Historical Tidbits: Spiritualism
Daily Diary, August 24, 2022, Day 723:
I listened to a https://shedunnitshow.com/knockknock/ podcast yesterday morning about how spiritualism (the belief that people could communicate with the dead) was used in Golden Age Detective Fiction. I highly recommend this particular episode, I found it fascinating.
I was particularly interested in this topic because, for the past couple of weeks, I have been skimming through the books I used over ten years ago to do my research for my second Victorian San Francisco Mystery novel, Uneasy Spirits.
What struck me about the information in the podcast was the way that WWI, with its high death rate, increased the interest in Spiritualism in the United Kingdom. Not only was this something I didn’t know before, but it also fit what I did know about the rise of this movement in the US.
There is fairly universal agreement among historians that numerous factors came together to set the stage for the Spiritualist movement, including: the rise of a new urban industrial economic system that disrupted traditional rural society; the emergence of a new national transportation system of roads, canals and railroads; and the impact of the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival movement that challenged traditional Protestant Calvinist beliefs and precipitated a period of reform that encompassed everything from vegetarianism and the temperance movement to the abolition and women’s rights movement in America.1
But one of the most important precipitating factors appears to be the high death rate of the period, particularly the infant mortality rate.
It is estimated that life expectancy in the United States 1860 was under 40 years (it had actually declined from the 18th century), and the rate of infant mortality in the US in the 19th century was horrific. It is estimated that in 1845, over 41 % of children under the age of 5 died that year, and the rate didn’t go below 30 % until 1890.2
As a wave of revivals started sweeping the nation, portraying hell in vivid images, many Americans began to question the doctrine of predestination (that the individual had no say in whether or not they would escape that hell-fire) and to look for assurance that their loved ones had escaped this awful fate. This assurance is what Spiritualism offered them.
Over and over, the recent deaths of loved ones played a role in determining who stepped forward to announce that they could communicate with the dead as well as who were willing to sit in a darkened room, waiting to speak to their dearly departed.
The desire for this communication increased even more during and after the Civil War. It is estimated that over 760,000 men died because of this war.3 Not surprising, as with the spread of Spiritualism in the United Kingdom after WWI, this caused an even greater desire to be assured that loved ones were in a better place.
The three Fox sisters who are credited with starting the Spiritualist movement in the United States, might never have made their mark in history if they weren’t good friends with prominent Rochester New York Quakers, Amy and Isaac Post, a couple who had recently lost their five-year-old daughter, Matilda. In 1848, the Posts, who knew the Fox sisters, invited them into their home, and were delighted when they reported that they had spoken to that daughter, as well as a son who had died years before, and that both were happy in their surroundings.
Convinced of the reality of these sisters’ ability to act as “mediums” between the living and the dead, the Posts started to host seances, inviting their friends to attend. Eventually, they hired a hall that could seat 400 people for three nights in order to let a committee of skeptics test the three girls. The girls “passed,” these tests and the word of their abilities spread.
While there were many men who eventually made their living speaking in public as trance mediums and holding seances, women played an unusually important role in the movement in both capacities. Often it was a young girl in a family who first claimed to speak with the spirits of the dead, and over time, the majority of those who advertised as mediums and clairvoyants, holding private seances, were women.
This has been explained by the fact that Spiritualism emerged just as a new ideal for women, was being shaped in society among the urban middle classes. Instead of being portrayed as the evil daughters of Eve, women were increasingly described as more naturally pious and pure than men, and therefor charged with the responsibility of maintaining the purity of the family and domestic life. Who better than these women, described as Angels in the Home, to communicate with the loves ones who had died and passed on and now resided in a heavenly place that Spiritualists often referred to as Summerland.
Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Ann Braude, Beacon Press, 1989; Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America, Molly McGarry, University of California Press, 2008; The Other Side of Salvation; Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience, John B. Burescher, Skinner House Books, 2004.
Fascinating, I've researched spiritualism and how it got started as well. I enjoyed reading this article.