of phantasms is no longer the night, the sleep of reason, or the uncertain void that stands before desire, but, on the contrary, wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition, and constant vigilance. Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds. The imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp. The fantastic is no longer a property of the heart, nor is it found among the incongruities of nature; it evolves from the accuracy of knowledge, and its treasures lie dormant in documents.5

Himself a lover of archives, Foucault understates the supernatural dimension of the fantastic in the nineteenth century, which I think is not incompatible with “the visionary experience [that] arises from the black and white surface of printed signs.” He is nonetheless right to underscore the bibliophiliac impulse and the rise of a new archival consciousness in this period. Otherwise than in the Dupin stories, where the faintly illuminated library is a sanctuary from the sensuous world, Holmes’s library is a space in which the strange and new becomes thoroughly familiar before it is encountered in the outside world, transformed via the agency of written texts into a comforting a priori intimacy. “There are, of course, details to be filled in,” Holmes explains on one occasion, “but I am as certain of all the main facts … as if I had seen them with my own eyes” (SS, p. 50). The nightmarish semiotic landscape of The Moonstone, where professional and dilettantish investigators only occasionally hit upon the right conjecture and where one is constantly in peril of encountering a vacant, self-effacing signifier, is transfigured in the Holmes stories into a semiotic dreamland, a fantasy about exhaustive encyclopedic knowledge and boundless archival resources which vouch that no clue will be overlooked or misinterpreted. Possibly wary of pushing against the limits of the reader’s credulity, Doyle makes this archival dreamland compatible with a spatially constricted mental topography. In the opening pages of A Study in Scarlet, Holmes famously explains to Watson that, while there is no limit to what one can learn, there is certainly a limit to what one can remember: I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him

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gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that the little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. (SS, pp. 11–12)6

Holmes reiterates this point elsewhere, accentuating the symbiosis of memory and archival know-how, and downplaying the role of empirical observation: Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilize all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. (“FO,” p. 300)

Work in the study paves the way for (and in some cases makes unnecessary) hands-on field work. Acquisition of all knowledge being impossible, however, Holmes proposes a more believable scenario: It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do … I say now, as I have said then, that a man should keep his little brainattic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. (“FO,” p. 300)

The storage capacity of the detective’s “brain-attic” is limited in ways that “the lumber-room of his library” is not – especially if this library is conceived not just in terms of the books one owns but also the books one can buy or borrow. Careful about which books he keeps at home as much as what he keeps in his head, Holmes often only has to point to his bookshelf. “Kindly hand me down the letter K of the American Encyclopaedia which stands upon the shelf beside you” (“FO,” p. 300), he instructs Watson, as if giving an order to his private librarian. Information unavailable in bookshops or archives and libraries is accessible in Holmes’s records: “For many years he had adopted a system of docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information.” When Watson looks up Irene Adler in Holmes’s index, he finds “her biography sandwiched in between

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that of a Hebrew rabbi and that of a staff-commander who had written a monograph upon the deep-sea fishes” (“SB,” p. 215). Holmes’s index is an inexhaustible source of information, as well as a kind of compass or astrolabe, a tool for navigating biographies and bibliographies. Holmes is a tireless gatherer and voracious consumer of information, and it is in his role as index-maker and author of specialized monographs on obscure subjects such as tobacco ashes and tattoos (which he is compelled to write not because they are likely to be best-sellers but because there are intolerable gaps in the library stacks) that Doyle’s detective exhibits symptoms of semiotic anxiety. Between the lines, as it were, of Holmes’s exhaustive index and behind his definitive contributions to obscure fields of knowledge (with Holmes it is possible to imagine an ashology, for instance, and a tatoo-ology7), the compulsion to read and write operates as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety about ever-retreating horizons of new information: no matter how much one knows and how much information is available in public or private archives, there will always be new facts to be gathered, indexed, and integrated into the extant body of knowledge. Storage space, whether in the brain-attic or in the lumberroom of one’s library, is always limited. Like the Freudian death drive, the archive, Derrida writes, “always works, and a priori, against itself” because it restricts what is archivable to what merits archiving, excluding certain things in order to include others: “There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.”8 Holmes bypasses the problem presented by the archive’s principle of necessary exclusion by means of a cartographic fantasy. “It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London” (“RL,” p. 243), he informs Watson, as an experienced navigator would boast to a novice shipmate. The map of London that Holmes has consigned to memory, the virtual London that he sees in his mind’s eye and can traverse without leaving his armchair, is a map of the city as an archive. Topographically speaking, the Holmesian archive consists of concentric circles, or related circuits, of information – the limited brain-attic, the more capacious library lumber-room, and finally the city itself as an enormous archive – so that what initially appears as the archive’s exterior turns out to be part of a larger storage space. It is this notion of the city as a mapped database that gives wings to Holmes’s notorious flight of fancy, where the cartographer becomes a Peeping Tom: If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the

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strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (“CI,” p. 251)9

“We might say,” as Glenn W. Most puts it, “that the street map of the city is imprinted on the neural network of the detective’s brain and is reproduced within his consciousness as a form of expert local knowledge.”10 Yet the map of London Holmes has memorized represents a topography that exists only in fiction – a city that, like its cartographic simulacrum, is forever frozen in time: “There is Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s carriage-building depot” (“RL,” p. 243). The tobacconist has always been there, and will always be next door to the newspaper shop, which will always be adjacent to the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank. Even though each of these businesses is dependent on volatile economic forces (the tobacconist relies on the import of foreign tobacco and a steady demand for this commodity, the proprietor of the newspaper shop on the continuous supply of and demand for newsworthy events, the bank on the perpetual circulation of capital), it appears that none of them will ever go out of business. Ironically, one of the most rapidly growing cities in the nineteenth century is imagined by Holmes as existing in a timeless vacuum – a petrified world. “Ours is not a dead world,” Welby writes, “without atmosphere in which all outline is clear-cut and hard: earth’s outlines melt and vary, shift and disappear, are magnified, contracted, veiled, by a thousand changing conditions. So with the ‘world’ of experience and its expression” (“SMI,” p. 195). A petrified landscape is precisely how Holmes imagines London – must imagine it so, or must admit that his knowledge of London can never be complete, just as his edition of the American Encyclopaedia, like every encyclopedia, needs to be updated and revised. As Franco Moretti observes, innocence, in the world of detective fiction, is lack of experience: stasis. Holmes’s “science” is also static … Holmes knows all the possible causes of every single event. Thus the relevant causes are always a finite set. They are also fixed: they always produce the same effect. Holmes cannot go wrong, because he possesses the stable code, at the root of every mysterious message – mysterious, that is, for the reader, who is kept in the dark with regard to the code, while Holmes takes in the only possible meaning of the various clues in a glance.11

Seeing is knowing, but behind every scene in which Holmes correctly reads a clue by visually scrutinizing it lurks the problem of information

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management (what to remember, what to keep within easy reach, what to discard or forget) and the anxiety that total control of information is nothing more than a fantasy. While Holmes’s monographs are meant to be definitive studies, to fill the gaps in knowledge with studies of tobacco ashes or tattoos is to admit that the work of reading, writing, and archiving can never be completed.12 The sum of Holmes’s bibliophilic desires is, of course, The Book of Life.13 A vademecum for aspiring detectives, its purpose is to demonstrate in practical terms “how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way,” and to include instructions on how, “by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts,” and “at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs” (SS, pp. 14–15). This, however, is one book that Holmes never writes: the skeleton key for unlocking the mystery of all clues is a book that lässt sich nicht lesen because es lässt sich nicht schreiben. Such books exist only in fiction or in dreams. As in Poe and Collins, the fetish of plain meaning and the fantasy of transparency are at once reified and deconstructed. Detectives do bring criminals to justice; they do see things more clearly than others. The explanation, however, of how they do this, which is an obligatory feature of the genre, is also the site at which the genre exposes its improbable claims about vision and knowledge.

Part III

Into the invisible: science, spiritualism, and occult detection

Chapter 9

Detective fiction’s uncanny

Published serially in the Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902, almost eight years after Doyle had composed what he then believed would be “The Final Problem” in the Holmes oeuvre, The Hound of the Baskervilles is in more ways than one a story about resurrection and return.1 Even before the narrative first suggests that the key to the mystery of the titular hound lies in understanding how the past incessantly returns to haunt the present – before we learn, that is, of the legend of a spectral hound that comes back to haunt the heirs of the Baskerville estate, and before the discovery of a forgotten Baskerville who has resurrected the ghost of the past in order to lay claim to what he believes to be his birthright – the very appearance of the novel’s first installment is a miraculous resuscitation of a detective whose creator thought he had laid him to rest. The Hound resurrects not only Holmes, who in “The Final Problem” plummeted to his death at the Reichenbach Falls,2 but also Doyle as a detective-fiction writer, as well as a sort of medium through which the irrepressible Holmes, refusing to stay dead, continues to speak and work. The spiritualist idiom is appropriate here, not just because Doyle became a passionate advocate of spiritualism,3 but because The Hound is already an occult text, both a transition to a new kind of detective fiction and a return to the genre’s occult origins. Given its multiple reanimating effects, it is fitting that a narrative that resuscitates a dead series and brings a dead character back to life should be a ghost story of sorts, especially one in which the specter’s appearance attests to the irrepressibility of what cannot be forgotten or laid to rest. The return of the familiar Holmes is signaled in the novel’s first sentence, which reminds us that Holmes “was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night” (HB, p. 3). More important than his nocturnal habits, however, is the assurance that Holmes’s method has not changed: he inspects a walking stick left behind by a client and is able to “reconstruct the man by an examination of it” (HB, p. 3). “You know my methods,” Holmes tells Watson. “Apply 131

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them!” (HB, p. 5). But it quickly becomes apparent that the Holmes who comes back in The Hound is not quite the Holmes we know, just as the specter who returns from beyond the grave is not the same person. The resemblance between the Holmes we know and the one who returns in August 1901, like the similarity between the flesh-and-blood living and the apparitional dead, is deceptive. The new Holmes is both his old self and a ghost, as it were, of his former self. Or in less mystical terms, Holmes ­reappears in The Hound as the kind of detective he always was: a closet believer in things supernatural who had managed to pass himself off as a materialist. The real mystery in the Holmes stories, it turns out, had always been Holmes himself. The Hound presents a series of puzzling events whose significance and relationship to each other become clear only once they are related to the past. The odd behavior of the naturalist Stapleton, such as his objections to Henry Baskerville’s amorous advances toward his sister, becomes understandable when it is discovered that he is in fact Rodger Baskerville, “whose real name is the same as his father’s” (HB, p. 138), and that the woman believed to be his sister is actually his wife. Similarly, Stapleton’s assumed vocation, which licenses him to roam the countryside unsuspected of ulterior motives, is recognized to have been the ideal cover for one who secretly keeps a large hound kenneled in the Grimpen Mire. Looking back, everything is intelligible and transparent to both the reader and the detective. The Hound concludes with “A Retrospection” in which the story is recapitulated with the advantage of hindsight. “The whole course of events,” Holmes then remarks, “from the point of view of the man who called himself Stapleton was simple and direct, although to us, who had no means in the beginning of knowing the motives of his actions and could only learn part of the facts, it all appeared exceedingly complex” (HB, p. 137). This disclosure of hidden motives and unperceived facts is organized around visual metaphors (“Retrospection” and “point of view”) that frame the work of detection in familiar ocularcentric terms. The scene in which Holmes’s eyes fall on a seventeenth-century portrait of Hugo Baskerville, “the wicked Hugo, who started the Hound of the Baskervilles” (HB, p. 120), and he begins to suspect that Stapleton is none other than Rodger Baskerville Jr., is a repetition of so many other scenes of detection in which objects speak the truth simply by virtue of being observed. Yet the first look, which one would expect to suffice for Holmes to apprehend the genealogical connection in the portrait, produces merely a vague suspicion. The portrait is an object as yet not perceived to be a clue: it has

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nothing significant to say because it appears unrelated to the mystery at hand. Holmes spends the rest of the evening intently gazing at the image; “the picture of the old roysterer seemed to have a fascination for him, and his eyes were continually fixed upon it during supper.” It is only after this long viewing session that Holmes detects the unmistakable, but apparently not so legible, traces of family resemblance. The portrait, he then triumphantly declares, “has supplied us with one of our most obvious missing links” (HB, p. 121). Yet the image that provides the missing link is also the centerpiece of a scene of clue reading in which the link between seeing and knowing appears rather fragile. Knowledge is a kind of delayed reaction, something that may or may not follow observation. More subversive of detective fiction’s epistemology is Holmes’s remark that the uncanny resemblance between Rodger Baskerville Jr. (a.k.a. Stapleton) and Hugo Baskerville “is an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation. The fellow is a Baskerville – that is evident” (HB, p. 121). The portrait confirms the arguments of Victorian psychologists and criminologists about the transmission of hereditary traits, but is also a validation of anti-­materialist and occult discourses. Ironically, it is not a glimpse of some fleeting apparition, but a long stare at a physical object that makes a believer out of Holmes by presenting evidence of otherworldly existence  – and of the return from that world to this one. Holmes’s comment opens a fissure in the epistemology of detective fiction: the genre transgresses its own rules and it becomes difficult to tell whether The Hound is a detective story with supernatural touches or a ghost story in detective-fiction format. Early on in The Hound, after he sends Watson off on an errand, Holmes engages in a practice that would have reminded many of Doyle’s readers of what spiritualists call traveling clairvoyance.4 “My body,” he tells Watson, “has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco. After you left I sent down to Stamford’s for the Ordnance map of this portion of the moor, and my spirit has hovered over it all day.” “It” is initially the ordnance map, but it is the landscape itself rather than its cartographic simulacrum that Holmes is referring to when he says that he has “been to Devonshire” (HB, p. 24). While the unsupervised body indulges its cravings for caffeine and nicotine, the spirit takes the form of a disembodied panoptic eye, an out-of-body experience that resembles another levitating act, which I have cited as an example of voyeuristic inclinations and panoptic desires:

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If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (“CI,” p. 251)

The juxtaposition of these two levitating acts suggests that the notion of Holmes as a recent convert to spiritualism is inaccurate:  he has always been a medium of sorts, though it is not until The Hound that the medium comes out of the closet. The intensely cerebral work of ratiocination, described by Watson as “intense mental concentration during which [Holmes] weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial” (HB, p. 23), can now be recognized as a kind of visionary trance in which the corporeal eye is sealed and inner sight activated. Detached from the body with its limited sensory powers, Holmes can traverse vast distances in spirit and inspect faraway locales.5 When Watson remarks that “Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will” (HB, p. 36), in other words, that his mind is not always in the same place as his body (a statement in which it is easy to imagine mind replaced with spirit), he is in fact reacquainting us with the Holmes we already know and reminding us that detective work is everywhere haunted by the specter of what is forbidden in rational explanations. Holmes acknowledges that some mysteries may involve the supernatural and as such are beyond the grasp of secular rationalism, but struggles to hold on to his convictions about how any truth is to be detected and what one may take for granted in seeking it. As he peevishly tells Watson, “if … we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one” (HB, pp. 24–5). As it happens, the mystery of the Baskerville hound does not involve the supernatural. By the end Holmes has exposed the “use of artificial means to make the creature diabolical” (HB, p. 139) and “laid the family ghost once and forever” (HB, p. 132), restoring his and Watson’s shaken materialist worldview. Yet this restoration is shadowed by his clairvoyant-like episode and his ideas about reincarnation, which summon the ghosts of things that detective fiction denies. Not only individuals, then, but genres too may be vulnerable to what Sigmund Freud describes as the “uncanny,” unheimlich, that “something

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which is secretly familiar [das Unheimliche das Heimliche-Heimische ist], which has undergone repression and then returned from it.”6 Our psychic identities and convictions about the nature of reality are exposed as fragile whenever “infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived [wieder belebt werden] by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”7 The complexes and beliefs that interest Freud belong as much to individuals as to the generalized bourgeois subject of Western culture whose convictions about reality stand on shaky ground. This is particularly evident in Freud’s observations on the belief in “spirits and ghosts [Geistern und Gespenstern],”8 which he considers to be the consummate example of the uncanny: “[W]e have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us [leben noch in uns fort] ready to seize upon any confirmation.” Something may come into view at any moment – an eerie portrait, a spectral hound – to confirm what we never really ceased to believe: “‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on [weiterleben] and appear on the scene of their former activities!’ and so on.”9 As Freud observes with annoyance, In our great cities, placards announce lectures that undertake to tell us how to get in touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be denied that not a few of the most able and penetrating minds among our men of science have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own lives, that a contact of this kind is not impossible. Since almost all of us still think as savages [die Wilden] do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead [die primitive Angst vor dem Toten] is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface [sich zu äußern] on any provocation.10

The Hound dramatizes Holmes’s regression to primitive beliefs in reincarnation and the afterlife, but also presents us with a case of déjà vu:  we have seen such regressions before.11 The detective is a borderline occult figure whose methods often break away from rationalist protocols.12 In Poe this regression takes the form of frequent comparisons between logical ratiocination and preternatural intuition. Dupin “exhibit[s] in his solutions … a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural,” and “[h]is results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition” (“RM,” p. 141). He is gifted with “apparently intuitive perception” (“RM,” p. 143). His “analytical abilities acquired for him the credit of intuition” (“MR,” p. 170). Referring to himself, he states that “intuition … is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius” (“MR,” p. 195). But if Poe is willing

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to concede that ratiocination has something oddly intuitive about it, and that “an identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent” (“PL,” p. 215) is not far from telepathy, he draws the line when it comes to spirits: “It is not too much to say that neither of us believe in praeternatural events. Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye were not destroyed by spirits. The doers of the deed were material and escaped materially” (“RM,” p. 156). In The Moonstone the denial of a resemblance between rationalist and clairvoyant procedures is pronounced not by the detective, who is ready to entertain gut-feeling moral evidence wherever hard evidence is lacking, but by the skeptical Murthwaite: “We have nothing whatever to do with clairvoyance, or with mesmerism, or with anything else that is hard of belief to a practical man, in the inquiry that we are now pursuing” (M, p. 332). When Holmes remarks in A Study in Scarlet that his remarkable ratiocinative powers are “a kind of intuition” (SS, p. 16), he concedes that the line between ratiocination and intuition is so fine that there may be no substantial difference between them. Holmes blurs this line every time he “detache[s] his mind at will” (HB, p. 36) to observe things inaccessible to corporeal sight but visible to the eye of the mind or spirit, yet will insist that “if … we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation” (HB, pp. 24–5). As he declares in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”: “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply” (“SV,” p. 535). But to say that detective fiction always had one foot in the occult is not to say that The Hound is just one more example of the genre’s spiritualist or occultist tendencies. Rather it signals, albeit somewhat hesitantly and equivocally, the trend, popular at the turn of the century, to refashion the detective into a professional investigator of the occult, a firm believer in things supernatural, endowed with keen intuition and extrasensory perception. The new detective is very much a creature of his or her time: detective fiction’s return to its occult origins, its repressed family resemblance with ghost fiction, occurs in the wake of a shift in late­Victorian science toward the invisible and, by almost inevitable extension, the supernatural.

Chapter 10

Light, ether, and the invisible world

One popular view of the relationship between science and religion, but also science and the occult, from the Enlightenment on is encompassed by what Bernard Lightman calls the “secularization thesis.”1 According to this account, science gradually but surely supplanted religion and the occult as the ultimate authority for understanding the natural world. While Berkeley, for instance, is relevant to nineteenth-century epistemologists and philosophers of science, his theory of vision is effectively purged of its theological dimension and absorbed by secular empiricism and scientific naturalism.2 But the secularization story, as Lightman, among others, has persuasively shown, is in some ways a myth: a scientifically informed natural theology flourished in the nineteenth century, and many of the prominent scientific naturalists of the period were agnostics, not hostile to religion but rather advocating a separation of spheres. Moreover, as I shall argue now, nineteenth-century science opened up new paths into the occult by virtue of its explorations of objects and phenomena that elude the limited register of the bodily senses – the invisible, unseen world surrounding us, whose properties we cannot directly observe and measure, but about which we can make strong, seemingly incontrovertible inferences. Spiritualist claims about ghosts, for instance, suddenly seemed more credible, and hopes about a future life compatible with, and supported by, scientific theories in the fields of optics, thermodynamics, and mathematics. To get a sense, first, of how optics and the occult come to be related, we can begin by turning our attention to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Color, published in 1810 and translated into English in 1840. “None will dispute,” Goethe believes, “a direct relationship [unmittelbare Verwandtschaft] between light and the eye.”3 In language that Carlyle4 and Ruskin would have commended, Goethe emphasizes the intrinsic ontological bond between light and sight:  “From among the lesser ancillary organs of the animals, light has called forth one organ to become its like, 137

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and thus the eye is formed by the light and for the light [am Lichte fürs Licht] so that the inner light [innere Licht] may emerge to meet the outer light.” Imagined here as a sentient being, light selected the organ of sight from a number of candidates as most worthy of receiving the luminous gift. After this originary interpellative moment light and sight are virtually indistinguishable: they are “one and the same,” since “the eye has within it a latent form of light [ein ruhendes Licht] which becomes active at the slightest stimulus from within or without.” Because “only things of like nature may recognize one another,”5 it is inconceivable that light is contaminated by darkness; rather, darkness is the absence of light, and vice versa. The absolute dichotomy of light and darkness is one manifestation of a dialectic evident everywhere in nature:  “[P]lus, minus; aggressive, resistant; active, passive; assertive, restraining; force, moderation; male, female.”6 The color spectrum emerges between two extremes – “light and dark, brightness and darkness, or, to use a more general formulation, light and non-light [Licht und Nichtlicht]” – so that the gradation of colors is both dependent upon and evidence of the separation of opposites: “The color we find emerging closest to light we term yellow; a second which arises closest to darkness we call blue.”7 To propose, as Newton had done in his Opticks (1704), that white light is composed of darker colors meant not just taking the study of optics down the wrong path, but, more inexcusably, raising doubts about the universal dichotomy of all elements and forces. Part of Goethe’s agenda, then, is to raze the Newtonian “bastion [Bastille]” and show that light, sight, and the understanding of nature imply each other by virtue of necessity: through colors “nature in its entirety seeks to manifest itself, in this case to the sense of sight, to the eye.”8 The bastion held out against Goethe’s assault. In an 1853 lecture “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” Helmholtz faults Goethe for regarding nature in a poetic rather than scientific manner. Goethe’s “poetic turn of mind” biases his scientific work on color and vision, with the unfortunate consequence that he dismisses Newton’s color spectrum theory, “the first germ of the scientific view which has subsequently been developed.”9 Goethe’s error stems from a blind devotion to “his principle, that Nature must reveal her secrets of her own free will; that she is but the transparent representation of the ideal world [dass die Natur … die durchsichtige Darstellung ihres ideelen Inhalts sei],” and that we can gain a complete understanding of natural phenomena “without ever having to trust any thing but our senses.”10 Far from supplanting Newtonian optics, Goethe’s work is “a desperate attempt to rescue from the attacks of science the belief in the direct truth of our sensations.”11 What Goethe failed to understand

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is “that the organs of sense do indeed give us information about external effects produced on them, but convey those effects to our consciousness in a totally different form, so that the character of a sensuous perception depends not so much on the properties of the object perceived as on those of the organ by which we receive the information.” For Goethe, the organ of sight enjoys a privileged relationship with light and color that distinguishes it from the other senses. Yet sensations, Helmholtz argues, are less dependent on the nature of the perceived object than on the physiological constitution of the organ that perceives them, so that “[t]he same ray of sunshine, which is called light when it falls on the eye, we call heat when it falls on the skin.”12 Sight has always had to share light with the other senses. Or: the eye indeed has a special relation to light, but only because we call it light when it is registered by the optic nerves. As Helmholtz explains in his 1868 lecture course “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” the solution to the mystery of color and light became available at the turn of the century, when the English physicist and polymath Thomas Young formulated the wave theory of light.13 In the decades between Goethe’s Theory of Color and Helmholtz’s lectures on vision, the structure of light had changed from particles to waves: the wave (undulatory) theory had replaced Newton’s particle (emission) theory, and had vindicated older ether hypotheses. For if light moves in waves, as Young had demonstrated in his experiments with the interference of light, it appeared necessary to assume that these waves must be undulations of something, and this something turned out to be the ubiquitous ether.14 By the 1860s Helmholtz could count on wide support (at least among British scientists15) for the undulatory theory: “Light is known in Physics as a movement which is propagated by successive waves in the elastic ether [Lichtäther, luminiferous ether] distributed through the universe, a movement of the same kind as the circles which spread upon the smooth surface of a pond when a stone falls on it, or the vibration which is transmitted through our atmosphere as sound.”16 It is wrong to assume that light and sight were meant for each other, since the eye, specializing in certain wavelengths, as it were, but insensitive to others, “only perceives one part of these vibrations of ether as light.” There is no qualitative difference between etheric undulations that produce the sensation of heat and those that produce the sensation of light: “Whatever produces an undulatory movement of ether, of course produces thereby all the effects of the undulation, whether light, or heat, or fluorescence, or chemical change.”17 But the English could not claim all the credit for this discovery. Young’s wave theory is in Helmholtz’s view merely an extension of Müller’s

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doctrine of specific nerve energies.18 The latter is critical, among other reasons because it enables us to answer the question whether it is possible to maintain the natural and innate conviction that the quality of our sensations, and especially our sensations of sight, give us a true impression of corresponding qualities in the outer world. It is clear that they do not. The question was really decided by Johannes Müller’s deduction from well ascertained facts of the law of specific nervous energy [Gesetz von den specifischen Sinnesenergien]. Whether the rays of the sun appear to us as colour, or as warmth, does not at all depend upon their own properties, but simply upon whether they excite the fibres of the optic nerve, or those of the skin.19

Young’s and Müller’s work, Helmholtz stresses, is entirely in accordance with “the Empirical Theory of Vision [die empiristische Theorie vom Sehen],” which “assumes that none of our sensations give us anything more than ‘signs’ [Zeichen] for external objects and movements, and that we can only learn to interpret these signs by means of experience and practice.”20 As for Goethe’s innere Licht, Helmholtz explains that “there is no objective light produced in the retina [nicht etwa objectives Licht in der Netzhaut entwickelt], as some of the older physiologists assumed.” If there were such light, “a second observer could not fail to see through the pupil the illumination of the retina” from inside the eye. “But nothing of the sort has ever been seen … there is not the smallest spark of actual light.”21 The ether too had never been seen, of course, but this did not prevent leading scientists from endorsing it without reservation. In a series of popular lectures, published in 1879 in Seeing and Thinking, the English philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford sought to impress his audience with the elegance and truth of the ether theory: You know, when you throw a stone into a pool of water, that waves go out in circles from the place where the stone has fallen in, and travel away, still keeping the circular form, till they come against the edge of the pool. The only difference between those waves of water and the waves of light is that, whilst the waves of water go out on the surface of the water and make circles, the waves of light go out in space in all directions and make spheres. When one of these gas lamps [in the lecture hall] is burning there is a tremendous disturbance set up by numerous atoms of carbon getting united each with two atoms of oxygen and then shaking about violently. They shake about and transfer that shake to something which is all over this room and all through space, which is called the luminiferous ether, because it carries such shaking as takes place when a thing is burnt, and the atoms fall into a more convenient position in consequence, from place to place; and that shake when carried by the luminiferous ether is what we call light.22

But the ether proved to be a stumbling block for empirical positivism, since it introduced a phenomenon that defied observation and measurement.

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Clifford runs into some difficulty in convincing his audience that the ether really exists: In order to carry a shake such as this it is necessary to suppose that the luminiferous ether is not a fluid like water, but that it is a solid, something like a piece of jelly. It is an exceedingly difficult thing to conceive how there should be a separate substance filling all space, and filling up all the interstices between different molecules of bodies, and which yet leaves us able to walk about in the midst of it as we do. But that is the truth.23

Yet when an unobservable phenomenon is used to shed light on observable ones, what is “necessary to suppose” was a matter of considerable debate among nineteenth-century scientists. As Larry Laudan has shown, midcentury discussions of the ether at once developed out of and took the lead in ushering a thorough reassessment of “what distinguished arbitrary and vacuous hypotheses from genuine and worthy ones.”24 Whereas Whewell found the wave theory of light convincing because it persuasively accounts for a sizeable range of natural phenomena, Mill maintained that “[t]he prevailing hypothesis of a luminiferous ether” (SL vii, p. 499) is an example of what “is at best a probable conjecture, not a proved truth” (SL vii, p. 505), and expresses astonishment that “a philosopher of Dr. Whewell’s abilities and attainments” should have failed to realize that it is “not … a valid reason for accepting any given hypothesis, that we are unable to imagine any other which will account for the facts. There is no necessity for supposing that the true explanation must be one which, with only our present experience, we could imagine” (SL vii, p. 503). Yet dissenting voices such as Mill’s were rare in the second half of the century. The ether was generally regarded to be as real as phenomena one can observe and measure, and was at the forefront of science’s efforts to penetrate into the invisible world – “to rend the veil which separates the sensible world from an ultra-sensible one,”25 as the renowned British physicist and popularizer of science John Tyndall put it in his 1882 lecture “Atoms, Molecules, and Ether Waves.” No longer the exclusive domain of theology, the ultra-sensible world after mid-century, Gillian Beer argues, “was becoming increasingly secularized; it seemed to be a domain now capable of being described predominantly in scientific terms.”26 But as Beer observes, this secularization of the invisible world at once “seemed to make room for a spiritualist interpretation in which emanations take on physical form and lost presences may be materially evoked.”27 Crowe’s assertion that “what we call seeing is merely the function of an organ constructed for that purpose in relation to the external world,” and “that we are surrounded by many things in that world which we can not see without

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the aid of artificial appliances and many other things which we can not see even with them” (NN, pp. 21–2), found unexpected corroboration in the ether theory. No sooner did materialist science step up to claim the invisible world for its own purposes and divest it of metaphysical attributes, than this world once again slipped out of its reach and was delivered to the spiritualists on a silver platter. This time the spiritualists were armed with an arsenal provided by science; they claimed to have adopted the method that permitted scientists to extend their reach beyond observable phenomena. When Crowe contends that the existence of the inner senses is “an hypothesis which, whoever believes that we are immortal spirits, incorporated for a season in a material body, can scarcely reject” (NN, p. 23), she is not very far from the sort of reasoning according to which whoever believes that light travels in waves must also believe in the ether. That such hypothesizing entails a leap of faith is occasionally evident in the ambiguous statements of ether enthusiasts. In a lecture entitled “The Wave Theory of Light,” delivered in 1884, the Scottish physicist and mathematician William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) initially declares:  “One thing we are sure of, and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether.”28 Yet after performing for his audience various light-related experiments and instructing them to “regard the existence of the luminiferous ether as a reality of science,” Thomson’s confidence in this reality seems to wane. From certainty in the existence of the ether he slips into a weaker formulation – “We believe [the ether] is a real thing” – and ends up making an appeal to faith: “surely we have a large and solid ground for our faith in the speculative hypothesis of an elastic luminiferous ether, which constitute, [sic] the wave theory of light.”29 The shift from a sound theory to a speculation suggests that no matter how solid the ground for belief may seem, reasons for doubt remain, raising questions about just how much one should be expected to believe without seeing – how much of what is considered true and real is in fact the product of unverifiable speculations. I now wish to turn from theories of light to theories of energy and their role in the remystification or spiritualization of the invisible world. According to Frank Miller Turner, the thermodynamic law of the conservation of energy was “probably more destructive to a supernatural interpretation of nature than was evolution by natural selection … The theory struck down any religious explanation entailing miracles, spirits, or God by suggesting such modes of interference would require new infusions of external energy into the closed mechanism of nature.”30 Yet thermodynamics, with its principle of a closed energy system, was not as incompatible with

