Abstract
This chapter examines the role of the visual imagination in scientific and metaphysical debates of the mid-century. Attention focusses on the scientific uses of the magic lantern and associated instruments in popular science shows, including Pepper’s ghost illusion of the 1860s, the kaleidoscope, and the oxyhydrogen microscope. As the chapter will make clear, rather than simply debunking ideas about ghosts and the supernatural, the examples altered the parameters of the debate, relocating supernatural phenomena into a border space between imagination, rationalism, and technological forms of perception. Material is drawn from scientific and philosophical texts published in the periodical press and non-fiction books, and there is an extended analysis of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel A Strange Story (1862).
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Notes
- 1.
James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, with critical notes by Alexander Bain, Andrew Findlater, and George Grote, ed. John Stuart Mill, 2 vol., 2nd edn. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1878) vol. 1, 243.
- 2.
Sir Benjamin Brodie, “Address to the Royal Society,” 30 November 1859, as quoted in John Tyndall, “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination. A Discourse. Delivered Before the British Association at Liverpool, 16 September 1870,” in Victorian Science and Literature, ed. Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, 8 vols., vol. 1 Negotiating Boundaries, ed. Piers J. Hale and Jonathan Smith, (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 150.
- 3.
John Tyndall, “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination,” 152.
- 4.
Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 1, 236.
- 5.
Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 24.
- 6.
Alexander Bain makes this exact comparison in an essay on “Errors of Suppressed Correlatives.” See Alexander Bain, Practical Essays (New York: D. Appleton, 1884), 54–55.
- 7.
These, of course, relate to the contextualising features in Herbert Spencer and Dugald Stewart’s thinking which were discussed in Chap. 3.
- 8.
Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, 451.
- 9.
Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 159.
- 10.
Frederick [Friedrich] Engels, “Natural Science in the Spirit World,” in Frederick [Friedrich] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1934, repr. 1976), 60.
- 11.
W.J.T. Mitchell provides a valuable account of Marx’s camera obscura metaphor, although, as Tom Gunning points out, the discussion does occasionally conflate multiple visual technologies. See Mitchell, Iconology, 170–172; Tom Gunning, “Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and its Specters,” Media Art History http://www.mediaarthistory.org
- 12.
Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 42.
- 13.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from Lectures on the Philosophy of History, in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Political Writings, ed. L. Dickey and H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 214–215.
- 14.
Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 76; 18–19.
- 15.
Popular formulations of science and entertainment, perhaps most famously exemplified in the Great Exhibition of 1851, have received considerable critical attention. See, for example, Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, ed. Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (London: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Iwan Rhys Morus, “Worlds of Wonder: Sensation of the Victorian Scientific Performance,” Isis, 101, no. 4 (2010): 806–816; Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Geoffrey Cantor, “Science, Providence, and Progress at the Great Exhibition,” Isis, 103, no. 3 (2012): 439–459; Marty Gould, “Anticipation, Transformation, Accommodation: The Great Exhibition on the London Stage,” Victorian Review, 29, no. 2 (2003): 19–39; John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999); The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbrick (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
- 16.
An article in Blackwood’s, for example, proclaimed: “The perception of a material universe, as it is the most prominent fact of cognition, so it has given rise to the problem which has been most agitated by philosophers.” To this end, articles in the periodical press attempted to find resolutions to this problem of perception in a range of philosophers’ works, from Comte to Berkeley, or through German philosophers like Kant and Hegel. See Anon. “Reid and the Philosophy of Common Sense,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1847. For discussion of these kinds of psychological debates within the periodical press, see Roger Smith, “The Physiology of the Will: Mind, Body, and Psychology in the Periodical Literature, 1855–1875,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 81–110.
- 17.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788) in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 269.
- 18.
David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), 95–97.
- 19.
For a detailed account of the ghost illusion in relation to science, see Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 167–218. For an account of the ghost illusion at the Royal Polytechnic, see Jeremy Brooker, The Temple of Minerva: Magic and the Magic Lantern at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, London, 1837–1901 (London: The Magic Lantern Society, 2013), 111–119.
- 20.
Hankins and Silverman, 70.
- 21.
