Spiritualism in the Suburbs

The comedy of the Diary reaches a high point in the hilarious and shrewd account of a séance in Chapter 22. This gives us a light-hearted but informative insight into this curious late-Victorian cultural phenomenon. Spiritualism appealed especially to the aspiring middle classes, especially the women, and table-turning and other forms of séance were a popular domestic entertainment in the suburbs. Some of the written accounts (see the Theobald and Marryat samples on this site) are so Pooterish in their unconscious absurdity as to suggest the Grossmiths needed to invent very little.

Since George Grossmith’s wife cultivated spiritualists, doubtless both brothers would have been familiar in outline with the work of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, whose original membership included the cream of Britain’s intelligentsia. Their friend the Punch editor Frank Burnand was a spiritualist, and both brothers, though highly sceptical, had frequented, and in Weedon’s case organised, séances themselves.

Levitating a table

Spiritualism’s heyday in Britain was the 1870s, with the rise of mediums who claimed to produce materialised spirit forms. The best-known was Florence Cook, whose spectacular ability to raise the spirit “Katie King” was investigated by a famous chemist and academic, William Crookes. He staked his reputation on the phenomena being genuine. Cook’s credibility suffered in a well-publicised incident in January 1880, when another of her 'manifestations' was seized during a séance and proved to be Cook in her underclothes. This is probably the context to Pooter’s masterful boast that he “put an end to it years ago when Carrie, at our old house, used to have séances every night with poor Mrs. Fussters.” [Entry of 30 May. Ch.22]

However, the Diary is, yet again, accurate in capturing a revival of interest in the early 1890s. This was due in part to the visit to England in 1889-90 of Leonora Piper of Boston, a respectable woman whose career withstood all investigation over many years. She was a “mental,” not a materialising medium, and gave that form of Spiritualism a new credibility. At the same time the feats of another, more dubious Italian physical medium, Eusapia Paladino, were becoming known in England.

The trigger for the Pooters’ séances is Carrie’s reading There Is No Birth (“All the world is going mad over the book”). A best-seller of 1891 was Florence Marryat’s There Is No Death. Marryat, a woman of extraordinary energy, had been George Grossmith’s touring partner years before. She was the author of more than eighty books, mostly sensational romances for women; she also worked as an editor, journalist, and opera singer. A friend described her as “a tall striking-looking woman, ”given to slang and breezy expletives in her talk (Downey, 38-9). She was a committed spiritualist, and her book is a breathless account of the wonders she had personally experienced during twenty years in the séance room. It is hard to reconcile the image of this versatile woman with the absurdities of There Is No Death. Even now it is impossible to decide whether Marryat was idiotically gullible, subject to bizarre hallucinations, or simply a barefaced liar.[1]

The séance scenes are amusing and sharply observed in their own right, but they are also woven cleverly into the plot. They are given sharp point -- indeed, some drama -- by the unspoken fears Pooter and Carrie have about their son. On 29 April Pooter has his dream:

I suddenly remembered an extraordinary dream I had a few nights ago, and I thought I would tell them about it. I dreamt I saw some huge blocks of ice in a shop with a bright glare behind them. I walked into the shop and the heat was overpowering. I found that the blocks of ice were on fire. The whole thing was so real and yet so supernatural I woke up in a cold perspiration. [Entry of April 29. Ch.19]

Sure as fate, a couple of weeks later Lupin is sacked, and Pooter forms “terrible suspicions” about his son’s behaviour, especially when he finds he is friends with Murray and Daisy Posh again, and is spending much of his time there. By the end of the month, the insensitive but astute Gowing puts into words Pooter’s worst fears:

Gowing said: “I say, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for Lupin if old Posh kicked the bucket.”

My heart gave a leap of horror, and I rebuked Gowing very sternly for joking on such a subject. I lay awake half the night thinking of it--the other half was spent in nightmares on the same subject. [Entry of 30 May Ch. 22]

Just two days later Pooter is persuaded to take part in his first séance, and then on 3 June the table spells out the ominous sequence “NIPUL-WARN-POSH” and “we all thought of Mrs Murray Posh and Lupin.” [3 June Ch. 22]. What they are all thinking -- though Pooter dare not confess it even in his diary -- is that Lupin and Daisy Posh are lovers who are conspiring to murder the latter’s rich husband. It all comes to nothing, of course -- Pooter has got the wrong end of the stick, as usual -- but, just for a moment, grotesque shadows seem to be gathering, fed by ambiguous menaces from the Other World.

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[1] Hall (1962) notices that the Athenaeum (intentionally?) reviewed Marryat’s book in the column “Novels of the Week,” on 12 December 1891. For further details of her spiritualism see Black (1906), Eisenbud (1983) and, most usefully, Oppenheim (1985), 38-9.