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a supernatural interpretation of the universe as Turner suggests, and the ether would play a significant part in the propagation of scientifically informed spiritualist ideas about matter and energy. As Dan Burton and David Grandy write, “nineteenth-century occultism was a ‘flight from reason,’ at least insofar as reason sought to evacuate nature of life and inner purpose. But it was also an accommodation to scientific reason, for many occultists felt that science would eventually come to embrace the spiritual and immaterial in its quest for universal understanding” and “would open a path into the occult”31 rather than shut down communication between material and spiritual realms. In fact, the first major appropriation of the ether for the spiritualist agenda came from reputable scientists. Integrating Swedenborgian mysticism with modern science, two Scottish physicists, Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, initiated with their The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875) a series of efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to hybridize materialist and spiritualist perspectives on invisibility. Stewart and Tait set out to show that, if faith alone will no longer suffice, science proves beyond any doubt that “the invisible world [is] not … something absolutely distinct from the visible universe, and absolutely unconnected with it, as is frequently thought to be the case, but rather … a universe that has some bond of union with the present.”32 Responding to the adherents of “the extreme materialistic school” who refuse “to believe there is anything beyond the visible universe,”33 the authors present an argument analogous to the popular ether theory: To those men we would reply, that even assuming their own point of view, our scheme will, we venture to suggest, be found to give a more complete and continuous explanation of the visible order of things than one which proceeds upon the assumption that there is nothing else. In this respect we may liken it to the hypothesis of atoms, or that of an ethereal medium, for neither of which we have the direct evidence of our senses, but which have nevertheless been adopted as affording the best explanations of the phenomena of the visible universe.34

Physics provides a ground for the reconciliation of antagonistic positions in the form of energy. Facilitated by the ether, energy undergoes transformations (such as from potential to kinetic energy), but these changes neither diminish nor increase its overall quantity: “In any system of bodies whatever, to which no energy is communicated by external bodies, and which parts with no energy to external bodies, the sum of the various potential and kinetic energies remains for ever unaltered.”35 This, of course, is the first law of thermodynamics, and its appeal to eternal preservation dovetails in Stewart and Tait’s cosmology with the belief in “the existence of a Deity

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who is the Creator of all things”36 and who wisely designed the universe as an economical perpetuum mobile. But after mid-century, thermodynamics had more than one law. Most poignantly (and devastatingly) formulated by Thomson in his 1852 paper “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy,” the second law of thermodynamics proposes that some energy is irretrievably lost: “When heat is created by any unreversible process (such as friction), there is a dissipation of mechanical energy, and a full restoration of it to its primitive condition is impossible.”37 Even in Thomson’s clinical formulation, the second law, with its entropic predictions, is close to a doomsday theory: Within a finite period of time past the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject.38

While the law which decrees the eternal conservation of energy in the universe could comfortably be mobilized to buttress belief in a wise cosmic architect, the second law by contrast evokes an apocalyptic vision of irreversible energy depletion and exhaustion of life forces: at some point, perhaps not too far in the future, the sun will be extinguished and our world will become a dark, desolate, uninhabitable place.39 Stewart and Tait reject the scandalous notion of “the apparently wasteful character of the arrangements of the visible universe” and the implication that God’s blueprint for the universe is flawed. “Can anything be more perplexing,” they wonder, “than this seemingly frightful expenditure of the very life and essence of the system?”40 Reverting to the conservation law, according to which energy is always reincarnated in some form, they maintain that “there must be an invisible order of things, which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away.”41 All this expended energy must end up somewhere; it is an affront to common sense, as well as a heretical proposition, to suggest that it simply vanishes.42 The enigma of apparent energy depletion can be solved by the ether theory. Stewart and Tait ask: Whether is it more likely that by far the larger portion of the high-class energy of the present universe is travelling outwards into space with an immense velocity, or that it is gradually transferred into an invisible order of things? May we not regard ether or the medium as not merely a bridge between one portion of the visible universe and another, but also as a bridge between one order of things and another, forming as it were a species of cement, in virtue of which the various orders of the universe are welded together and made into one?43

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The authors take this logic further to propose that the metaphor of the ether as a bridge between the visible and invisible world is redundant if the ether itself is invisible: “May we not at once say that when energy is carried from matter into ether it is carried from the visible into the invisible; and that when it is carried from ether to matter it is carried from the invisible into the visible?” The invisible world is the spiritual one, where the energy of “the spiritual body”44 ends up after death. That all this is not just hopeful speculation is evidenced by the authoritative words of Thomas Young, the mastermind of the ether theory. Stewart and Tait quote from his A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807): We know not but that thousands of spiritual worlds may exist unseen for ever by human eyes; nor have we any reason to suppose that even the presence of matter, in a given spot, necessarily excludes these existences from it. Those who maintain that nature always teems with life, wherever living beings can be placed, may therefore speculate with freedom on the possibility of independent worlds; some existing in different parts of space, others pervading each other unseen and unknown, in the same space, and others again to which space may not be a necessary mode of existence.45

Matter need not displace or evict the spirit, Young suggests, and Stewart and Tait readily concur: the same space may be inhabited by overlapping material and spiritual worlds.46 Instead of refusing to look at things in the disenchanting light of materialism, Stewart and Tait, like Whewell before them, discover that materialist science, by postulating laws which declare the visible world to be only a fraction of the invisible one, gives spiritualist ideas fresh currency and validates claims that previously seemed incongruous with scientific naturalism. Scientists without spiritualist inclinations were unimpressed by The Unseen Universe. In a caustic review of the book, Clifford argues that Stewart and Tait abduct the ether and forcibly enlist it in the service of spiritualism. He summarizes what he regards as an atrocious bit of reasoning perpetrated by the authors and rewrites it in parodic form: “Because atoms are exactly alike and apparently indestructible, they must at one time have come into existence out of nothing. This can only have been effected by the agency of a conscious mind not associated with a material organism.” Forasmuch as the momentous character of the issue is apt to blind us to the logic of such arguments as these, it may not be useless to offer for consideration the following parody. “Because the sea is salt and will put out a fire, there must at one time have been a large fire lighted at the bottom of it. This can only have been effected by the agency of the whale who lives in the middle of Sahara.”47

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Not only have Stewart and Tait abused physics, they have warped Christianity into something like neo-Christian paganism: “It is clear that the good old gods of our race – sun, sky, thunder, and beauty – are to be replaced by philosophic abstractions – substance, energy, and life, under the patronage respectively of the persons of the Christian Trinity.” Once one begins molding the ether in this fashion, there is no end to the fantasies one can create: “If there is room in the unseen universe for the harmless pantheistic deities which our authors have put there, room may also be found for the goddess Kali, with her obscene rites and human sacrifices, or for any intermediate between these. Here is the clay: make your images to your heart’s desire!”48 The myth-making imagination may be boundless; reality is another matter. “[T]he physical world,” Clifford writes elsewhere, “is made of atoms and ether, and there is no room in it for ghosts.”49 Yet that Stewart and Tait’s work should demand urgent debunking suggests that it must be taken seriously: their bad science looks too much like legitimate science simply to be ignored. The real problem, however, is that the new physics seems to encourage spiritualist misappropriations by virtue of its bold anti-positivist excursions into empirically unobservable realms.50 With quantum theory at the turn of the century, physics would move still farther from the visible world and the sphere of everyday experience. As Ian G. Barbour explains, while classical physics is “naively realistic, reductionistic, and deterministic,” modern quantum physics, by contrast, is marked by “the abandonment of naive realism, the loss of picturability, and the recognition of the involvement of the observer.”51 The prevalent nineteenthcentury notion that “scientific theories are literal descriptions of nature as it is in itself” becomes unfeasible. Whereas the planetary atomic model is conducive to easy visualization, “in quantum theory moving particles are replaced by wave structures described by differential equations, abstract mathematical representations that cannot be visualized at all.” As described by quantum theory, an atom is radically unimaginable:  “If one tried to imagine such an atom, it would be a pattern of probability-waves filling the whole region in harmonic relationships in space and time, which might be compared with a three-dimensional symphony of musical tones of incredible complexity. However, the analogy would be inadequate  – there is simply nothing in everyday experience comparable to this strange atomic realm.”52 But for how long did scientists continue to endorse the ether theory? One indicator of the ether’s forceful impact on the nineteenth-century scientific imagination is that, while it does not figure in the mathematical

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formulas of James Clerk Maxwell’s 1865 essay “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” Maxwell was a committed believer in the ether. “[T]here is an aethereal medium,” he declares in the same essay, “filling space and permeating bodies, capable of being set in motion and of transmitting that motion from one part to another, and of communicating that motion to gross matter so as to heat it and affect it in various ways.”53 The ether received what ought to have been a death blow in 1887 when two American scientists, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, conducted the first in a series of experiments to measure the “wind” generated by the Earth’s movement through the ether.54 To their great shock, they detected no sign of what they were looking for. No wind – no ether. The Michelson-Morley experiment, however, was insufficient to destabilize what had by then become “normal science” (in Thomas Kuhn’s language).55 Joe Milutis observes that “[t]he ether-drift experiment acts almost like a trauma that disappears into the structure of history. Not attracting the wide attention of intellectual and artistic circles as did the later theories of Einstein, Michelson-Morley evades historicism through the very logic of the horror vacui that its implications encourage.”56 Whereas Einstein’s formulation of the special theory of relativity of 1905 declares the ether to be superfluous, by 1920 Einstein had changed his mind: “[T]he special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny ether.” The theory of general relativity in fact requires its existence: “To deny the ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever. The fundamental facts of mechanics do not harmonize with this view.”57 There was less wavering about the ether in spiritualist circles. In The Missing Sense, and the Hidden Things Which It Might Reveal (1887), Charles William Wooldridge argues that the ether theory enables the construction of “a rationalist’s faith,” a means of conceptualizing the relationship between the visible and the invisible worlds that would close the gap dividing “two great schools, materialists and spiritualists.”58 The ether stands as a kind of ambassador of all those things “we cannot manipulate, bottle up, weigh, and examine their substance,” but whose existence is nonetheless beyond doubt: “Our senses do not put us in relation to the ether, do not allow us to examine it, nevertheless its existence is not in any sense less doubtful, it is real, and we are sure of it.”59 By adhering “to the study of facts by the strictest scientific methods” and following the trajectory of the ether theory to the realization that there is “something which science cannot reach” but to which it had paved the road, Wooldridge is led to conclude “that the imperfection is in our physical organization and not in the organization of the universe, which prevents our having exact and minute

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knowledge at will of things distant, inaccessible, intangible, and invisible to us now.”60 Yet this imperfection, Wooldridge argues, can be overcome by a spiritual version of the corporeal organ of sight: The intelligence, the spiritual person, that experiences this consciousness of distant things may remain located in the living body, while this consciousness is received through the agency of some medium external to itself and some spiritual adaptation in itself to this medium, which medium and adaptation would be more analogous to light and the sense of sight than to anything else within the range of our common and sensible experience.61

Bodily sight channels desire for a kind of seeing we would never have aspired to reawaken had we not eyes in the first place: “Yet in this case man would never suspect that he lacked anything. Light for him would have no existence, and he could have no desire for a sense with which to perceive and use it. He would not have the cause to desire … a sense that would put us in relation with the ether and with pure spirit, because he could not even suspect its existence.”62 Light and sight occasion a sense of lack and longing, a feeling that something is missing – another kind of light and sight. In the realm of desire, sight draws attention both to its limitations and to its superiority over the other senses, none of which can awaken the same yearning to apprehend the non-sensuous. In James Coates’s Seeing the Invisible (1906), the ether similarly helps to explain extra-sensory perception and ghost sightings: If a luminiferous ether has to be hypothecated to explain the phenomena of light, which, striking on the physical organs of vision, give rise to sight, may there not also be a more subtile luminiferous ether, by which we, in a way which transcends the ordinary play of the senses  – by which we see visions, apparitions, of both the living and of the so-called dead? There seem to be such ethers; and although I do not know their exact character, and cannot say much about them, it must be clear, judging from analogy, and from what we already do know of emanations and of auras, that there is some such media by which our Inner or Psychic Faculties are affected.63

Coates draws attention to “the steady march of physics into the domain of the Invisible,” whereby spiritualism, rather than being treated as a cryptoscience, makes its contribution to our knowledge of “many unseen and imponderable forces, such as we have become familiar with through wireless telegraphy, X-rays, the researches of bacteriologists, and indeed of physical science.”64 The ether is also an essential component of theosophist cosmogonies. In Charles Webster Leadbeater’s A Textbook of Theosophy (1912), a beginner’s guide to what is “at once a philosophy, a religion and a science,” the

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ether is conceived as a primordial substance, “[t]he ultimate root-matter as seen at our level.”65 Significantly, Leadbeater does not feel he needs to convince the reader that the ether is real; all the hard work had already been done by scientists. What needs elaboration is the theosophist doctrine of seven interpenetrating worlds – from the highest down: divine, monadic, spiritual, intuitional, mental, emotional (or astral), and physical – all of which are made of the same matter. This universal matter is, courtesy of the wave theory, in a state of constant undulation. Though parts of one allembracing world, the individual worlds are on different wavelengths: “The matter of which all these interpenetrating worlds are built is essentially the same matter, but differently arranged and of different degrees of density. Therefore the rates at which these various types of matter normally vibrate differ also. They may be considered as a vast gamut of undulations consisting of many octaves.”66 All worlds are inhabited (otherwise we would presumably need to account for an extravagant waste of space), but their inhabitants generally have no awareness of their immediate neighbors: Each of these worlds has its inhabitants, whose senses are normally capable of responding to the undulations of their own world only. A man living (as we are all doing) in the physical world sees, hears, feels, by vibrations connected with the physical matter around him. He is equally surrounded by the astral and mental and other worlds which are interpenetrating his own denser world, but of them he is normally unconscious, because his senses cannot respond to the oscillations of their matter, just as our physical eyes cannot see by the vibrations of ultra-violet light, although scientific experiments show that they exist, and there are other consciousnesses with differently formed organs who can see by them.67

Formulated in such terms, theosophy appears as indebted to Eastern belief systems as to Young’s wave theory of light and Müller’s work on specific nerve energies. Belief  – or rather the progression from faith to certain knowledge – is precisely what is at stake. Theosophy “asserts that man has no need to trust to blind faith, because he has within him latent powers which, when aroused, enable him to see and examine for himself, and it proceeds to prove its case by showing how those powers may be awakened.”68 The ether is invisible to the naked eye but perceptible “to highly developed clairvoyant power,” and “[n]o one who is clairvoyant can be atheistic; the evidence is too tremendous.”69

Chapter 11

Inner vision and occult detection: Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius

Enthusiasm about awakening hidden or missing senses was tempered by suspicion about what else might be awakened in the process. For an early literary example of this anxiety in the nineteenth century I wish to turn to Le Fanu’s 1872 short story collection In a Glass Darkly, which also features the first overtly occult detective in literature, the German Martin Hesselius.1 While I shall say more about occult detectives later, the merger of the ether, wave theory, and extra-sensory perception discussed in the previous chapter is integral to understanding Hesselius’s ideas about a mode of perception which he “term[s] indifferently ‘sublimated,’ ‘precocious,’ and ‘interior’” (“GT,” p. 38).2 However we choose to describe it, the condition is very serious and, as Hesselius’s research and experiences demonstrate, often fatal to the seer. Calling himself a “medical philosopher” and “philosophic physician” (“GT,” pp. 8, 28), Hesselius blends physiology, psychiatry, and Swedenborgian mysticism; his medicine is a science of body and soul alike. As he explains: [T]he entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organized substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body – a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.” (“GT,” p. 8)

In his definitive work on The Cardinal Functions of the Brain, Hesselius, we are told, proves “by the evidence of innumerable facts … the high probability of a circulation arterial and venous in its mechanism, through the nerves” (“GT,” pp. 38–9). This fluid, “which is propagated hence through one class of nerves, returns in an altered state through another, and the 150

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nature of that fluid is spiritual, though not immaterial, any more than … light or electricity are so.” The fluid’s circulation is modeled on the cardiovascular system – “Of this system, thus considered, the brain is the heart” (“GT,” p. 39) – but also has thermodynamic resonances: just as energy is transformed from potential to kinetic, the fluid changes from one form to another and back again. Essential to one’s physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being, this fluid is not to be trifled with: By various abuses, among which the habitual use of such agents as green tea is one, this fluid may be affected as to its quality, but it is more frequently disturbed as to equilibrium. This fluid being that which we have in common with spirits, a congestion found upon the masses of brain or nerve, connected with the interior sense, forms a surface unduly exposed, on which disembodied spirits may operate: communication is thus more or less effectually established. Between this brain circulation and the heart circulation there is an intimate sympathy. The seat, or rather the instrument of exterior vision, is the eye. The seat of interior vision is the nervous tissue and brain, immediately about and above the eyebrow. (“GT,” p. 39)

Hesselius’s ideas about inner vision and its relation to bodily sight are an amalgam of spiritualist ideas and ether-theory physics with Swedenborgian inflections, which anticipate The Unseen Universe but also take the ether back to some of its eighteenth-century formulations. His study on the brain is almost certainly inspired by English physician David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749). Hartley explains that sensation, motion, and means “by which Ideas are presented to the Mind ” can all be accounted for by the vibrations of a “white medullary Substance of the Brain.”3 Sense impressions occasion vibrations of medullary particles. These vibrations “are excited, propagated, and kept up, partly by the Æther, i.e. by a very subtle and elastic Fluid ”4 which pervades solid bodies and open spaces, and whose existence, Hartley reminds us, was hypothesized by Newton in the more daring sections of his Principia and Opticks.5 Because of its extreme sensitivity, the medullary substance is easily destabilized: “Poisons, spirituous Liquors, Opiates, Fevers, Blows upon the Head, & c. all plainly affect the Mind, by first disordering the medullary Substance.”6 An overdose of a strong liquid suffices to upset the fluid’s equilibrium, as happens in Le Fanu’s “Green Tea,” in which the tea-addict Reverend Jennings is afflicted with a severe case of inner vision. A clergyman with a fondness for mysticism, Jennings is an avid reader of Swedenborg’s Arcana Caelestia (1749–56) from which Hesselius quotes the following passages, which lead him to his diagnosis of Jennings’s condition:

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“When man’s interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.” “By the internal sight it has been granted me to see things that are in the other life, more clearly than I see those that are in the world. From these considerations, it is evident that external vision exists from interior vision, and this from a vision still more interior, and so on.” (“GT,” p. 14)

Hesselius’s diagnosis is also informed by a more sinister side of Swedenborg’s theory of inner and outer senses. Inner vision, which makes it possible for one “to see things that are in the other life,” may also operate as a channel for the invasion of demonic spirits into the seer’s body and mind. Inner vision is a kind of two-way street, Swedenborg suggests, enabling spirits “from the hells” to perceive that they are associated with and in proximity to the world of the living: “If evil spirits could perceive that they were associated with man, and yet that they were spirits separate from him, and if they could flow in into the things of his body, they would attempt by a thousand means to destroy him; for they hate man with a deadly hatred” (“GT,” p. 14). Jennings’s spectral stalker – a monkey-like creature whose appearance inspires “loathing and horror” (“GT,” p. 24)  – is an indefatigable watcher whom none but Jennings can see. Having imbibed an immoderate amount of an eye-opening substance, Jennings has made himself subject to the creature’s relentless gaze:  “In all situations, at all hours, it is awake and looking at me” (“GT,” p. 26). Hesselius fails as a therapist or exorcist, and accounts for this by emphasizing that Jennings had never really become his patient or given him “his full and unreserved confidence” (“GT,” p. 40). He succeeds, on the other hand, as a diagnostician, a detective of the causes of occult phenomena and motivations for actions and behaviors. He ascribes the appearance of Jennings’s devilish stalker to the opening of inner vision, and the latter to green tea, “a poison which excites the reciprocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior” (“GT,” p. 37). Jennings’s gruesome final act (he slits his throat with a razor) is ascribed to a “hereditary suicidal mania” (“GT,” p. 40) triggered by the opening of inner vision. The poison theory is clearly modeled on the kind of deductive reasoning used by physicians and detect­ ives to diagnose and treat a patient or client, but in this case blends medical science with occultism, neither one of which, it is implied, could have provided the solution without the cooperation of the other. In “The Familiar” Le Fanu orchestrates a similar scenario. The naval officer Barton is haunted by a humanoid creature with “a look of maniacal

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menace and fury” (“F,” p. 51) who calls himself The Watcher. In Barton the fatal opening of inner vision is not caused by negligence of bodily and mental health or through the action of an external agent, but by a troubled conscience. Having, six years earlier, fathered a child out of wedlock with the daughter of a sailor under his command, Barton acted ignobly toward both child and mother. Upon being confronted by the sailor, Barton availed himself of “those terrible and arbitrary severities,” presumably flogging, “which the regulations of the navy placed at the command of those who are responsible for its discipline” (“F,” pp. 81–2). The sailor dies from the punishment and the cruel act leaves a stain on Barton’s conscience that, like the stain on Rosanna’s character in The Moonstone, cannot be sponged away. The Watcher’s appearance suggests to Barton from the onset that “[t]he whole circumstance was … connected with certain passages in his past life, which, of all others, he hated to remember” (“F,” p. 50). When he says that “a malignant spirit is following and watching me wherever I go” (“F,” p. 62) and that “the dreadful association between me and it, is now established – I shall never escape – never!” (“F,” p. 70), he is speaking not only of the malicious Watcher but also of his own sadistic side which creates specters of repressed guilt: he is the subject of a “strange persecution” whose cause “was known to himself” but which “he could not or dared not disclose” (“F,” p. 58). Inner vision is the immediate cause of trauma, but also positively affects Barton by changing him from “an unbeliever … incapable of deriving help from religion” (“F,” p. 59) into a believer in “a dreadful God” presiding over “a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned!” (“F,” p. 60). Yet this transformation is another form of trauma. The atheist is converted into a god-fearing Christian just prior to the merciless execution of heavenly justice. Barton and Hesselius never actually meet – the narrative is passed on to the latter by a clergyman to whom Barton appeals for spiritual guidance – and Hesselius again speculates about “hereditary predispos­itions” (“F,” p. 41). Just as Holmes’s fateful encounter with the portrait of Hugo Baskerville leads him to invoke not just the laws of heredity but also the occult laws governing spiritual reincarnation, Hesselius’s hereditary hypothesis does not preclude a supernatural explanation. One should call it spiritual rather than supernatural, though. Whereas supernatural denotes something outside or at odds with the natural world, Hesselius believes that “the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of [the] spiritual world” (“GT,” p. 8). Some who suffer from inner vision, the doctor explains,

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propagate the illusions of which they complain, from diseased brain or nerves. Others are, unquestionably, infested by, as we term them, spiritual agencies, exterior to themselves. Others, again, owe their sufferings to a mixed condition. The interior sense, it is true, is opened; but it has been and continues open by the action of disease. This form of a disease may, in one sense, be compared to the loss of the scarf-skin, and a consequent exposure of surfaces for whose excessive sensitiveness, nature has provided a muffling. (“F,” p. 41)

Instead of pitting occultism against science, and the supernatural against the natural, the disease theory hybridizes physiology, psychology, and mysticism with the ether theory. Hesselius again mentions “the cerebral circulation” of a fluid that “undergoes periodically … [a] vibratory disturbance” (“F,” p. 42). Barton’s case is more complicated, though, as his disease is also a moral and spiritual sickness caused by an unpardonable act of cruelty. In an exemplary enactment of the Freudian uncanny, the supernatural returns “to upset the pride of scepticism and vindicate the old simple laws of nature within us” (“F,” p. 47). This return of the supernatural is manifested on another level as well, namely that of genre. In what genre do “Green Tea” and “The Familiar” belong? Are they ghost stories? Robert Tracy notes that “none of these stories are about ghosts.” Rather, “they are about hauntings.”7 Tracy’s astute discrimination between ghosts and hauntings recalls the methodological complexities that attend ghostology, and which I discussed earlier. If we limit ghost stories to narratives about the return of the dead in spectral form, then “Green Tea” and “The Familiar” are not ghost stories properly speaking. This time, moreover, the veracity of the ghost-seer’s vision is not in question: “what Le Fanu’s haunted protagonists see is real though uncanny.”8 Whereas ghost stories call upon physiological optics to explain aberrant vision, Hesselius and Jennings are skeptical of physicians “leaning to the materialistic school” (“GT,” p. 17), such as the one who had misdiagnosed Jennings. “Optic nerves, he talked of,” Jennings complains to his new doctor. “Ah! well – there are other nerves of communication” (“GT,” p. 28). Jennings “had read, of course, as every one has, something about ‘spectral illusions,’ as … physicians term the phenomena of such cases” (“GT,” p. 25), but all that this reading does is convince him that something crucial is consistently overlooked by materialist science. The most salient feature of Victorian ghost stories, I previously argued, is undecidability. Is the ghost real? Should the ghost-seer trust his or her eyes? And if not, what is the criterion for determining what is real? The Hesselius stories are perhaps closer to detective fiction, where the mystery

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involves not problems of reality but of causality. As with Dupin and Holmes, Hesselius’s task is to make inferences and conjectures, link effects to causes. For Hesselius a theory which straddles the boundary between materialism and spiritualism qualifies as a rational, scientific explanation. Indeed, it is the only theory that fits the data. His method is compatible with that of the traditional detective, but his starting premise is ­different – there are such things as “disembodied spirits” (“GT,” p. 39) – and so are the deductions he can legitimately make. What we get in the Hesselius stories, then, is a case of science forging inroads into what it denies and represses, and of detective fiction returning to its occult roots – but also a case of the ghost story’s incorporation of the intellectual concerns and investigative procedures typically encountered in detective fiction. Perhaps the best example of this hybridization of genres is Le Fanu’s “Mr Justice Harbottle.” While the account of Harbottle’s affliction and violent death (authored by one Anthony Harman, Esq. and transcribed verbatim by Hesselius) is ambiguous about the veracity of Harbottle’s visions, Hesselius’s fictitious editor comments that the case belongs to the class of those described in Hesselius’s “extraordinary Essay on ‘the Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the opening thereof’,” and that it presents “one of the best declared cases of an opening of the interior sense, which I have met with” (“JH,” p. 83). The story is a reworking of Le Fanu’s “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House in AungierStreet,” rewritten as a narrative about the detection of ghosts rather than a ghost story. Like “The Familiar,” it is about retribution and punishment for unrepented sins. Harbottle, a “sarcastic and ferocious administrator of the criminal code of England” (“JH,” p. 95), is visited by the apparition of a man he had unjustly sent to the gallows, and who exhibits to him “a stripe of swollen blue round his neck, which indicated … the grip of the rope” (“JH,” p. 101). Soon after, apparently while taking a nap (so that what follows may only be a dream), Harbottle is abducted and brought before the otherworldly High Court of Appeal presided over by the Lord ChiefJustice Twofold, Harbottle’s more sarcastic and ferocious double. Twofold is “an image of Mr Justice Harbottle, at least double his size, and with all his fierce colouring, and his ferocity of eye and visage, enhanced awfully” (“JH,” p. 108). Following a brief Kafkaesque trial, not unlike those over which he himself had presided, the High Court sentences Harbottle to the gallows. On the day appointed for his execution he is found in his house “hanging by the neck from the banister at the top of the great staircase, and quite dead.” Medical evidence suggests that Harbottle commits suicide as a result of his “atrabilious state” (“JH,” p. 117), but Hesselius’s

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introductory remarks direct our attention elsewhere: to Harbottle’s moral and spiritual pathology. He has been forced to witness the spectacle of the criminal trial from the point of view of a condemned man, to experience a mock trial from the perspective of those he had complacently sent to their deaths.9 Yet something else is also inverted in this perspective shift. A ghost story becomes a detective story, but a tongue-in-cheek one that breaks the conventions. The ghost of the hanging judge in “Strange Disturbances” is rewritten into a flesh-and-blood person haunted by crimes for which he cannot be punished by the law (Harbottle is the law), and is treated in the narrative as a patient inflicted by a disease that he has brought upon himself. The conversion from the ghost of a judge to a judge haunted by his own judgments blurs the line separating criminal from victim (the two are one and the same) and shifts the execution of justice from secular authority to an otherworldly court, suggesting that the work of detection is incapable of redressing wrongs perpetrated by the system that it serves to protect. What later occult detectives share with Hesselius is the desire to lay the ghost and restore the balance between this world and the world of spirits by shutting down channels of communication between them. But before we get to these later exorcisms and the occult investigators who perform them, we must venture into the terrain of non-Euclidean and n-dimensional­geometries, which facilitate yet another spiritualist appropriation of late-Victorian science.

Chapter 12

Other dimensions, other worlds

In “The Postulates of the Science of Space,” a lecture delivered in 1874 and published the following year in The Contemporary Review, Clifford begins by humbly paying homage to a book that “has been for nearly twenty-two centuries the encouragement and guide of that scientific thought which is one thing with the progress of man from a worse to a better state.”1 This vital book is Euclid’s Elements, the foundational text of geometry as well as “the inspiration and the aspiration of scientific thought,” since “the aim of every scientific student of every subject was to bring his knowledge of that subject into a form as perfect as that which geometry had attained.”2 But what begins as a tribute to Euclid soon turns into a eulogy of sorts, though one without a note of sadness. By the 1870s the foundational premises of Euclidean geometry had convincingly been challenged by a number of prominent mathematicians, and Clifford elatedly describes the break from the Euclidean paradigm as a new Copernican revolution:  “[T]he transcendent importance of these two changes is that they are changes in the conception of the Cosmos.”3 Dubbing the Russian mathematician Nicolai Lobachevskii the new Copernicus of geometry, Clifford explains that what the shift from Euclidean to non-Euclidean concepts of space means is that space which we cannot observe is space about which we can say nothing: “knowledge of Immensity and Eternity is replaced by knowledge of Here and Now.” Geometry may still be the model and inspiration for all exact sciences, but its purview is not unlimited. “The geometer of to-day,” Clifford writes, “knows nothing about the nature of actually existing space at an infinite distance; he knows nothing about the properties of this present space in a past or a future eternity.”4 Yet Clifford arguably does not go far enough. For non-Euclidean geometry declines to make definitive pronouncements, not only about eternity and infinity, but also about the nature of the space inhabited by our bodies. This position was crystallized in the 1880s when mathematicians such as Henri Poincaré argued that, whether Euclidean or 157

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non-Euclidean, geometry does not (or should not) concern itself with space as it actually is, but simply with the consistency of its theorems and axioms. “[T]he word ‘existence’ has not the same meaning when it refers to a mathematical entity as when it refers to a material object,” Poincaré explains. Unlike physical objects, “[a] mathematical entity exists provided there is no contradiction implied in its definition, either in itself, or with the propositions previously admitted.”5 Moreover, what Clifford did not anticipate is that non-Euclidean geometry, much like the ether, would occasion not an implosion of knowledge to Here and Now but instead an explosion of speculations about spaces and dimensions other than those we know – and which, it was argued, were the key to accessing the world of spirits. Before we proceed to spirits, though, we should acquaint ourselves with some of the basic ideas of non-Euclidean geometry. Lobachevskii’s seminal contribution was to demonstrate that Euclid’s infamous fifth postulate, involving parallel lines, cannot be proved within the Euclidean system, and, furthermore, that an alternate, entirely consistent geometry can be developed alongside the Euclidean one. The fifth postulate states:  “That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than two right angles.”6 In the somewhat simpler terms of the Playfair axiom: “Through a given point only one parallel can be drawn to a given straight line or, Two straight lines which intersect one another cannot both be parallel to one and the same straight line.”7 Another formulation, derived from the Playfair axiom, is that the sum of the angles in a triangle is invariably equal to 180°, or the sum of two right angles.8 In his article “On the Principles of Geometry,” published in 1829 in the Kazan Messenger, Lobachevskii demonstrated that, presuming the fifth postulate inoperative, an infinite number of straight lines can be drawn passing through a point outside a given line and that all the lines thus derived will be parallel to each other. Differently put: an infinite number of intersecting lines can be drawn parallel to a given line, one consequence being that the sum of the angles in a triangle is less than 180°. Clifford cites Lobachevskii as the inventor of non-Euclidean geometry, yet the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai had independently obtained the same results in 1829, although he did not publish them until 1832 (his “The Science of Absolute Space”9 appeared as an appendix to his father Wolfgang’s mathematical treatise Tentamen). Historians consider Lobachevskii and Bolyai to have invented non-Euclidean geometry

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simultaneously, though Lobachevskii may have the greater claim to first place as he published his work before Bolyai. The famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss would have beaten both Lobachevskii and Bolyai, however, had he dared to go public with his own non-Euclidean geometry, which he had developed as early as 1824. When Wolfgang mailed Gauss an advance copy of the Appendix, Gauss wrote back to congratulate the son, albeit somewhat peevishly: “If I begin with the statement that I dare not praise such a work, you will of course be startled for a moment: but I cannot do otherwise; to praise it would amount to praising myself; for the entire content of the work, the path which your son has taken, the results to which he is led, coincide almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for from thirty to thirty-five years.” Gauss ends the letter by magnanimously stating that he is “overjoyed that it happens to be the son of my old friend who outstrips me in such a remarkable way.”10 Mathematicians had for centuries treated the parallel postulate as an embarrassing complication in what is otherwise an elegant, consistent system; Jean Le Rond d’Alembert exasperatedly called it “l’écueil et le scandale des élémens de Géométrie.”11 All attempts to prove the postulate had failed, yet this was not regarded as an indication that there was something questionable about the rest of the Elements or even that the postulate, frustratingly resistant to proof, might be false.12 “Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature,” David Hume asserted in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), “the truths, demonstrated by euclid, would for ever retain their certainty and evidence.”13 But the postulate, as Hans Reichenbach observes, is fundamentally suspect: “At first glance the axiom appears to be self-evident. There is, however, something unsatisfactory about it, because it contains a statement about infinity; the assertion that the two [parallel] lines do not intersect within a finite distance transcends all possible experience.”14 Proof for the parallel postulate cannot be derived from experience because parallel lines cannot be followed into infinity to make sure that they keep their distance from each other. There is always the possibility that, if we were to pursue them far enough, they will at some point start converging or diverging. Euclid’s space is flat and infinite: the kind of space in which a straight line will continue on its trajectory into infinity. Lobachevskii and Bolyai showed that space may in fact be curved – or that mathematically constructed spaces and physical space need not be identical. In any case, a space of constant negative curvature (shaped like a saddle, and on which movement in any direction is uninterrupted) can be constructed in which the parallel postulate is false but the others remain valid.

