The Other World
Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914

A study of the public fascination with spiritualism and psychical research in Victorian and Edwardian times.

Janet Oppenheim (Author)

9780521347679, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 February 1988

532 pages
23.5 x 15.3 x 3.3 cm, 0.81 kg

"This is a book of rich and complex texture dealing with important activities of Victorian and Edwardian society: spiritualism and physical research....a most stimulating study..." Journal of Modern History

The Other World examines the public fascination with spiritualism and psychical research in Britain from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It explores the variety of social background, education, and professional expertise that characterized the men and women who attended séances and investigated psychic phenomena, and it places them in the context of their times without ridiculing their beliefs. It is not concerned with the question of whether psychic phenomena are 'real', but rather attempts to understand the reasons why artisans, intellectuals, and aristocrats alike embraced spiritualism as a surrogate religion or endorsed psychical research as the science of the future. Whether self-educated workers, medical doctors, clergymen, housewives, university professors, journalists, comparative psychologists, or Nobel prize-winning physicists, they cannot be dismissed as cranks and eccentrics. Their efforts to mediate between the demands of science and the comforts of faith reflected anxieties central to the Victorian and Edwardian decades.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The Setting: 1. Mediums
2. Membership
Part II. A Surrogate Faith: 3. Spiritualism and Christianity
4. Psychical research and agnosticism
5. Theosophy and the occult
Part III. A Pseudoscience: 6. Concepts of mind
7. The problem of evolution
8. Physics and psychic phenomena
Conclusion
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX]