Search results
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 30 items for
- Author: William Hughes x
- Refine by access: All content x
In an age of Imperial confidence, the social rhetoric of Victorian Britain frequently manifested a perceptible unease when considering cultural problems within the home nation. The imagery of ‘darkest England’, dependant as it was upon a powerful colonialist discourse, authorised and transmitted a register of language whereby an internal Other might be configured as uncivilised, and thus capable of being subject to the explorer and the missionary. Much, of course, has already been written upon the Gothic possibilities of this phenomena which characterised an Imperial age which allegedly declined with the nineteenth century. No similar consideration, however, has yet been made of its continuation into the twentieth century, a progressively post-colonial era in which the Imperial (or Imperialised) Other, in consequence, functions differently. This article considers two Gothic short stories, one in a reprinted Edwardian collection, the other a component of an original collection, both of which were issued in volume form in the late 1940s. The two narratives examine classic ‘cultures-within-cultures’, pockets of resistance within the fabric of the Imperial nation, though in a cultural context radically different from their Victorian predecessors. Algernon Blackwood‘s ‘Ancient Sorceries’ (1908), published in the 1947 reprint of his John Silence, and L.T.C. Rolt‘s ‘Cwm Garon’ published in Sleep No More (1948) share a preoccupation with the casual, localised, travelling which has replaced Imperial adventure, and with the decline of identifiable Christian institutions and landmarks themselves the products of earlier missionary activity in a familiar, though threatening, European landscape. In both short stories a form of devil worship is enacted before the eyes of the traveller, and in a landscape which fascinates and somehow holds him. In ‘Ancient Sorceries’, where the Devil does attend the bacchanal, the protagonist is almost seduced into willing participation but, on evading the sexual lure of the sabbat, vows never to return. Rolt, writing after the recent horrors of the Second World War, discards the presiding Devil in favour of a mortal substitute, but still leaves open the possibility that, in Kilvert‘s words, ‘an angel satyr walks these hills’. Neither welcomed nor seduced by the satanic community, Rolts protagonist finds himself fascinated by the land, and thus drawn into unwilling participation. In colonial terms, these two narratives explore the frequently rehearsed dangers of ‘going native’ that lie at the core of, among other works, Kipling‘s ‘The Mark of the Beast’, Rider Haggard‘s She and Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness. A subject people is identified, but their strength either supernatural or merely cultural, the ability to preserve a distinctive and resistant way of life tests the limits of the perceiving power. These are, in a sense, Imperial fantasies for a post-colonial world, a reflexing of colonised culture back in upon the formerly colonising nation.
Postcolonial criticism is preoccupied for the most part with the implications and the cultural consequences of European interference in a vaguely delineated territory which could best be termed `the East‘. This statement, which might justifiably be regarded as being simplistic, provocative or even mischievous, must however be acknowledged as having some currency as a criticism of an occluded though still discernible impasse within an otherwise vibrant and progressive critical discourse. The postcolonial debate is, to borrow a phrase from Gerry Smyth, both characterised and inhibited by a `violent, dualistic logic‘ which perpetuates an ancient, exclusive dichotomy between the West and its singular Other. In practical terms, this enforces a critical discourse which opposes the cultural and textual power of the West through the textuality of Africa, Asia and the Far East rather than and at the expense of the equally colonised terrains of the Americas and Australasia. This is not to say that critical writings on these latter theatres of Empire do not exist, but rather to suggest that they are somehow less valued in a critical discourse which at times appears,to be confused by the potentially more complex diametrics implied in the existence of a North and a South.
This book explores how the nineteenth-century popular mind envisaged, elided and expressed both magnetism and hypnotism. It supplements and addresses the script of Mesmerized through access to a considerably more dense body of detail derived from the most widely disseminated publications in the British metropolitan and provincial press. The book contends that popular accounts of magnetic and hypnotic practice constitute a comparable form of evidence to those derived from clinical publications. It supplements mesmerism studies by conveying the widely disseminated cultural archive of images, reputations and fears through which the reading public may have approached the mesmeric fictions of its day. In emphasising the pervasive nature of a popular press, the book acknowledges the predispositions and prejudgements that may be embodied in a popular audience. The book begins with a discussion on how British readers perceived the work of Mesmer, his followers and his imitators on the Continent of Europe in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It charts the transition of mesmerism from its initial theatres of the salon and the drawing room into the regular hospital system. The book also presents a detailed reading of the Doctor's involvement with the London Mesmeric Infirmary, a well-funded institution patronised by the nobility which faded quietly into obscurity around 1870. Finally, it briefly charts the obscure final years of British mesmerism. The book is a methodological pointer as to how the other pseudosciences of the Victorian period could best be revealed in all their richness and variety.