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The next pivotal contribution came from the German mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, who showed that Lobachevskii’s hyperbolic space of constant negative curvature is not the only alternative to Euclid’s parabolic geometry of zero curvature space. In “Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen,” a lecture delivered in 1854 at the University of Göttingen as his Habilitationsschrift and published in 1867, Riemann made the crucial distinction between finite/ infinite and bound/boundless space, and formulated an elliptic geometry of constant positive curvature in which space is finite yet boundless. Shaped like a sphere, in contrast to the pseudo-spherical constructions of Lobachevskii and Bolyai, such space is said to be finite because the surface of the sphere does not extend into infinity; it is boundless, however, because an object moving along the surface of the sphere will never reach the end of the surface. Whereas in Lobachevskii’s and Bolyai’s negative curvature space an infinite number of parallel lines are possible and the sum of the angles in a triangle is less than 180°, in Riemannian space there are no parallel lines and the sum of the angles is greater than 180°. With Riemann it became clear that instead of one non-Euclidean geometry there were at least two equally viable alternatives, both of which suggested that the Elements needed reconsideration and that the very notion of a geometric axiom is deeply problematic. Non-Euclidean geometry was not a resounding success in Britain, in part because of the language barrier but mostly because Euclid was unanimously regarded as infallible.15 A major step forward was made in 1873 when Clifford published his translation of Riemann’s article in Nature16 and the following year delivered a series of lectures on Riemann at the Royal Institution. More influential in spreading the word on Riemann were the articles that Helmholtz published in British scientific journals in the 1870s. Helmholtz found non-Euclidean geometries serviceable to promoting his empiricist agenda and disproving intuitionism.17 In “The Origin and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” an 1876 article for Mind (originally a lecture delivered in Heidelberg in 1870 and published that year in The Academy),18 Helmholtz argues that Kant was mistaken in claiming that geometric axioms are synthetic a priori. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had argued that “mathematical propositions, properly so called, are always judgments a priori, and not empirical, because they carry along with them necessity, which can never be deduced from experience.”19 Helmholtz is suspicious of such assumptions because we cannot be sure whether what we seem to grasp intuitively might not in fact be derived from experience.

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The parallel postulate, which “has called forth a great number of seeming demonstrations” (“OM,” p. 302),20 is a case in point: The main difficulty in these inquiries is and always has been the readiness with which results of everyday experience become mixed up as apparent necessities of thought [scheinbare Denknothwendigkeiten] with the logical processes, so long as Euclid’s method of constructive intuition is exclusively followed in geometry. In particular it is extremely difficult, on this method, to be quite sure that in the steps prescribed for the demonstration we have not involuntarily and unconsciously [unwillkürlich und unwissentlich] drawn in some most general results of experience, which the power of executing certain parts of the operation has already taught us practically. (“OM,” p. 302)

Euclid’s method is founded on the assumption of the congruence of geometrical figures: “The foundation of all proof by Euclid’s method consists in establishing the congruence of lines, angles, plane figures, solids, &c. To make the congruence evident, the geometrical figures are supposed to be applied to one another, of course without changing their form and dimensions.” But “this assumption of the free translation of fixed figures with unchanged form to every part of space,” Helmholtz maintains, is not a matter of a priori necessity, as it can be shown that “every proof by congruence rests upon a fact which is obtained from experience only” (“OM,” p. 303) rather than from an intuitive understanding of space. Helmholtz illustrates his argument with an analogy that would quickly inspire both scientists and spiritualists to speculate on other kinds of space as well as other dimensions – and the intelligent beings who may inhabit them: Let us, as we logically may, suppose reasoning beings of only two dimensions to live and move on the surface of some solid body. We will assume that they have not the power of perceiving anything outside this surface, but that upon it they have perceptions similar to ours. If such beings worked out a geometry, they would of course assign only two dimensions to their space. They would ascertain that a point in moving describes a line, and that a line in moving describes a surface. But they could as little represent to themselves [eine Vorstellung machen können] what further spatial construction would be generated by a surface moving out of itself, as we can represent what would be generated by a solid moving out of the space we know. (“OM,” p. 303)

If such beings inhabited an infinite plane, “their geometry would be exactly the same as our planimetry.” They would hold it as axiomatic “that only one straight line is possible between two points, that through a third point lying without this line only one line can be drawn parallel

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to it, that the ends of a straight line never meet though it is produced to infinity, and so on.” If we presume, on the other hand, that their world is not flat but a sphere, such as Riemann’s space of positive curvature, one axiom of their geometry would be that no parallel lines can be drawn and that the “shortest or straightest line between two points … [is] an arc of the great circle passing through them” (“OM,” p. 304), i.e. a geodetic line. This and all other axioms would not be the result of intuitive judgments but of experience, although the axioms might appear to possess universal validity and necessity. Moving now from flat or curved two-dimensional space to our space of three dimensions, we can see how the same mistake is made when we suppose that the axioms of Euclidean geometry are the result of an intuitive grasp of space, and how, rather than being universal and necessary, “geometrical axioms must vary according to the kind of space inhabited” (“OM,” p. 305). Non-Euclidean geometry is a welcome contribution to the philosophy of science and general epistemology because it shows us that “if we can imagine such spaces of other sorts” (if such spaces are conceivable, vorstellbar), as is clearly the case, then “it cannot be maintained that the axioms of geometry are necessary consequences of an a priori transcendental form of intuition, as Kant thought” (“OM,” p. 314).21 Yet if we can imagine and construct mathematical models of spherical and pseudo-spherical alternatives to Euclid’s flat space, this does not mean that we are also able to imagine a space of four dimensions – just as the inhabitants of a plane cannot imagine a space in which objects have length, width, and breadth. What the inhabitants of each space can represent (vorstellen) to themselves is confined by what they can experience. As a hard-line empiricist, it is critical for Helmholtz to distinguish the imaginable spaces of Lobachevskii and Riemann (which demonstrate that the Euclidean axioms are experientially derived) from the unimaginable, unrepresentable space of four dimensions: By the much abused expressions “to represent” [“sich vorstellen”] or “to be able to think how something happens” [“sich denken können, wie etwas geschieht”] I understand  – and I do not see how anything else can be understood by it without loss of all meaning – the power of imagining the whole series of sensible impressions [sinnlichen Eindrücke] that would be had in such a case. Now as no sensible impression is known relating to such an unheard-of event as the movement to a fourth dimension would be to us, or as a movement to our third dimension would be to the inhabitants of a surface, such a “representation” [“Vorstellung”] is as impossible as the “representation” of colours would be to one born blind, though a description of them in general terms might be given to him. (“OM,” p. 304)

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Just as a blind person cannot form a Vorstellung of colors, no matter how vividly we describe them to him or her, so too are we constitutionally blind to a fourth dimension of space. Helmholtz is adamant about this and underscores the impossibility of our visualizing more than three dimensions: Inhabiting a space of three dimensions and endowed with organs of sense for their perception, we can represent to ourselves the various cases in which beings on a surface might have to develop their perception of space; for we have only to limit our own perceptions to a narrower field. It is easy to think away [wegdenken] perceptions that we have; but it is very difficult to imagine [sinnlich vorstellen] perceptions to which there is nothing analogous in our experience. When, therefore, we pass to space of three dimensions we are stopped in our power of representation [Vorstellungsvermögen] by the structure of our organs and the experience got through them which correspond only to the space in which we live. (“OM,” p. 308).

Thus Helmholtz seems to want to have it both ways with the imagination (Vorstellungskraft), and power of imagination (Vorstellungsvermögen), which is at once summoned to tear down nativist and intuitionist arguments, and severely restricted to a combinatory exercise in which we reshuffle the building blocks of experience to form mental representations of alternate spatial models. The imagination is powerful enough to enable us to conceive, in perceptual terms, what it would be like to inhabit a space of only two dimensions, and “represent to ourselves the look of a pseudospherical world” (“OM,” p. 318), but, because conditioned by experience and limited by the physiology of our sense organs, it cannot take us into a four-dimensional world. Since a fourth dimension “is not merely a modification of what we have but something perfectly new, we find ourselves by reason of our bodily organisation quite unable to represent a fourth dimension” (“OM,” p. 319).22 Scientists regularly use vivid analogies to illustrate and clarify complex propositions. In the case of Helmholtz’s plane and sphere dwellers, the analogy did much more in the long run than simply package a complicated idea in a way that made it understandable to non-specialists.23 Despite his warning about confusing the imaginable and the unimaginable, in popular culture the multi-world analogy operated as bonding agent between non-Euclidean and what are called n-dimensional geometries (of more than three dimensions), and spurred interest in considering ways to apprehend the fourth dimension. For who is to say what is or is not imaginable (vorstellbar)? Not only is imaginability a matter of individual capabilities, but the concept, as Helmholtz deploys it, hinges on a

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dubious, exclusionary definition: the ability mentally to construct a “series of sensible impressions” (“OM,” p. 304). But to imagine something can also mean to speak about it in some fashion, to speculate on the nature and properties of a thing, without necessarily forming a mental image of it. In this regard, the fourth dimension – as well as a fifth, sixth, and so on – is very much imaginable. Not only is the fourth dimension imaginable in this alternate sense of the word, but, as Poincaré for one believed, one might actually be able to get a glimpse of four-dimensional objects. We should first note that Poincaré’s major contribution to geometry was to cut its Gordian knot: which mathematical space, the Euclidean or one of the non-Euclidean versions, corresponds to the space we inhabit? Starting from the premise that “every deductive science, and geometry in particular, must rest upon a certain number of indemonstrable axioms,”24 Poincaré argues that the question of veracity is meaningless, as the axioms of geometry are neither a priori synthetic judgments, as Kant had believed, nor, as Helmholtz maintained, derived from experience. In an 1887 article, “Sur les hypothèses fondamentales de la géométrie,” Poincaré reasons: One may now ask what these hypotheses [axioms] are. Are they experimental facts, analytic judgments or synthetic a priori judgments? We must respond negatively to these three questions. If these hypotheses were experimental facts, geometry would be subject to unceasing revision and would not be an exact science; if they were synthetic a priori judgments or, even more, analytic judgments, it would be impossible to remove one and establish a system on its negation.25

This removal and negation had occurred via non-Euclidean geometry, so that what are called geometric axioms are best understood as conventions. This is not to say, however, that a set of axioms is chosen randomly: “the observation of certain physical phenomena … accounts for the choice of certain hypotheses among all possible ones.” Still, “the group chosen is only more convenient than the others and one cannot say that Euclidean geometry is true and the geometry of Lobachevsky is false any more than one could say that cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false.”26 As he later phrased it in “Les Géométries non euclidiennes” (1891), to ask “Is Euclidean geometry true?” is to pose a meaningless question. “We might as well ask if the metric system is true, and if the old weights and measures are false … One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.”27 Poincaré’s “Sur les hypothèses fondamentales de la géométrie” and “Les Géométries non euclidiennes” were collected in La Science et l’ hypothèse (1902), which also includes a more daring and controversial piece, “L’Espace

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et la géometrie,” first published in 1895. Here Poincaré recycles Helmholtz’s multi-dimensional analogy but hints that perceiving four-dimensional objects is indeed possible if we put our minds – and eyes – to it: Let us begin with a little paradox. Beings whose minds were made as ours, and with senses like ours, but without any preliminary education, might receive from a suitably-chosen external world impressions which would lead them to construct a geometry other than that of Euclid, and to localise the phenomena of this external world in a non-Euclidean space, or even in space of four dimensions. As for us, whose education has been made by our actual world, if we were suddenly transported into this new world, we should have no difficulty in referring phenomena to our Euclidean space. Perhaps somebody may appear on the scene some day who will devote his life to it, and be able to represent to himself the fourth dimension.28

Perception, Poincaré maintains, can be enhanced by training:  “Just as we have pictured to ourselves a non-Euclidean world, so we may picture a world of four dimensions.”29 His mathematical conventionalism and perceptual relativism rest on the assumption that there is a substantial difference between geometric and perceptual space. Geometric space is considered to be continuous, infinite, three-dimensional, homogeneous, and isotropic; perceptual space, he maintains, has none of these properties. For instance, perceptual space is two-dimensional. The “image formed on the back of the retina” is continuous, but “possess[es] only two dimensions, which already distinguishes purely visual from what may be called geometrical space.” Similarly, perceptual space is not homogeneous, given that the yellow spot, the area of greatest visual acuity, “can in no way be regarded as identical with a point on the edge of the retina”30 where vision is blurry. When we look at something, Poincaré further explains, the eyeball performs a great number of muscular movements that rapidly imprint on the retina a series of images, each slightly different from the next in terms of perspective. These images are almost instantaneously collated and superimposed to produce a three-dimensional picture. Thus although the surface of the retina has only two dimensions and the images captured by it are two-dimensional as well, ocular accommodation and convergence enable us to see three-dimensionally. These operations are performed in accordance with certain laws that “form a group, which has the same structure as that of the movements of invariable solids.”31 But these laws are not the ultimate arbiters of what we can imagine and perceive: There is nothing … to prevent us from imagining that these operations are combined according to any law we choose – for instance, by forming a group with the same structure as that of the movements of an invariable four-dimensional solid.

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In this there is nothing that we cannot represent to ourselves, and, moreover, these sensations are those which a being would experience who has a retina of two dimensions, and who may be displaced in space of four dimensions. In this sense we may say that we can represent to ourselves the fourth dimension.32

Mathematical conventions, as well as conventional ways of seeing or knowing, can be altered, as there is no innate or necessary correspondence between our perceptual space and the geometric spaces we construct through conventions and experience. Poincaré’s refutation of Helmholtz’s empiricist take on geometric axioms was part of a broader discussion on four-dimensional seeing. Literary authors were quick to explore this possibility. In Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland:  A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) an inhabitant of two-dimensional space discusses geometry with a Sphere and reasons that there must exist “some yet more spacious Space, some more dimensionable Dimensionality” which a Sphere, closer to it than a Flatlander, can perceive “with the inner eye of thought.”33 The fourth dimension is conceived as time in Herbert George Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). The Time Traveller explains: Clearly … any real body must have extension in four dimensions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness and  – Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh … we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three of which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time … You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they [i.e. mathematicians] think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four – if they could master the perspective of the thing.34

To do so one would mentally need to superimpose a series of time-bound images and construct a chrono-composite:  “For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.”35 As Wells must have known, Victorian photographers were adept at making composite images by means of multiple exposure. Yet time is not what most nineteenth-century mathematicians had in mind when they spoke of the fourth dimension, which they conceptualized in spatial rather than temporal terms.36 The ability to imagine three-dimensional non-Euclidean spaces was arguably enhanced in the late 1860s when the Italian mathematician Eugenio Beltrami constructed visual models of spherical and pseudospherical spaces, which heightened the interest of contemporary mathematicians

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in non-Euclidean geometry.37 But as Reichenbach has argued, such images show us too little; they merely map out non-Euclidean geometry upon Euclidean space, so that we fail to see the extra dimension purportedly represented in them. We can, however, “emancipate ourselves from Euclidean congruence,” he argues in the manner of Poincaré, by “training the eyes to adjust to the behavior of solid bodies”38 under non-­Euclidean rules of congruence. But representing four-dimensional objects is far more challenging. As Linda Dalrymple Henderson explains, such an object (called a hypersolid) “is bounded by three-dimensional solids, just as the three­dimensional solids we know are bounded by two-dimensional planes. Such a complex figure must necessarily be viewed in sections either by passing it through our space so that new three-dimensional sections continually appear or by turning it on an axis and taking successive threedimensional views of it.”39 Yet understanding what must be done to see four-dimensionally does not enable us to actually do so. A breakthrough of sorts was made by the American mathematician Washington Irving Stringham, whose 1880 article “Regular Figures in n-Dimensional Space”40 includes visual models of hypersolids, but these glaringly lack the illusionism we encounter in two-dimensional perspectival representations of three-dimensional figures. The challenge of figuring out how to “master the perspective of the thing,” as Wells’s Time Traveller puts it, was vital to arousing public interest in hyperspace (i.e. space of more than three dimensions). In The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained (1910), a collection of 22 essays selected from 245 submissions for a science-prize competition, statements about picturability and visibility range from the Helmholtzian position that we are constitutionally forever barred from seeing in four dimensions  – “The idea [of another dimension] is to us incomprehensible,” asserts one writer; “even if a fourth dimension exists, it must forever remain unknown to us in our natural condition”41 – to bolder variants of Poincaré’s speculations on breaking free from perceptual conventions. Another widely discussed question was whether the fourth dimension concealed not just something but someone from our sight, namely spirits. Dismissals were in order. “[T]he idea of a fourth dimension has been made ridiculous,” the same writer continues, “by the suggestion that spirits probably dwell in that dimension and can appear to us and disappear at pleasure, thus offering an explanation for the so-called phenomena of spiritualism.”42 Yet there is nothing ridiculous about this suggestion, another contributor maintains, if we recognize that our mental vision is actually four-dimensional: “we can do in thought” what a four-dimensional being “could do in fact.” A

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simple experiment proves the theory. “For imagine a solid cube before your mind’s eye. You can look direct at the front of it. You can look equally straight at its back or at any side, without either moving your own imagined position or the cube’s position. This is four-dimensional.”43 In fact, there may be more to our four-dimensionality than mental vision: “If our mental vision be four-dimensional, then our mental or spiritual self may be four-dimensional. If séance-wonders are four-dimensional, they may represent the powers of spiritual beings. If time is but the way in which we perceive the fourth dimension, then our spiritual selves, being fourdimensional, may be above time, outside of time – eternal.”44 Such reasoning challenges Clifford’s claim that the knowable universe had imploded via the non-Euclidean revolution to “knowledge of Here and Now,”45 and part of the reason why the new geometries were often received with hostility in Britain is that they could so easily be abducted by spiritualists looking to buttress their arguments with the latest scientific theory. Riemann and Helmholtz were severely criticized for uprooting geometry from its Kantian foundations and opening the door to fantastic speculations. In an 1896 article for The Philosophical Review, the American psychologist, philosopher, and mathematician James Hervey Hyslop warns against a great deal of crazy metaphysics which might support itself upon the authority of men like Helmholtz and Riemann. Occultism simply revels in the doctrine of a fourth dimension, and is absolved from the duty of proving it in se by the authority of presumably sane scientific men; and while it may be sufficient simply to laugh at the pretensions of the occultist, and while it only dignifies his speculations seriously to consider them, there are some at least quasi-genuine phenomena which throw the reins to madhouse theories, when both parties soberly discuss the claims for a fourth dimension and remain wholly ignorant of the logical principles, which not only vitiate the argument for the existence, or even possibility, of this “dimension,” but make the talk about it mere child’s play.46

Hyslop admits that “it is not necessary to deny the fact of other than the known properties of existence, nor to deny that there is more than is dreamt of in any of our philosophies,” but cautions that modifying “geometry and mathematics, so that they … are made to share the precarious fortunes of metaphysics” is not a good idea because “our science would lose its much boasted certitude by the change, and would very soon turn into a fool’s paradise.”47 Although Hyslop does not name names, it is more than likely that the “madhouse theories” that worry him are those of the German physicist and astronomer Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner and the English

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mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, both of whom were regularly cited by late-Victorian popularizers of non-Euclidean geometry as no less authoritative on dimensional matters than Riemann and Helmholtz.48 Zöllner’s experiments with the celebrated American medium Henry Slade are documented in his Transcendental Physics (first published in German in 1878 as the third volume of his Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen and translated into English in 1880), where Zöllner makes an effort to show the compatibility of clairvoyance with the new geometries. The experiment that convinced him that clairvoyance is indeed empirically demonstrable involved inviting Slade to a séance and presenting him with two sealed cardboard boxes. One box was circular and contained a five-Mark piece; the other, rectangular, held two smaller coins. Seated at a table with the boxes in front of him and furnished with a writing slate and two pencils, Slade first concentrated on the circular box and reported seeing the numbers 5 and 1876 (the denomination of the coin and the year it was minted), after which the coin apparently dropped through the bottom of the box, penetrated the table’s twenty millimeters of oak wood, and landed on the slate which the medium was holding under the table. In Zöllner’s estimation, Slade’s ability to see inside the box without touching it “established the existence of a direct perception of objects, not effected in the ordinary way of our sense-perceptions.”49 Slade’s performance with the first box presented “incontrovertible proof … of the reality of so-called clairvoyance.”50 While clairvoyance may be inexplicable from the perspective of traditional science, it admits a very easy and natural explanation by help of the fourth dimension. From the direction of the fourth dimension, the, to us, three-dimensionally enclosed space must be regarded as appearing open, and indeed in an interval from the place of our body so much the greater, the higher the soul is raised to the fourth dimension. At the same time, with the increasing elevation to this fourth dimension there is a widening of the overlooked space of three dimensions, just as by elevation above the surface of the earth there is, according to geometrical laws, a widening of the overlooked two-dimensional expanse.51

Slade communicated the contents of the rectangular box by writing on the slate, after which the coins dropped onto it. But when Zöllner picked up the box and shook it, he heard rattling. Puzzled, he opened the box. The results were better than he could have hoped. Not only had the coins been removed, but the two pencils had taken their place. Differently than with the circular box, Slade was unable to communicate the contents of the rectangular box without using the slate. Rather than being discouraged by this discrepancy, Zöllner turned it to his advantage: “The contents of

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this rectangular box must therefore have existed as imaged in another, not a three-dimensionally incorporated intelligence, before that represented image could be transmitted to us by the aid of writing. Hereby is proved, as it seems to me, in a very cogent manner the existence of intelligent beings, invisible to us, and of their active participation in our experiments.”52 In the case of the first box, “Slade’s soul was … so far raised in the fourth dimension that the contents of the box in front of him were visible in particular detail” to Slade himself. “In the second case, one of those intelligent beings of the fourth dimension looked down upon us from such a height that the contents of the rectangular box were visible to him, and he could describe its contents upon the slate by means of the pencil.”53 Such experiments provide “proofs of the reality of a fourth dimension” and “the transport of material bodies from a space enclosed on every side,”54 while the fourth dimension in turn explains how something like clairvoyance is possible – a suspiciously neat arrangement, a skeptic might say: two dubious theories dovetail to validate one another. Zöllner begins to sound a bit like Poincaré when he launches into a discussion of the laws of perspective and the adjustment that occurs when we move from three-dimensional “cubical vision” to four-dimensional “quadratic vision.”55 The ascertainment of these laws of perspective for space intuition widened by a dimension would first of all be the task of geometry, just as the elements of Euclid must have been known and have become the common property of physicists and astronomers before the spatial significance of celestial phenomena could be thought. That intuitional images, or representations of objects of sight clothed with all the attributes of sense, arise, change and disappear in our soul without the intervention of the physical sight is proved by dreams, hallucinations, and illusions.56

Zöllner admits that, for the time being, we know nothing of the means by which such representations are created “and can therefore only advance hypotheses about them.” He is confident, however, that “the essential criterion for the fact that the latter [intuitional] class of representations have real objects in an external world corresponding to them, is the geometrical criterion; that is, the possibility for our understanding to refer a part of the changes and differences of those representations to the geometrical laws of remoteness and position.”57 Translated into less imposing language, Zöllner’s point is that just as elevation in three-dimensional space gives us a broader visual scope, so too are mediums such as Slade, and “other individuals under other conditions in the clairvoyant state,”58 able to see more from a higher vantage point in the fourth dimension – to peek inside closed boxes, for instance.

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In an 1878 article for The Quarterly Journal of Science, entitled “On Space of Four Dimensions” (reprinted in the English edition of Transcendental Physics), Zöllner argues that “our contemplation of a three-dimensioned space has been developed by means of the law of causality, which has been implanted in us a priori,”59 and suggests that Kant’s intuitionism is not entirely at odds with Helmholtz’s empiricism: [O]ur present conception of space, familiar to us by habit, has been derived from experience, i.e., from empirical facts by means of the causal principle existing a priori in our intellect. This in particular is to be said of the three dimensions of our present conception of space. If from our childhood phenomena had been of daily occurrence, requiring a space of four or more dimensions for an explanation which should be free from contradiction, i.e., conformable to reason, we should be able to form a conception of space of four or more dimensions. It follows that the real existence of a four-dimensional space can only be decided by experience, i.e., by observation of facts.60

No such experiences being available to us, our conception of space is limited to three dimensions. “A great step has been made,” however, “by acknowledging that the possibility of a four-dimensional development of space can be understood by our intellect, although … no corresponding image of it can be conceived by the mind.”61 But clairvoyants such as Slade are endowed with greater perceptual ­powers and can see what others cannot. That objects perceived by “quadratic vision” tend to be hazy, transparent, and seem to lose solidity is in accordance with the rules of geometric perspective, but also in accordance with Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Berkeley’s distinction between vivid ideas derived from sense perception and vague ideas produced by the imagination is compatible, Zöllner believes, with his own argument regarding the difference between high-­definition corporeal vision and fuzzy “intuitional images” apprehended “in our soul.”62 Berkeley enables Zöllner to raise his discussion of the ­mechanisms of perception from Helmholtz’s secular dimension onto a theological plane. “The ideas of sense,” Berkeley writes and Zöllner quotes, “are more strong, lively, and distinct, than those of the imagination … and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series – the admirable connection whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its author.”63 Whereas Zöllner tried to come up with empirical evidence for clairvoyance, the fourth dimension, and the existence of intelligent spirits,64 Hinton took a more theoretical route. His two series of Scientific Romances (1884–5;

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1896), containing popular essays dealing chiefly with the fourth dimension, were a touchstone for later attempts to bridge the divide between materialism and spiritualism by means of geometry. Hinton’s work is representative of the leap in late nineteenth-century hyperspace philosophy from an endorsement of Helmholtzian restrictions on perception and the imagination to predictions of opening unseen multi-dimensional vistas. In “What is the Fourth Dimension?” (which opens the first series and was originally published in 1880 in the Dublin University Magazine), Hinton revisits Helmholtz’s multi-dimensional analogy and argues that the inhabitants of lower dimensions can neither perceive nor form mental images of higher dimensions of space. Yet this does not mean that we cannot conceptualize an object with an extra dimension, as Helmholtz insisted, but that in doing so we must “rely, not on a process of touching or vision, such as informs us of the properties of bodies in the space we know, but on a process of thought,” or what Hinton terms the “exercise of the abstract imagination.”65 For instance, it is possible to form a “mental construction” of a so-called four-square, a four-dimensional object with sixteen points, twenty-four surfaces, and thirty-two lines, bounded by eight cubes. Yet we should not expect to be able to visualize the object in the familiar sense of the word and must “divest ourselves of the habit of visual or tangible illustration.”66 Differentiating between mental conceptions and mental images, Hinton maintains that “speculations of this kind … have considerable value; for they enable us to express in intelligible terms things of which we can form no image. They supply us, as it were, with scaffolding, which the mind can make use of in building up its conceptions.”67 Fourdimensional objects are imaginable but not picturable. In “Many Dimensions” (1885), Hinton replaces mental constructions of four-dimensional objects with something very different: “the feeling of being in four-dimensional (or more dimensional) space.”68 Affective rather than cognitive, “the inward apprehension of space” affords a mystical communion with something larger instead of being simply a challenging mental exercise, as it is for Poincaré. When he argues that “we would pass beyond the knowledge of the things about us in the world” if we made an effort “to acquire a sense and living apprehension of four-dimensional space,”69 Hinton is careful to specify that by sense and apprehension he means something other than what a physiologist would. Space, he argues, is not to be mastered intellectually, but to be worshiped. Like God, space is infinite and omnipresent, and can be comprehended by human intellect only by wrapping it in the artificial and arbitrary “garments of magnitude and vesture of many dimensions.” Space, again like God, surpasses

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understanding and makes customary modes of apprehension inadequate. This deification of space, the hallmark of Hinton’s work on the fourth dimension, is anti-ocularcentric as well as anti-logocentric, in that it abandons both outer and inner senses in favor of a transcendental, mystical affect of the soul: “[T]he divinity moves, and the raiment and robes fall to the ground, leaving the divinity herself, revealed, but invisible; not seen, but somehow felt to be there.”70 The move from sense perception and rational comprehension to spiritual affect is essential for the conversion that Hinton encourages his readers to make “from the most complete materialism to something very different,” namely “the elevation of our notion of space to its true place,” where “the antagonism between our present materialistic and our present idealistic views of life falls away.”71 Hinton, it should be remarked, was not alone in calling for a deification of space. Echoing Wooldridge’s “rationalist’s faith,” in The Dimensional Idea as an Aid to Religion (1907) W. F. Tyler seeks “an hypothesis that conceivably explains consonantly with our reason the conditions in which we find ourselves,” and that at the same time would “form the basis of a new religion founded on reason and not on mysticism.” The foundations for this new, reasonable religion are readily available in “the dimensional idea,” specifically in the notion that “[i]mmediately above us is a fourth dimensional existence, in which the whole of each of us, past, present, and future is an existing thing.”72 “The infinite-dimensional existence,” Tyler declares, “I conceive to be God, of Whom, therefore, in an infinitely small degree we are a ‘part,’ but of Whose nature and attributes, it is hopelessly impossible to gain any conception whatever.” This, he explains, “is not so much a new religion in addition to existing ones as a new religious idea, capable of being grafted on to any existing religion, and forming the esoteric basis of the ideas of cultured exponents.”73 But the anti-ocularcentrism of Scientific Romances does not carry over into another work by Hinton on the same subject, A New Era of Thought (1888). Hinton begins in the familiar mode, arguing for “liberating our minds from the limitations imposed on it [sic] by the particular conditions under which we are placed.”74 What were previously feelings are now “spiritual intuitions,” which Hinton describes as “thoughts and imaginations, not observations of external facts.”75 Yet his clarification of this and other similarly vague statements relies on ocularcentric language; “the right direction to look,” he writes, “is, not away from matter to spiritual existences, but towards the discovery of conceptions of higher matter.”76 “The first thing to be done,” he instructs the reader, “is to organize our higher-space perception, and then look.” “We have been subject

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to a limitation of the most absurd character. Let us open our eyes and see the facts.”77 This figurative use of looking and seeing morphs into literal usage, and Hinton eventually abandons affect and intuition to settle on something more concrete. To establish communication with “the high intelligences by whom we are surrounded,” we must learn “to develop our power of perception.” This time Hinton specifically refers to a noncorporeal alternative to the bodily eye:  “The power of seeing with our bodily eye is limited to the three-dimensional section. But I have shown that the inner eye is not thus limited; that we can organize our power of seeing in higher space, and that we can form conceptions of realities in this higher space, just as we can with our ordinary space.”78 To have a conception of higher space means to perceive it with the inner eye – a hidden, underdeveloped sense long overdue for some exercise. Such exercises, however, are not to be undertaken simply in order to satisfy our curiosity about what else we may see if we extend ourselves into the fourth dimension. “It is necessary,” Hinton argues, “to develop our perceptions of higher space, so that we can apprehend with our minds the relationship we have to beings higher than ourselves.”79 Heightened apprehension is critical, for it enables us to answer the fundamental questions about love and duty: “The question is, Whom are we to serve?” It cannot be ourselves (for this would be self-centered and selfish), and it cannot be other individuals, since “their claims are conflicting, and as often as not there is more need of a master than of a servant.”80 Nor do our fellow human beings always inspire in us feelings of sympathy and duty. The correct answer is that we must serve “the undiscerned higher beings, of which we are a part.”81 “[T]o love them,” Hinton reasons, “we must know them,” and to know them we must educate ourselves to perceive them. In brief: seeing is knowing is loving. The “perception of higher beings in higher space”82 is not some kind of dimensional game but a moral imperative which we must follow if our lives are to have any real meaning or purpose. “Spiritualists literally had an alternative worldview through their distinctive and extensively described theories of spiritual or inner vision,” remarks Sarah A. Willburn in her study of Victorian spiritualism and mediumship. She observes that these theories, together with various séance practices, “called into question the very meaning of vision and changed the spiritualist’s concepts of visible culture while creating an invisible culture for the practitioner.”83 It is important to recognize that this new invisible culture of spiritualists and mediums was part of a larger discourse on invisibility and alternate modes of perception. Hinton’s appeal to these sense

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modalities, for instance, has its antecedents not just in spiritualist works such as Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature and the Romantic concern with the visionary powers of the imagination, but also in the lectures and writings of nineteenth-century scientists who offered to their audiences visual models of invisible objects and processes, and appealed to their imagination to help picture the imperceptible. A good example is Tyndall. In an 1870 lecture entitled “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” Tyndall tries to impress upon his audience “some of the more occult features and operations of Light and Colour,” to transport them “beyond the boundary of mere observation, into a region where things are intellectually discerned, and to show … [them] there the hidden mechanism of optical action.” “[W]e cannot transcend experience,” Tyndall concedes in Helmholtzian fashion, yet the imagination gives us the capacity to “carry it a long way from its origin. We can magnify, diminish, qualify, and combine experiences, so as to render them fit for purposes entirely new. In explaining sensible phenomena, we habitually form mental images of the ultra-sensible.”84 This is what enabled scientists to discover the luminiferous ether, Tyndall explains. But the imagination is not just an aid in grasping complex concepts; it is a prime mover in the progress of science: “without the exercise of this power, our knowledge of nature would be a mere tabulation of co-existences and sequences” rather than, as it ought to be, an endeavor in “binding the parts of nature to an organic whole.”85 The imagination is “a power of expansion” and “a power of creation” that has, in the case of the ether, “led us into a world not less real than that of the senses, and of which the world of sense itself is the suggestion and, to a great extent, the outcome.”86 Tyndall’s use of the word occult to designate those properties of light and color that surpass empirical observation evokes its etymological roots in occultis (that which is secret, hidden, undetectable by the senses), but also has mystical resonances – as does imagination, a word that most scientists avoid, Tyndall observes, “because of its ultra-scientific connotations.”87 It is possible, he suggests, that Goethe and Young were both correct in their assertions about the nature of light, and that religion and the theory of evolution are not as incompatible as they seem. One can imagine such opposites attracting and dovetailing at “the outer rim of speculative science,” for example in “the idea of primeval union between spirit and matter.”88 The imagination is critical in such endeavors. Its function is to synthesize empirical data and help us make leaps and gain insights – for instance, to open vistas to “a higher region” (PIS i, p. 708), as Whewell calls it, where materialist science must confess to its limitations.

