England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare

about the arms and head’, telling witnesses ‘to take the lamp out of her hand’, while Harriet Mills, a fifteen-year-old servant, was found in the wash-house, ‘exclaiming repeatedly, “Oh! Oh!”… her clothes being all in flames. She was told to lie down so that a rug could be put over her, but was too frightened to do as she was instructed …’ Other victims of this incendiary epidemic included Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters, who perished in 1871 when one’s dress caught fire and the other attempted to put out the flames.

      A sense of social justice underpinned Human Nature. One article on ‘Life in the Factories’ attacked Victorian philanthropy; noting that a Bradford factory had recently given a ‘substantial knife and fork tea’ for their workers, its author complained that ‘No slave is so helpless as the factory operative. He is doomed to privations, of which the savage negro cannot complain, viz., want of fresh air and sunshine. Till the radical defects of this iniquitous system are altered, we feel that gluttonous suppers and “mutual admiration meetings” are only opiates to induce the victims to submit to further injury, and thus postpone the day of readministration and retribution.’ It was no coincidence that Bradford was a stronghold of spiritualism, or that in 1851 the philanthropic Titus Salt was moved to build his industrial utopia, Saltaire, on the outskirts of the town, where my own father was born in 1915.

      In publishing such critiques, Burns allied spiritualism to a radical agenda, and addressed other means of social control. In ‘The Vaccination Humbug’, he examined the harmful effects of compulsory immunisation – medicine as violation – and quoted Richard Gibbs of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League: ‘I believe we have hundreds of cases here, from being poisoned with vaccination, I deem incurable … We strongly advise parents to go to prison, rather than submit to have their helpless offspring inoculated with scrofula, syphilis, and mania …’ Diet was another issue, and although Human Nature did not go as far as Fruitlands, it exhorted the readers to abandon ‘alcoholic liquors and hot stimulants, such as tea, coffee &c … and substitute the juicy fruits which will at once remove a heavy tax from the pocket of the individual, and promote health, happiness, and long-life’.

      In this era of mass production, questions of consumption and abstinence defined the new age. Burns published a report on The Cases of the Welsh Fasting Girl & Her Father. On the Possibility of LONG CONTINUED ABSTINENCE FROM FOOD, a bizarre account of Sarah Jacobs, the daughter of a Carmarthenshire farmer, who had gone without food for two years. Burns had visited the girl at her parents’ farm, where he found her lying in a bed covered with books and pamphlets. ‘In length she measures about 4 feet 8 inches. She has not the power of moving her body [and] has fits several times a day,’ he noted. In 1869 the case was investigated by a committee which appointed four nurses from Guy’s Hospital, under whose scrutiny the girl died. ‘Her death was a triumph for science, which took no account of the influence of these four death-watchers upon a frail hysterical girl living on the very precipes of this life, whom a puff of air or of feeling threw into convulsions.’ Her parents were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; the judge decided that their daughter must have been fed in the previous two years, ‘and that when she was watched she of course died’. It seemed a drastic manner in which to prove the fact. Citing instances of living toads found in rocks, Burns proposed a number of reasons as to how Sarah had been able to survive, including the possibility of absorbing nutrition through the skin and from organic particles in the air.

      Human Nature’s -isms would not be out of place in a modern Sunday supplement. Subscribers could turn to fiction by Eliza W. Farnham (The Ideal Attained), pick up hints on the conservation of fuel, and read essays on ‘Walt Whitman; or, the Religion of Art’ and extracts from Thomas Lake Harris’s poetry, ‘Music from the Spirit Shore’. They might wonder WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE POISONED BECAUSE WE ARE SICK, and under the heading PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA, discover titbits on ‘Mysterious Photographs on Window Panes’ in Milan, Ohio, or an account of a nine-year-old negro girl from Kentucky able to memorise entire pages from books. But Human Nature’s most important function was to assemble news of spiritualist progress in places as far apart as Liverpool, Paris and America, from where J. H. Powell reported on Vineland, a ‘modern miracle of some 10,000 human beings, who are solving the question of colonisation with spirit. Six years ago, it was a houseless tract of 50 square miles, mostly covered with timber; now, a considerable part of it is a blooming township. Here are congregated men and women of intellect’, among them Robert Dale Owen, himself a committed spiritualist. Meanwhile, the English medium J. J. Morse attended a psychic festival of 15,000 spiritualists at Lake Pleasant, complete with displays of animals, ‘alive and stuffed’, and a tent for ‘mesmeric entertainments’.

      But if there was a particular ‘science’ to which Human Nature was drawn, it was spirit photography. The capture of psychic manifestations in photographic emulsion was an exciting development; and in the excitement, it seems, rational observers suspended their critical faculties. Human Nature incorporated actual examples – all the more unreal for being stuck onto stiff, pale cream pages and outlined in thin red frames like photographs in a Victorian album. Yet their glossy physical presence still speaks of implicit faith: someone fixed them there; someone believed in them.

      Particularly favoured was the work of Mr Hudson, of 2 Kensington Park Road, London, the first of the English spirit photographers. One of a pair of his pictures in the September 1874 edition displayed ‘the baby sister of Dr Speer … and the shadowy form in the right front is the mother of the infant …’ The author of the accompanying article, ‘MA (Oxon)’, was William Stainton Moses, an Oxford graduate, Anglican minister and himself an accomplished medium. ‘I have written before how this child-spirit has persistently manifested at our circle almost from its formation … She passed from this sphere of life more than fifty years ago at Tours, being then only seven months old. Her joyous little message, “Je suis heureuse, très heureuse”, was the first indication we had of her presence …’ Yet to our eyes this cloth-swaddled figure is quite obviously a china doll and looks more like baby Jesus in a school Nativity than the shade of a dead infant.

      Photography was still a young and plastic art, and to those untutored in its sly deceptions, the camera could not lie. Spirit photographs seemed to demonstrate the survival of the soul, and a happy survival at that. It was as if the camera were able to peer into another dimension. The immortalising power of photography had been taken one step further, and in such pictures, Human Nature revealed the extent of the desire to believe, a thirst for hard proof satisfied by cotton-wool fantasies. Encoded with an occult unconsciousness, these images prefigured the surrealist constructions of the next century, the uncanny imagined in silver nitrate. Yet their moral instability – their essential untruthfulness – turns such putative glimpses of eternity into mere psychic pornography; glossy, titillating images carefully concealed within the pages of the periodical. One print by W. H. Mumler of Boston, a jewellery engraver and pioneer of American spirit photography, shows Mrs Abraham Lincoln (whose husband was a believer, as was Wild Bill Hickok) with the assassinated president looking over her: ‘… The evidence for the genuineness of Mr Mumler’s photographs, and for the integrity of Mr Mumler himself, is as strong as can well be conceived.’ But in 1871 Mrs Lincoln was declared insane and Mr Mumler was later prosecuted for witchcraft in New York.

      In its acceptance of such pictures, Human Nature was betrayed by its own innocence. Opening the pages of the journal now, I look at these images with a childish sense of revelation and disappointment: in an ironic reversal of their intended function, they resonate with charlatanism and fakery, undermining my