The dome of thought examines how phrenology and phrenologists were represented in British daily newspapers, popular magazines and serious journals from the opening of the nineteenth century to its conclusion, before tracing the residual influence of the pseudoscience across the twentieth century and, surprisingly, into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The book opens with a consideration of how phrenology was deployed to explain literary celebrity in the Victorian period with particular attention being directed to the interpretation of the skulls of William Shakespeare and Robert Burns. The book then continues by recalling the manner in which the doctrine of phrenology was introduced to British culture in the early nineteenth century, and the manner in which the Continental activities of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gasper Spurzheim were reported. The lecture tour of Britain and Ireland subsequently undertaken by Spurzheim is discussed, and the book reassess the controversy which surrounded his encounter with the Scottish medical establishment in 1816. Spurzheim’s influence upon George Combe, the Scottish lawyer who was the popular face of British phrenology for much of the century, is then considered, as is the interface of phrenological thought with mesmerism in the work of John Elliotson. The final chapter of the book surveys the declining years of speculative and theoretical phrenology and its transformation into a primarily commercial activity under the particular influence of the American Fowler brothers. The conclusion surveys phrenology in the twentieth century, and its resurgence in political satires directed against Donald Trump.
In twentieth-century histories of devil's hypnotism, Franz Anton Mesmer is more often deployed in the manner of a rhetorical device than advanced in the guise of a historical figure. Hypnotism, even in the mid-nineteenth century, could still be conflated with magnetism in a way that is inconceivable in the twenty-first century. Mesmerism, as practised by Mesmer and his immediate disciples, and Perkinism as undertaken by all those who purchased the authentic tractors, shared a common commitment to medical technology. Reputedly the first indigenous practitioner of magnetism in the British Isles, John Bonnoit de Mainaduc, is usually dismissed in modern histories of hypnotism by way of a page or two of biographical description. Derek Forrest advances the tantalising suggestion that Mainaduc's vision of magnetism was shaped not by his sometime teacher Charles d'Eslon but by another of Mesmer's immediate disciples, Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puysegur.
James Braid is distinguished in his contribution to the popular consciousness of devil's hypnotism by a consistent scepticism that suggests more the professional tenor of Wakley than that of John Elliotson. Mesmerism is deployed as a post-traumatic analgesic rather than an anaesthetic in interventive surgery. However, it might be contended that James Esdaile's decision avoids any suggestion that a European might be subjected to the will, even temporarily, of a native Indian. The founding of a mesmeric infirmary in London in the 1840s was almost inevitable. Elliotson's expulsion from the wards and lecture theatres of University College Hospital in 1838 institutionalised hostility towards the claims of mesmerism in the established metropolitan hospitals. When Dr Esdaile professed to perform surgical operations without pain to patients by means of mesmerism, the Deputy-Governor of Bengal appointed a committee of medical officers to investigate the subject and superintend his experiments.
The obscure nature of British magnetism has shaped the manner in which historians of devil's hypnotism have regarded the relationship between the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of British magnetic practice. An eighteenth-century precursor to the many medical disciplines that were laying competing claims to the increasingly respectable title of hypnotism, the theoretical dogma of animal magnetism was controversial even at the time of the play's conception. Animal magnetism, or mesmerism as it was often called, was arguably an unavoidable linguistic correlative of any form of later trance-based curative, anaesthetic or diagnostic practice, whatever its formal appellation. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is a study of how the nineteenth-century popular mind envisaged, elided and expressed both magnetism and hypnotism.
In recent years, J. Sheridan Le Fanu's ghost-story collection In a Glass Darkly (1871) has been interpreted through its Gothic, medical and theological contexts. Yet the focus of these disparate literary and cultural discourses at the moment of death and – more pointedly – in the enactment of self-annihilation has never been explored. The first three narratives in the collection, ‘Green Tea’, ‘The Familiar’ and ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’, depict troubled, indeed persecuted, individuals – a diffident clergyman, a retired naval officer, a notorious and corrupt hanging judge – whose lives end prematurely following a personal contemplation of past actions known to themselves, but not to their contemporaries. This chapter will consider the deteriorating mental states of the Reverend Jennings and Captain Barton, the respective protagonists of ‘Green Tea’ and ‘The Familiar’, and the retrospective account which charts the final days of the unfortunate Mr Justice Harbottle. All three stories amply illustrate the complex relationship between introspection and self-destruction in the persecutory tradition of Gothic fiction.
The book ends with a coda which illustrates and analyses the enduring presence of phrenological imagery within a culture that retains little memory of the theory itself. Towards the close of his presidency, Donald Trump was on several occasions mocked by political cartoonists who purported to analyse and explain his behaviour and aspirations by mapping these out upon a recognisable phrenological map of his profile. The implications of this act demonstrate the continued presence of phrenology in a contemporary culture very different to that in which the pseudoscience originated.