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Light has occult features – imperceptible qualities, certainly, but also possibly “occult qualitates”89 in the mystical sense of the phrase – but so too does vision. In the Preface to the sixth (1880) edition of Heat a Mode of Motion, Tyndall writes that in the pages to follow he has tried to show the tendency displayed throughout history, by the most profound investigators, to pass from the world of the senses to a world where vision becomes spiritual, where principles are elaborated, and from which the explorer emerges with conceptions and conclusions, to be approved or rejected as they coincide, or refuse to coincide, with sensible things. By his observations and reflections in the domain of fact the scientific philosopher is led irresistibly into the domain of theory, his final repose depending on the establishment of absolute harmony between both domains.90

The journey of scientific discovery forms a circle, or more precisely a coil along which the discoverer moves from the sensuous world to the nonsensuous one and back again, rotating between two kinds of vision. To make a discovery, say one concerning occulted relations between natural phenomena, it is necessary to elevate oneself to a world distinct from “the world of the senses,” a world “where vision becomes spiritual” and “principles are elaborated.” For the loop of discovery to be completed, the visionary must return to the sensuous realm, where the insights of spiritual vision are tested against “sensible things.” Thus behind the linear history of science – or the linear narrative of this history  – is a story of oscillations:  “vision becomes spiritual,” then corporeal, then spiritual again, and so on. We should be careful, however, not to confuse Tyndall with Zöllner, Hinton, and other spiritualist proponents of inner vision. For while his spiritual vision has affinities with clairvoyance, Tyndall regarded spiritualism as a hoax. “Surely no baser delusion ever obtained dominance over the weak mind of man,”91 he decided after attending a séance. His position on religion is more complicated. In the famous “Belfast Address” of 1874, Tyndall declares it to be the primary objective of science to “wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.”92 Tyndall subscribed to the basic tenet of scientific naturalism, namely that, “[r]educed to the common denominators of evolving matter and energy, all natural phenomena could be explained mechanically and interpreted without reference to God, supernatural agencies, or independent mind.”93 Yet as Bernard Lightman shows, such a conviction did not necessitate atheism or hostility toward religion. Tyndall was an agnostic, in the particular sense of someone who holds “that God is unknowable

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owing to the inherent limitations of the human mind.”94 As Lightman explains in his study of prominent Victorian agnostics, including Tyndall, Clifford, Spencer, and Huxley: “The agnostics were prepared to fight to the death to defend the right of scientists to remain strictly on the material level when analyzing physical phenomena, since materialistic terminology had proven in the past to help people control nature better than obscure spiritualistic terminology. But equally important to the agnostics was the recognition that the scientist erred who tried to convert his materialistic description of nature into an actual ontological doctrine.”95 In “Scientific Use of the Imagination” Tyndall reassures his audience that science is not the enemy of religion. For instance, they have nothing to fear from the theory of evolution: Fear not the Evolution hypothesis. Steady yourselves, in its presence, upon that faith in the ultimate triumph of truth which was expressed by old Gamaliel when he said: “If it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; if it be of man, it will come to nought.” Under the fierce light of scientific enquiry, it is sure to be dissipated if it possess not a core of truth. Trust me, its existence as a hypothesis is quite compatible with the simultaneous existence of all those virtues to which the term “Christian” has been applied. It does not solve – it does not profess to solve – the ultimate mystery of this universe. It leaves, in fact, that mystery untouched.96

Tyndall urges his audience to regard matter and spirit as “equally worthy, and equally wonderful; to consider them, in fact, as two opposite faces of the self-same mystery.”97 Theology must not infringe on science, but science should not presume that it will ever be able to answer all our questions. His contempt for spiritualist séances aside, what Tyndall shared with contemporary spiritualists was an impatience with intellectuals who fail to recognize “the limits beyond which science ceases to be strong.”98 It would seem that Wooldridge’s “rationalist’s faith,” or something like it, was in some ways achieved through an epistemic hybridization. Stewart and Tait, Zöllner, and Hinton were not alone in their efforts to reorganize the terms of discourse between spiritualism and materialism by showing how the scope of scientific inquiry may be extended by making conjectures about the invisible world – the kind of conjectures, they insisted on pointing out, that scientists themselves were already making about, say, the nature of space or the etheric undulations that permeate it. If the boundary between “real” science and quasi-science needed to be policed, this was partly because the sciences had helped to erode it. According to skeptics of Hyslop’s thinking, this was the beginning of the end of respectable science:  spiritualism and metaphysics had begun to degrade it to a “fool’s

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paradise.”99 Such opinions are still heard today. Late-Victorian “vision[s] of a happy otherworld” predicated on the fourth dimension are “[s]illy and sad,”100 comments one critic. Yet given the paradigm shifts that have punctuated the history of science and occasioned radical turns, Victorian spiritualists could fairly take the same dismissive tone in addressing scientists who refused to consider that what they held as axiomatic may at best be a useful convention, at worst a total fiction. Hyslop, it should be noted, eventually adopted a more critical view of materialism and reinvented himself as a passionate advocate of spiritualism. His Life After Death: Problems of the Future Life and Its Nature (1918), one of several books he authored on the subject, is an appropriate closing example in this chapter, in that it is one of the most forceful and, so far as I can tell, most cogent demonstrations of how mainstream scientific theories or laws – specifically the atomic theory, the ether theory, and the law of energy conservation – are not only not inimical to a survivalist argument but imply it as a matter of necessity. “The belief in a soul,” Hyslop writes, “is primarily based, so far as conceivability is concerned, upon the assured existence of something transcending sense and that is not matter as we ordinarily know it. Is there any such thing?”101 The affirmative answer is provided, in the first place, by the atomic theory. Atoms, Hyslop explains, are thought to be matter, yet they are supersensible, and it is only pure imagination that ascribes material properties to them … Even the best of physicists say that the term means only quantity of energy and they do not pretend to define their properties. It will not do to say that they have form or shape, because no atom has ever been seen by naked eye or microscope. Nor will it do to say that they have weight, because no atom has ever been weighed.

The only evidence that atoms have the properties of matter is not evidence at all but a conjecture, namely “the a priori assumption that the constituent elements of matter as known to sense perception have the same properties as the compounds.”102 Hyslop is careful not to suggest that he has a better understanding of atoms than a physicist; rather, he points out that, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, scientists who endorse the atomic theory share with spiritualists a confidence in the existence of things that elude the senses: “Let the physicist give any conception to it he wishes; it is not a sensory fact and that is all we require to indicate its resemblance in one important feature of it to what has been called spirit from time immemorial; namely, that it transcended sense perception.”103 The ether provides the next link in Hyslop’s chain of reasoning, for it is the immaterial substance par excellence. “The essential qualities of matter,” he explains, “are gravity, inertia, and impenetrability.” The ether

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does not fit this description on any account: it “is universally distributed through space, is not subject to gravity, is perfectly penetrable and apparently not inert … If we insist on calling it by the name ‘matter’ this term has so changed its meaning that what we have called its essential properties are not essential to it at all and we might call it anything we pleased.” From here Hyslop reasons: “If any reality exists in this universe with the properties ascribed to the ether and these the opposite of what we understand by matter, it is not hard to conceive the existence of an energy that thinks and it may be that the ether is this energy.” Again, Hyslop is wary of making indefensible claims: “Now all this does not prove the fact of spirit. It only shows that dogmatic denial of its possibility is not justified.” Physical science has every right “to demand evidence for the assertion of it,” but it must first “concede that the question is an open one and subject to the laws of evidence, and by spirit we do not need to go farther than to suppose some energy that thinks apart from the physical organism with which it is usually associated, or always associated as we know it normally.”104 The notion of a thinking energy is not so outré if we consider the full implications of the law of energy conservation, as Hyslop is prepared to do. He observes, first, that this law proposes “the persistence of the antecedent in the consequent.” The energy which in a steam-powered machine moves the piston, for instance, “is the same in kind as well as amount as that which is distributed about the machine shop and does the ultimate work.” Next, if we assume, and Hyslop does, that there exists the “same sort of causal relation between mental and physical phenomena,”105 and that consciousness is a mode of motion, we are forced to admit that the doctrine of survival stands on solid ground: You cannot say that the effect, consciousness, is a mode of motion without assuming also that the antecedent motion is also consciousness, or your conservation of energy does not hold good. The conservation of energy that will assume a causal nexus between physical and mental phenomena, and at the same time assumes that the two terms are qualitatively the same, must admit that one of the terms is just as permanent as the other, and the doctrine of survival would be a necessity from the very nature of the case … Hence the conservation of energy interpreted as a material causation; that is, the transmission of force from subject to subject and identical in quality or quantity must yield the doctrine of survival, whether we assume a soul or not.106

Physicists of the materialist persuasion who deny this reasoning, Hyslop contends, fall into a logistic trap of their own making: “Hence the only escape which the physicist has, who interprets causality in terms of

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conservation, is to deny a causal nexus between physical and mental phenomena, and to deny that distinctly opens the way to supposing that there is something else than physical phenomena and their accidents in the world.”107 The “fool’s paradise” of occultists turns out not to have been so foolish after all. The real fools, in fact, are on the other side. “I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved,” Hyslop bluntly declares later in his book, “and I no longer refer to the skeptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject.”108

Chapter 13

Psychic sleuths and soul doctors

I opened Part III with a discussion to which I now wish to return: the dual impulse in detective fiction both to embrace and reject alternate ways of seeing and knowing, modes of perception and understanding that appear incompatible with rationalist protocols but that detective fiction itself prompts us to regard as rationalism’s occulted supplements – or variants. Clairvoyance, telepathy, and intuition, I suggested, are not just uncannily reminiscent of the detective’s mind-reading powers and miraculous feats of deductive reasoning, but are versions of these practices, and vice versa. My example was The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Holmes’s levitating act and confession of spiritualist leanings problematize a number of related distinctions:  between natural and supernatural, rational and irrational, science and spiritualism, detective and ghost fiction. Holmes’s anxiety about the limitations of his method – “if … we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature,” he admits, “there is an end of our investigation” (HB, pp. 24–5) – is overshadowed by the greater fear that detective fiction was never ghostless to begin with, never spirit-free or immune to the supernatural. Dull as he usually is, Watson seems to understand this better than Holmes. “You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago” (“SB,” p. 210), he tells Holmes after the latter performs one of his off-the-cuff deductive feats. Holmes is “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (“SB,” p. 209). But this is precisely why he is uncannily like a magician. Wizardry and reasoning, Watson suggests, may very well be two names for the same thing. Chris Willis observes that spiritualism and detective fiction have a set of common features: “the rise of the fictional detective coincided with the rise of spiritualism. Both began in the mid-nineteenth century and were widely popular in Britain from the turn of the century until the 1930s. Both attempt to explain mysteries. The medium’s role can be seen as being similar to that of a detective in a murder case. Both are trying to make the dead 181

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speak in order to reveal a truth.”1 Detective fiction is haunted by occultism from Poe onward, but I suggested that The Hound offers a glimpse of a more openly spiritualist brand of detective fiction. The scene in which Holmes regards the portrait of Hugo Baskerville as evidence of both hereditary and spiritual reincarnation is emblematic of the hybridization that occurred in the preceding decades, when matter, energy, and spirit intermingled in holistic, conciliatory narratives of the sort we find in Zöllner and Wooldridge, but also in agnostics such as Tyndall. Heredity and reincarnation are intertwined here in such a way that it makes no sense to separate them: to transmit one’s mental and physical characteristics is to be reincarnated in body as well as in spirit. Staring at the portrait, Holmes is not looking at two irreconcilable truths but two facets of some larger truth. The ghost, however, is simply a dog coated with phosphorus. In The Hound we encounter a more timid articulation of the aggressive hybridization of ontologies, epistemologies, and literary genres that proliferate at the turn of the century and that can be traced back to Le Fanu’s Hesselius stories, where the physician, detective, and occult investigator are one and the same person. One way to understand this hybridization is in terms of the “paranormal mode” in Nancy H. Traill’s typology of fantastic literature: In a radical transformation, supernatural and natural are no longer mutually exclusive. The opposition loses its force because we find that the word “supernatural” is merely a label for strange phenomena latent within the natural domain. Clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, for instance, are taken to be as physically possible as any commonplace human ability. In other modes, such extraordinary faculties would be properties only of supernatural entities; where humans possess such abilities, they are usually the gift of deities or demons. In the paranormal mode, a structural change occurs: the natural domain is enlarged and encompasses a special region accessible to those with extraordinary perceptual capacities. Supernatural phenomena are reinterpreted and brought within the paradigm of the natural.2

Traill further argues that the rise of the paranormal mode was conditioned by the scientification of spiritualism in the nineteenth century: “Spiritualism was reshaped by the very scientific discoveries that had sparked its resurgence, ‘naturalizing’ phenomena once attributed only to supernatural agency. Within this new paradigm, such phenomena were described as ‘paranormal,’ and, therefore, natural.”3 Traill’s category of the paranormal has the merit of being historically grounded:  the paranormal emerged at a particular historical juncture, and in the previous pages I have described some of the late-Victorian discourses in which matter and spirit complement each other via current scientific theories. The case of Hesselius is indicative of the shape that this

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complementing will take in the decades to follow, but also of contemporary anxieties, frequently voiced in the literature of occult detection, about the traumatic consequences of opening extra-sensory channels of communication between our world and that of disembodied spirits. Occult detection is as much a critique of normal science and conventional methods of detection as it is a skeptical rejoinder to the naïve ghostophilia of Victorian spiritualism.4 In contrast to the optimism of Crowe, Wooldridge, Hinton, and other spiritualists about the reactivation of the inner eye and subsequent (always friendly) contact with the spirit world, Le Fanu’s Hesselius stories, as we have seen, are essentially spectrophobic tales about spiritual trauma, psychological collapse, and violent death. Whereas spiritualists eagerly solicited the presence of spirits at séances or dreamed of joining them in the fourth dimension, in occult detection the supernatural realm is represented more complexly in terms of the Swedenborgian duality of good and evil – with a consistent emphasis on the deleterious effects of inter-worldly communication. To open the inner eye, the would-be ghostseer is cautioned, is to let in more than one had bargained for – to see more than one ought to see. If the eye is the proverbial window of the soul, the inner eye is a gateway through which something or someone can enter to take possession of the physical, mental, and spiritual premises. A soul doctor is needed to restore the balance, to police the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds, the seen and unseen universe. Yet this doctor also demands that we understand these dichotomies as conventions or fictions: the natural and the supernatural are like conjoined twins. More precisely, their relation to each other is like the relation between perceptible wavelengths and those that elude the bodily senses. Hesselius is, among other things, an expert on abnormal psychology, as well as a prototype of the psychoanalyst or psychotherapist – an investigator of interiority. Freud is the obvious point of reference here and elsewhere in occult detection, but equally pertinent are other turn-of-the-century explorers of the psyche, today eclipsed by the long shadow cast by Freud and his followers. As Roger Luckhurst has shown, though, Freud himself oscillated between contempt and respect for occultism, regarding spiritualist explorations of the terra incognita of the mind as both a threat and a valuable contribution to a field of inquiry laboring to establish its scientific credentials. Luckhurst explains that the anxiety about the occult in psychoanalysis is not simply due to its dubious scientific status: what, after all, could be more occulted at the time than the Freudian unconscious, this dynamic, structural thing, founded on the mechanism of

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sexual repression and “outside,” in a way still inconceivable to his contemporaries, the consciousness? Rather, Freud’s anxiety is that explanations of the occult find their footing in the orthodoxies developing around non-physiological concepts of psychology, an orthodoxy from which Freud is marginalized.5

Indeed, Freud’s was one of several models of the psyche available in the 1890s and after. Others, just as sophisticated, I would say, and in any case not wholly incompatible with Freud’s, more easily accommodated clairvoyance, telepathy, and similar “borderline” phenomena. One of the most influential contributions was Frederic William Henry Myers’s ambitious Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). A leading member of the Society for Psychical Research, Myers claims that so-called veridical hallucinations (which include dreams, crystal visions, traveling clairvoyance, and, not to be forgotten, ghost sightings) offer strong evidence of spiritual survival after death, and that “the study of inward vision [is] no mere curiosity, but rather the opening of an inlet into forms of knowledge to which we can assign no bound.” He refers to numerous case studies from the Society’s Journal and Proceedings suggesting that “man’s ocular vision is but a special or privileged case of visual power, of which power his inner vision affords a more extensive example.”6 Myers’s aim is to “generalise our conception of vision as far as possible, – no longer confining it to the definite phenomenon of retinal or optical vision, – and thus to find out by actual inquiry, what sort of messages are brought to us by each form of vision which this enlarged conception contains.”7 This inquiry, he believes, will shed light on the occulted regions of the psyche, which are not peripheral but central to the self:  “[W]e­should now see the subliminal self no longer as a mere chain of eddies or backwaters, in some way secluded from the main stream of man’s being, but rather as itself the central and potent current, the most truly identifiable with the man himself.”8 The subliminal self – composed of “thoughts, feelings, &c., lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold”9 – is capable of sensations about which the supraliminal or conscious self knows nothing. As a consequence, “two main streams of vision may be discerned – the external and the internal, the optical and the mental, of which the one is almost wholly supraliminal, the other largely subliminal.”10 The two types of vision differ considerably in their degree of sensitivity to external stimuli, but in other respects they are identical. Subliminal (mental) vision, just like its supraliminal (optical) counterpart, operates through inferences, or “symbolism” as Myers terms it, and confirms the notion that seeing is an acquired skill, as perceptual empiricists from Berkeley to Helmholtz

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had argued. “Now we adults,” Myers elaborates, “stand towards this subliminal symbolism in much the same attitude as the baby stands towards our educated optical symbolism. Just as the baby fails to grasp the third dimension, so may we still be failing to grasp a fourth; – or whatever be the law of that higher cognisance which begins to report fragmentarily to man that which his ordinary senses cannot discern.”11 Like Zöllner and Hinton before him, Myers speculates that the fourth dimension may be the missing link between the physical, visible world and the invisible world of “higher intelligences by whom we are surrounded,”12 and whose powers of perception are so advanced that they can see through solid matter and read minds: The resisting matter which we see and touch has “solid” reality for minds so constituted as to have the same subjective feeling awakened by it. But to other minds, endowed with other forms of sensibility – minds possibly both higher and more numerous than our own  – this solid matter may seem disputable and unreal, while thought and emotion, perceived in ways unknown to us, may be the only reality. This material world constitutes, in fact, a “privileged case”  – a simplified example – among all discernable worlds, so far as the perception of incarnate spirits is concerned. For discarnate spirits it is no longer a privileged case; to them it is apparently easier to discern thoughts and emotions by non-material signs.13

Myers’s purpose in Human Personality, like Hinton’s in A New Era of Thought, is not just to hypothesize on “the range of man’s inner vision,” but also, on the practical side, to suggest some of “the means which he must take to understand, to foster, and to control it.”14 Myers is convinced that subliminal perception is a cerebral faculty that permits of scientific study. Echoing Crowe’s claims about the undifferentiated “universal sense” (NN, p. 20), he argues that synaesthesia is “the most generalised form of inward perception,” and “believe[s] that we have still persistent in our brain-structure some dim vestige of the transition from that early undifferentiated continuous sensitivity to our existing specialisation of sense.”15 If Crowe and Myers are correct, then Berkeley was wrong in arguing that visual sensations are arbitrarily associated with other kinds of sensation:  “[F] or a true synaesthetic or ‘sound-seer’ … there is a connection between sight and sound which is instinctive, complex, and yet for our intelligence altogether arbitrary.”16 Other spiritualist researchers of the time discovered innovative ways to integrate the developing discourse on the unconscious with other fields of science. Coates, whom we earlier saw hypothesizing on the existence of

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ethers other than the luminiferous one, and pointing out that “the trend of modern science is towards and into the invisible, and her veritable conquests have been in the provinces of the Unseen,”17 concluded after conducting a series of experiments with telepathy and clairvoyance that there is back of mind [sic], as revealed to each of us by self-consciousness and to experts by cerebral research; there is a transcendental mind, the Greater Self, call it spirit, soul, or the sub-conscious self, which is the actual gleaner of knowledge through the unseen forces referred to, and this knowledge is passed from the inner to the outer, from the transcendental to the external consciousness – if realised at all – to our external plane of being.18

The concept of an external plane of existence combines spatial models of the mind with the language of planes and dimensions in n-dimensional geometry. But the dominant scientific idiom interlacing psychology in Coates’s Seeing the Invisible is not that of geometry but of physics, and particularly the physics of waves and rays. Like Myers’s supraliminal mind, Coates’s transcendental mind is at once reminiscent of the Freudian unconscious and much more versatile: a photo-sensitive psychic receptor and transmitter of “a subtile emanation [that] irradiates from human beings, and from other beings and substances.”19 These so-called N-rays (well known, he explains, to mesmerists) are nowadays no more mysterious than wireless telegraphy, whose medium of transmission is the ether, a substance regarding whose existence there is no doubt. And if the ether is capable of channeling telegraphic messages over great distances, what other sorts of vibration and communication may also be mediated by it? The history of scientific discovery, Coates suggests, is a history of broadening the scope of plausible hypotheses to embrace phenomena previously dismissed as ­magical or impossible: “A few years ago the very idea of sending messages in this way [i.e. telegraphically] would have been rejected with scorn by most people.”20 Quoting the English astronomer John Herschel, Coates insists that “[t]he perfect observer in any department of Nature will have his eyes open for any occurrence which, according to received theories, ought not to occur, for these are the facts which serve as clues to new discoveries.”21 Even without the explicit reference to clues, Coates’s statement could serve as the motto of the occult detective. In the January 1898 number of Pearson’s Magazine, Kate and Hesketh Prichard, the mother-and-son literary team better known at the time by their pen names E. and H. Heron, announced in the introduction to the first of their twelve Flaxman Low stories (“The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith”) the advent of a new kind of investigator and, importantly, scientist.22 Claiming to be Low’s

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literary agents, the Prichards describe him (inaccurately, given Le Fanu’s contribution, to say nothing of numerous occult researchers associated with the Society for Psychical Research) as “the first student in this field of inquiry [i.e. psychology] who has had the boldness and originality to break free from old and conventional methods, and to approach the elucidation of so-called supernatural problems on the lines of natural law.” The motivation for going public with Low’s purportedly true exploits is to provide an answer to an old question: “Have ghosts any existence outside our own fancy and emotion? This is the question with which the end of the century concerns itself more and more, for, though a vast amount of evidence with regard to occult phenomena already exists, the ultimate answer has yet to be supplied.” In compliance with the convention of ghost stories, the narratives are presented as factual accounts. Low, we are told, is not a fictional character but a real person “under the thin guise of [whose] name many are sure to recognise one of the leading scientists of the day, with whose works on Psychology and kindred subjects they are familiar.” In Pearson’s each story is accompanied by a photograph of a haunted house as further evidence of the narratives’ factuality. As in so many ghost stories, “the exact localities where these events are said to have happened are in every case merely indicated.”23 Watson avers that Holmes, that connoisseur of crime, “refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, even the fantastic.”24 But this craving for the sensational does not extend beyond the boundaries of the natural world: “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply” (“SV,” p. 535). The Prichards overtly fashion Low as the kind of detective one would seek out after someone like Holmes had declined to involve himself in a more outré case. Yet Low’s method of dealing with the supernatural cases is not in defiance of the laws of nature as he sees them. On the contrary, he advises investigating such cases “on prosaic, rational lines, as we should deal with a purely human mystery,” in other words “elucidat[ing] the mysteries of spiritual phenomena on the lines of natural law,”25 the same law that Holmes regards as the final frontier of knowledge. Yet for Low this frontier extends farther than for Holmes – so far that natural and supernatural cease to be useful descriptors. The common denominator in the cases Low tackles is the rule that “there is no such thing as the supernatural, all is natural.”26 Low’s declaration harkens back to Carlyle’s “natural supernaturalism,” and evokes Teufelsdröckh’s answer to “the question of questions”:  “What … is a Miracle?” (SR, p. 184). Teufelsdröckh answers with another question: “What are the Laws of Nature? To me perhaps

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the rising of one from the dead were no violation of these Laws, but a confirmation; were some far deeper Law, now first penetrated into, and by Spiritual Force, even as the rest have all been, brought to bear on us with its Material Force” (SR, p. 185). Yet Carlyle would have made a dubious ally in the project of deploying science to collapse the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. For though he could appreciate the value of intellectual revolutions brought about by paradigm shifts in science, he remained suspicious of totalizing scientific explanations: Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived down to the foundations of the Universe, and gauged everything there? Did the Maker take them into His counsel; that they read His groundplan of the incomprehensible All; and can they say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in anywise! These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some handbreaths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore. (SR, p. 185)

“To the wisest man,” Teufelsdröckh declares, “wide as is his vision, Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square-miles” (SR, p. 186). By comparison, Low’s position is anti-Carlylean; he emphasizes that experience does not so much limit knowledge as provide a point of departure for venturing into the unseen: As there is a well-defined break in the notes of the human voice, so there is a break between what we call natural and supernatural. But the notes of the upper register correspond with those in the lower scale: in like manner, by drawing upon our experience of things we know and see, we should be able to form ­accurate hypotheses with regard to things which, while clearly pertaining to us, have so far been regarded as mysteries.27

Analogical reasoning is the occult detective’s link to the kind of science which freely theorizes about the non-sensuous world based on an understanding of the known, sensuous one. Moreover, the project of “illustrat[ing] the unknown by what is known,”28 as Coates puts it, is not just one task among many. To “rend the veil which separates the sensible world from an ultra-sensible one,”29 Tyndall believed, is one of the most important contributions any science can make, and one that involves manipulating the data of experience: “We can magnify, diminish, qualify, and combine experiences, so as to render them fit for purposes entirely new.”30 One can argue, then, about the best procedures and necessary precautions in making inferences about the invisible world, but the method of moving from the experiential to the non-experiential realm is not the

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exclusive prerogative of any one type of research. Scientists who took the existence of the ether for granted would at least have had to agree with Coates that “[i]t is idle to suppose, because ‘something’ is unseen, unfelt, and undetectable by the ordinary processes of the senses and the intellect, that therefore it does not exist,” if not with his prediction that “crude materialism” will in time “be dissipated by Psychical Research.”31 Simplistic oppositions such as matter versus spirit, Tyndall argues, can be transcended via the scientific imagination, and his explorations of the occult properties of light mediate a reconciliation of Darwinism and Christianity. What is necessary, Low declares, is “more light, more knowledge.”32 But Low’s entreaty is qualified by the admonitory tone of the stories. “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” in which Low solves a case of spiritual obsession,33 is intended as a “warning [to] persons who feel inclined to dabble in spiritualism without any serious motive for doing so … Extremely few persons are sufficiently masters of themselves to permit of their calling in the vast unknown forces outside ordinary human knowledge for mere purposes of amusement.”34 The fate of Sinclair, an imprudent dabbler in the occult, illustrates the tragic outcome awaiting those not sufficiently self-possessed to endure direct contact with the spirit world. Sinclair “has opened what may be called the doors of life,” extra-sensory channels of perception fortunately closed to most, and Low predicts “[i]t will be a hard task to close them again, and to become his own master.” Occult investigation is best left to the psychically resilient professional; “habits of self-control have been Low’s only shield in many a dangerous hour.”35 Ghost-seeing is for Low a symptom of abnormality, as it was earlier for Scott and Brewster, but with the difference that Low does not regard the ghost as the result of an optical malfunction – on the contrary, the specter is all too real and calls for an exorcistic medical and psychiatric intervention: The nerve and brain specialist is the link between myself and the man you would send for if you had a touch of lumbago … Each division is but a higher grade of the same ladder – a step upwards into the unknown. I consider that I stand just one step above the specialist who makes a study of brain disease and insanity; he is at work on the disorders of the embodied spirit, while I deal with abnormal conditions of the free and detached spirit … A very small portion of spirits return as apparitions after the death of the body. Hence we may conclude that a ghost is a spirit in an abnormal condition. Abnormal conditions of the body usually indicate disease; why not of the spirit also?36

Psychotherapy, demonic exorcism, and detective work are complementary; indeed, they are versions of each other. Ghosts are not only symptoms of

