ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Spectacles and Spectres: The Experimental Spirit in Victorian Scientific Culture

• In Event: Science and Spiritualism: Current Perspectives and Future Directions

English Abstract

On the upper shelf in a storeroom at Tarling, where John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh maintained his private laboratory after resigning as head of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, sits a sealed glass flask. Inside the flask are a pencil and a sheet of paper. Rayleigh left the flask there to be observed following his death as an experiment in spiritualism. It offers a useful starting point for discussing experiments with, about, and on ghosts and spirits throughout the nineteenth century. For David Brewster, writing in the 1830s, ghosts, and the people who saw them, might be understood as experimental evidence for the mutual operations of eye and mind. William Crookes used electrical apparatus to offer experimental evidence for the presence or otherwise of spirits. Ghosts haunted Victorian experimenters with the spectre of experiment’s limits: what the senses – and who’s senses – could be trusted to show, and where sensation failed. Looking at these experimental ghosts offers ways of getting at how experimenters understood their practices as strategies for reliably generating spectacle, as ways of making the invisible visible.

Author

• Iwan Morus, Aberystwyth University