England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare

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      Particularly favoured was the work of Mr Hudson, of 2 Kensington Park Road, London, the first of the English spirit photographers. One of a pair of his pictures in the September 1874 edition displayed ‘the baby sister of Dr Speer … and the shadowy form in the right front is the mother of the infant …’ The author of the accompanying article, ‘MA (Oxon)’, was William Stainton Moses, an Oxford graduate, Anglican minister and himself an accomplished medium. ‘I have written before how this child-spirit has persistently manifested at our circle almost from its formation … She passed from this sphere of life more than fifty years ago at Tours, being then only seven months old. Her joyous little message, “Je suis heureuse, très heureuse”, was the first indication we had of her presence …’ Yet to our eyes this cloth-swaddled figure is quite obviously a china doll and looks more like baby Jesus in a school Nativity than the shade of a dead infant.

      Photography was still a young and plastic art, and to those untutored in its sly deceptions, the camera could not lie. Spirit photographs seemed to demonstrate the survival of the soul, and a happy survival at that. It was as if the camera were able to peer into another dimension. The immortalising power of photography had been taken one step further, and in such pictures, Human Nature revealed the extent of the desire to believe, a thirst for hard proof satisfied by cotton-wool fantasies. Encoded with an occult unconsciousness, these images prefigured the surrealist constructions of the next century, the uncanny imagined in silver nitrate. Yet their moral instability – their essential untruthfulness – turns such putative glimpses of eternity into mere psychic pornography; glossy, titillating images carefully concealed within the pages of the periodical. One print by W. H. Mumler of Boston, a jewellery engraver and pioneer of American spirit photography, shows Mrs Abraham Lincoln (whose husband was a believer, as was Wild Bill Hickok) with the assassinated president looking over her: ‘… The evidence for the genuineness of Mr Mumler’s photographs, and for the integrity of Mr Mumler himself, is as strong as can well be conceived.’ But in 1871 Mrs Lincoln was declared insane and Mr Mumler was later prosecuted for witchcraft in New York.

      In its acceptance of such pictures, Human Nature was betrayed by its own innocence. Opening the pages of the journal now, I look at these images with a childish sense of revelation and disappointment: in an ironic reversal of their intended function, they resonate with charlatanism and fakery, undermining my own will to believe, as much as if I had been shown videotape of Christ’s crucifixion and seen Kensington gore rather than blood oozing from His wounds. This was faith as theatre, ‘by way of a singular intermediary … by way of Death’, a sensational sequence of manipulated images: from nineteenth-century tableaux vivants to Eadweard Muybridge’s calibrated human graphs and Julia Margaret Cameron’s angelic children, bedecked with wings and suspended in amniotic fluid, innocent emblems of infant mortality at the beginning of life. With the aid of muslin, montage and double exposure, the spirit photographers created equally convincing, equally fantastical visions of life after death. The final irony is that spiritualism invested its faith in such evidence, for the passing of time would ensure that these images undermined the movement more comprehensively than any amount of improbable table-tapping or levitating chairs.

      The powerfully eclectic editorial stance of Human Nature was to provide a natural platform, and excellent publicity, for Frederick Evans, while James Burns was keen to promote Shakerism for his own ends. This earthly alliance suited their spiritual ambitions – a vivid example of the cross-pollination of utopian belief between England and America. Evans and Burns were as much prophets of their age as their more colourful antecedents – and they had the added benefit of new media. Cheap publishing, burgeoning literacy and photographic reproduction allowed spiritualism to be widely disseminated via the self-promoting identities of its practitioners, feeding on a trend which was even more evident: the American genius for self-invention, and an attendant sense of glamour. Thus the meeting of Evans – the intellectual embodiment of American Shakerism – and Burns – the motivating force of British Spiritualism – was an enormously potent encounter. Yet behind these men lay two female spirits; and just as the progenitor of their meeting was Ann Lee, so Mary Ann Girling would be its progeny.

      That summer of 1871, as Mary Ann was making preparations for her mission to London, Evans and Peebles left New York on the new White Star liner, S.S. Atlantic. ‘The whole СКАЧАТЬ