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an “abnormal condition” of the disembodied spirit, thus lending themselves to case studies of the psychiatric kind, but are also carriers of an infectious spiritual sickness, and their malicious motivations for seeking contact with the world of embodied spirits are comparable to those of a career criminal constantly on the lookout for new victims: “They certainly choose suitable persons … that is, not credulous persons, but those whose senses are sufficiently keen to detect the presence of a spirit.”37 The psychiatric case is a criminal case. Like crimes and psychoses, the kind of pathology that Low specializes in detecting and exorcizing has the tendency to manifest “under conditions which admit of human observation.”38 As a result of upsetting the balance between the natural and the supernatural realms – descending from “the upper register,” where it belongs, to “the lower scale”39 in the natural-supernatural continuum – the spirit inscribes itself into a familiar, manageable system of readable traces, symptoms, and clues. “Ghosts are admittedly immaterial,” Low observes, but it sometimes happens (as in the case of the spirit-possessed corpse of a leper in “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith”) that “our spook has an extremely palpable body.”40 In “The Story of the Moor Road” Low’s client is assailed by a specter who leaves on the victim’s body telltale fingerprints: “[T]hree singular marks were visible, irregularly placed as the fingers of a hand might fall.”41 In cases when spectral materialization fails to occur, crucial clues are furnished by objects that offer themselves to the kind of reading that Holmes regularly performs. A Bengali idol in “The Story of Medhans Lea” bears traces of being handled by a child: “Observe it. It has not been roughly used; it is rubbed and dinted as a plaything usually is. I should say the child may have had Anglo-Indian relations.”42 While this and other cases are more outré than the type Holmes takes on, Low’s method here is essentially Holmesian. Examining the watch that Watson has inherited from his deceased brother, Holmes gathers that the dead man “was a man of untidy habits – very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died” (SF, p. 112). The Prichards liberally borrow from Doyle and seek to establish Low’s credentials by associating him with the Holmesian scientific method. Yet this method, I suggested, is already deeply implicated in the occult. For what else is Holmes doing in this example but communicating with the dead, the watch serving as a portal to the spirit world? This, or something like it, occurs in every scene in which the detective makes an inference about the unseen based on his observations of the seen. Every object, not just a dead

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man’s watch (which not only keeps track of time but also recalls the time when the dead man was living), is potentially a gateway to a world of hidden motivations and concealed thoughts. A similar technique is adopted by the analyst who seeks to open channels of communication between the patient’s conscious and his or her unconscious, attentive to symptoms that only a professional can detect and interpret. In this triad of medium, detective, and analyst, it is not easy to discern which one has learned more from the other, and where one kind of work ends and another begins.43 One expects detectives (especially if they work closely with the police) to have no criminal propensities themselves, and the analyst to have a clean bill of mental health. Accordingly, Low’s ability to keep the supernatural at bay hinges on fastidiously maintaining an ascetic mental hygiene, that is preserving immunity to the disease he specializes in curing: “If … you are fighting against supernatural powers, the very first point is to keep a firm and calm control of your feelings and thoughts,”44 keep certain doors closed and veils drawn. This in part explains why Holmes puts his feelings aside, whether he is working on a case or not: “All emotions … were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind” (“SB,” p. 209). To be in touch with one’s feelings is not just to be out of touch with rationalist protocols, but also to establish rapport with something occulted, or even occult – the unconscious, subliminal, or transcendental mind. Just as different physicians and psychiatrists sometimes give different diagnoses, occult detectives do not agree on the best course of action, nor are they always consistent in their opinions and prescriptions. Inner vision is more than just a case in point, for it is here that the occult detective is at once analyst and analysand, physician and patient. The clairvoyant detective of Algernon Blackwood’s 1908 short-story collection John Silence, Physician Extraordinary at first recommends keeping the doors of extra-sensory perception wide open. “Form your own impressions and cultivate your intuitions” (“NF,” p. 85),45 Silence advises his Watsonian secretary Hubbard. When Silence tells Hubbard that he should “[l]earn how to think” (“PI,” p. 3), as Holmes instructs Watson on numerous occasions, what he has in mind is not reasoning – or not the kind of reasoning that denies its affiliations with intuition. As Hubbard learns from his far-seeing mentor, “intuition [is] … of more use to a man than double the quantity of mere ‘brains,’ as such” (“NF,” p. 86). Impressions received through the inner senses are more reliable than corporeal sensations, and one must be careful not to distort the former with deductive reasoning: “If you pay attention to impressions, and do not allow them to be confused by

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deductions of the intellect, you will often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate” (“NF,” p. 93). Telepathy and clairvoyance regularly trump ratiocination and the bodily senses. The letter one of Silence’s clients writes to him is less valuable for its written message than for holding residues of the writer’s psychic energy. This unintentionally dropped clue (the psychic equivalent to the verbal slip or fingerprint) is “sufficient to give another mind – a sensitive and sympathetic mind – clear mental pictures of what is going on,” Silence claims; “I think I have a very sound general idea of his problem” (“NF,” p. 85). The letter – not the writing, then, but the paper – is the carrier of symptoms, traces of unconscious anxieties which are undetectable by conventional methods of investigation and interpretation, as well as, indirectly, the bearer of news about the limitations of the senses and of both inductive and deductive reasoning. From an instructional perspective the latter message is the one that really matters:  the powers of the mind are demonstrably more extensive than traditional science is ready to admit. As an occult psychologist, Silence knows that “thought can act at a distance” and “can accomplish material results” (“PI,” p. 3). For instance, “it may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years” (“PI,” p. 42), waiting to be picked up by the photo-sensitive clairvoyant. The notion is not unique to Silence. As Coates expresses it breathlessly: The sunlight of heaven; the phenomena of nature in her wildest moods; the actions of men, clothed in the skins of wild beasts, or draped in purple or fine linen, – from the rudest barbarianism to the highest civilisation, from the making of rude stone instruments by cave dwellers, to the conquests of the earth, sea, and sky; by temple builders, and the achievements of modern science; – the life history of plants, the movements of animals, – all are painted indelibly by their subtle emanations on whatever surfaces these have touched and in whatever substance they have permeated. What a gorgeous biograph, an unending panorama of life and of death, of light and of darkness, of beauty and of ugliness, of pathos and bathos, is unfolding itself to the eye of science – albeit it be psychical science.46

How does one get to see such images? “Don’t deliberately look for anything,” Silence teaches Hubbard. “Just imagine you see the inside of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen” (“NF,” p. 86). Clairvoyance “is nothing more than a keen power of visualising,” he clarifies, and specifically the kind of visualizing that produces the best results when corporeal sight is obstructed: “Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tealeaves, are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the inner vision may become open. Once the

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method is mastered, no system is necessary at all” (“PI,” p. 3). Contrary to Low’s warnings about the traumatic effects of extra-sensory perception and his insistence on maintaining an ascetic mental hygiene, Silence is of the opinion that one ought to become an open-minded – and closedeyed – receptor of images. The “dark screen” is like a cinematic projection screen or a photographic plate waiting to be exposed and developed. But it is also a psychic camera obscura whose dark chamber is not the eye but the mind. The psychic camera trope appears in more explicit form in The Dream Detective, a 1920 collection of stories by Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (or Sax Rohmer, Ward’s nom de plume), featuring the psychic sleuth Moris Klaw. Describing himself as “an old fool who sometimes has wise dreams,”47 Klaw’s ingenious solution to the problem of suppressing overprivileged ratiocination and dulling the bodily senses is to fall asleep at a crime scene. While dreaming, Klaw develops a “mind photograph” or “etheric photograph”48 of the crime. “Thoughts are things,” he explains. They linger in the form of images in “the surrounding atmosphere (it is a sensitive plate)”49 that can be captured by a clairvoyant sleeper. His theory of how such things are possible has a familiar ring: “What is it,” continued [Klaw] …, “but the odic force, the ether – say it how you please – which carries the wireless message, the lightning? It is a huge, subtile, sensitive plate. Inspiration, what you call bad luck and good luck – all are but reflections from it. The supreme thought preceding death is imprinted on the surrounding atmosphere like a photograph. I have trained this” – he tapped his brow  – “to reproduce those photographs! May I sleep here to-night, Mr. Coram?”50

The unconventional method (shutting one’s eyes in order to see, dreaming in order to wake up to the facts) is rationalized in scientific terms; the ether and the wave theory ground the supernatural in the natural: “All perception … is the result of vibrations; and clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of vibrations. The awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about means no more than that” (“PI,” p. 9). Silence’s interest in inner vision reflects Blackwood’s own. He writes in the preface to one of his short-story collections: My interest in psychic matters has always been the interest in questions of extended or expanded consciousness. If a ghost is seen, what it is interests me less than what sees it. Do we possess faculties which, under exceptional stimulus, register beyond the normal gamut of seeing, hearing, feeling? That such faculties may exist in the human being and occasionally manifest is where my interest has always lain.51

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Yet this occulted faculty, despite Silence’s prompting of Hubbard to unseal his inner vision, is represented in conflicting terms. Just as the sensitive plate has no say in the selection of locale and framing of the image, exposure, and development, the oversensitive clairvoyant cannot choose to shut some inner eyelid and block out impressions he or she would prefer not to register. Himself an accomplished clairvoyant, Silence knows better than anyone that “not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions” (“PI,” p. 43). To have seen this limbo, which with its horrors and abominations is more like a hell than a purgatory, is to have suffered a trauma from which one is forever recovering, forever a convalescent whose condition is perpetually aggravated by more visions of the same. At once doctor and patient, analyst and analysand, Silence is of two minds about inner vision, then; he regards it both as a capacity that facilitates a privileged point of view and a channel for sensory overload and psychic overexposure:  “The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds a new horror to his life, and is in the nature of an affliction” (“PI,” p. 3). Myers similarly warns that inner vision must be controlled, not just fostered, and Coates remarks that “there are many persons who suffer from high susceptibility or sensitiveness” whose “lives are consequently made miserable; they have experiences of which they are afraid to speak.” His photographic “biograph” of nature and history is not, after all, a pleasant tableau vivant but a dialectical spectacle “of light and of darkness, of beauty and of ugliness, of pathos and bathos.”52 In the manner of Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, the Silence stories dramatize the development of clairvoyant powers in subjects ill-equipped to handle them. In “A Psychical Invasion,” his client risks spiritual insanity in the afterlife (“a far more radical condition than merely being insane here”) by having consumed too much hashish, which, like green tea in Jennings’s case, “has partially opened another world to [him] by increasing [his] rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering [him] abnormally sensitive” to malevolent “Ancient forces” (“PI,” p. 14). If Silence’s client (or patient, rather) has “become clairvoyant in the true sense,” he has also thereby become “a clairvoyant victim” (“PI,” p. 20) afflicted by a condition that “threatens, not [his] physical existence but the temple of [his] psychical existence – the inner life” (“PI,” p. 13).53 Along similar lines, the fourth dimension – by the end of the century a popular haunt of disembodied spirits and higher intelligences – harbors more dangers than attractions for the visionary explorer. In “A Victim of

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Higher Space” Silence’s tragi-comical client Racine Mudge is ill-­fatedly possessed of an instinctive grasp of “higher mathematics and higher geometry” (“VHS,” p. 236). His journeys into the fourth dimension are caused by his abnormally developed powers of imagination and intuition. From the early stages of his illness, when Mudge “could imagine in a new dimension” and “perceive in four dimensions” (“VHS,” p. 238), his condition takes a turn for the worse: I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like and how exactly it must look. Later, when I slipped in there and saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three measurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see, space does not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only a spiritual condition. (“VHS,” pp. 238–9)

Mudge’s inter-dimensional travels hybridize levitation, traveling clairvoyance, exotic tourism, and non-Euclidean geometry: the “audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of Gauss,” and “the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky” (“VHS,” p. 237). They are also journeys of self-discovery from which one cannot return the same – there is no recovery from the traumatic epiphany that space, properly speaking, does not exist, and that there is no fixed set of dimensions for us to call home. Passing into the fourth dimension means crossing over into a multi-dimensional netherworld beyond intellectual comprehension: “My intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually it was all unthinkable. Never was the limitation of mere reason more plainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that I began to advance” (“VHS,” p. 239). The references to intuition hark back to Kant’s idea of space as a category of intuitive understanding. From the Mudgeian perspective, however, Kantian intuition of three-dimensional space is the construct of an empirically constricted spatial imagination that, as Helmholtz insists, confuses the a posteriori with the a priori. But Mudge’s experience is as much anti-Helmholtzian as anti-Kantian. Mudge ­intuits his way past Kant and Helmholtz, past the dichotomy of empiricism and intuitionism: true space intuition leads to the abolition of all familiar concepts of space. Carlyle would probably have objected to the spiritualist fetishization of scientific explanations, but I think he would have agreed with the ontological implications of Blackwood’s story. Space and time, he writes in Sartor Resartus, are “two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances … In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavour to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through” (SR, p. 188).

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Silence regards this leap into another dimension (or another spiritual state, rather) as an abnormality, and treats it in Freudian fashion as casestudy material for generalizations about normal and abnormal psychology, here with a distinct Darwinian twist: “Higher Space is no mere external measurement. It is, of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world at the present stage of evolution” (“VHS,” p. 235). In a sense, Mudge’s intuitive vision is the ocularcentric dream come true. It enables him to perceive “objects … as they actually are” (“VHS,” p. 238) and facilitates his evolution into a mind-reading superobserver:  “For me no interiors are hidden. I see inside. When in that state the content of your mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day” (“VHS,” p. 240). But this condition, evocative of the analyst’s privileged access to the buried layers of the analysand’s mind, is less desirable than one might think:  “It’s seeing people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a world of monsters … To hear the human voice proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely recognise as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside everything and everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing” (“VHS,” p. 241). To see the whole person is to see a monstrous, chimerical creature. Extended vision destroys our blissful ignorance about the true nature of our fellow human beings, and, of course, ourselves. Like psychic invasion or obsession, clairvoyance is traumatic in the first place because it gives evidence of “the pathetic impermanence of the human personality” (“CD,” p. 222). The victim of this affliction is in peril of “losing more and more of his recognisable personality” (“AS,” p. 63) by atavistic regression to “a former and lower state of development” (“AS,” p. 83) or hyper-accelerated evolution into a visionary Übermensch who loses himself, psychically and corporeally, in the interstices of ­n-dimensional space. It is only because Silence has analyzed himself and has come to terms with his personal ghosts and demons, which is to say “submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual” (“PI,” p. 2), that he is qualified to work as a “soul-doctor” (“PI,” p. 8). Yet the soul doctor must not be cured of his affliction – the therapist must in this case share the patient’s condition if he is to administer a cure. I do not wish to belabor the points I have made about occult detectives and will briefly cite just one more example  – William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, whose ghost-busting exploits appeared in The Idler in 1910.54 Carnacki has a profound knowledge of occult lore, both ancient and modern. He frequently consults the obscure fourteenth-century Sigsand

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manuscript, which serves him as a vademecum into the occult, as well as the more recent works of a Professor Gardner, such as his impressively titled lecture “Astral Vibrations Compared with Matero-involuted Vibrations below the Six-Billion Limit” (“HL,” p. 62). But in Carnacki’s line of work this knowledge is not as valuable as what he describes as “a kind of intuitive knowledge” (“TI,” p. 22). A keen intuitive sense qualifies Carnacki for exorcizing the spectral, banishing the “ab-human” (“GM,” p. 50) from the human world. But it is a faculty over which he, unlike Silence, exerts little control. “I believe at times,” he says, “it is something warning you, and fighting for you” (“GM,” p. 41), but something unpredictable, unintelligible, and not very comfortable: “a queer knowledge” (“GM,” p. 52), “a queer feeling something [is] about to happen” (“SE,” p. 94), an “extraordinary and peculiar nervousness” (“SE,” p. 103), an “extraordinary sense of weirdness” (“GM,” p. 46), “a premonitory conviction of impending danger” (“HI,” p. 124). This intuitive faculty is also described as “some inward, unused sense” (“GM,” p. 47) which puts Carnacki in touch with phenomena “incredible and inconceivable (because not understood) to our senses” (“SE,” p. 109). As in Le Fanu’s and Blackwood’s cautionary tales about the perils of unsealing the inner eye, such perception is not something to be desired. Visions of the ghosts of a woman and child in “The Searcher of the End House,” for example, are discovered to have been caused by intense fear of the spectral. As Carnacki later explains, “ fear was in every case the key, as I might say, which opened the senses” (“SE,” pp. 107–8) to phenomena that ordinarily cannot not be seen or heard. Fear of the unseen – but also fear that it will suddenly be seen, that it will emerge into visibility in some terrifying form – is ironically just what makes it visible. “I saw nothing,” Carnacki explains, “until I became really frightened” (“SE,” p. 108). Terror is thus responsible for a kind of reverse illumination, an ocularcentric nightmare. Intense fear causes “the phenomenon that is light to our natural eyes” to be transformed into “absolute blackness” (“SE,” p. 104) from which emerge things one would rather not see – things one wishes would stay hidden, in the dark. As for Low, the presence of ghosts indicates a “spiritual sickness” (“GM,” p. 50). The invisibility of the spectral is linked to its abominable incomprehensibility; the unseen force in “The House Among the Laurels” is a “monstrous, invisible, impossible creature” (“HL,” p. 65). The invisible thing is monstrous because it is impossible fully to comprehend, and because it is “a thing that is looking at you and not seeable itself” (“WR,” p. 77). What we have here, in stark contrast to the ocularcentric fantasy of an all-seeing and all-knowing detective, is the nightmare of a subject trapped inside a spectral panopticon. The spectral

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comes out of hiding fitfully, unpredictably, often only partially, as happens with the malevolent “Force” in “The Gateway of the Monster” that takes “visible expression as a Hand” (“GM,” p. 52). This is clearly not a hand one wants to shake. As the story’s title indicates, the invisible realm is home to monsters, abominations – not playful spirits who move planchettes on Ouija boards or transport coins out of sealed boxes. Occult detective stories are narratives about invasion, possession, ­obsession – about confrontation not just with external supernatural forces but also with what lies within: unexcavated layers of the psyche, buried selves that challenge the conviction that we are in possession of ourselves and that the self is a coherent, consistent, rational thing. The threat of psychic invasion by malevolent spirits duplicates – and often pales in comparison to – the dispossession that occurs from within: the conscious self (what Myers calls the supraliminal mind) is never master of itself. This revelation has been attributed to psychoanalysis (most consistently by psychoanalysis itself), but its origins also lie in the spiritualist discovery of what Hubbard, schooled by Silence, calls “the pathetic impermanence of the human personality” (“CD,” p. 222). It is a discovery that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Henry Jekyll, a Hesselius-like adept in “transcendental medicine,” predicts will one day culminate in the scandalous realization that the self is “a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”55 Insisting on the rationality of its procedures, psychoanalysis invites us, despite itself, to regard its history from Freud on as the story of disavowal and repression – and of the return of the repressed – suffered by a discourse that makes the study of repression one of its specialties. In The Future of an Illusion (1927) Freud curtly dismisses spiritualism by diagnosing its adherents as self-deluded  – or at least incurably uncertain about how many of their claims are grounded in reality and what portion (significant, Freud thinks) is attributable to wish-fulfillment:  “[T]hey are convinced of the survival of the individual soul and they seek to demonstrate to us beyond doubt the truth of this one religious doctrine. Unfortunately they cannot succeed in refuting the fact that the appearance and utterances of their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity.”56 But in “Dreams and Occultism,” in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), Freud is more willing to believe in – or is prepared to entertain the possibility of one day being convinced of – the reality of telepathy. Telepathy, he suggests, is the most respectable (or least disrespectable) of spiritualist claims: the “core of yet unrecognized facts

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[einen realen Kern] in occultism round which cheating and fantasy [Trug und Phantasiewirkung] have spun a veil which it is hard to pierce.”57 He is anxious to enlist experiments with telepathy in the service of psychoanalysis and to downplay occultism’s involvement: “It would seem to me that psychoanalysis, by inserting the unconscious between what is physical and what was previously called ‘psychical’, has paved the way for the assumption of such processes as telepathy.”58 Close to four decades later, the specter of the occult had not yet been expelled from psychoanalysis. In his account of the strange, suspiciously mystical ontology of the Freudian unconscious (which “is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized”), Jacques Lacan is at pains to underscore the distance between Freud’s “rationalist” contribution, as he calls it, and the charlatanism of the “meta-psychical research, as one used to say, … of spiritist, invocatory, necromantic practice,” particularly “the Gothic psychology of Myers.” Lacan is vexed by Freud’s flirtations with occultism, which at a critical historical juncture threatened to take psychoanalysis in a very different direction, and he looks back with some relief at the moment when the “infernal opening” of the discourse on the unconscious was sealed and “asepticized.” For there was a time, now best forgotten, when both psychoanalysis and the unconscious wavered between darkness and light, between the “lower world” of Myers and the broad, open road of Freud (or rather Lacan’s Freud, the Freud that Lacan wishes Freud had always been). After the resolution of this perilous wavering between truth and illusion, science and occultism, “One may regard as exceptional, not to say aberrant,” Lacan insists, “any concern in the analytic circle of today with what have been called  – significantly enough, in order to sterilize them – the psi (ψ) phenomena.”59 May we not conceptualize the relationship between psychoanalysis and occultism as analogous to the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious? And is not resistance to the implication of complicity between psychoanalysis and occultism necessary for the same reason that the detective is compelled to disavow any family resemblance to his or her clairvoyant or telepathic double? The similarity is too striking, too worrisome, simply to be ignored.

Coda

“The French term revenant (someone who revient, who comes back),” writes Miguel Tamen, implies “that a phantasm, a vision, is indeed a revision.”1 Thus, he suggests, there is something ghostly, something at once unheimlich and ephemeral, about every vision and revision of literary history. The history of literary-historical projects is the story of revenant-like returns, repetitions: “In every revision, the past gets apprehended through visions. Deceptively varied as the latter might be, however, each and every vision consists primarily in the ascribing of mistakes to previous visions.”2 It is sobering, especially to a critic who aspires to say something new, to make visible something hitherto unseen, to be reminded that there is a heimlich side to his or her novel views – that “the practice of literary history, while often presenting itself as producing definitive visions of well-established topics, cannot help being a revisionary practice.” And it is a little disquieting, but humbling, to think that, as Tamen reflects, “all revisions get revised, as my own truly true ghost descriptions will become, at the most, someone else’s ghost.”3 Writers, I find, know better than anyone else where their weaknesses lie. Instead of a retrospective or punchy anecdotal ending, I shall conclude with a brief look at one reason why my readings of the texts I have tackled are open to revision – how these readings are made ghostly because of the blind spot, or blind spots, that they generate, and which are both inevitable and deliberate. They are inevitable, I think, because every project of this kind is structured around omissions; one can never say everything one would like to say (and very often one should not). But they are also deliberate and calculated because certain authors, certain passages in this or that text, provided me with what I was looking for, and others did not. Evidence is as much produced (or conjured) as it is found. To use terms such as look and blind spot is to package things in ocularcentric terms – which is precisely the point, or rather the problem. One thing that makes my book already spectral is its consistent inattention to non-visual modes 200

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of perception and their place in literary, scientific, and other discourses in the nineteenth century. To make this clear, but without trying to make last-minute amends, I refer the reader to two related passages. From Goethe’s Theory of Color I previously quoted: “Through them [i.e. colors] nature in its entirety seeks to manifest itself, in this case to the sense of sight, to the eye.”4 To this I now add what Goethe writes in the next paragraph of his text: Similarly, the whole of nature reveals itself [entdeckt sich] to yet another sense. Let us shut our eyes, let us open our ears and sharpen our sense of hearing [Man schließe das Auge, man öffne, man schärfe das Ohr]. From the softest breath to the most savage noise, from the simplest tone to the most sublime harmony, from the fiercest cry of passion to the gentlest word of reason, it is nature alone that speaks, revealing its existence, energy, life, and circumstances, so that a blind man to whom the vast world of the visible is denied may seize hold of an infinite living realm [ein unendlich Lebendiges] through what he can hear.5

From Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus I quoted:  “Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?” (SR, p. 191). Carlyle then continues: This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact; we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and æons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do we not squeak and jibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead, – till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? (SR, pp. 191–2)

Clearly, what has been suppressed in my book is the auditory component, a possible otocentric culture in the nineteenth century. Other critics have been sensitive to the various modalities of Victorian sound culture and have justly underscored its significance to our understanding of Victorian perceptions and self-perceptions. John M. Picker argues that “the development of Victorian self-awareness was contingent on awareness of sonic environments, and that … to understand how Victorians saw themselves, we ought to understand how they heard themselves as well.” The Victorian age, Picker demonstrates, “was an age of ‘auscultation,’ not only in the medical sense … but also in the sense of careful listening to a world at large  – and in flux.”6 Exclusive focus on only one sense means that we cannot see how the senses interacted and competed – in philosophy and science, in art and literature, in the business of everyday life. Gillian Beer

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suggests that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, “[s]ound began to assume the status as ideal function that sight had earlier held.” “Vision was extending its bounds” via more powerful telescopes and microscopes, the camera and the X-ray, “but the effect was to suggest how much lay beyond its powers and its focus, how fleeting its intervention.” The ear arguably “became the chosen arbiter of refined discriminations.”7 To return to the passages I quoted with this insight (another loaded ocularcentric term): Goethe regards hearing as sight’s equal – at moments its superior – in the hierarchy of the senses. Although “we cannot discuss color with one who is blind,”8 blind people may have an advantage over the sighted. For instance, there is no aural equivalent to the Newtonian bastion that needs to be dismantled. One is almost made to envy those who are blind, to mimic them by shutting one’s eyes and opening one’s ears. Sealing off one sense in order to sharpen the other puts one in touch with a cosmic symphony of notes ranging from the depths of passion to the heights of reason. Hearing enables us to perceive the full spectrum of things, to apprehend the universe as it really is – a composite of complementary opposites: passion, reason; “plus, minus; aggressive, resistant; active, passive; assertive, restraining; force, moderation; male, female.”9 Blind people are more in tune with the harmoniousness (and the harmonies) of the universe, and the passage on hearing is accordingly one of the most poetic moments in Theory of Color. In Carlyle hearing is a superior substitute for sight; the ear is the receptor of what Beer calls “a harmonious acoustic eternity.”10 But Carlyle’s exuberant otocentric note is not held for long. The reference to “tones of Love and Faith,” “celestial harp-strings,” and “the Song of beatified Souls” quickly transitions into a denigration of hearing. Contentiousness, egotism, and bigotry produce a cacophony of inarticulate “squeak[s] and jibber[s].” (In “Spiritual Optics” the expression of religious intolerance is described as “shriek[ing].”)11 Can we trust ourselves, then, to hear the tonal difference between sublime harp-strings and quarrelsome harpings? And is it fair to speak of otocentrism in the case of a text in which hearing is conceived in such ambivalent terms? Lastly, what to make of “the scent of the morning air”? How does smell fit into (or how does it challenge) critical perspectives and historical narratives that privilege sight or hearing? Committed to a particular way of looking at things, this book easily accommodates passages such as the one in Adam Bede in which Eliot’s narrator reflects (in empiricist fashion) that “we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it

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is.”12 But Adam muses on the relative worth of seeing and hearing when it comes to perceiving ghosts – and prefers the latter: It’s no use staring about to catch sight of a sound. Maybe there’s a world about us as we can’t see, but th’ ear’s quicker than the eye, and catches a sound from ’t now and then. Some people think they get a sight on ’t too, but they’re mostly folks whose eyes are not much use to ’em at anything else. For my part, I think it’s better to see when your perpendicular’s true, than to see a ghost.13

Had I started my study of Victorian sense culture from Adam Bede, it may have been a different study altogether: one about ghost-hearers and ­detectives who are attentive listeners. In which case I suspect that the book’s Coda would have reflected on its insensitivity to what was right in front of my eyes but that I could not see.

Notes

I n t r oduc t ion 1 Doyle, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” p. 537: hereafter abbreviated as “SV” (see List of Abbreviations, pp. x–xi). 2 Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, p. 25. 3 James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 898. 4 Carlyle, “Spiritual Optics,” p. 13. 5 Ruskin, “The Relation to Art of the Science of Light,” p. 194. 6 Reid, Essays, pp. 322, 323. 7 Lewes, “Seeing is Believing,” p. 382. 8 Berkeley, New Theory of Vision, p. 31. 9 Ibid., p. 53. 10 Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” p. 347. 11 Wooldridge, The Missing Sense, pp. iv, 7.





C h a p t e r 1 Con t e x t ua l i z i ng t h e g ho s t s t or y 1 Cox and Gilbert, “Introduction,” p. x. 2 Auerbach, “Ghosts of Ghosts,” p. 278. 3 George Eliot, Adam Bede, pp. 178, 175. 4 Ibid., p. 176. 5 Compare Eliot’s statements on the mission of the realist writer with Karl Marx’s description of the methods of historical materialism. The flawed social theories of German idealist philosophers, Marx maintains in The German Ideology, are the outcome of their unwillingness or inability to engage with “real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process.” Unlike the idealists, Marx intends to study “men, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions.” Marx, The German Ideology, pp. 36, 37. 6 Eagleton, The English Novel, pp. 4–5. 7 Coughlan, “Doubles, Shadows, Sedan-Chairs,” pp. 22–3. Elsewhere I argue that nineteenth-century literary realism is not as inimical to the supernatural as critics generally assume. See Smajić, “Supernatural Realism.” 8 George Eliot, Adam Bede, pp. 175, 177. 204

Notes to pages 12–16

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9 Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 7. 10 Ibid., pp. 7, 12. 11 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 57. 12 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 141. 13 Heath, “The Politics of Genre,” pp. 168–9. 14 For a reappraisal of the role of genre theory in Victorian studies, see Williams, “‘Genre’ and ‘Discourse’.” 15 Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, p. 81. 16 Ibid., p.3. 17 On Lucian’s ghost stories, see Felton, Haunted Greece and Rome, pp. 77–88. 18 Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 25. See also Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction:  “The ghost is the most constant figure in supernatural fiction. It appears from the beginning of literature” (p. 32). 19 Lang, “The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories,” p. 623. 20 Ibid., p. 624. 21 Ibid., p. 632. 22 Lang, “Ghosts up to Date,” pp. 47–8. 23 Buse and Stott, “Introduction,” p. 10. 24 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, p. 1. 25 Ibid., pp. x–xi. 26 Ibid., p. xii. 27 Ibid., p. xiii. 28 Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell, “Introduction,” p. 10. 29 Derrida, Specters of Marx; Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity; Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel. 30 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 8. 31 Ibid., p. 17. 32 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, p. 3. 33 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 7. 34 I prefer to use the term ghostology rather than hauntology, since the latter is associated too strictly for my taste with deconstruction and psychoanalysis. For an informative discussion of hauntology and the differences between the Derridean variant and the psychoanalytic one espoused by Abraham and Torok, see Davis, Haunted Subjects, esp. pp. 8–19 and 66–92. 35 Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell, “Introduction,” p. 12. 36 “The ghost,” John Potts argues, “is an idea shaped by its worldly environment, undergoing transformations in specific cultural habitats. As it will be used to meet varying cultural demands, its functions and characteristics will alter across cultures.” He adds, however, that there is “a commonality beneath the cultural variations,” and that “the ghost-idea appears to be universal.” Potts, “The Idea of the Ghost,” pp. 81, 82. 37 Dickerson argues that Victorian middle-class women could more readily identify with spectral figures than men because “the ghost corresponded … to the Victorian woman’s visibility and invisibility, her power and powerlessness, the contradictions and extremes that shaped female culture.” Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide, p. 5. Whereas male-authored stories “tend to

206

Notes to pages 17–20

be more diagnostic, clinical, journalistic, vested in mensuration” (p. 7), for women the genre offered “a fitting medium for eruptions of female libidinal energy, of thwarted ambitions, of cramped egos” (p. 8). Julia Briggs similarly suggests that women writers may have “felt some special affinity with freer and more imaginative modes of expression: Gothic, in particular, often includes some element of rebellion against or resistance to existing social forms.” Briggs, “The Ghost Story,” p. 128. 38 Lynch argues that there is a strong correlation between domestic servants and ghosts in the middle-class Victorian imagination: “[T]he domestic servant suggested a silent estate of discontent and dis-ease cohabiting the same physical space as the family, but imagined by that family as immaterial and invisible. The cook and the maid seemed to go with the house – and sometimes did, being ‘inherited’ by succeeding families  – furnishing the home with a ghostly agency that moved the tables and chairs, emptied the grates and chamber pots, and disappeared around corners and through passages to the ‘other side’ of the green baize door.” Lynch, “Spectral Politics,” p. 68. 39 Simmel, “Sociology of the Senses”; Baxandall, Painting and Experience; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Debord, The Society of the Spectacle; Virilio, The Vision Machine; Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”; Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy; Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, pp. 22, 39. 40 Anon., “The Ghosts of the Day,” p. 338. 41 Lang, “Ghosts up to Date,” p. 57. 42 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 70. 43 An indispensable work on the subject of anti-ocularcentrism is Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes. See also Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for a critique of “the domination of the mind of the West by ocular metaphors” (p. 13). 4 4 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 69. 45 Crary’s “dominant model” of the observer has met with considerable critical resistance. W. J. T. Mitchell, for instance, accuses Crary of having “no interest in any empirical history of spectatorship, any treatment of the observer’s body as marked by gender, or of a vision inflected by class or ethnicity.” Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn,” p. 92. For a Lacanian critique of Crary’s argument, see Copjec, “The Body as Viewing Instrument.” For the argument that Crary’s analysis is historically flawed because it fails to take into account the work of George Berkeley, see Atherton, “How to Write the History of Vision.” 46 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 4. C h a p t e r 2 T h e r i s e of op t ic a l a ppa r i t ions 1 The number was published in November 1828 for the following year. Scott’s contributions to the number also include “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” “Death of the Laird’s Jock,” and “A Scene at Abbotsford.”

