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.

falls into two parts. The first section discusses the main elements of the touring repertoire. This consisted initially of popular melodramas such as The Manxman, Trilby and The Sign of the Cross. The Bandmann Opera Company, his most important company, provided facsimile versions of Edwardian musical comedies, most of which were drawn from the George Edwardes’ Gaiety Theatre, with whom Bandmann had an exclusive agreement. Another mainstay of his repertoire was variety theatre, which became increasingly important after 1914. Each genre was represented by its own company, each of which toured on an integrated rotation system. The second section discusses the heterogeneous publics on the Bandmann Circuit as a colonial public sphere. Bandmann’s publics included non-English-speaking audiences in Japan, parts of China and the Dutch East Indies, among other areas.