Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930

241 Pages·2012·1.41 MB·English

by  Christine Ferguson

D
e
t
e
r
m
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture i Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
n
e
d
Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys S
p
i
Drawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth- r
century’s literature and culture. i
t
s
Determined Spirits
Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in
Determined Spirits
Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930
Christine Ferguson Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in
Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930
Christine Ferguson
C
h
r
i
s
t
i
n
e

F
e
r
g
u
s
o
n
E
ISBN 978 0 7486 3965 6
d
Jacket design concept by Cathy Sprent i
n
Edinburgh University Press b
22 George Square u
Edinburgh EH8 9LF rg
www.euppublishing.com h
28147 eup Ferguson JKT.indd 1 14/10/11 14:50:30
Determined Spirits
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd ii 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys
Volumes available in the series:
In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian
Literary Genres
Saverio Tomaiuolo
978 0 7486 4115 4 Hbk
Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of
Modernism
Deaglán Ó Donghaile
978 0 7486 4067 6 Hbk
William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and
Propaganda, 1880–1914
Anna Vaninskaya
978 0 7486 4149 9 Hbk
1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain
Nicholas Freeman
978 0 7486 4056 0 Hbk
Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in
Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930
Christine Ferguson
978 0 7486 3965 6 Hbk
Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban
Multiplicity
Julian Wolfreys
978 0 7486 4040 9 Hbk
Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at
www.euppublishing.com/series/ecve
Als o available:
Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing,
1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys
ISSN: 2044–2416
www.eupjournals.com/vic
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iiii 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
Determined Spirits
Eugenics, Heredity and Racial
Regeneration in Anglo-American
Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930
Christine Ferguson
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iiiiii 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
For John Guliak
© Christine Ferguson, 2012
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3965 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5066 8 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5068 2 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5067 5 (Amazon ebook)
The right of Christine Ferguson
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iivv 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
Contents
Illustrations vi
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium 21
2. Spirits in Mind: Madness, Idiocy and the Cultural Capital of
Ignorance 58
3. Eugenic Summerlands: Sexual Reproduction and Family
Engineering in the Spheres 86
4. Blended Souls: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Occult
Miscegenation 114
5. Criminal Man and Recidivist Spirit: Spiritualism, Criminal
Anthropology and Thanato-Rehabilitationism 142
6. Dead Letters: Bioaesthetics and the New Realism in Fin-de-
Siècle Spiritualism 172
Conclusion 199
Bibliography 204
Index 220
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vv 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
Illustrations
1. S.C. Hall in The Medium and Daybreak (1883).
© The British Library Board 43
2. Henry Slade in The Medium and Daybreak (1876).
© The British Library Board 44
3. William Oxley in The Medium and Daybreak (1885).
© The British Library Board 45
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vvii 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
Series Editor’s Preface
‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept
and, simultaneously, an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all
meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist
about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s
Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word
for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought,
belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in
nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional
inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits
of the nominal defi nition, and have sought to question the very grounds
on which the unrefl ective perception of the so-called Victorian has been
built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century
studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of
interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-
minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and
inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars
and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century
society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of
‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical,
scientifi c, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns;
indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to
the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclu-
sive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches.
A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most
part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists,
pursued with as much fervour as the affi rmative exploration between
different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the
service of reading the nineteenth century.
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up
both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vviiii 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
viii Determined Spirits
convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for
the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the
most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose
is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary
approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely
revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the
same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed
or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present
a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations.
Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the
series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing,
principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated
close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nine-
teenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that
is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange.
Working from original sources, primary documents and recent inter-
disciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian
Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the
nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and
provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders.
Julian Wolfreys
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd vviiiiii 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044
Acknowledgements
Like the movement it traces, this project has been a transatlantic enter-
prise, its research taking place over ten years in institutions across
Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Along the way, I
have accrued many debts of gratitude to the individuals, organisations
and funding agencies without whom the work would have been impos-
sible. A 2002–4 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia
gave me the invaluable time and resources to start exploring the verbal
and writing practices associated with Victorian Spiritualism. Here I ben-
efi ted immensely from the encouragement and inspirational early career
mentorship provided by Pamela Dalziel and Joy Dixon. By the end of
the fellowship period, I had redirected my focus onto the fascinating
and curiously persistent obsession with reproduction and heredity that
I had started to observe in the Spiritualist archive. This shift coincided
with a geographic move to the University of Alberta, where I took up
a position in the Department of English and Film Studies. Here Peter
Sinnema and Susan Hamilton, wonderful friends and intensely sup-
portive colleagues, gave me invaluable feedback on early project-related
grant applications and articles and helped me with the tricky logistics
of overseas research trip planning. Their assistance was crucial to the
success of my 2007 SSHRC New Scholars Standard Grant bid, a major
award for which I remain deeply thankful despite having to turn it down
in light of my departure from Canada to a post at the University of
Glasgow. A 2008 British Academy Small Research Award and a 2009
C.P. Snow Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of
Texas-Austin allowed me to extend and deepen my researches into the
rich eugenic imagination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-
American Spiritualism. Special thanks are due to the excellent reading
room staff at the Ransom Center for their helpfulness in pointing out
relevant and rare archival sources well beyond the ones I had initially
FFEERRGGUUSSOONN 99778800774488663399665566 PPRRIINNTT..iinndddd iixx 2277//0022//22001122 1166::0044