Notes to pages 20–27

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2 On ghosts in Scott’s fiction, see Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction, esp. pp. 105–21. 3 Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 36. 4 Scott, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” p. 62. 5 Ibid., pp. 63, 64. 6 In The Keepsake the story is accompanied by an engraved illustration that hardly does justice to the ghost’s monstrous appearance: she looks as stunned to see Browne as he is to see her. 7 See Scott, “Story of an Apparition.” Scott’s authorship is convincingly established in Parsons, ‘“Scott’s Prior Version of ‘The Tapestried Chamber’.” 8 Castle, The Female Thermometer, pp. 170, 174. 9 Ibid., pp. 173, 175. 10 Kate Flint has also observed the importance of nineteenth-century theories of illusions and hallucinations for our understanding of contemporary ghost stories: “When may someone be believed to have seen something which is not actually there? This question, which forms the pivot for countless Victorian ghost stories, which lies at the heart of debates about spiritualism and the degrees of fraud and deception inhering within its practices, is intimately entwined with developments in the physiology and psychology of vision during the period.” Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, p. 262. I deal with the matter more extensively and in a different context. 11 Ferriar, Theory of Apparitions, pp. 14, 17. 12 Ibid., pp. 100, 117. 13 Ibid., p. 138. 14 Ibid., p. 69. 15 Hibbert, Philosophy of Apparitions, pp. 287–8. 16 Ibid., p. 291. 17 Ibid., pp. 288, 362. 18 Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, p. 53. 19 Ibid., p. 61. Many of Brewster’s writings on vision are collected in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade. Wade comments that Brewster’s “interpretations of visual phenomena were referred consistently to the analysis of the retinal projection and visible direction. In modern parlance, Brewster’s visible direction would be referred to as oculocentric direction; that is, the specification of direction with respect to the centre of the eye rather than the head” (pp. 27–8). 20 Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, p. 20. 21 Ibid., p. 21. 22 Ibid., pp. 19, 21. 23 Ibid., p. 26. 24 Ibid., pp. 30, 26. 25 Ibid., p. 53. 26 Ibid., pp. 13, 14. 27 Alderson, An Essay on Apparitions, p. 42. 28 Ibid., pp. 51–2.

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Notes to pages 28–33

29 Scott remarks that “[t]he learned and acute Dr Ferriar of Manchester was the first who brought before the English public the leading case, as it may be called, in this department,” and that Nicolai’s case has been discussed by Hibbert “and others who have assumed Demonology as a subject” (LDW, p. 21). 30 For an account of Brewster’s and Scott’s shared interest in ghosts and vision, and the argument that Scott was less invested in the physiological explanation of spectral appearances than I have suggested, see Burwick, “Science and Supernaturalism.” 31 Radcliffe, Fiends, Ghosts, and Sprites, pp. 102, 108. 32 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 90. 33 Ibid., p. 92. On Müller also see Boring, Sensation and Perception, pp. 68–78. 34 Radcliffe, Fiends, Ghosts, and Sprites, p. 161. 35 Brown, Spectropia, p. 7. 36 Ibid., p. 4. 37 Ibid., p. 3. 38 Ibid., p. 7. For a discussion of specters produced by mechanical means in the early nineteenth century, see Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 211–20. 39 Lightman, “Victorian Sciences and Religions,” p. 344. 40 Ibid., p. 364. 41 A more recent advocate of this position, Stephen Jay Gould, argues that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria”: “The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise – science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives.” Gould, “Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” p. 592. 42 Lightman, “Victorian Sciences and Religions,” p. 351. The proponents of scientific naturalism, as Frank Miller Turner explains, “constructed their model of external nature from three seminal theories of nineteenth-century science,” namely “Dalton’s atomic theory, the law of the conservation of energy, and evolution.” Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. 24. “All three doctrines are intimately connected,” Huxley argued, “and each is applicable to the whole physical cosmos” (qtd. in Turner, p. 24). 43 Brooke, Science and Religion, p. 220. 4 4 Ferriar, Theory of Apparitions, pp. ix–x. 45 Hibbert, Philosophy of Apparitions, pp. 87–8. 46 Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, p. 18. 47 Ibid., p. 23. 48 Brewster, A Treatise on Optics, p. 240. 49 “A law presupposes an agent; for it is only the mode, according to which an agent proceeds: it implies a power; for it is the order, according to which that power acts.” Paley, Natural Theology, p. 9. 50 Ibid., pp. 20, 23. 51 Ibid., pp. 26, 27. 52 Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, pp. 17–18. 53 Ibid., p. 23.

Notes to pages 34–44

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C h a p t e r 3 I n n e r v i s ion a n d s pi r i t ua l op t ic s 1 On the famous case of the Cock Lane ghost, see Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, pp. 13–32. 2 “Spiritual Optics” was first published in 1882 in James Anthony Froude’s biography of Carlyle. According to what Carlyle reportedly told Froude, the essay expresses his “real conviction, a conviction that lay at the bottom of all his thoughts about man and man’s doings in this world.” Froude, Thomas Carlyle, vol. ii, p. 15. 3 Carlyle, “Spiritual Optics,” pp. 10–11. 4 Ibid., p. 9. 5 Ibid., p. 12. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 13. 8 Ibid., p. 10. 9 Ibid., pp. 13, 14. 10 Ibid., p. 12. 11 Levine, Dying to Know, pp. 71, 72. 12 Robert F. Geary observes that Crowe’s “was one of the first and one of the most popular voices in what by the century’s end would be a substantial chorus dissenting from what was felt as a dehumanizing scientific orthodoxy.” Geary, “The Corpse in the Dung Cart,” p. 51. 13 Howitt, The History of the Supernatural, vol. i, p. 168. 14 Ibid., p. 25. 15 Ibid., p. iii. 16 Ibid., p. 167. 17 Anon., “The Lost Faculty, or Sixth Sense,” p. 657. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 662. 21 For an excellent discussion, see Fellows, The Failing Distance, esp. pp. 1–23. 22 Ruskin, “The Relation to Art of the Science of Light,” p. 194. 23 Ibid., p. 195. 24 Ibid., p. 201. 25 Ibid., p. 200. 26 Ruskin, “The Three Æras,” p. 114. 27 The often quoted passage reads:  “The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, – as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.” Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, p. 27. 28 Ruskin, “The Three Æras,” p. 116. 29 Ibid., p. 115. 30 Ibid., p. 120. 31 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 44–53

32 Ibid., p. 122. Whether Ruskin refuses to see marks of the passage of time or notices what others fail to see, his remarks corroborate George L. Hersey’s evaluation of him as a “visual or optical rather than verbal” writer. Hersey explains:  “A verbal writer may be defined as one who is interested in sequence, consequence, action, the passage of time. He avoids gaps, too many branchings-off, and the like. He wants to get the reader from point A to point B. A visual writer on the other hand is interested in juxtaposition rather than sequence, simultaneity rather than consequence, appearance rather than time. He delights in colour, aura, texture, nearness. He does not see thought as a form of transport from A to B.” Hersey, “Ruskin as an Optical Thinker,” pp. 45–6. 33 Ruskin, “The Relation to Art of the Science of Light,” p. 201. C h a p t e r 4   “Be t w i x t a nc i e n t fa i t h a n d mode r n i nc r e du l i t y ” 1 Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story, p. 303. 2 Melville, “The Yellow Gown,” p. 384. 3 Edwards, “The Engineer,” p. 217. 4 Molesworth, “The Story of the Rippling Train,” p. 621. 5 See Melville, “Optical Delusion of the Yellow Gown.” 6 E. J. Clery comments that Scott’s “critique of the ‘explained supernatural’,” particularly in the works of Radcliffe and Charles Maturin, “was so persistent it could almost be called a campaign.” Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, p. 108. 7 Scott, “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe,” p. 305. 8 Ibid., pp. 326–7. 9 Ibid., pp. 328–9. 10 Ibid., p. 328. 11 Ibid., pp. 300, 329. 12 Le Fanu, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances,” p. 721. 13 Ibid., p. 722. 14 Ibid., pp. 723, 725. 15 Ibid., p. 726. 16 Ibid., p. 727. 17 Ibid., p. 730. 18 Ibid., p. 729. 19 Dickens, “The Signalman,” pp. 99, 98. 20 Ibid., p. 105. 21 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 22 Ibid., p. 110. 23 Edwards, “The New Pass,” p. 63. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 64. 26 Price, “Reality, or Delusion?,” p. 534. 27 Ibid., p. 535.

Notes to pages 53–63

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28 Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell, “Introduction,” p. 1. 29 Anon., “The Latest Thing in Ghosts,” p. 102. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares, pp. 130, 131. 33 Ibid., pp. 132, 134. 34 Lang, “Ghosts up to Date,” p. 49. For a more reliable account, and one that does not make Scott into a ghost-seer, see Parsons, “Scott’s Experiences in Haunted Chambers.” 35 Turner, Between Science and Religion, pp. 3, 5. 36 Oppenheim, The Other World, p. 61. 37 Price, “Reality, or Delusion?” p. 522. 38 Melville, “The Yellow Gown,” p. 391. 39 Parsons notes that Scott visited Lichfield in May 1807, where he met with Anna Seward, and that he wrote the story down from memory eight years later for “Story of an Apparition.” Parsons, “Scott’s Prior Version of ‘The Tapestried Chamber’,” p. 418. 40 On Scott’s reasons for preferring anonymity, see his 1829 “General Preface” to Waverley. 41 Potts, “The Idea of the Ghost,” p. 79. 42 Anon., “A String of Ghost Stories,” p. 77. 43 Eagleton, The English Novel, p. 5. 4 4 Crowe, Ghosts and Family Legends, pp. vi–vii. 45 Dickens, Review of Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature, p. 132. The review is attributed to Dickens and reprinted in Philip Collins, “Dickens on Ghosts.” 46 On Dickens’s treatment of Augusta de la Rue, see Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism, pp. 74–105. 47 Dickens to Emile de la Rue, February 10, 1845 in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. iv, p. 264. 48 Dickens to Emile de la Rue, January 25, 1845 in Letters, vol. iv, p. 249. 49 Dickens to Emile de la Rue, February 10, 1845 in Letters, vol. iv, p. 263. 50 Dickens to William Howitt, September 6, 1859 in Letters, vol. ix, p. 116. 51 Henson, “Investigations and Fictions,” pp. 49, 61. 52 Dickens, “To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt,” p. 33. 53 Ibid., pp. 33–4. 54 Dickens to Frances Elliot, September 12, 1867 in Letters, vol. xi, p. 425. 55 Ibid. 56 Collins, “Mrs. Zant and the Ghost,” p. 1. It would be disingenuous on my part not to mention that Collins’s story departs from the seeing-is-believing requirement: “Not in the obscurity of midnight, but in the searching light of day, did the supernatural influence assert itself. Neither revealed by a vision, nor announced by a voice, it reached mortal knowledge through a sense which is least easily self-deceived: the sense that feels” (p. 1). 57 Scott, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” p. 60. 58 Ibid., p. 61.

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Notes to pages 68–71

C h a p t e r 5  V i s ua l l e a r n i ng: s ig h t a n d V ic t or i a n e pi s t e mol o g y 1 Draper, Human Physiology, pp. 404, 405. 2 Ibid., p. 405. 3 Ibid., p. 407. 4 Lewes, “Seeing is Believing,” p. 381. 5 Ibid., p. 382. 6 This rise was gradual. Writing in 1874, Lewes remarked that “Psychology is still without the fundamental data necessary to its constitution as a science; it is very much in the condition of Chemistry before Lavoisier, or of biology before Bichat.” Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, vol. i, p. vi. Problems consists of three series in five volumes. Hereafter it will be abbreviated as PLM and cited by volume and page number. For an informative discussion of the development of psychology in the nineteenth century, especially in regard to its struggle to establish itself as a science of the mind rather than the soul, see Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind. 7 For discussions of Comte’s influence on Mill and Lewes, see Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 172–201; Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture, pp. 33–84. Mill’s relationship with Comte is covered in Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 164–85. On Lewes and Comte, see Ashton, G. H. Lewes, pp. 45–50. For a general introduction to the positivist philosophy of the period, see Harré, “Positivist Thought in the Nineteenth Century.” 8 Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, pp. 33, 34. 9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 221. 10 Reid, Essays, pp. 322–3. 11 Ibid., p. 78. 12 Ibid., p. 81. 13 Ibid., p. 111. 14 Ibid., p. 78. 15 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 16 Ibid., p. 309. 17 Ibid., p. 312. 18 Ibid., p. 315. 19 A thorough account of Reid is beyond the scope of my discussion. It should be noted that Reid is an advocate of the direct realist theory of perception. As James Van Cleve shows, Reid contested the notion, put forth in different forms by Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley, “that the object immediately present to the mind is never an external thing, but only an internal image, sense datum, representation, or (to use the most common eighteenth-century term) idea.” Theories of perception based on this notion, Reid argued, are philosophically weak, do not explain how perception is possible, and stand in the way of our understanding of the external world. Van Cleve, “Reid’s Theory of Perception,” pp. 101, 102. 20 See, for instance, Dennis Porter: “[A] crime implies the violation of a community code of conduct and demands a response in terms of the code … What is

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particularly notable about detective stories … is that they only exceptionally raise questions concerning the code; the law itself is accepted as a given. As a result, from a contemporary Marxist perspective the detective story may be understood as a branch of that ideological state apparatus called culture. It is, moreover, a branch whose particular mission involves the celebration of the repressive state apparatus or at least of that important element of it formed by the police.” Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, pp. 120–1. 21 From a Foucauldian perspective there are significant overlaps between detective fiction’s investment in vision and its disciplinary agenda. D. A. Miller lucidly observes: “Detective fiction is … always implicitly punning on the detective’s brilliant super-vision and the police supervision that it embodies.” The detective’s “intervention marks an explicit bringing-under-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative.” Miller, The Novel and the Police, p. 35. 22 Ibid., p. 36. 23 Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, p. 3. 24 Alewyn, “The Origin of the Detective Novel,” p. 70. 25 “The literary detective’s power is consistently represented as a new kind of reading, just as the genre which produced him was regarded as a new kind of writing in the nineteenth century.” Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, p. 3. 26 de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 141. 27 Horton, “Were They Having Fun Yet?,” p. 13. 28 Copjec, “The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal,” p. 169. 29 For discussions of Berkeley’s theory of vision, see Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche, pp. 25–46; Armstrong, Berkeley’s Theory of Vision; Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception, pp. 71–99; McGowan, “Berkeley’s Doctrine of Signs”; Hooker, “Berkeley’s Argument from Design”; Atherton, Berkeley’s Revolution in Vision; Wilson, “The Issue of ‘Common Sensibles’”; Pappas, Berkeley’s Thought, pp. 147–82. For a defense of Berkeley’s linguistic model, see Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor. 30 Descartes, La Dioptrique, p. 155. 31 Margaret Atherton argues that many of the commonly perceived differences between Descartes’s and Berkeley’s theories of vision are largely unfounded:  “[I]t would be a mistake to characterize the transition from Descartes’s geometric optics to Berkeley’s linguistic optics as a rupture … It makes far too much sense to see Berkeley not merely as incorporating elements of Descartes’s theory into his own, but as developing his alternative account in response to difficulties perceived in Descartes’s theory.” Atherton, “How to Write the History of Vision,” p. 159. Indeed, Descartes anticipates Berkeley when he writes: “We ought, however, to bear in mind that there are several things besides images which can excite our thought, as for instance, signs and words, which have no manner of resemblance to the things they signify.” Descartes, La Dioptrique, p. 146. Regardless of Berkeley’s debt to Descartes, it is the former’s “associationistic, languagebased model,” Atherton argues, “that provided the dominant account of vision throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries” (p. 159).

214

Notes to pages 73–79

32 Berkeley, New Theory of Vision, p. 21. 33 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 34 Ibid., p. 38. 35 Ibid., p. 31. 36 Ibid., p. 51. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 53. As William McGowan demonstrates, Berkeley’s doctrine of signs replaced Locke’s tabula rasa hypothesis. With Berkeley, the observer becomes a reader (or Lector) of a universal Scriptura contrived by God (the Auctor). To understand how vision works means to move one step closer to understanding God’s benevolence. McGowan, “Berkeley’s Doctrine of Signs,” p. 236. 39 Berkeley, The Theory of Vision or Visual Language, p. 243. 40 Ibid., p. 241. 41 For an assessment of the epistemological implications and historical positionality of Descartes’s work on vision, see Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 69–82. 42 Snyder, Reforming Philosophy, p. 53. 43 Ibid., p. 58. 4 4 Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy, p. 2. 45 On Whewell as a natural theologian, see Brooke, “Indications of a Creator.” Menachem Fisch sums up the theological basis of Whewell’s theory of scientific knowledge: “The world without, [Whewell] believed, was created purposefully and meaningfully by an omnipotent and benevolent Creator. Yet when presented to man via his sensations, nothing of the divine plan, is disclosed. The book of nature, though initially composed with a definite meaning and by means of a definite ‘grammatical scheme’, presents man with no more than the ‘formless material’ of its bare and uninterpreted characters. Reality, Whewell held, resembles a meaningful yet foreign text,” but one whose “meaning is not, as it were, in the text.” Fisch, William Whewell, p. 146. Whewell’s mistake, Fisch explains, was to claim that, regardless of the evident obstacles, it is possible to achieve certainty about the truth of some interpretations. “To claim that truth as such is recognizable was a blunt violation of his own epistemology. If, as he claimed, the only input from ‘out there’ that we enjoy is formless sensation, if the Lord’s master-plan is forever concealed, and if, as he insisted, all form superimposed in knowledge upon unstructured sensation is truly mind-made, then even if certain of our hypotheses do happen to dovetail with the Creator’s original plan, there can be no way for us to know that they do” (pp. 146–7). 46 Mill, “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” p. 162. 47 Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, p. 226. 48 For an excellent discussion of the Mill–Whewell debate, see Snyder, Reforming Philosophy. Also see Ducasse, “Whewell’s Philosophy of Scientific Discovery. I”; Strong, “William Whewell and John Stuart Mill”; and Harold T. Walsh, “Whewell and Mill on Induction.” 49 Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 270.

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50 “Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; the latter, of Inference. The truths known by intuition are the original premises from which all others are inferred” (SL vii, pp. 6–7). 51 The odd thing about Mill’s explanation, Snyder points out, is that his “argument here relies on a curious counterfactual. He noted that if we had adequate visual organs, or if the planet left a visible track as it moved through the sky, and if we occupied a privileged position with which to view this path, we could directly observe the planet’s orbital path.” Snyder, Reforming Philosophy, p. 104. The problem, of course, is that we do not have such visual powers and that the orbital movement of a planet does not leave a visible track. 52 Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 1st edn., pp. 277–8. 53 Ibid., p. 278. 54 Ibid., pp. 282–3. 55 Ibid., pp. 283–4. 56 Ibid., p. 284. 57 Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2nd edn., vol. ii, p. 494. 58 Ibid., p. 497. 59 Ibid., p. 503. 60 Hock Guan Tjoa observes that Lewes’s brand of positivism was “equidistant from mysticism and empiricism.” Tjoa, George Henry Lewes, p. 106. What attracted Lewes to Comte, Tjoa shows, was the possibility of adopting positivism as a “surrogate religion” (p. 112), and “[t]he avidity with which Lewes expounded Comte and the urgency with which he urged the positive philosophy upon his readers was a measure of his thirst for a satisfying, universal philosophy” (p. 105). 61 Darwin proves indispensable in this scheme: “[A]ll who believe in evolution believe that these forms and tendencies represent ancestral experiences and adaptations; believe … that man is born with a tendency to think in images and symbols according to given relations and sequences which constitute logical laws, and that what he thinks is the necessary product of his organism and the external conditions” (PLM i, p. 201). 62 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 79. 63 On the eye as a camera obscura, or photographic camera, see Wald, “Eye and Camera”; Wade, A Natural History of Vision, pp. 25–36. 64 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” p. 130. Cf. Helmholtz, “Die Neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens.” 65 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” pp. 131, 180. 66 Ibid., p. 194. 67 Helmholtz, “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” p. 14. Cf. Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s Naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten.” 68 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” p. 197. 69 Ibid., p. 198. 70 Ibid., p. 199.

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Notes to pages 88–90

71 Ibid., p. 201. 72 Ibid., p. 202. 73 Ibid., p. 176. On perceptual empiricism and nativism, see Boring, Sensation and Perception, pp. 28–34; Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception, pp. 192–222; Earhard, “Association (and the Nativist-Empiricist Axis)”; Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative; Krasner, The Entangled Eye, pp. 22–32. 74 Bailey, A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, pp. 21, 22. 75 Ibid., pp. 21–2. 76 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 77 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 78 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 79 Mill, “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” p. 167. 80 Ibid., p. 169. 81 Ibid., pp. 178, 191. But as Edward S. Reed points out, Mill’s criticism of Bailey is misdirected. For Bailey, who closely followed Reid, the distinction between sensation and perception is somewhat beside the point, since what Reid was ultimately interested in was the veracity of perception, not sensation. For Bailey, as for Reid, “the perception of the third dimension is a truth, but it is neither a truth of intuition nor a true judgment or inference based on intuition. It is a truth of perception.” Failing to understand both Reid and Bailey, Mill insists that Bailey make up his mind regarding a conundrum that Bailey in fact has no intention of tackling, namely the question of whether “the truth of our awareness of a three-dimensional, solid world is … intuitive (sensation based)” or the result of “inferences based on sensations.” Reed, From Soul to Mind, p. 136. Reed explains that, in addition to Mill’s failure to understand where Bailey is coming from and what precisely he is arguing, Bailey’s assault on Berkeley’s theory in fact rests on two rather convincing arguments. First, “[i]f one assumes that no sensations (visual, tactile, or other) contain information about outness,” by which Bailey means the perception of an object’s externality rather than its distance, “then outness can never be the result of the association of these sensations.” And second, “[i]f it is legitimate to assume,” as Berkeley does, “that touch contains information about depth and outness, and that touch ‘teaches’ vision, why should vision itself not contain information about outness (as [William] James later maintained)?” (pp. 136–7). In so far as “Bailey followed Reid and did not accept Mill’s new distinction between sensation and perception, we can see how the modern confrontation between empiricism and nativism in perceptual theory was created by Mill’s novel distinction” (pp. 135–6). On Mill’s critique of Bailey also see Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception, pp. 214–18. 82 Thomas K. Abbott, Sight and Touch, pp. iii, 2. Alexander Campbell Fraser, editor of Berkeley’s collected works, reaches the opposite conclusion, namely that Berkeley provides us with a lesson in reading “natural phenomena, which form one of the Books of God, – a Book too which is in literal truth a Book of Prophecy.” Coopting Berkeley for an effort to “reconcil[e] … faith in natural

Notes to pages 90–94

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science with faith in religious thought,” Fraser chooses to see the phenomenal world as “a grand procession of natural signs, which we have been learning to interpret ever since we were born, in the beautiful Book of Vision that is always open before us.” Fraser, Berkeley, pp. vii, 40, 46. For a discussion of the debate between Abbott and Fraser on the subject of Berkeley’s theory of vision, see Atherton, “Mr. Abbott and Professor Fraser.” 83 Abbott, Sight and Touch, p. 10. 84 Ibid., p. 2. 85 Ibid. 86 James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 847. 87 Ibid., pp. 849, 902. 88 Ibid., pp. 900–1. 89 Ibid., pp. 901, 903. 90 As Boring explains, in the early twentieth century empiricism and nativism, in so far as these terms pertain to experimental psychology, both undergo a transformation: “[E]mpiricism disappeared because it was absorbed by behaviorism and its later sophisticated substitutes, just as nativism disappeared because Gestalt psychology kept it by swallowing it.” Boring, Sensation and Perception, p. 34. That Gestalt psychology might have swallowed too much in the process, and that it deployed nativism to make some sweeping generalizations regarding perception, is suggested by D. W. Hamlyn in The Psychology of Perception. A classic statement in support of the Gestalt theory is Rudolf Arnheim, “The Gestalt Theory of Expression.” The Gestalt theory of expression, as discussed by Arnheim, presupposes an innate correspondence between psychological states and physical expressions of these states, a relationship that is immediately and directly available to untutored perception and does not require (although it is sometimes fine-tuned by) knowledge from experience. 91 Bailey, A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, pp. 11–12. 92 James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 898. 93 Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, p. 375. 94 Maudsley, Common Source of Error, p. 12. 95 Ibid., p. 5. 96 Ibid., p. 7n. 97 Ibid., p. 6. 98 Ibid. C h a p t e r 6  S c op op h i l i a a n d s c op op hobi a :  Poe’s r e a de r ly f l â n e u r 1 For the term scopophilia I am indebted to Laura Mulvey’s important 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Unlike Mulvey, though, who uses the term to designate “pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (p. 61), I associate scopophilia with the pleasure derived from viewing objects and persons as legible texts.

218

Notes to pages 94–101

2 I am not the first reader to observe this. See Norman N. Holland: “Dupin exists in a world of texts, but he himself is not a text to be read. Behind the green spectacles, he sees but is not seen.” Holland, “Re-Covering ‘The Purloined Letter’,” p. 357. 3 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” p. 9. 4 Foster, Sublime Enjoyment, pp. 38–9. 5 Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, p. 27. 6 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” p. 8. 7 Baudelaire likens his favorite flâneur, the French painter Constantin Guys, “to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.” Ibid., p. 9. For a reading of Dupin as a flâneur, see Rignall, “From City Streets to Country Houses.” 8 Lawrence Frank convincingly shows that there is much more at stake here than the comical echo of “urine” in “Urion.” With its allusions to Pierre Simon Laplace’s nebular hypothesis and evolutionary theory, Poe’s story registers the conflict between the creationist position of evangelicalism and Natural Theology, and the evolutionary, developmental model of the origin of the universe. Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence, pp. 29–43. 9 As Daniel Hoffman observes, “Dupin is a mind-reader,” and if “Dupin’s mind works by association,” it also “partakes of the irrational, and is therefore the highest kind of ratiocination, since it is not the captive of its own premises.” Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, p. 107. John T. Irwin offers a different perspective on Dupin’s mind-reading abilities. In “The Purloined Letter,” he argues, Dupin does not identify with his opponent’s mind but with another side of his own self. Dupin cannot be said to read minds because “our ideas of another’s mind are still our ideas.” Dupin’s mind-reading thus evidences a split in the detective’s psyche and precludes a unified mind or subjectivity:  “It is precisely because the self’s thought of another mind’s otherness to it reflects the otherness of thought to itself that the effort to imagine the thought processes of an opponent produces a specular, antithetical double of the self, the self’s own projection of psychic difference.” Irwin, “Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading,” p. 36. For an astute discussion of perception in Poe’s detective stories, particularly “The Purloined Letter,” see Bellei, “‘The Purloined Letter’: A Theory of Perception.” 10 Barthes, “Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Poe,” p. 10. The tale in question is “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” 11 “The Man of the Crowd,” argues J. Gerald Kennedy, “stands as a transitional work between the haunting Gothic tales of the late thirties and the ratiocinative fiction of the early forties, possessing obvious qualities of both.” Kennedy, “The Limits of Reason,” p. 187. 12 Patricia Merivale reads “The Man of the Crowd” as a prototype of the postmodernist (or metaphysical, as it is sometimes called) detective story, and as “the first metaphysical gumshoe story.” Merivale, “Gumshoe Gothics,” p. 110.

