Wednesday 29 July 2020

All About History and the Victorian Occult


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.