Opening with an account of the emergence of spiritualist practice in nineteenth-century America and Britain, Chapter 6 analyses the range of sonic phenomena – from raps and taps to more elaborate musical manifestations – which were frequently used to register the supposed presence of spiritual phenomena in séances. To date, cultural histories of attempted communications with the dead have tended to focus on the technological appropriations or extra-sensory abilities which were believed necessary to access the spirit realm, while overlooking the profound social, emotional, bodily, and sensory experiences associated with the intimate space of the Victorian séance. This chapter, in contrast, is dedicated to the human, rather than the technological, connections forged by the séance, and the profound desire on the part of many séance attendees to obviate the need for spiritual telegraphy altogether by once more realising the actual physical and intellectual intimacy that technology could only simulate.

“Spirits” discusses the limitation of strict materialist explanations of the processes of inanition, and how hunger artists fit in alternative vitalist, naturist, eclectic, spiritualist approaches, which at the time had numerous defenders. Succi’s case, being the editor of the spiritist journal Il Correo Spiritico is a paradigmatic example of this trend. In that context of heterodoxy, hunger artists contributed towards opening the door to a psychological turn, to the progressive emergence of psychological explanations of voluntary hunger and resistance to inanition as a new field of scientific inquiry, often with a gender bias. The psychological turn gave new prominence to names such as Charles Richet and Hippolyte Bernheim, but it also had its roots in Luigi Luciani’s non-strictly materialist explanation of Succi’s resistance to inanition in Florence in 1888. The chapter brings to the fore the names of several women fasters, often treated as patients and pathologized as “fasting girls”, but in other cases appearing in the public sphere like other male professional fasters and following analogous performances. In that gendered psychological turn, terms such as willpower, inner force, hypnosis, and insanity progressively gained influence in explanations on the causes of resistance to prolonged fasting.

Clemens must have continued to have his doubts about the head readers into the 1870s, because he decided to conduct an experiment of his own on a leading head reader in 1872. Having discovered some of the tricks mediums were using, he made two trips to Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological emporium in London. He dressed and acted like a nobody during the first trip. Then, after some weeks had passed, he returned and presented himself as the famous American humorist and author Mark Twain. He would later describe his great awakening in a short but serious published letter, and with humor and artistic liberties in an autobiographical dictation and his posthumous but never-completed novel Eddypus. The letter and phrenological parts of his dictation and Eddypus are presented in this chapter. Being told on his first visit that his head had a cavity above the organ for a sense of humor and on his second that he had a Mount Everest in the same spot would change how he would depict the head readers in his most famous novels. Writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens would now set forth to educate the gullible public.

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.