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“In the narrative structure of ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ ‘my’ (that is, the detective-narrator’s) silent pursuit of the Other, who turns out to be ‘Me,’ exemplifies the reductionist form of the metaphysical detective story, in which the triadic multiplicity of detective, criminal, and victim is reduced to a solipsistic unity. From the narrator’s point of view, I, the detective, am following the criminal, to discover more about him. From the Man of the Crowd’s point of view, I, the victim, am being followed by a masked and ominously silent criminal.” In Poe’s story, Merivale concludes, “it is the narrator who is ‘really’ the Man of the Crowd” (p. 107), and er lässt sich nicht lesen signifies the impossibility of fully knowing not just the Other but oneself as well. 13 My reading is compatible with Shawn Rosenheim’s, who suggests that Poe’s detective stories stage a conflation of the hieroglyph and the cryptograph:  “Unlike the hieroglyph … the cryptograph presumes the arbitrariness of signifying forms … But recognition of this arbitrariness is profoundly troubling, since it undermines the shadow relationship of image to sign which ostensibly grounds the hieroglyph by establishing a ‘natural’ visual equivalence between signified image – river, tree, or whatever – and the signifying ‘shadow’.” Rosenheim, “The King of ‘Secret Readers’, ” p. 378. Poe attempts “to preserve the possibility of an originary hieroglyphic moment” and “to treat the cryptograph as if it were ordinary language that, once decoded, will offer up perfectly transparent meaning” (p. 380). 14 The most exhaustive discussion of the composition of Poe’s story, and the relation between fact and fiction in it, is John Walsh, Poe the Detective. Also useful is Wimsatt, “Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers.” 15 Poe suggests that it is not he who is telling the story, but Dupin’s friend, who had written “an article entitled The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” where he “endeavored, about a year ago, to depict some very remarkable features in the mental character of [his] friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin” (“MR,” p. 170). 16 As David Van Leer observes: “The question of how detection discovers truth becomes that of how detection constructs it – not clarifying obscurities which have, after all, been invented to be clarified, but using a fictional act of clarification to make extratextual truth possible.” Van Leer, “Detecting Truth,” p. 75. 17 Belsey, Critical Practice, p. 117. 18 Howard Haycraft, for instance, argues that “there could be no detective stories (and there were none) until there were detectives. This did not occur until the nineteenth century.” Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure, p. 5. Voltaire’s Zadig (1747), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Eugène François Vidocq’s Mémoires de Vidocq (1827–8), and Edward Bulwer’s Pelham (1828) are sometimes cited as predecessors to Poe’s Dupin stories, but Haycraft claims that it is erroneous to call these narratives detective stories:  “It would be quite as logical to maintain that the primitive pipings of the Aegean shepherds were symphonies – because the modern symphony includes passages for reed instruments in its scores! As the symphony began with Haydn, so did the detective story begin with Poe” (p. 6). I have no intention of pursuing a discussion about origins. It should be noted, however, that Poe was catering to a

220

Notes to pages 107–109

demand for sensational accounts of crime already exploited by the immensely popular Newgate Calendar, and in this regard was not exactly a trend-setter. For a more developmental account of the rise of detective fiction, see Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800–2000. 19 de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 18. C h a p t e r 7 S t a i ns , s m e a r s , a n d v i s ua l l a ng uag e i n the moonstone

1 Stephen, “Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life,” p. 712. For a discussion of Stephen’s contribution to Victorian debates about the law of evidence, and particularly the problematic value of circumstantial evidence, see Welsh, Strong Representations, esp. pp. 152–65. 2 Stephen, “Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life,” p. 713. 3 Poe was aware of this. He confesses in an 1846 letter to Philip P. Cooke: “You are right about the hair-splitting of my French friend: – that is all done for effect. These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious – but people think them more ingenious than they are – on account of their method and air of method. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.” Poe to Philip P. Cooke, August 9, 1846 in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. ii, p. 328. 4 Stephen, “Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life,” p. 713. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 According to D. A. Miller, that virtually all the principal characters in The Moonstone participate in the work of detection makes it such a prominent example of the genre: “That none of these characters intends to assist the work of detection is irrelevant to the fact of their practical collaboration, without which the mystery would never be solved. In effect, the work of detection is carried forward by the novel’s entire cast of characters, shifted not just from professional to amateur, but from an outsider to a whole community. Thus, the move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection.” Miller, The Novel and the Police, p. 42. While I agree with Miller on this point, it will become clear that my reading of Collins’s novel does not support his claim that the novel is “more fundamentally about the securities of perception and language than about the problems they pose” (p. 54). Ronald R. Thomas revises Miller’s argument and makes the case for a politically informed Freudian reading of the theme of policing

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and self-policing in The Moonstone and detective fiction generally:  “The detective novel is, like psychoanalysis, centrally concerned with the acquisition of knowledge – with the gathering and interpretation of information about persons and the motives for their actions. But detective fiction and psychoanalysis are also both centrally concerned with power – with authority, with enforcement, with surveillance. That surveillance imposes limits on the conception of the self as independent, even as it seeks to preserve the ‘safety’ of the individual within society.” Thomas, Dreams of Authority, p. 198. 10 T. S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” p. 136. 11 Welsh’s analysis of the role of circumstantial evidence in The Moonstone leads him to conclude that Collins’s “model work is an anti-detective novel.” Welsh, Strong Representations, p. 229. For a discussion of the anti-detective novel, see Tani, The Doomed Detective, esp. pp. 1–51. 12 Ibid., pp. 173, 174. On a related note, W. H. Auden has lucidly observed that murder is a special case because it shifts the responsibility of restitution and forgiveness onto the shoulders of society. “Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.” Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” p. 149. 13 The notion of moral evidence as a legally suspect form of testimony or proof frames the novel’s multiple narratives. In the prologue, the author of a “Family Paper” comments that he had never openly declared John Herncastle to be a murderer because “I have no evidence but moral evidence to bring forward. I have not only no proof that he killed the two men at the door; I cannot even declare that he killed the third man inside – for I cannot say that my own eyes saw the deed committed” (M, p. 38). For Victorian readers, moral evidence carried considerable weight and would have been regarded as being on a par with legally admissible evidence. In Jane Eyre, a novel saturated with references to Providence, it is significantly a lawyer, Mr. Wood, who tells Jane that he is “morally certain” that her uncle, then on his deathbed in faraway Madeira, will be dead before she could reach him. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 294. The only evidence Wood provides to back up this assertion  – and which Jane does not think to question, even though she has only just met the man – is his personal moral conviction. For Jane, though, this is enough; she takes Wood at his word and stays in England. 14 Berkeley, New Theory of Vision, p. 51. 15 For a contrary view of the role of Providence, see Ian Ousby who maintains that the “insistence on the detective’s failure” in The Moonstone and other detective novels of the period “derives from the writers’ almost obsessive reliance on the abstractions of Providence and Destiny to dictate the progress of their plots and to bring the action to neat and satisfactory conclusions in which mystery is dispelled, the good rewarded, and the bad punished.” Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven, p. 115. 16 The mirror scene is the precursor of the scene in Anna Katharine Green’s The Woman in the Alcove (1906), in which an amateur detective catches a glimpse

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Notes to pages 114–117

of the murderer by means of a double reflection in a window pane and a mirror. Tom Gunning reads Green’s novel in the context of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project to show how “the detective story activates the complex dialectical optics of modernity, an optics based not only on the visual mastery of surveillance but also on the uncanny experience of transformed vision, glimpsing a presence where it is not, a space where it does not belong, and triggering a frisson of possible recognition.” Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur,” p. 127. The detective story, Gunning argues, dramatizes the (often traumatic and uncanny) invasion of public spaces into the cocooned interior of the bourgeois parlor: a superimposition and intermingling of inside and outside via mirrors, but also via stereoscopes, kaleidoscopes, magic lanterns, and other optical devices. 17 Focusing on the significance of dreams in Collins’s novel, Lewis A. Lawson shows that “there is a residual sexual layer in the novel lying beneath the consciously censored literal layer.” Lawson, “Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone,” p. 71. 18 Critics have made much of the novel’s stance toward imperialism and colonialism, specifically Britain’s relation to India, the “Jewel in the Crown.” See, for instance, John R. Reed, “English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone”; Roy, “The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone”; Duncan, “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic.” 19 Cuff makes the same point later on: the “smear, and the loss of the Diamond, [are] pieces of the same puzzle” (M, p. 206). 20 The gem also invalidates the notion of value as something to be defined in monetary terms alone. As Blake explains:  “The flawed Diamond, cut up, would actually fetch more than the Diamond as it now is; for this plain reason – that from four to six perfect brilliants might be cut from it, which would be, collectively, worth more money than the large – but imperfect – single stone” (M, 72). Cutting up the diamond would increase its monetary value, yet this would destroy any symbolic significance that the object has for those to whom it rightfully belongs. Critics have rightly emphasized the symbolic value of the diamond. Patricia Miller Frick argues that the diamond “enables Collins to expose and to assess the many false assumptions and dubious values underlying Victorian life.” Frick, “Wilkie Collins’s ‘Little Jewel’,” p. 317. Mark M. Hennelly, Jr. claims that “the Moonstone crystallizes the novel’s preoccupation with metaphors common to both detective and Victorian fiction: those of surface and interiors, misleading facades and hidden depths, objective facts and subjective feelings.” Hennelly, “Detecting Collins’ Diamond,” p. 41. 21 Collins anticipates Gestalt psychology, specifically what Rudolf Arnheim describes as “the principle of isomorphism; according to which processes which take place in different media may be nevertheless similar in their structural organization. Applied to body and mind, this means that if the forces which determine bodily behavior are structurally similar to those which characterize the corresponding mental states, it may become understandable

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why psychical meaning can be read off directly from a person’s appearance and conduct.” Arnheim, “The Gestalt Theory of Expression,” p. 160. C h a p t e r 8  S e m io t ic s v. e nc yc l ope di s m :  t h e c a s e of S h e r l o c k Hol m e s 1 For an overview of Welby’s work, see Charles S. Hardwick, “Introduction.” 2 Heedless of her own advice against definitions, Welby proposes “the definition of man as the sign-generator” (“SMI,” p. 188). 3 In a letter to William James, Welby describes “the primal sense” as “the inborn and generative alertness to danger and profit in mind which answer to that wariness which has enabled the race to survive the formidable dangers of early life; that ‘fitness’ is unerring response which has been ‘selected’.” Qtd. in Charles S. Hardwick, “Introduction,” p. xxix. For a discussion of this primordial instinct or primal sense in Welby’s work, see Simmons, “Regaining Victoria Welby.” 4 Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” p. 90. 5 Ibid. For another inspired exploration of the fantasia of the library, see Manguel, The Library at Night. 6 According to Watson, Holmes’s knowledge of literature, philosophy, and astronomy is “Nil.” His knowledge of politics is “Feeble,” of botany “Variable,” of geology “Practical, but limited,” of chemistry “Profound,” of anatomy “Accurate, but unsystematic,” and of sensational literature “Immense.” Holmes is a good violin player, “an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman,” and possesses “a good practical knowledge of British Law” (SS, pp. 12–13). Despite Watson’s effort to chart out the terrain of Holmes’s encyclopedic mind, what exactly Holmes knows remains a mystery. Holmes tells Watson that “a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all” (SS, p. 29). 7 “The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist,” Holmes informs one of his clients, “could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject” (“RL,” p. 232). 8 Derrida, Archive Fever, pp. 11, 12. 9 Jonathan Arac comments on the increasing reliance on aerial perspective in the works of nineteenth-century novelists: “In building up ‘systems of vision and knowledge,’ their writings parallel the activity of the centralizing agencies of government that were studying and shaping the new human problems of a society much larger and more mobile than had ever before been known … The narrative overview in fiction accompanies the new techniques of inspection and centralization worked out by a growing interventionist bureaucracy.” Arac, Commissioned Spirits, p. 7. 10 Most, “Urban Blues,” p. 68. 11 Moretti, “Clues,” p. 145.

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Notes to pages 128–134

12 Nor is this a specifically Holmesian anxiety. As Thomas Richards has shown, “in the late nineteenth century, the problem of the disorganization of knowledge came to replace the problem of the organization of knowledge … Information was archival without belonging to an archive, vast but not total, extensive but not complete. Information was positive knowledge that refused to become comprehensive. Information meant knowledge without the central structuring agency of an archive, or a totalizing metastable structure for knowledge. The Victorian information explosion threatened the sense that human understanding could ever achieve mastery over knowledge.” Richards, The Imperial Archive, p. 76. 13 One obvious literary antecedent to Holmes’s The Book of Life is Edward Causabon’s ambitious Key to All Mythologies in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. This work “of attractively labyrinthine extent” would show “that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.” Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 19. Like Holmes, Causabon has “a mind weighted with unpublished matter” (p. 181). C h a p t e r 9 De t e c t i v e f ic t ion ’s u nc a n n y 1 In terms of publication history, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2) follows “The Final Problem” (1893), but The Hound ’s events predate this story, which in the Holmes timeline is followed by “The Empty House” (1903). 2 “The manner of Holmes’s supposed death,” observes Michael Hardwick, “made it possible to resurrect him without straining credence at all. If, instead of being presumed to have plunged into the cataract, without witnesses and without subsequent traces, Holmes had been shot to death, identified, buried, and memorialized, further narratives would have had to be like The Hound, set back in time before that fatal day in 1891.” Hardwick argues that there is no reason to suspect that Doyle had “realized this and changed the method of execution to leave himself a loophole,” and that there is every reason to think that “[h]e wanted Holmes dead, and thought he had killed him.” Michael Hardwick, The Complete Guide to Sherlock Holmes, p. 123. 3 On Doyle and spiritualism, see Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, esp. pp. 255–82; Higham, The Adventures of Conan Doyle, esp. pp. 116–24, 253–334; Trevor H. Hall, Sherlock Holmes and His Creator, esp. pp. 91–143; Stashower, Teller of Tales, esp. pp. 87–99, 333–414, 427–39. 4 See Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, pp. 45–8. 5 Michael Atkinson suggests that “the public was drawn to Holmes’s methods not by the actuality of close physical observation but by the possibility of seeing an unseen world that constantly surrounds us.” Atkinson, The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes, p. 119. Atkinson proposes that “Holmes is not just a keen

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observer but a visionary. He reenacts the old theological gestures for a nontheological age, filling the world with meaning, or rather discovering the meanings with which (he claims) it is already richly saturated, significances (almost) available to anyone who would undertake the discipline to see.” Such vision is a covert celebration of the unseen and a way of “reenchanting the world” (p. 117), Atkinson maintains, and it is even possible, as Stephen Kendrick shows, to see Holmes as a spiritual guide who “possesses a nearly superhuman vision into the moral life of all those he meets.” Kendrick, Holy Clues, p. 9. Michael Saler contends that Holmes is a re-enchanter of secular modernity who responds to cultural disillusionment with instrumental reason, positivism, and materialism by integrating reason and imagination in a non-supernatural framework:  “The conceptual intertwining of reason and imagination in the twentieth century yields modern, secular enchantments that replace the supernatural enchantments of the premodern period.” Saler, “‘Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’,” p. 607. As will become clear, my reading of Holmes takes issue with this view. 6 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” p. 245. Cf. Freud, “Das Unheimliche.” 7 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” p. 249. 8 Ibid., p. 241. 9 Ibid., pp. 247, 248. Terry Castle observes that Freud’s argument in “The ‘Uncanny’” is enabled by its historical positionality, a view from a point in time when it becomes possible to assert that the belief in ghosts is something like an infantile complex. The uncanny is not just “a function of enlightenment” (because “it is that which confronts us, paradoxically, after a certain light has been cast”), but also of the historical Enlightenment as an effort to expel the supernatural: “[I]t is precisely the historic internalization of rationalist protocols that produces the uncanny.” Castle, The Female Thermometer, pp. 7, 15. 10 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” p. 242. 11 Jonathan Arac remarks that the aerial perspective assumed by Holmes can be regarded as an uncanny experience that “resonates with a spiritual tremor. The technique brings with it a ghostly uneasiness, as if it were a meddling with extraordinary powers. Such comprehensive overview achieves a return to a wholeness of perception, an integral view of the world, common in early life but typically lost in adulthood. To regain such a view, even if through intellectual organization of concrete knowledge, brings us back to an infantile perception. Freud argues that the sensation of the ‘uncanny’ arises whenever such a return to lost infantile perceptions occurs; even if the perception itself was a pleasure in infancy and is positively charged in adulthood, it has been estranged from us by an intervening repression and thus seems unsettlingly eerie.” Arac, Commissioned Spirits, pp. 2–3. 12 Slavoj Žižek has argued that efforts to explain detective fiction’s appeal typically follow one of two paths. “On the one hand, the figure of the detective is interpreted as ‘bourgeois’ scientific rationalism personified; on the other, he is conceived as successor to the romantic clairvoyant, the man possessing an irrational, quasisupernatural power to penetrate the mystery of another

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Notes to pages 137–139 person’s mind. The inadequacy of both these approaches is evident to any admirer of a good logic and deduction story. We are immensely disappointed if the denouement is brought about by a pure scientific procedure (if, for example, the assassin is identified simply by means of a chemical analysis of the stains on the corpse). We feel that ‘there is something missing here,’ that ‘this is not deduction proper.’ But it is even more disappointing if, at the end, after naming the assassin, the detective claims that ‘he was guided from the very beginning by some unmistakable instinct’ – here we are clearly deceived, the detective must arrive at the solution on the basis of reasoning, not by mere ‘intuition’.” Žižek, Looking Awry, p. 49.

C h a p t e r 10 L ig h t, e t h e r , a n d t h e i n v i s i bl e w or l d 1 Lightman, “Victorian Sciences and Religions,” p. 364. 2 See Margaret Atherton: “Berkeley’s language theory of vision, as it survives in the nineteenth century, is entirely secular in form.” Atherton, “How to Write the History of Vision,” p. 154. 3 Goethe, Theory of Color, p. 164. Cf. Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre. 4 In July 1829 Goethe wrote to Carlyle offering to send him a copy of Theory of Color. In his reply Carlyle writes: “The Farbenlehre, which you are so good as to offer me, I have never seen and shall thankfully accept and study, having long had a curiosity after it. Natural Philosophy, Optics among the other branches, was for many years my favourite, or rather my exclusive pursuit; a circumstance which I must reckon of no little import, for good and evil, in my intellectual life. The mechanical style in which all these things are treated here, and in France, where my only teachers were, had already begun to sicken me; when other far more pressing investigations of a humane interest altogether detached me from Mathematics, whether pure or applied.” Carlyle to Goethe, November 3, 1829 in Norton, ed., Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, p. 156. When the volume arrived the following year, Carlyle wrote back: “The Farbenlehre I have already looked into with satisfaction and curiosity; and mean, this winter, to master it, so far as possible, according to the plan you recommend.” Carlyle to Goethe, August 31, 1830 in Norton, ed., Correspondence, p. 212. 5 Goethe, Theory of Color, p. 164. 6 Ibid., p. 159. 7 Ibid., p. 165. 8 Ibid., pp. 158, 160. On Goethe’s quarrel with Newton, see Park, The Fire Within the Eye, pp. 238–45. Park explains that Goethe had failed to reproduce the exact conditions of Newton’s prism experiment and, unable to obtain the same results, falsely concluded that Newton was wrong. 9 Helmholtz, “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” pp. 9, 14. Cf. Helmholtz, “Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten.” 10 Helmholtz, “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” p. 12. 11 Ibid., p. 14. 12 Ibid., p. 13.

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13 Young launched his wave theory in 1801 in his Royal Society lecture “On the Theory of Light and Colours.” For discussions of Young’s work on light and its importance to his wave theory, see Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything, esp. pp. 95–129, 165–78; Park, The Fire Within the Eye, pp. 245–51. 14 An early advocate of the wave theory, the Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens, writes in his Treatise on Light (written in 1678 and published in 1690): “It is inconceivable to doubt that light consists in the motion of some sort of matter … Matter which exists between us and the luminous body … but it cannot be any transport of matter … That which can lead us to comprehend it is the knowledge of … sound.” Qtd. in Swenson, The Ethereal Aether, p. 9. On Huygens also see Park, The Fire Within the Eye, pp. 215–21. 15 Park notes that “people in England had faith in ether, but at mid-nineteenth century it was otherwise on the Continent, especially in Germany, where theories based on a purely mathematical description of the interactions that omitted all mention of the ether had been very successful.” Park, The Fire Within the Eye, p. 296. 16 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” p. 152. Cf. Helmholtz, “Die Neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens.” 17 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” p. 153. 18 Helmholtz neglects to mention the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, whose work on the interference of polarized light in the 1820s supported Young’s undulatory theory. 19 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” p. 165. 20 Ibid., p. 177. Gary Hatfield finds “a thoroughgoing continuity between Helmholtz’s epistemology and psychology of perception: the uninterpreted signs of epistemology are identical with psychologically primitive sensations, and the formation of spatial representations ascribes a ‘meaning’ to or ‘interprets’ those sensations. Psychologically derivative spatial perceptions are also epistemologically derivative – they result from combining elemental sensations according to psychical laws of inference. Thus his psychological account of spatial perception as resulting from inferences based on uninterpreted ‘signs’ merges completely with his epistemological distinction between uninterpreted signs and their epistemological interpretation.” Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative, p. 208. 21 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” p. 151. 22 Clifford, “The Eye and Seeing,” p. 38. 23 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 24 Laudan, “The Epistemology of Light,” p. 129. 25 Tyndall, “Atoms, Molecules, and Ether Waves,” p. 78. 26 Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things’,” p. 86. 27 Ibid., p. 87. 28 Thomson, “The Wave Theory of Light,” p. 325. 29 Ibid., pp. 333, 341. 30 Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. 27. 31 Burton and Grandy, Magic, Mystery, and Science, pp. 184–5.

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Notes to pages 143–147

32 Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe, p. 43. 33 Ibid., p. 46. 34 Ibid., pp. 46–7. 35 Ibid., p. 81. 36 Ibid., p. 47. 37 Thomson, “On a Universal Tendency in Nature,” p. 140. 38 Ibid., p. 142. 39 On religious responses to the new energy physics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Hiebert, “Modern Physics and Christian Faith.” On Victorian anxieties about “heat death” and entropic exhaustion, see Beer, “‘The Death of the Sun’”; Clarke, “Dark Star Crashes.” 40 Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe, pp. 155, 156. 41 Ibid., p. 157. 42 Greg Myers shows that Thomson’s cosmic-death-through-energy-depletion scenario was not quite so gloomy in Thomson’s eyes as in those of some of his contemporaries. Influenced by Paley’s Natural Theology, Thomson regarded the laws of thermodynamics in a theological light, referring to a “Creative Power” that presides over the transformation of energy. Myers argues that “Thomson recalls the Old Testament vision of decline in order to preserve a conservative, natural theological sense of the power of the Creator over nature.” Myers, “Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics,” pp. 317, 318. 43 Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe, p. 158. 4 4 Ibid., p. 159. 45 Ibid., p. 161. Cf. Young, “On the Essential Properties of Matter.” 46 As Crosbie Smith puts it, Stewart and Tait attempted “to forge continuity between the visible world and the invisible realm by supposing that the energy of visible matter had originally derived from, and would eventually return to, the energy of invisible ether. The indestructible energy of the ‘Great Whole’ was infinite in space and time but the energy of the visible universe, part only of the Whole, was constantly being dissipated according to the Second Law.” Smith, The Science of Energy, p. 254. 47 Clifford, “The Unseen Universe,” pp. 249–50. 48 Ibid., pp. 251, 252. 49 Clifford, “Body and Mind,” pp. 66–7. 50 On late-Victorian attempts to produce visual models of the ether and the electromagnetic field, see Hunt, “Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether.” 51 Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, p. 283. 52 Ibid., p. 284. 53 Qtd. in Park, The Fire Within the Eye, p. 283. 54 On Michelson and Morley, see Swenson, The Ethereal Aether. 55 See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 56 Milutis, Ether, p. 37. 57 Einstein, “Ether and the Theory of Relativity,” pp. 171, 174. Einstein points out, however, that his ether “differs widely from … the ether of the

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mechanical undulatory theory of light” (p. 177). On Einstein’s reconstruction of the ether, see Isaacson, Einstein, pp. 316–20. 58 Wooldridge, The Missing Sense, pp. iv, 7. 59 Ibid., pp. 13, 11. 60 Ibid., p. 28. 61 Ibid., p. 20. 62 Ibid., p. 30. 63 Coates, Seeing the Invisible, p. 44. 64 Ibid., pp. 28–9. 65 Leadbeater, A Textbook of Theosophy, pp. 2, 18. 66 Ibid., p. 24. 67 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 68 Ibid., p. 2. 69 Ibid., pp. 9, 19.







C h a p t e r 1 1  I n n e r v i s ion a n d o c c u lt de t e c t ion:  L e Fa n u ’s M a r t i n H e s s e l i u s 1 On the supernatural in Le Fanu’s fiction, see Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction, pp. 71–91; Brownell, “Wicked Dreams”; Briggs, Night Visitors, pp. 44–51; Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares, pp. 11–68; Lozès, “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu”; Browne, “Ghosts and Ghouls and Lefanu”; Carter, Specter or Delusion?, pp. 84–93; Cavaliero, The Supernatural and English Fiction, pp. 33–45; Tracy, “Sheridan Le Fanu and the Unmentionable”; Harris, “Spiritual Warnings.” 2 “Green Tea” was first published serially in All the Year Round in 1869. The publishing history of the other stories by Le Fanu that I refer to in this chapter is a little more complicated, however. For inwstance, “The Familiar” originally appeared as “The Watcher” in Le Fanu’s Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (Dublin: J. McGlashan, 1851), and “Mr Justice Harbottle” was first published in Belgravia in 1872 under the title “The Haunted House in Westminster.” 3 Hartley, Observations on Man, vol. i, p. 8. I have made slight typographic modifications to modernize Hartley’s spelling. 4 Ibid., p. 13. 5 Robert W. Wood suggests that “Newton had a dim notion of a dual nature of light, Corpuscles and Waves (vibrations in a medium) acting together.” Wood, Physical Optics, p. 2. In the General Scholium of the second (1713) edition of Principia, Newton summons the ether to explain gravity, refraction and diffraction of light, sense perception, and muscular action: “And now we might add something concerning a certain subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit the particles of bodies attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances as well repelling as attracting the neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of the spirit, mutually

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Notes to pages 151—160

propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explained in a few words, nor are we furnished with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.” Qtd. in Cohen, “Preface,” pp. xxxi–xxxii. For a discussion of Newton’s interest in the ether, see A. Rupert Hall, All Was Light, esp. pp. 74–8, 153–62, 176–9. 6 Hartley, Observations on Man, vol. i, p. 9. 7 Tracy, “Introduction,” p. xi. 8 Ibid., p. xviii. 9 That persons other than Harbottle had experienced the opening of the inner senses is explained by “the contagious character of this sort of intrusion of the spirit-world upon the proper domain of matter. So soon as the spirit-action has established itself in the case of the patient, its developed energy begins to radiate, more or less effectually, upon others.” Inner vision sometimes works like an infectious disease spreading from one person to another through a “common center of association,” such as can be observed “in certain cases of lunacy, of epilepsy, of catalepsy, and of mania” (“JH,” p. 83).

C h a p t e r 1 2  O t h e r di m e ns ions , o t h e r w or l d s 1 Clifford, “The Postulates of the Science of Space,” p. 360. 2 Ibid., pp. 361, 360. 3 Ibid., p. 361. 4 Ibid., pp. 362–3. 5 Poincaré, “Non-Euclidean Geometries,” p. 44. 6 Euclid, Elements, ed. Heath, vol. i, p. 155. 7 Ibid., p. 220 (Heath’s commentary). 8 Sommerville, The Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry, p. 5. 9 The full title of Bolyai’s work is Appendix. Scientiam Spatii absolute veram exhibens: a veritate aut falsitate Axiomatis XI Euclidei (a priori haud umquam decidenda) independentem: adjecta ad casum falsitatis, quadratura circuli geometrica. 10 Gauss to Wolfgang Bolyai, March 6, 1832. Qtd. in Greenberg, Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries, p. 141. 11 Sommerville, The Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry, p. 3. 12 On the unsuccessful attempts to prove the postulate, see Wolfe, Introduction to Non-Euclidean Geometry, pp. 26–43; Gray, János Bolyai, pp. 32–48. 13 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 15. 14 Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time, p. 3. 15 On the reception and popularization of non-Euclidean geometry in Britain, see Joan L. Richards, Mathematical Visions, esp. pp. 61–114. 16 See Riemann, “On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Basis of Geometry.” 17 For a discussion of the intersection of perceptual theory, mathematics, and philosophy in Helmholtz’s work on geometry, see Joan L. Richards, “The Evolution of Empiricism.”

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18 See Helmholtz, “The Axioms of Geometry.” 19 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 10. 20 Cf. Helmholtz, “Über den Ursprung und die Bedeutung der Geometrischen Axiome.” 21 For some contemporary Kantian critiques of Helmholtz, see Jevons, “Helmholtz on the Axioms of Geometry”; Land, “Kant’s Space and Modern Mathematics”; Hyslop, “Helmholtz’s Theory of Space-Perception.” Hyslop accuses Helmholtz of being a Kantian in disguise. Helmholtz fails to be a thorough empiricist, he maintains, because if we follow his argument carefully it becomes evident that unconscious inferences are drawn from something like intuitions because they are grounded in “the a priori conception of causality” and “an a priori law of mind” (p. 56). As Gary Hatfield shows, Helmholtz was troubled throughout his career by the intuitionist implications of his theory of unconscious inferences. He could have treated the law of causality “as innate and innately ‘corresponding’ to an independent, objective world,” but “that would amount to postulating a ‘preestablished harmony’ between a principle of thought and a mind-independent world of the very sort he roundly rejected in his arguments against nativism.” Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative, p. 216. Helmholtz’s “strongly Kantian account not only of the natural sciences, but also of the very possibility of perception,” is also emphasized by Rom Harré, “Positivist Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” p. 19. 22 For a discussion of imaginability as it pertains to Helmholtz’s work, as well as a useful overview of Victorian responses to non-Euclidean geometry, see Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling, pp. 180–210. 23 Hans Reichenbach credits Helmholtz for being “the first to advocate the idea that human beings, living in a non-Euclidean world, would develop an ability of visualization which would make them regard the laws of nonEuclidean geometry as necessary and self-evident, in the same fashion as the laws of Euclidean geometry appear self-evident to us.” Reichenbach, “The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity,” p. 308. 24 Poincaré, “Non-Euclidean Geometries,” p. 35. 25 Qtd. in Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, pp. 15–16. 26 Qtd. in ibid., p. 16. 27 Poincaré, “Non-Euclidean Geometries,” p. 50. 28 Poincaré, “Space and Geometry,” p. 51. 29 Ibid., p. 68. 30 Ibid., pp. 52, 52–3. 31 Ibid., p. 69. 32 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 33 Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland, pp. 103, 104. 34 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 4–5. 35 Ibid., p. 5. 36 Henderson shows that “[o]nly the popularization of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, with its redefinition of the fourth dimension as time instead of

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Notes to pages 167–171

space, brought an end to th[e] era in which artists, writers, and musicians believed they could express higher spatial dimensions.” Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. xix. 37 See ibid., p. 4. 38 Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time, p. 57. 39 Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 8. 40 See Stringham, “Regular Figures in n-Dimensional Space.” 41 Silverman, “The Fairyland of the Fourth Dimension,” p. 239. 42 Ibid., p. 241. 43 Johnston, “The Mind’s Eye and the Fourth Dimension,” p. 188. 4 4 Ibid., p. 190. 45 Clifford, “The Postulates of the Science of Space,” p. 363. 46 Hyslop, “The Fourth Dimension of Space,” pp. 369–70. 47 Ibid., p. 370. 48 On Zöllner and Hinton, see Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, pp. 22–31. 49 Zöllner, Transcendental Physics, p. 157. 50 Ibid., pp. 164–5. Zöllner comments that what Slade accomplished “could not be any so-called thought-reading by the medium; that is, the perception of representations already in the heads of human beings. For neither [he], and much less Mr. Slade and Herr von Hoffmann [the third person present at the séance], knew what sort of coin there was in the box, nor what date it bore” (p. 157). 51 Ibid., pp. 165–6. 52 Ibid., p. 165. 53 Ibid., p. 166. 54 Ibid., p. 149. 55 Ibid., p. 168. 56 Ibid., p. 169. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., p. 168. 59 Zöllner, “On Space of Four Dimensions,” pp. 228–9. 60 Ibid., p. 232. 61 Ibid. 62 Zöllner, Transcendental Physics, p. 169. Charles C. Massey, the English translator of Zöllner’s Transcendental Physics, remarks that Zöllner’s use of intuition demands some clarification for the English reader: “The philosophical sense of the word intuition (Anschauung) may have some difficulty for nonmetaphysical English readers. With us it usually denotes an internal sense; in German philosophy it is the act of perception, whether of the external or internal sense, before all application of the categories of the understanding by which the ‘matter’ of perception becomes an ‘object.’ In the Kantian philosophy, which Zöllner follows, space and time are intuitional ‘forms.’ The word Anschauung is translated intuition and conception at different places as the context seems to require” (p. 149n). 63 Qtd. in Zöllner, Transcendental Physics, pp. 173–4.

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64 Henderson observes that “Zöllner’s union of spiritualism and science to prove empirically the existence of a fourth dimension was unusual in the history of the concept. Unlike later mystically oriented supporters of the fourth dimension who scorned positivist science for its limitation to immediately observable phenomena, Zöllner managed to encompass both points of view.” Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 23. 65 Hinton, “What is the Fourth Dimension?,” pp. 10, 11. 66 Ibid., pp. 17, 24. 67 Ibid., p. 31. 68 Hinton, “Many Dimensions,” p. 35. 69 Ibid., p. 33. 70 Ibid., p. 39. 71 Ibid., pp. 42, 44. 72 Tyler, The Dimensional Idea as an Aid to Religion, p. 56. 73 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 74 Hinton, A New Era of Thought, p. xiv. 75 Ibid., pp. xiv, 49. 76 Ibid., p. xiv. 77 Ibid., pp. 67, 68. 78 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 79 Ibid., p. 75. 80 Ibid., p. 73. 81 Ibid., p. 76. 82 Ibid., pp. 70, 71. 83 Willburn, Possessed Victorians, pp. 50, 51. 84 Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” p. 103. 85 Ibid., p. 104. 86 Ibid., pp. 106, 107. 87 Ibid., p. 104. 88 Ibid., p. 132. 89 On the discursive transformation of qualitates in the seventeenth century, from properties deemed insensible, supernatural, and unintelligible, to properties one can treat rationally and scientifically, see Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” 90 Tyndall, Heat a Mode of Motion, p. viii. 91 Tyndall, “Science and the ‘Spirits’,” p. 452. 92 Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” p. 197. 93 Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. 24. 94 Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism, p. 27. 95 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 96 Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” p. 133. 97 Ibid., p. 132. 98 Ibid., p. 134. 99 Hyslop, “The Fourth Dimension of Space,” p. 370.

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Notes to pages 178–186

100 Connor, “Afterword,” p. 270. 101 Hyslop, Life After Death, p 168. 102 Ibid., pp. 168–9. 103 Ibid., pp. 169–70. 104 Ibid., pp. 170–1. 105 Ibid., p. 171. 106 Ibid., p. 172. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., p. 306. C h a p t e r 13 P s yc h ic s l e u t h s a n d s ou l d o c t or s 1 Willis, “Making the Dead Speak,” p. 60. 2 Traill, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic, pp. 17–18. 3 Ibid., p. 21. 4 Scholarship on occult detectives is virtually nonexistent. See, however, Tibbetts, “Phantom Fighters.” On the use of psychics to solve real-life crimes, see Lyons and Truzzi, The Blue Sense. 5 Luckhurst, “‘Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’,” pp. 59–60. For another discussion of Freud’s engagement with occultism, see Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. ii, pp. 375–407. 6 Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality, vol. i, p. 229. 7 Ibid., pp. 223–4. 8 Ibid., p. 297. 9 Ibid., p. xxi. 10 Ibid., p. 224. “By ordinary psychology,” Myers notes, “supraliminal life is accepted as representing the normal or substantive personality, of which subliminal life is the semi-conscious substratum, or half-illuminated fringe, or the morbid excrescence. I, on the other hand, regard supraliminal life merely as a privileged case of personality; a special phase of our personality, which is easiest for us to study, because it is simplified for us by our ready consciousness of what is going on in it; yet which is by no means necessarily either central or prepotent, could we see our whole being in comprehensive view” (pp. 222–3). On Myers’s theory of the subliminal self, see Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research, pp. 275–99; Oppenheim, The Other World, pp. 254–60. Also see Turner, Between Science and Religion, pp. 104–33. 11 Myers, Human Personality, vol. i, p. 277. 12 Hinton, A New Era of Thought, p. 69. 13 Myers, Human Personality, vol. i, pp. 277–8. 14 Ibid., p. 232. 15 Ibid., pp. 225, 224. 16 Ibid., p. 224. 17 Coates, Seeing the Invisible, p. 47. 18 Ibid., pp. 48–9. 19 Ibid., p. 32.

