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Our
fascination with the supernatural has grown since Victorian times.
Halloween is celebrated each year with increasing enthusiasm,
especially by the younger generation. We still light great fires each
autumn, and gather around them in family and village groups. We still
collect the traditional evergreens such as holly and ivy, and bring them
into our homes in the winter, and we celebrate the coming of spring with
complex ceremonies involving brightly coloured eggs. In this age of
so-called reason and enlightenment, we generally explain our involvement
in these activities by referring to them as ‘pagan traditions’ absorbed
into a ‘Christian heritage’, and so we are happy to continue to
participate in them.
Robert James Lees was born at the time of the rebirth of British
Spiritualism. The industrial revolution had led to a dramatic expansion
of scientific discovery, and to an era in which superstition and a
fast-expanding understanding of physical scientific facts existed side
by side. In Victorian England, alongside the developing scientific
principles of research and exploration, accusations of witchcraft were
still commonplace and still taken very seriously. As we become more able
to make sense of the physical and the tangible, the supernatural – and
intangible – becomes even more mysterious.
Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution were published in 1859. They
prompted, not only controversy and debate, but also a new age of
philosophical thought. By the time the young Lees was beginning to
explore his world, Darwin’s radical approach to the age-old assumptions,
based on the faith of past generations, was influencing many areas of
research. It was a time when a belief in the spirit world was
accompanied by physical experiments in order to give the research a
pseudo-scientific authenticity. Ultimately, this led to the setting up,
in 1882, of the Society for Psychical Research whose investigators were
inclined to talk about their experiences in the form of scientific
prose, speaking, for instance, of ‘magnetism’ and ‘vibrations’.
An article by one psychic investigator, A.J.Davis, in The Herald of
Progress, published in 1862, is a typical example of the type of
phenomenon being investigated at that time, and the pseudo-scientific
approach adopted by investigators. Davis precedes his report with a
reference to previous research into the subject:
“We have positive knowledge of houses that have been ‘haunted’ and so
absolutely that no family could be induced to live within their walls.”
In this particular article, which is one of many similar pieces, Davis
recounts the story of a family in which an only son had committed
suicide. Two small children had burned to death, and their mother had
consequently thrown herself to her death from an upstairs window ‘in a
fit of frenzy’.
“Years afterward, when these events had nearly vanished from the
people’s memory, the dwelling was occupied by a new proprietor. One
winter’s night, when the husband was gone from home, the family was
awakened and frightened by the sounds of footsteps in the fatal
chamber…. While they listened, a light female form glided across the
room, before their very eyes, although the apartment was dark as
midnight…”
Davis subsequently investigated this ‘haunting’, using the latest
scientific methodology of the day. In his final report, he noted that he
found the ‘electrical particles’ of the unhappy son and mother ‘still
lingering’ in the mildew and atmosphere of the chamber. Adopting the
scientific prose of the day, he concluded that:
“The bodily emanations of a person while in extreme distress of either
mind or body, will, under certain states of the atmosphere, completely
impregnate and saturate the particles of a room…. Precisely what
combination of mental forces and electrical emanations is requisite to
mediumise an apartment, we cannot say…”
In Victorian England, belief in a spirit world was supported by the
search for physical proven evidence. Sometimes this led to the most
absurd claims being given a false credibility because of the attention
given to them by well-known writers and thinkers. Sir William Crookes
was probably the first major figure to investigate spiritualism.
Some years later, no less an eminent writer and researcher than Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, despite his grounding in medicine and science, and a
mind broadened by a good education and by extensive worldwide travel,
announced publicly in 1922 that he was totally convinced of the
existence of fairies. He had ‘investigated’ in depth the now-famous
photographic plates of the Cottingley ‘fairies’, which ‘proved’ that
small beings with wings inhabited the back garden of the two young girls
who had taken the pictures. In reality, the girls had created their
fairies by using nothing more sophisticated than figures cut from
cardboard. Although there is a certain charm and delicacy in the images,
to many it still seems remarkable that such simple fakery could deceive
the man who created Sherlock Holmes. |