The final episode of the
three-part BBC series Victorian
Sensations, broadcast on 5 June 2019, was titled ‘Seeing and
Believing’. It was presented by Philippa
Perry, whose remit was to examine the last decade of the nineteenth century to show,
at a time when established religion was under pressure, how the Victorians squared
major scientific and technological developments with their interest in the
paranormal, particularly life after death.
Perry is a psychotherapist who appears to have no credentials in this
area and spent much of her time depicting wide-eyed awe.
It was a rich field to get her
teeth into with only an hour to do it, and the result was not entirely
satisfactory. She began by describing Marconi’s
work, noting the parallel between the development of wireless telegraphy and
the possibilities of telepathy and contact with those in the afterlife, utilising
the supposed ether. Such speculations demonstrated that the implications of
scientific developments, such as communication at a distance by invisible means,
could be co-opted by Spiritualists and psychical researchers.
Naturally we were shown examples
of physical mediumship. In a segment on
spirit photography, Almudena Romero, not a noted expert and looking out of her
depth, attempted to demonstrate the principles.
W T Stead’s Julia’s Bureau, set
up to allow messages to pass between living and dead, and Stead’s association
with Ada Goodrich Freer, with whom he conducted editorial meetings
telepathically (though contrary to the impression given they did use the postal
service as well), was the subject of some amusement. Slightly off-topic was a segment on the fascination
with life on Mars and its depiction in popular culture.
For part of the film Perry relied
on the archive of the Society for Psychical Research at Cambridge, visiting the
University Library to leaf through the records that make up the 1894 Census of Hallucinations and describe a
crisis apparition. The scientific and
psychical researches of Sir Oliver Lodge (SPR president 1901-1903 and 1932)
featured prominently, while other famous SPR members William James (SPR
president 1894-1895), Alfred Russel Wallace and William Gladstone received
name-checks. Conan Doyle was shown getting
his hands dirty going out on an SPR poltergeist investigation at Charmouth, in
Devon.
Oddly, considering how prominent
the SPR was in the programme, meriting first-billing in the acknowledgements at
the end, nobody from the Society was interviewed. Instead Matthew Tompkins popped up,
presumably on the back of his Wellcome exhibition-related book The Spectacle of Illusion, to discuss
Eusapia Palladino and some of the tricks mediums used in the séance room,
including a demonstration of slate writing the secret of which, as a magician
as well as a psychologist, he did not reveal.
There was an intriguing programme
trying to get out on the overlap between psychical research and the new medium
of cinema, which early on began featuring spooky themes. While there was a mention of Hove filmmaker
James Williamson, as Perry pointlessly recreated his The Big Swallow, there was no reference at all to G A Smith, who
would have exemplified the connections between psychical research – working as
hypnotist, among other things, for the SPR – and later, as a colleague of
Williamson’s, as a film pioneer. Bryony
Dixon, silent film curator at the British Film Institute, was interviewed at
length and showed a variety of trick film snippets, so it was a surprising
omission. And if you are going to quote
from Maxim Gorky’s famous essay beginning, ‘Last night I was in the kingdom of
shadows,’ why call him ‘one early reviewer’ rather than give his name?
Despite the weaknesses it was
good to see the SPR receive this much coverage in a mainstream programme, and
treated with respect rather than as an organisation filled with cranks. Perry was at pains to show the extent to
which its activities fitted in with scientific explorations of new frontiers in
the 1890s, ‘an era when anything seemed possible’ as she put it, hence the SPR’s
ability to attract a wide range of members, many of them possessing a
scientific background.
Unfortunately she laid on the
eccentric persona a little thickly, with the time-wasting Williamson ‘tribute’,
having her picture taken sitting in front of someone completely covered by a
sheet as a ‘spirit photograph’, and recording a humorous message on an Edison
phonographic cylinder (there was nothing on Edison’s interest in communication
with the dead either), but the programme was enjoyable as far as it went. A better one would have ditched the Mars
section, good for a documentary in its own right, and focused on the other
topics in greater depth.