Notes to pages 186–190

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20 Ibid., pp. 43, 44. 21 Ibid., p. 33. 22 Jack Adrian suggests that Hesketh did most of the writing and that his Oedipal attachment to his mother explains why he credited her with co-­ authorship. “He had the imagination. He was the plotter, and the main writer, his mother the embellisher, the tidier – the editor. He was immensely loyal to her, placing (I believe) her name on the spine, front cover, and titlepage when what she might have done to a book or set of short stories did not truly warrant this gesture.” Adrian, “Introduction,” p. xv. As there appears to be no real evidence for this theory, I shall presume collective authorship. As on other occult detectives, scholarship is scarce. See, however, Roden, “The Adventures of Flaxman Low.” 23 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,” p. 60. 24 Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” p. 346. 25 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,” p. 63; Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Sevens Hall,” p. 30. 26 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” p. 184. 27 Ibid. 28 Coates, Seeing the Invisible, p. 29. 29 Tyndall, “Atoms, Molecules, and Ether Waves,” p. 78. 30 Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” p. 103. 31 Coates, Seeing the Invisible, pp. 40–1. 32 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” p. 184. 33 As Fodor explains, the term obsession is valued differently in psychiatry and psychical research:  “Obsession in psychiatry means that the mind of the patient is dominated by fixed ideas to which an abnormal mental condition corresponds. In psychical research, obsession is an invasion of the living by a discarnate spirit, tending to a complete displacement of normal personality for purposes of selfish gratification which is more or less permanent.” Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, p. 265. Hyslop defines obsession as “the supernormal influence of a foreign consciousness on the mind and organism of a sensitive person.” Anyone who “believes in telepathy or mind-reading,” he adds, “cannot escape the possibility of obsession. Accepting such a phenomenon, he assumes the influence of an external consciousness on another mind. Hence, if you once grant the existence of discarnate spirits, the same process, namely, telepathy from discarnate minds, might exercise and have an influence, either sensory or motor, on the minds of the living, provided they are psychically receptive to such influences.” Hyslop, Life After Death, p. 306. 34 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” p. 176. 35 Ibid., pp. 185, 183. 36 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of the Moor Road,” p. 247. 37 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Yand Manor House,” p. 586. 38 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Medhans Lea,” p. 145. 39 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” p. 184. 40 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,” p. 68.

236

Notes to pages 190–193

41 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of the Moor Road,” p. 254. 42 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Medhans Lea,” p. 145. 43 On the similarity between the conjectural semiotics of the psychoanalyst and the detective, see Ginzburg, “Clues.” Lisabeth During argues that Holmes and Freud are alike in their focus on the exceptional: “In the detection of crime, in the questioning of the psyche’s individual prehistory, reason is asked to abandon the sphere of the normal and the generalizable for that of the pathological, the extreme and the aberration. Holmes and Freud are specialists in the exception: their focus is sharpened and their facility increased by the discovery of ‘abnormal’ features, meaningless assertions, freaks of speech or manner, clues that appear to lead nowhere. These are what they ‘see’ when everyone else has ‘looked’ and come to the conclusion that there is nothing to be found.” During, “Clues and Intimations,” p. 44. 4 4 Prichard and Prichard, “The Story of Sevens Hall,” p. 31. 45 All the stories by Blackwood cited here were originally published in John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1908), with the exception of “A Victim of Higher Space,” which appeared in Day and Night Stories (London: Cassell, 1917). On Blackwood, see Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction, pp. 228–53; Hudson, “A Study of Algernon Blackwood”; Briggs, Night Visitors, pp. 59–63; Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares, pp. 112–29; Punter, The Literature of Terror, pp. 329–35; Cavaliero, The Supernatural and English Fiction, pp. 79–86; Joshi, The Weird Tale, pp. 87–132; Joshi, “Introduction.” 46 Coates, Seeing the Invisible, pp. 41–2. 47 Ward, “Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room,” p. 13. Ward is better known as the creator of the villain Dr. Fu-Manchu, who appeared in a number of Ward’s novels and eventually made it to the silver screen to be played by Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, and Peter Sellers. 48 Ibid., pp. 29, 32. 49 Ibid., p. 14. Rosalind Krauss has observed that the unique ontology of the photographic trace was often regarded in the nineteenth century in metaphysical terms: “Standing rather peculiarly at the crossroads between science and spiritualism, the trace seemed to share equally in the positivist’s absolutism of matter and the metaphysician’s order of pure intelligibility, itself resistant to a materialist analysis.” Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” p. 35. Tom Gunning similarly argues that, “if photography emerged as the material support for a new positivism, it was also experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing the appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses verified by positivism.” Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations,” pp. 42–3. 50 Ward, “Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room,” p. 15. Klaw’s biographer, Searles, explains that “Moris Klaw’s methods were, if not supernatural, at any rate supernormal,” but that mysteries tackled by Klaw which “fell strictly within the province of the occult” were excluded from the collection “because

Notes to pages 193–203

237

readers of these papers would be unlikely to appreciate the nature of Klaw’s investigations outside the sphere of ordinary natural laws.” Ward, “Case of the Veil of Isis,” pp. 280–1. But in this final of ten stories Searles presents a case that “fell between the provinces of the natural and supernatural in such a way that it might, with equal legitimacy, be included under either head” (p. 281). 51 Blackwood, “Author’s Preface,” pp. 8–9. 52 Coates, Seeing the Invisible, pp. 39, 41, 42. 53 George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) are two more important literary examples of the deleterious effects of the opening of inner sight. On vision, prevision, and insight in The Lifted Veil, see Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, pp. 74–93. 54 With the exception of “The Thing Invisible,” which was published in The New Magazine in 1912. The stories were first collected in Hodgson’s Carnacki, The Ghost Finder (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913). 55 Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, pp. 74, 76. 56 Freud, The Future of an Illusion, p. 42. 57 Freud, “Dreams and Occultism,” p. 44. Cf. Freud, “Traum und Okkultismus.” On Freud and telepathy, see Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. iii, pp. 380–2. 58 Freud, “Dreams and Occultism,” p. 68. 59 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 30. Coda 1 Tamen, “Phenomenology of the Ghost,” p. 297. 2 Ibid., p. 299. 3 Ibid., pp. 296, 299. 4 Goethe, Theory of Color, p. 158. Cf. Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre. 5 Goethe, Theory of Color, p. 158. 6 Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, pp. 6, 11. 7 Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things’,” p. 91. 8 Goethe, Theory of Color, p. 164. 9 Ibid., p. 159. 10 Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things’,” p. 93. 11 Carlyle, “Spiritual Optics,” p. 8. 12 George Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 161. 13 Ibid., p. 50.

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Index

Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland, 166 Abbott, Thomas K., Sight and Touch, 90 agnosticism, 31, 137, 176–7 Alderson, John, An Essay on Apparitions, 27 Alewyn, Richard, 71, 72 anti-ghost treatises, 34, 47 see also Alderson, John; Brown, J. H.; Ferriar, John; Hibbert, Samuel; Radcliffe, John Netten; Scott, Sir Walter anti-ocularcentrism, see ocularcentrism Auerbach, Nina, 11 Bailey, Samuel, 90, 91 A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, 88–91 see also Mill, John Stuart Bain, Alexander, The Senses and the Intellect, 92 Barbour, Ian G., 146 Barthes, Roland, 100 Baudelaire, Charles, 94, 95 Baxandall, Michael, 17 Beer, Gillian, 141201–2 Belsey, Catherine, 107 Beltrami, Eugenio, 166, 195 Bentham, Jeremy, 114 Berkeley, George, 69, 78, 79, 87, 88, 96, 137, 184, 185 appropriation by Victorian epistemologists, 6, 78 vision and language, 5–6, 73–5, 88 An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, 5–6, 73–4, 112 The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained, 74–5 see also Abbott, Thomas K.; Bailey, Samuel; James, William; Mill, John Stuart; Whewell, William; Zöllner, Johann Carl Friedrich Blackwood, Algernon on inner vision, 193 John Silence

as clairvoyant, 191–3, 194 dangers of inner vision, 194–6 divination, 192 the fourth dimension, 194–6 “Ancient Sorceries,” 196 “The Camp of the Dog,” 196, 198 “The Nemesis of Fire,” 191 “A Psychical Invasion,” 191, 192, 194, 196 “A Victim of Higher Space,” 194–6 Bolyai, János, 158–9, 160, 195 Bown, Nicola, 15, 16, 53 Brewster, David, 5, 45, 46, 60, 61, 68, 189 Letters on Natural Magic, 4, 25, 32–3 A Treatise on Optics, 32–3 Briggs, Julia, 12, 13, 21 Brooke, John Hedley, 32 Brown, J. H., Spectropia, 30–1 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, A Strange Story, 45–6 Burdett, Carolyn, see Bown, Nicola Burton, Dan, 143 Buse, Peter, 14 camera obscura, 86–7, 93, 193 see also Carlyle, Thomas; Crary, Jonathan; Helmholtz, Hermann von Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 45, 137 camera obscura (as metaphor), 35–6 on ghosts, 35 on hearing, 202 methodological problems, 37–8, 45 on science, 188 Sartor Resartus, 34–5, 187–8, 195, 201 “Spiritual Optics,” 35–7, 38, 202 see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Levine, George Castle, Terry, 23, 225 n 9 clairvoyance, 6, 133, 136, 176, 181, 182, 184, 186 see also Blackwood, Algernon; Coates, James; Zöllner, Johann Carl Friedrich Clifford, William Kingdon, 158, 160, 177

256

Index on ghosts, 146 on B. Stewart and P. G. Tait, 145–6 “The Postulates of the Science of Space,” 157, 158, 168 Seeing and Thinking, 140–1 Coates, James on ether, 148, 186 on N-rays, 186 transcendental mind, 186 Seeing the Invisible, 148, 185–6, 188, 189, 192, 194 Collins, Wilkie, 6, 122, 128 The Moonstone, 109–18, 124 circumstantial evidence, 10–11 inference in detection, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 intuition, 110 national identity/foreignness, 116–17 observer as reader/interpreter, 110, 111–18 occult/spiritualist tendencies, 7, 136 as parody of detective fiction, 109, 111, 117–18 ratiocination, 110 relation to genre conventions, 109, 110–11 see also detective fiction; Stephen, James Fitzjames; Welsh, Alexander “Mrs. Zant and the Ghost,” 62, 211 n 56 Comte, Auguste, 6, 68 Introduction to Positive Philosophy, 77 Copjec, Joan, 72 Coughlan, Patricia, 12 Cox, Michael, 11 Crary, Jonathan, 17, 18, 30, 86, 206 n 44 Crowe, Catherine, 43, 45, 47, 183, 185 on anti-ghost treatises, 38–9 investigation of the supernatural, 39–40 methodological problems, 41–2, 45 on spiritual vision, 39–40 Ghosts and Family Legends, 58 The Night-Side of Nature, 38–40, 41–2, 141–2, 175, 185 see also Dickens, Charles d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 159 Darwin, Charles, 121, 189, 196, 215 n 61 Debord, Guy, 17 de Man, Paul, 72, 107 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 14, 15, 126 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 6, 73, 74 Descartes, René, 70 La Dioptrique, 73 Meditations on First Philosophy, 75 detective fiction anti-detective fiction, 95, 111, 118 critical studies of, 71–2

257

detective as analyst, 191, 236 n 43 detective as observer/reader, 6, 71–3, 93, 109, 122 see also Collins, Wilkie; Doyle, Arthur Conan; Poe, Edgar Allan epistemology of, 2, 3, 7, 71, 72, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103 , 106, 108, 111, 114, 116, 117, 122, 133, 182 ideology and, 71, 212 n 20 occult/spiritualist tendencies, 2–3, 6–7, 8, 135–6, 150, 181–3 see also Blackwood, Algernon; Collins, Wilkie; Doyle, Arthur Conan; Hodgson, William Hope; Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan; Poe, Edgar Allan; Prichard, Kate and Hesketh Prichard; Ward, Arthur Henry Sarsfield parody of, 95 see also Collins, Wilkie popularity in the Victorian period, 108 postmodernist, 218 n 12 relation to empiricism and nativism, 93, 99 relation to ghost stories, 71, 106–7, 132, 133 relation to real detective work, see Collins, Wilkie; Stephen, James Fitzjames Dickens, Charles correspondence with F. Elliot, 61–2 correspondence with W. Howitt, 59–60 on C. Crowe, 42, 58–9 on ghosts and ghost stories, 58–62 and mesmerism, 59 “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman,” 50–1 “To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt,” 60–1 Dickerson, Vanessa D., 16, 205 n 36 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 6 Sherlock Holmes archival impulse, 124–7 on criminal investigation, 122 dismissal of the supernatural, 2 encyclopedic knowledge, 123, 124, 125, 127 on memory, 124–5 on observation, 123, 128 occult/spiritualist tendencies, 6–7, 131–4, 135, 190–1 semiotic anxiety, 126 and spiritualism, 131 “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” 187 “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” 1–3, 8, 136, 187 “A Case of Identity,” 123, 126–7, 134 “The Final Problem,” 131 “The Five Orange Pips,” 125 The Hound of the Baskervilles, 7, 131–4, 135, 136, 181, 182

258

Index

Doyle, Arthur Conan (cont.) “The Red-headed League,” 126, 127 “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 123, 125–6, 181, 191 The Sign of Four, 123, 190 A Study in Scarlet, 122–3, 124–5, 128, 136 see also detective fiction Draper, John William, Human Physiology, 67–8 Eagleton, Terry, 11–12, 211 n 43 Edwards, Amelia B. “The New Pass,” 51–2 “No. 5 Branch Line: The Engineer,” 46, 48, 50 Einstein, Albert, 147 Eliot, George and realism, 11, 12 Adam Bede, 11, 12, 202–3 Middlemarch, 224 n 13 Eliot, T. S., 109 Elliot, Frances, see Dickens, Charles empiricism, see detective fiction; Helmholtz, Hermann von; Mill, John Stuart; nativism Enlightenment, 95, 137 entropy, see thermodynamics ether, 7, 139, 140–2, 143–49 see also Coates, James; Leadbeater, Charles Webster; Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan; Stewart, Balfour; Tyndall, John; Wooldridge, Charles William; Young, Thomas; Zöllner, Johann Carl Friedrich Euclid, see non-Euclidean geometry Ferriar, John, 24, 26, 28, 38 An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions, 23–4, 32 Flint, Kate, 3, 17, 207 n 10 Foucault, Michel, 17, 123–4 fourth dimension, see non-Euclidean geometry Freud, Sigmund, 126, 154, 186, 196 on spiritualism and the occult, 135, 183–4, 198–9 “Dreams and Occultism,” 198–9 The Future of an Illusion, 198 “The ‘Uncanny’,” 134–5 Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 159, 195 Gestalt psychology, 217 n 90, 222 n 21 ghosts, see anti-ghost treatises; ghost stories; spiritualism ghost stories critical studies of, 11, 12–16 historical contextualization of, 16–19 parody of, 53–4, 110 popularity in the Victorian period, 11

relation to detective fiction, see detective fiction relation to optics, 23, 47, 49, 154 relation to veridical ghost stories, 52, 56–8 Victorian attitudes toward ghosts, 53, 54–6 see also Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; Collins, Wilkie; Dickens, Charles; Edwards, Amelia B.; ghosts; Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan; Melville, G. J. Whyte; Molesworth, Louisa; Price, Ellen; Scott, Sir Walter Gilbert, R. A., see Cox, Michael Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von correspondence with T. Carlyle, 226 n 4 on hearing, 202 on I. Newton, 138 Theory of Color, 137–8, 139, 201 see also Helmholtz, Hermann von; Tyndall, John Gordon, Avery F., 15–16 Gould, Stephen Jay, 208 n 41 Grandy, David, see Burton, Dan Hartley, David, Observations on Man, 151 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 112 hearing, 4, 201–3 Heath, Stephen, 13 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 67, 91, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 175, 184, 195, 222 n 20 empiricism, 67, 87, 88, 140 on Euclid, 161 eye as camera obscura, 86 on the fourth dimension, 162–3 on J. W. von Goethe, 138–9 on I. Kant, 160, 162 on nativism, 88 unconscious judgments, 87–8 vision and language, 87–8 on T. Young, 139–40 “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” 138–9 “The Origin and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” 160–4 “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 86–7, 139–40 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 167 Henson, Louise, 60 Herschel, John, 186 Hibbert, Samuel, 25, 26, 28, 38, 45, 46 Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions, 24–5, 32 Hinton, Charles Howard, 169, 174, 176, 177, 183, 185 A New Era of Thought, 173–4, 185 Scientific Romances, 171 “Many Dimensions,” 172–3

Index “What is the Fourth Dimension?,” 172 Hodgson, William Hope “The Gateway of the Monster,” 197, 198 “The Horse of the Invisible,” 197 “The House Among the Laurels,” 196, 197 “The Searcher of the End House,” 197 “The Thing Invisible,” 197 “The Whistling Room,” 197 Horton, Susan R., 72 Howitt, William, 43 The History of the Supernatural, 40 see also Dickens, Charles Hume, David, 159 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 31, 42, 177 Huygens, Christiaan, 227 n 14 hyperspace, see non-Euclidean geometry Hyslop, James Hervey on the atomic theory, 178 on ether, 178–9 on spirits/spiritualism, 178–80 on thermodynamics, 179–80 “The Fourth Dimension of Space,” 168 Life After Death, 178–80 Jaffe, Audrey, 17 James, William, 4, 91 on G. Berkeley, 91 on J. Locke, 91 on nativism and empiricism, 90–1 The Principles of Psychology, 90–1 Jameson, Fredric, 12–13 Jay, Martin, 17 Johnston, Charles, “The Mind’s Eye and the Fourth Dimension,” 167–8 Kant, Immanuel, 69, 75, 84, 91, 164, 168, 171, 195 Critique of Pure Reason, 69 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, 69 see also Helmholtz, Hermann von Kepler, Johannes, see Mill, John Stuart; Whewell, William Lacan, Jacques on S. Freud, 199 on F. W. H. Myers, 198–9 Lang, Andrew, 14, 17–18, 58 on W. Scott as ghost-seer, 55 “The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories,” 13–14 Laudan, Larry, 141 Leadbeater, Charles Webster, 148–9 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 8, 182–3, 187 detective fiction, 154–5, 156 ghost stories, 154, 156

259

“An Account of Some Strange Disturbances,” 49–50, 155 In a Glass Darkly, 150–6, 194 Martin Hesselius as detective, 152 and ether, 151, 154 and inner vision, 150, 151, 154–155, 183 and the spirit world, 150–1, 152, 153, 230 n 9 “The Familiar,” 152–4 “Green Tea,” 150–2, 154 “Mr Justice Harbottle,” 155–6 Levine, George, 37 Lewes, George Henry, 67, 87, 91, 92 on ghosts/ghost-seeing, 68 inference in perception, 83, 85 intuitionism and sensationalism, 84–5 on G. W. Leibnitz, 84 on J. Locke, 84 relativity of knowledge, 83–5 vision and language, 86 Problems of Life and Mind, 83–6, 97, 113, 117 “Seeing is Believing,” 5, 68 Lightman, Bernard, 31–2, 137, 176–7 Lobachevskii, Nicolai, 157, 159–160, 162, 164, 195 Locke, John, 75, 84 see also James, William; Lewes, George Henry “The Lost Faculty, or Sixth Sense,” 40–1 Luckhurst, Roger, 183–4 Lyell, Charles, see Ruskin, John Lynch, Eve M., 16, 206 n 37 Marx, Karl, 11, 204 n 5 Maudsley, Henry, Common Source of Error in Seeing and Believing, 92–3 Maxwell, James Clerk, 147 Melville, G. J. Whyte “Optical Delusion of the Yellow Gown,” 47 “The Yellow Gown,” 46, 47, 56 Michelson, Albert A., 147 Mill, John Stuart, 67, 82, 87, 91 on S. Bailey, 89–90, 216 n 81 on G. Berkeley, 78 debate with W. Whewell, 79, 80–1 empiricism, 78 induction, 79, 81 inference in perception, 78, 79, 81 on J. Kepler, 81 rejection of intuitionism, 80, 81 on religion and metaphysics, 79–80 on the wave theory of light, 141 Auguste Comte and Positivism, 79 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 78–9 A System of Logic, 78, 79–80, 89, 112

260

Index

Miller, D. A., 71, 213 n 21, 220 n 9 Milutis, Joe, 147 Molesworth, Louisa, “The Story of the Rippling Train,” 46–7 Moretti, Franco, 127 Morley, Edward W., see Michelson, Albert A. Most, Glenn W., 127 Müller, Johannes, 29–30, 45, 46, 139–40, 149 Myers, Frederic William Henry, 194, 198 on the fourth dimension, 185 on inner vision, 184–5 on ocular/optical vision, 184 on the subliminal self, 184–5, 234 n 10 Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 184–5 see also Lacan, Jacques nativism, 88–91, 93 see also Bailey, Samuel; detective fiction; James, William; Mill, John Stuart natural theology, 137 see also Paley, William; Whewell, William Newton, Isaac, 138, 139, 151, 202, 229 n 5 see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von non-Euclidean geometry, 7, 157–74 development of, 158–66 fourth dimension (n-dimensional geometry), 7, 162–74, 183 hyperbolic space, see Lobachevskii, Nicolai hypersolids, 167 hyperspace, 167, 172 reception in Britain, 160, 168 see also Blackwood, Algernon; Bolyai, János; ether; Helmholtz, Hermann von; Hinton, Charles H.; Johnston, Charles; Lobachevskii, Nicolai; Poincaré, Henri; Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernhard; Silverman, A. C.; Zöllner, Johann Carl Friedrich ocularcentrism, 18, 73, 93, 110, 111, 116, 132, 173, 196 Oppenheim, Janet, 55 optics, see Brewster, David; Carlyle, Thomas; ether; ghost stories; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Müller, Johannes; Myers, Frederic William Henry; Reid, Thomas; Scott, Sir Walter; Tyndall, John otocentrism, 201, 202 see also hearing Paley, William, Natural Theology, 32, 33 particle theory of light, see Newton, Isaac; wave theory of light Picker, John M., 201

Poe, Edgar Allan, 6, 93, 108, 122, 128, 182 Auguste Dupin as bibliophile, 101–2 as flâneur, 94, 100, 104 and intuition, 100, 135–6 as mind-reader, 95, 107, 218 n 9 occult/spiritualist tendencies, 135–6 as pleasure-seeker, 94, 95 ratiocination, 95, 102, 104, 105, on Dupin stories, 220 n 3 Gothic fiction, 101, 106 inference in detection, 97, 101, 102 , 104 , 106 metatextuality, 103 , 106 realism, 103 , 107 scopophilia and scopophobia, 94, 95–96, 101, 105, 217 n 1 “The Man of the Crowd,” 94, 95–6, 100–1, 116 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 94, 95, 97–99, 101–2, 135, 136 “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” 103–7, 117, 135 “The Purloined Letter,” 99–100, 102 , 136 see also detective fiction Poincaré, Henri, 166, 167, 170, 172 “Non-Euclidean Geometries,” 157–8, 164 “Space and Geometry,” 164–6 “Sur les hypothèses fondamentales de la géométrie,” 164 Potts, John, 57, 205 n 35 Price, Ellen, “Reality, or Delusion?,” 53, 56 Prichard, Kate and Hesketh Prichard Flaxman Low on extra-sensory perception, 189 on ghosts and ghost-seeing, 189–90 method of investigation, 187, 190–1 on nature and the supernatural, 187, 188, 190 as psychologist, 187 on spiritual obsession, 189 “The Story of Medhans Lea,” 190 “The Story of the Moor Road,” 189, 190 “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” 187, 188, 189, 190 “The Story of Sevens Hall,” 187, 191 “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,” 187, 190 “The Story of Yand Manor House,” 190 psychoanalysis, 198–9 see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques quantum physics, 146 Radcliffe, Ann, 13 see also Scott, Sir Walter Radcliffe, John Netten, Fiends, Ghosts, and Sprites, 29, 30

Index realism, 11, 58, 109 see also Coughlan, Patricia; Eagleton, Terry; Eliot, George; Poe, Edgar Allan Reichenbach, Hans, 159, 167, 231 n 23 Reid, Thomas, 69, 91, 212 n 19 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 5, 69–71 Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernhard, 160, 162, 168, 169 Ruskin, John, 5, 45, 70, 95, 137 on T. H. Huxley, 42 on C. Lyell, 43–4 methodological problems, 45 as optical thinker, 210 n 32 on vision, 42–4 The Elements of Drawing, 43 “The Relation to Art of the Science of Light,” 42–3 “The Three Æras,” 43–4 Scarborough, Dorothy, 13 scientific naturalism, 6–7, 31–2, 55, 75, 137, 145, 176 Scott, Sir Walter, 5, 61, 189 on optical derangements, 29 on A. Radcliffe, 48–9 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 4, 27–9, 49, 52, 62–3 “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” 21, 63–4 “Story of an Apparition,” 22, 49 “The Tapestried Chamber,” 4–5, 20–3, 49, 56–7 Silverman, A. C., “The Fairyland of the Fourth Dimension,” 167 Simmel, Georg, 17 Slade, Henry, see Zöllner, Johann Carl Friedrich Snyder, Laura J., 76, 215 n 51 Society for Psychical Research, 184, 187 Spencer, Herbert, 67, 87, 177 inference in perception, 81–2 Transfigured Realism, 82–3 The Principles of Psychology 1855 edn., 81–2 1872 edn., 82–3 spiritualism, 5, 55, 131, 134, 136, 137, 143, 145–6, 167–8, 174–5, 177–8 see also Balfour, Stewart; Brown, J. H.; Coates, James; Crowe, Catherine; detective fiction; Doyle, Arthur Conan; Freud, Sigmund; ghost stories; Hinton, Charles Howard; Howitt, William; Hyslop, James

261

Hervey; Myers, Frederic William Henry; Zöllner, Johann Carl Friedrich Stephen, James Fitzjames, 108–9, 110, 111, 117 Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 198 Stewart, Balfour, 177 The Unseen Universe, 143–6 see also Clifford, William Kingdon Stott, Andrew, see Buse, Peter “A String of Ghost Stories,” 57–8 Stringham, Washington Irving, 167 Sullivan, Jack, 54–5 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 69, 143, 150, 151–2, 183 Tait, Peter Guthrie, see Stewart, Balfour Tamen, Miguel, 200 telepathy, 6, 136, 181, 182, 184, 186, 192 theosophy, 148–9 see also Leadbeater, Charles Webster thermodynamics, 142–5, 151 see also Stewart, Balfour; Thomson, William; Turner, Frank Miller Thomas, Ronald R., 71, 72, 220 n 9 Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin) “On a Universal Tendency in Nature,” 144 “The Wave Theory of Light,” 142 Thurschwell, Pamela, see Bown, Nicola Todorov, Tzvetan, 19 Tracy, Robert, 154 Traill, Nancy H., 182 Turner, Frank Miller, 55, 142–3, 176, 208 n 42 Tyler, W. F., The Dimensional Idea as an Aid to Religion, 173 Tyndall, John, 175–7, 182, 189 on ether, 175 on J. W. von Goethe and T. Young, 175 imagination, on the use of, 175 and optics, 175–6 on religion, 176–7 on spiritualism, 176 “Atoms, Molecules, and Ether Waves,” 141, 188 “The Belfast Address,” 176 Heat a Mode of Motion, 176 “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” 175, 177, 188 Virilio, Paul, 17 Ward, Arthur Henry Sarsfield, The Dream Detective, 193, 236 n 50 wave theory of light, 7, 139–40, 141, 142 see also Helmholtz, Hermann von; Thomson, William; Young, Thomas

262

Index

Welby, Victoria, 199–122 correspondence with W. James, 223 n 3 on evolution, 120, 121 on language, 121–2 on psychology, 119, 121 semiotics/significs, 119, 120, 121 “Sense, Meaning and Interpretation,” 119–22, 127 Wells, Herbert George, The Time Machine, 166, 167 Welsh, Alexander, 110–11 Whewell, William, 67, 82, 87, 119, 141, 145 colligation, 80 eye as optical instrument, 86 induction, 75 influenced by G. Berkeley, 75, 76 on J. Kepler, 80 on religion, 77–8, 214 n 45 vision and language, 75–8 The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 75–8, 79, 80, 86, 99, 100, 115, 119, 175

see also Mill, John Stuart Willburn, Sarah A., 174 Willis, Chris, 181–2 Wolfreys, Julian, 14–15, 16 Wooldridge, Charles William, 173, 177, 182, 183 The Missing Sense, 8, 147–8 Young, Thomas, 139–40, 145, 149 see also Helmholtz, Hermann von; Tyndall, John Zöllner, Johann Carl Friedrich, 168, 176, 177, 182, 185 on G. Berkeley, 171 on clairvoyance, 169–71 experiments with H. Slade, 169–70 on intuition, 170–1, 232 n 62 “On Space of Four Dimensions,” 171 Transcendental Physics, 169–71

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Titles published 1.  The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill Miriam Bailin, Washington University 2.  Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Donald E. Hall, California State University, Northridge 3.  Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4.  Byron and the Victorians Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Patten, Rice University, Houston 6.  Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield 8.  The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater William F. Shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by Margaret Homans, Yale University and Adrienne Munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11.  Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels Pamela K. Gilbert, University of Florida

12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature Alison Byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney 14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home Monica F. Cohen 15.  Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia 16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth Gail Marshall, University of Leeds 17.  Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin Carolyn Dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature:  Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19.  Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre Deborah Vlock 20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance John Glavin, Georgetown University, Washington DC 21.  Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson, Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry Matthew Campbell, University of Sheffield 23.  Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War Paula M. Krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God Michael Wheeler, University of Southampton 25.  Dickens and the Daughter of the House Hilary M. Schor, University of Southern California 26.  Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science Ronald R. Thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology Jan-Melissa Schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge

 28.  Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World Elaine Freedgood, University of Pennsylvania 29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture Lucy Hartley, University of Southampton 30.  The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study Thad Logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 Dennis Denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 Pamela Thurschwell, University College London 33.  Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature Nicola Bown, Birkbeck, University of London 34.  George Eliot and the British Empire Nancy Henry, The State University of New York, Binghamton 35.  Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College, California 36.  Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body Anna Krugovoy Silver, Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust Ann Gaylin, Yale University 38.  Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 Anna Johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 Matt Cook, Keele University 40.  Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland Gordon Bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41.  Gender and the Victorian Periodical Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green, University of Western Australia 42.  The Victorian Supernatural edited by Nicola Bown, Birkbeck College, London Carolyn Burdett, London Metropolitan University and Pamela Thurschwell, University College London 43.  The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination Gautam Chakravarty, University of Delhi

44.  The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People Ian Haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey 45.  Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds Richard Noakes, University of Cambridge Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and Jonathan R. Topham, University, of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot Janis McLarren Caldwell, Wake Forest University 47.  The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by Christine Alexander, University of New South Wales and Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta 48.  From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction Gail Turley Houston, University of New Mexico 49.  Voice and the Victorian Storyteller Ivan Kreilkamp, University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture Patrick R. O’Malley, Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain Simon Dentith, University of Gloucestershire 53.  Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal Helena Michie, Rice University 54.  The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture Nadia Valman, University of Southampton 55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Julia Wright, Dalhousie University 56.  Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination Sally Ledger, Birkbeck, University of London 57.  Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester 58.  ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle Marion Thain, University of Birmingham 59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing David Amigoni, Keele University

60. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Daniel A. Novak, Lousiana State University 61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 Tim Watson, University of Miami 62.  The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History Michael Sanders, University of Manchester 63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain:  Jane Austen to the New Woman Cheryl Wilson, Indiana University 64.  Shakespeare and Victorian Women Gail Marshall, Oxford Brookes University 65.  The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood Valerie Sanders, University of Hull 66.  Darwin and the Memory of the Human Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto 67.  From Sketch to Novel Amanpal Garcha, Ohio State University 68.  The Crimean War the British Imagination Stefanie Markovits, Yale University 69.  Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction Jill Matus, University of Toronto 70.  Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin 71.  Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smajić, Furman University