One might think here of the long trend of texts on psychology and the supernatural, which includes Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic as well as less well-known books, essays, and articles, such as Catherine Crowe’s book The Night Side of Nature: or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848), or the anonymously published “A Few Passages on Dreams, Night-noises, and Phantoms” which appeared across multiple articles in Ainsworth’s Magazine in 1844. Shane McCorristine gives a detailed account of this tradition of psychologising the supernatural in Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 43–52.
- 22.
Of course, this was not limited to shows involving the magic lantern. Pepper’s ghost, as a prime example, used mirrors and glass as well as lanterns, but the aims and general effects of these various shows were the same: to demonstrate both natural wonders and the ability of science to explain these wonders.
- 23.
Anon. “Holiday Art – The Colosseum,” London Review, 22 August 1863.
- 24.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Preface to A Strange Story in A Strange Story and The Haunted and The Haunters. Caxton Edition (London: George Routledge and Sons, c.1884), viii–ix.
- 25.
Anon. “The Kaleidoscope,” Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 7 May 1818.
- 26.
Anon. “The Kaleidoscope,” Liverpool Mercury, 24 April 1818.
- 27.
Stuart Talbot, “The Perfect Projectionist: Philip Carpenter, 24 Regent Street, London,” Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 88 (2003): 17.
- 28.
Anon. “The Kaleidoscope,” Hull Packet and Original Weekly Commercial, Literary and General Advertiser, 9 June 1818.
- 29.
Brenda Weeden, The Education of the Eye: History of the Royal Polytechnic Institution 1838–1881 (Cambridge: Granta Editions, 2008), 46.
- 30.
Both Iwan Rhys Morus and Nicole Garrod Bush have noted the metaphorical role of the kaleidoscope as a device that visualised harmony and sequential regularity. See Morus, “Illuminating Illusions, or the Victorian Art of Seeing Things,” Early Popular Visual Culture, 10, no. 1 (2012): 39; Nicole Garrod Bush, “Kaleidoscopism: The Circulation of a Mid-Century Metaphor and Motif ” [online], Journal of Victorian Culture, 20: 5 (2015): 509–530. https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2015.1090242
- 31.
Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of The Riots of ‘Eighty’, ed. John Bowen (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 32–33.
- 32.
Bailey, “Berkeley and Idealism.”
- 33.
Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 24.
- 34.
George Henry Lewes, “Seeing is Believing,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1860. This idea was echoed by James Hinton: “Our propensity to error consists in this: that while our senses only show us part, we tend to trust them as if they showed us all.” James Hinton, “Seeing with the Eyes Shut,” Cornhill Magazine, July 1862.
- 35.
Albert Smith, Comic Tales and Sketches (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 106–107.
- 36.
For an account of the gas microscope at the Royal Polytechnic, see Brooker, 46–49.
- 37.
Debates revolving around scientists’ increasing ability to render the invisible visible through instruments like the microscope commonly followed this demarcation between empirical materiality and intangible psychology/spirituality, especially from the 1870s onwards. For discussions of this, see P.M. Heimann, “The ‘Unseen Universe’: Physics and the Philosophy of Nature in Victorian Britain,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 6, no. 1 (1972): 73–79; David B. Wilson, “The Thought of Late Victorian Physicists: Oliver Lodge’s Ethereal Body,” Victorian Studies, 15, no. 1 (1971): 29–48; Ann Scott, “‘Visible Incarnations of the Unseen’: Henry Drummond and the Practice of Typological Exegesis,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 37, no. 4 (2004): 435–454.
- 38.
Anon. “The Original Hydro-Oxygen Microscope,” The Times, 10 March 1834.
- 39.
Anon. “Oxy-Hydrogen Microscope,” The Times, 20 November 1834.
- 40.
This relates to the wider Victorian interest in the infinitesimal which Kate Flint explicates in The Victorian Visual Imagination (4–64).
- 41.
Isobel Armstrong gives a useful account of some of the diversity of reactions to microscopes in “The Microscope: Mediations of the Sub-Visible World,” in Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 37.
- 42.
