Chapter 10 analyses nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical debates surrounding hypnotism by way of a close reading of George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). Criticism of Trilby has tended to focus on the extraordinary powers of Svengali to seize control of another’s consciousness in order to conduct their preternatural performances. I, however, attend to the intricately constructed physiological and psychological interiority of Trilby O’Ferrall and to the hidden spaces of the mind and body which constitute the complex, multilayered selves with which Du Maurier’s novel is preoccupied. Du Maurier, I argue, conceives of human selfhood in distinctly materialist terms, as a complicated series of caverns and recesses holding experiences and emotions, dreams and memories, latent talents, and the deep impressions of desire, pain, and trauma. His fiction probes the ways in which those depths might be sounded. In the case of Trilby, I argue, this investigation is primarily an acoustic and musical one.

Chapter 9 considers Victorian practices of mesmerism in the context of ongoing debates in the period as to whether a conscious, rational individual might be made to behave in certain ways through unconscious influences. The fundamental premise of mesmeric practice – the transmission and reception of nervous energy by way of the imponderable vibrations of the magnetic fluid – was, I argue, grounded in acoustics. Sound and music played a critical role in inducing trances and triggering responses, while also providing a potent series of auditory metaphors by which these unusual states of being might be framed and understood. The mesmeric bond between individuals was believed to operate as a form of communication network, which transcended the limitations of the individual body and its sensory capacities, while also pointing to the potential forces and energies that might operate beneath the threshold of human consciousness.

This chapter examines late nineteenth-century instances of a fictional trope of “mind invasion,” in which the white male unconscious is controlled by the very subaltern mind that Western science associated with “primitive” levels of mental and cultural evolution. The psychical automatism of mind invasion sometimes reproduces the power dynamics of colonialism, but the chapter examines countervailing examples in which the colonizer’s unconscious is dominated by mental powers and occult knowledge attributed to the colonized. It also explores depictions of extraterrestrial or future-human mind invasion, which redraw the racialized hierarches of mind constructed by Western scientists. Reiterations of the mind-invasion trope satirized the claim of educated white males to possess superior rationality, detached objectivity, and the ability to resist automatist mental states. The chapter analyses the multivalent aims of this reversal, including antimaterialism, a defense of paranormal experience, and a decolonizing attack on the very concept of racial hierarchy.

This volume considers the meanings of automatism and automata for Victorian culture. In the nineteenth century, theories of automatism became central to scientific and popular understandings of human thought and action. Engineers made the first attempts at constructing mechanisms that replicated the intelligence of human beings. Mechanical automata charmed crowds. Black and Asian automata became popular commodities. This collection brings together essays by scholars of the history of science, literature, theatre, and media, which explore the widespread cultural interest in mechanical automata and conceptions of automatism in the period. The essays examine social, technological, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic developments that automata and their representation generated. They look at the conceptions of legal responsibility, volition, and creativity that theories of automatism produced, and show how automata and automatism were recruited in constructions of race. The essays examine automata and automatism in literary texts. They demonstrate that Victorian thought on automata and automatism continues to have resonance for current understandings of mind, agency, mechanism, and artificial intelligence.

The final chapter, “Mesmeric Revolution: Pauline Hopkins’s Matrilineal Haiti,” extends the coordinates of Hopkins’s global commitments, charting an alternative geography beneath the Africa-oriented Of One Blood. By turning to the Caribbean, Hopkins reveals how Haiti emerges at key moments of energetic resistance. Moreover, she explicitly genders these moments of resistance as feminine. Focusing on the matrilineage of Hannah, Mira, and Dianthe, I argue that women in the novel carry specifically Haitian valences: from colonial Saint-Dominguan mesmerism, to the poison of Makandal, to the legacy of marronage. This muted Caribbean geography recenters women at the heart of the narrative, adumbrates Hopkins’s anti-imperialist politics, and subverts the dehumanizing energy politics of plantation genealogies.

Within a tidal wave of dispossession, Indigenous performers forged livings in scientific showmanship. In 1850, ‘Jemmy’, an Aboriginal boy, starred in a Melbourne lecture series that fused phrenology with mesmerism. During the mid 1860s, Tamati Hapimana Te Wharehinaki, chief of the Ngati Ruangutu hapū of the Tapuika Iwi, toured through the Australian colonies with the infamous Thomas Guthrie Carr. Supposedly mesmerised by the lecturers, these performers demonstrated actions that corresponded with particular phrenological organs, wrapping feigned subordination in displays of cultural difference that fascinated Europeans. An ethnographic history approach to these lecture reports reveals how these performers cannily shaped these representations for personal gain. Although serving colonial fantasies of control, the stage world nevertheless allowed them to push against the constraints that bound their daily lives. The fragile relations of power that made or broke a show enabled tactical choices for fleeting material or social benefit.

More than one in ten lecturers in the Tasman World also served as lay preachers or clergyman, with Methodists particularly represented. Sometimes they occupied both roles at once as scientific men of the cloth. At other times, one identity slid away as another formed. Such preachers were almost all men, owing to the gendered nature of pulpit and platform. The configurations of authority that they navigated are best studied from the fissures revealed by court cases or scandals. In 1893, Wesleyan minister Ralph Brown benefited from gender and class advantages when charged with indecently assaulting a teenage girl after mesmerising her. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert James Abbott, nurseryman, practical phrenologist and leader of Melbourne’s Free Christian Assembly, faced allegations related to perceived scientific powers. Layered authority helped these men to recover from the rubble of their excesses. Popular science proved a resilient safety net when God departed.

Samuel Clemens, later adopt to write under “Mark Twain,” spent his formative years in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. After his father died, he began working for printers. While just a teenager, he carefully observed various performers stopping in the town. He was especially taken by a mesmerist and tried to become his assistant. After failing to become hypnotized, he faked being in a trance and fooled everyone by “reading” the audience to guess what the mesmerist was compelling him to do and gathering advance information about people he would mention in his trance. This experience might have made him suspicious of the itinerant phrenologist he watched in 1850, one of many now visiting small towns. The townsfolk flocked to him and adored him. But what most registered on young Clemens was how the phrenologist was giving every client a glowing report, as if each was another George Washington. This observation made him wonder if there were anything to the head readings or whether the phrenologist was just out to dupe his clients. Still, he recognized that phrenology might be a quick and helpful way to judge character and of use to a writer.

Set in Paris, Bolaño’s deeply contextualized novel, Monsieur Pain, takes place in a historical moment heightened with geopolitical tensions. The Spanish Civil War is raging, fascism is on the rise; Europe is looking back at the devastation of the Great War and forward to another world war. César Vallejo – the exiled Peruvian poet, a communist and supporter of the doomed Spanish Republic – is dying in Paris, stricken by incessant hiccups. Pierre Pain, a mesmerist who tries and fails to cure Vallejo, becomes drawn into a noirish intrigue he never manages to decipher. Layered upon this immediate context are other moments drawn from Bolaño’s own lived experience: the Cuban Revolution, the Latin-American liberation movements of the 1960s, the Tlatelolco massacre, Pinochet’s coup, the Dirty War in Argentina. Failure thus becomes the ultimate context of this novel, operating on multiple levels both within the diegesis and beyond: Pain’s failure implicitly points to all the defeats and betrayals of twentieth-century emancipatory projects; the novel sets readers up for failure by thwarting our efforts to navigate the dense intertextual web and by foreclosing resolution; and on the level of literary language the text admits and indeed announces its own failure as written expression.

This chapter explores the beginning of the end of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility and the origins of surgical scientific modernity. It illuminates this crucial period of transition through the juxtaposition of two distinct but conceptually and ideologically intertwined moments in surgical history. These are, firstly, the debates surrounding the practice of anatomical dissection that came to the fore in the 1820s and culminated in the passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832, and, secondly, the introduction and early use of inhalation anaesthesia in the later 1840s. In both instances it highlights the powerful influence of utilitarian thought in divesting the body, both as object and subject, of emotional meaning and agency. In the former instance it demonstrates how an ultra-rationalist understanding of sentiment was set in opposition to popular ‘sentimentalism’ in order to divest the dead bodies of the poor of emotional value. Meanwhile, in the latter, it considers how the emotional subjectivity of the newly anaesthetised patient was swiftly tamed by the operations of a techno-scientific rationale.

The first chapter situates Philippe de Loutherbourg’s work in relation to animal magnetism. It reveals how his art dramatized the exact structural characteristics of animal magnetism that made it both enormously popular and widely discredited – namely, its twin claims to possess significant control over the body and to lie beyond the reach of conventional scientific forms of apprehension or measurement. Revisiting several of de Loutherbourg’s major British and Swiss paintings, it argues that they cultivated effects of profound perceptual ambiguity and in doing so illuminated the epistemological fault lines along which animal magnetism was positioned. When London critics subsequently described his paintings as “magnetic,” they, in turn, drew on that science to articulate – even to conceptualize – their experience of looking at art.

This chapter analyzes the Victorian figure of the female medium as another embodiment of wayward reading. In both nonfictional and fictional portrayals of telepathy, or “brain-reading,” female mediums represent a model of identification that is neither passive nor manipulative but defensive. This model also provides a corrective to recent popular accounts of scientific studies that conflate enhanced Theory of Mind (the ability to recognize and interpret the beliefs and emotional states of other people) with actual compassion as an effect of reading literature. Though mediums sometimes represented their ability to communicate with dead and distant minds as an unwanted gift, accounts of spiritualism depict telepathy as directed and purposeful, and not always sympathetic. In her memoir novelist and actress Florence Marryat recounts using clairvoyance in order to understand the disposition and plans of both declared and secret enemies. Mina, the heroine of Dracula (1897), can reverse the direction of mind-reading between herself and the villainous Count, and use her access to his perspective to help defeat him. The feminized type of the Victorian medium deploys her stereotypical sensitivity not always as an effusion of beneficent feeling but as a social strategy to protect herself from predatory and intrusive others.

Chapter One explores ancestors of the idea that the physical sciences were relevant and significant to the study of obscure powers associated with the human body and mind.In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, practitioners of animal magnetism and mesmerism linked the study of a supposed new imponderable ‘magnetic’ fluid affecting health to better-known physical imponderables.In the mid-nineteenth century the German chemist Karl von Reichenbach and his followers stimulated much debate for their alleged discovery of new imponderable ‘od’ that they believed extended the domain of physics into the realm of physiology.From the 1840s onwards ’Modern Spiritualism’ prompted many natural philosophers to intervene on controversies over its startling physical effects.The final section of the chapter contextualises these attempts to link physical and psychical realms in terms of the fluid state of the physical sciences in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

The introduction sets out the historiographical framework and principle approaches of the book.Studies of nineteenth and twentieth century interactions between the established sciences and psychical phenomena have yielded many important insights but left many questions unanswered.We know a good deal about the psychical interests and investigations of a handful of scientists but only a partial sense of how far their examples were followed.We know a lot about the ‘occult’ uses to which spiritualists, theosophists and other occultists put developments in physical sciences relating to ether, energy, electricity and matter, but far less about the uses to which scientists made of psychical and occult phenomena in their scientific enquiries.Existing studies have also established much about the connections between ’physics and psychics’ at the level of ideas, theories and concepts, but have largely sidestepped the experimental nature of these connections.