All About History is a
heavily-illustrated magazine from Future Publishing Ltd with mostly short
articles containing basic information on miscellaneous subjects. The
cover story in issue 93 (August 2020) is ‘Victorian Occult’, subtitled ‘Lifting
the shroud on the 19th century’s obsession with death and the afterlife.’
The tone is set by the question on the cover: ‘Was a morbid obsession with the
paranormal fuelled by fraudsters?’ and the editorial line is that the
individuals discussed were fraudulent, with no further discussion required.
‘Victorian Occult’ was written, apparently
in haste, by Callum McKelvie (he has another article, ‘Atomic Spies’, in the
same issue so he would have been busy). He is billed as Features Editor
on the magazine’s staff and therefore not someone with deep knowledge of the topics
covered. These are brief, badly linked, sprinkled with incorrect facts,
and containing nothing that could not have been culled from a basic internet
search, supplemented with quotes from respected scholar Simone Natale.
We begin naturally with the Fox sisters in
1848, and the first error (leaving aside the uncertainty over the children’s
actual ages, McKelvie sticking with Wikipedia) is a lulu because Natale must
have been interviewed over the phone and McKelvie misheard Hydesville, New York
State, where it all began, as Huddersfield! We move on to Maria B Hayden,
who brought mediumship to England, Daniel Dunglas (spelled here Donglas) Home
and Robert Browning’s attack on him in Mr. Sludge, "The Medium", and mediums Charles Williams and
Frank Herne (spelled here Herme). William Mumler’s spirit photography
segues to voodoo and then to the Society for Psychical Research (note to editor:
please tell your subs, if you have them, that it is ‘for’, not ‘For’).
In keeping with the negative tone of the
article, the SPR is totally mischaracterised. After noting that in
Britain ‘the Spiritualist craze was in full-swing (sic),’ we are told the SPR
‘was founded in 1882 with the intention of investigating (“without prejudice or
prepossession of any kind”) various paranormal phenomena and acted as an
extremely fierce proponent of the movement.’ That statement could only
have been written by someone ignorant of the SPR’s ‘no corporate views’ policy,
to which it has adhered since its foundation, and unaware of the complex
relationship the Society has always had with Spiritualists.
The Ghost Club is mentioned, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
literary ghost stories, W T Stead, his assistant on Borderland Ada
Goodrich Freer and her investigation of Ballechin House. This sorry tale
is used as a stick to beat the SPR, as McKelvie claims that because of
criticism over her handling of the case, ‘rather than standing by one of their
own, the Society For Psychical Research quickly disowned the clairvoyant and
discredited all findings of the investigation,’ as if it acted
dishonourably. In fact she had behaved fraudulently and plagiarised
material by Father Allan MacDonald, good reasons for the SPR to distance itself
from her.
Then despite the title ‘Victorian Occult’
it’s on to the First World War, Sir Oliver Lodge and Raymond, Dennis
Wheatley and Aleister Crowley, both it seems writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, and
Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Further comments from Natale bring it all
up to the recent past with Most Haunted. The main article is
accompanied by two supplementary pages, one on ‘Ghost Stories’ (paragraphs on
The Hammersmith Ghost, Spring-Heeled Jack, 50 Berkeley Square, the 1855 Devil’s
Footprints and the Theatre Royal’s Man in Grey ghost), the other an interview
with Alan Murdie about the Ghost Club.
This is a dreadful article, lazy,
simplistic and error-strewn, shoehorning disparate strands of the paranormal
into the convenient but unanalysed and uninformative catch-all ‘occult’, even
though it does not apply to organisations like the SPR or the Ghost Club, or to
the Spiritualist movement. Magazines like All
About History are supposed to provide information while entertaining a
general audience, not to misinform, and this mess does its readers a
disservice. Anyone tempted, as I was, to sport out £5.20 on the strength
of the article would be well advised to save the money and check out more
reliable sources (which do not include Wikipedia, Mr McKelvie), not least the SPR’s free
online Psi Encyclopedia.