There was a whole genre of fiction inspired by scientific ideas. For examples, see Science as Romance, ed. Ralph O’Connor, vol. 8 of Victorian Science and Literature, ed. Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). Particularly notable of the examples included here is the naturalist Agnes Catlow’s long poetic epigraph to her book, Drops of Water; their Marvellous and Beautiful Inhabitants Displayed by the Microscope (1851) which talks of worlds “by some magic spell revealed” in the “glass/Of wizard science!” in Science as Romance, 275–276.
- 43.
Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (London: Penguin, 1995), 75–76. Subsequent in-text page citations are to this edition.
- 44.
See Morus, “Illuminating Illusions,” 48.
- 45.
Anon. “Christmas Ghosts and Scientific Ghosts,” Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, 2 January 1864.
- 46.
Bulwer-Lytton, Preface to A Strange Story (1862), viii–ix.
- 47.
Bulwer-Lytton, Preface to A Strange Story (1862), viii–ix.
- 48.
Bulwer-Lytton, Preface to A Strange Story (1862), v.
- 49.
Of The Disowned (1829) and Devereux (1829) in particular, Bulwer-Lytton writes that these were “in the midst of metaphysical studies and investigations, varied and miscellaneous enough, if not very deeply conned. At that time I was indeed engaged in preparing for the press a Philosophical Work which I had afterwards the good sense to postpone to a riper age and a more sobered mind. But the effect of these studies is somewhat prejudicially visible in both the romances I have referred to; and the external and dramatic colourings which belong to fiction are too often forsaken for the inward and subtle analysis of motives, characters, and actions. The workman was not sufficiently master of his art to forbear the vanity of parading the wheels of the mechanism, and was too fond of calling attention to the minute and tedious operations by which the movements were to be performed and the result obtained.” See Bulwer-Lytton “Dedicatory Epistle” (1835) in Devereux: A Tale (New York: Belford, Clarke, and Co., 1835), 6.
- 50.
Bulwer-Lytton, letter to his son Edward Robert, 14 September 1861, in Victor Alexander George Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Earl of Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, First Lord Lytton, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1913) vol. 2, 345.
- 51.
Bulwer-Lytton, letter to Charles Dickens, undated but either from the end of 1861 or beginning of 1862, in Victor Bulwer-Lytton, vol. 2, 345.
- 52.
Bulwer-Lytton, undated letter to Charles Dickens, in Victor Bulwer-Lytton, vol. 2, 346–347.
- 53.
John Forster, unpublished letter to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 11 December (Hertfordshire County Record Office ref. D/EK C14) quoted in Brown, “The ‘Supplementary Chapter’ to Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 26, no. 1 (1998), 160–161.
- 54.
The chapter was, however, drafted, and this was eventually published in 1998 with annotations and introduction by Andrew Brown. See Brown, 157–182.
- 55.
Bulwer-Lytton, letter to his son Edward Robert, undated, in Victor Bulwer-Lytton, vol. 2, 351.
- 56.
Justin McCarthy, Modern leaders: being a series of biographical sketches (New York: Shelden and Co., 1872), 160.
- 57.
The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter, 3 vols. (London: Nonesuch, 1938) vol. 3, 234 cited in Brown, 164.
- 58.
It was with bemused humour that Joseph Conrad commented in 1897: “The popularity of Bulwer Lytton in the forecastles of Southern-going ships is a wonderful and bizarre phenomenon.” Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ed. J.H. Stape and Allan H. Simmons, intr. Gail Fraser (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), 7.
- 59.
Bulwer-Lytton, in Victor Bulwer-Lytton, vol. 2, 346.
- 60.
George Henry Lewes, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences: Being an Exposition of the Principles of the Cours de Philosophie Positive of Auguste Comte (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 5.
- 61.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “An Essay On Breakfasts,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, August 1833, 434.
- 62.
Bulwer-Lytton, quoted in Robert Lee Wolff, Strange Stories and other Explorations in Victorian Fiction (Boston: Gambit, 1971), 314.
- 63.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, letter to his son Edward Robert, 15 April 1862, in Victor Bulwer-Lytton, vol. 2, 348.
- 64.
Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story, 18. All in-text page numbers for A Strange Story refer to the Caxton edition. Materialism places a stronger, less ambiguous emphasis on tangibility than terms like “empiricist,” which is open to Hume’s denial of all reality, or “positivist,” which might imply Comte’s interest in social structures, yet the term was often used pejoratively. Bernard Lightman writes: “even in the 1870s, the charge of materialism was a serious one” which, in the case of John Tyndall, “grouped Tyndall together with lower-class atheists, casting aspersions on his status as a member of the intellectual elite.” See Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” Science Serialized, 202. For a discussion of the difficulties with these and similar terms, see Turner, Between Science and Religion, 10–11.
- 65.
Joseph Fradin contended: “some of the melodramatic excesses of A Strange Story seem to be the result of Bulwer-Lytton’s intense reaction to evolutionary theory – a kind of nervous anxiety which splashes disconcertingly over the surface of the novel.” See Joseph I. Fradin, “‘The Absorbing Tyranny of Every-day Life’: Bulwer-Lytton-Lytton’s A Strange Story,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16, no. 1 (1961): 5.
- 66.
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, vol. 1, 98.
- 67.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 252.
- 68.
See, for example, Anon. “The Kaleidoscope,” Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 7 May 1818. For a history of the ocular harpsichord, see Hankins and Silverman, 72–85. For a general discussion of the concept, see E.H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979), 286–305.
- 69.
Similarly, a theory of light promoted by Tyndall claimed that light travelled through an unknown substance, “ether,” in the manner of sound vibrating through air. For examples, see John Tyndall, “The Constitution of the Universe,” Fortnightly Review, 1 December 1865; C.K. Akin, “New Views on Light,” Fortnightly Review, 15 April 1866.
- 70.
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 253.
- 71.
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 253.
- 72.
Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 329.
- 73.
Hegel, quoted in Stefan Andriopoulos, “Kant’s Magic Lantern: Historical Epistemology and Media Archaeology,” Representations 115, no. 1 (2011), 43. Andriopoulos makes a case that in Kant’s theory of transcendental illusion the magic lantern was not merely illustrative but was constitutive.
- 74.
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 4th ed., ed. Derek R. Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 22.
- 75.
In comparison, in his account of theories of the soul/mind, Alexander Bain mentions Hume only in discussing Dugald Stewart as a “fair representation of metaphysicians,” although Bain’s essay follows a similar divide between the “two sides” presented by competing mental and physical philosophers. Lewes, too, is dismissive of Hume in his history of philosophy. This suggests that perhaps Bulwer-Lytton, among others in the popular press, was wrestling with ideas that were already considered outdated by those at the forefront of the debate (e.g. Bain, Spencer, Lewes). See Alexander Bain, “A Historical Overview of the Theories of the Soul,” Fortnightly Review, 15 May 1866; George Henry Lewes, The History of Philosophy, from Thales to Comte, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1871), 335.
- 76.
Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 38.
- 77.
Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” 38.
- 78.
Susie Vrobel, Fractal Time: Why a Watched Kettle Never Boils (Singapore: World Scientific, 2011), 76.
- 79.
Bulwer-Lytton, undated letter to Dickens, in Victor Bulwer-Lytton, vol. 2, 345.
- 80.
Anon. “Christmas Ghosts and Scientific Ghosts,” Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, 2 January 1864.
- 81.
John Tyndall, “On Radiant Heat in Relation to the Colour and Chemical Constitution of Bodies” (1866), repr. in John Tyndall, Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1902) vol. 1, 71.
- 82.
Tyndall, “On Radiant Heat,” 71.
- 83.
Tyndall, “On Radiant Heat,” 71.
- 84.
Tyndall, “On Radiant Heat,” 72–73.
- 85.
Baden Powell, The Order of Nature Considered in Reference to the Claims of Revelation (London, 1859), 231–232.
- 86.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, unpublished letter to John Forster, 5 December 1861, quoted in Brown, 160.
- 87.
Hankins and Silverman, 70.
- 88.
Anon. “A Dissolving View of the Polytechnic,” Punch, 19 March 1881, 132.
- 89.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 54.
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Potter, J. (2018). Visions of Thought: Mid-century Science and Visual Knowledge. In: Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_5
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