Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  A sign of this trend was the successful breach of the Stationers’ Company's monopoly on astrological publishing. Until 1775, the almanac trade remained firmly in the hands of the Company, which continued to exploit it in the old-fashioned way, by strictly controlling the compilation, printing, distribution and sales of its most lucrative wares. The annual profits from almanac sales had risen from a few hundred pounds in the early eighteenth century to around £2,000 in the last decades of the century. In 1775, the Company was stunned when the Court of Common Pleas ruled that it did not have an exclusive right over the printing of almanacs. Following this legal setback, it failed in its attempt to persuade Parliament to limit the damage by allowing no further almanac publishers, although it managed to raise the stamp tax on paper so as to discourage further competition.21

  The Company also responded to the loss of its privileges in more positive ways. Almost at once, it increased the level of advertising for its almanacs in newspapers. After 1786, the Company paid Charles Hutton, a respected professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, to compile the astronomical information for its almanacs, at a handsome annual salary of 130 guineas.22 The same almanac titles, however, remained in circulation throughout the late eighteenth century, although some of them were not particularly popular. Among the dozen or so book almanacs published by the Company in this period, only one was extending its sales and making a healthy profit: Vox Stellarum, first compiled by Francis Moore and later famous as Old Moore's Almanac. Since at least 1768, Vox Stellarum had been selling far more copies than all the other book almanacs combined. In 1800, for example, it reached sales of almost 340,000, compared to 71,000 for its competitors. The steady rise of Vox Stellarum occurred in spite of inflation which drove up the cost of a copy from 9 pence in 1781 to 16 pence in 1798.

  Why was Vox Stellarum a runaway bestseller among late eighteenth-century almanacs? While its rivals had been largely purged of astrological or occult material, and filled instead with puzzles, poetry or general information, Vox Stellarum remained a traditional source of predictions and was “profound in occult science,” as William Hone later wrote, disparagingly.23 Every issue contained planetary directions, short prognostications, a table showing “The Dominion of the Moon in Man's Body,” essays on the main events of the upcoming year (often supported by quotations from Nostradamus) and “An Hieroglyphic, alluding to these present Times,” offering what amounted to a graphic prophecy. The 1777 volume, for example, contained a depiction of “a City in Flames” and the advice “that Perjury, Rebellion, Treachery, &c. make Nations to mourn, as surely as they do Families or private Persons.”24 Britain was already fighting a rebellion in the American colonies, so this was hardly a revelation, but the promise to divulge secrets through a “Hieroglyphic” doubtless added to the mysterious allure of the almanac.

  Vox Stellarum was compiled by a genuine astrologer, Henry Andrews, who was paid a measly £20 for his work in 1800, and according to his son never received more than £25. A pirated version of his famous almanac appeared for a few years after 1789, which further testifies to its success. The Stationers’ Company was not eager to create competition for Andrews, and when Thomas Jackson of Newcastle, Staffordshire, who styled himself “Student and practticer [sic] in Astrology,” proposed to them a new almanac containing “Astrological Observations” in 1773, he apparently received no encouragement.25 Vox Stellarum would remain the leading source of astrological predictions until well into the nineteenth century, eliciting scandalized comments from respectable printers and publishers, who denounced the Stationers as “the only Company that gives bread to conjurors.”26

  Who read almanacs in the late eighteenth century? The Stationers’ Company itself provided a clue in presenting its complaint against competitors, arguing that their criminal actions would endanger simple rural souls: “as most of the Almanacks are Sold in the Country, Sedition and Scandal will hereafter inflame the Minds of many Persons who now seldom see a News Paper or a Magazine.”27 The snobbish inference is reminiscent of the prosecuting counsel's question at the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial in 1960: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” It reveals, however, a fundamental point. The rural market was crucial to almanac sales, as is suggested by the number of provincial newspapers in which the Company advertised its wares after 1774. Country folk may indeed have been the main audience for Vox Stellarum, although there is no reason to think that it sold poorly in London or other large towns, as it was also advertised in Manchester, Bristol and Leeds. The Scottish market, however, had been largely abandoned, and advertising space was purchased in only one Aberdeen newspaper.28 Through almanacs, the commercialized London book trade of the late eighteenth century was reaching into the far corners of the English, if not of the Scottish, realm.

  Sentimentality and Terror

  Commercialism was not the only force that transformed the occult. The last forty years of the eighteenth century witnessed a cultural trend towards the expression of sentiment in literature and the visual arts. This had its roots in the evangelical revival, as well as in the enlightened validation of natural rather than artificial feelings. The notion that everyone shared the same “sensibility” was built on George Cheyne's studies of the nervous system and David Hartley's theories of human nature. To be sure, one was not supposed to give way to vulgar passions: sensibility was governed by inherent goodness and benevolence. The acceptable sentimental repertoire limited itself to what was noble and uplifting: love of God, family, country, humanity. “Sentiment,” wrote an anonymous novelist in 1785, “is a refinement of moral feeling, which animates us in performing the dictates of Reason, and introduces many graces and decorums to the great duties of Morality.”29

  Sentimental writing had a connection with mysticism from its inception. Samuel Richardson, author of the novels Pamela and Clarissa, was a friend of Dr Cheyne and printed works by both William Law and John Byrom. Clarissa has even been interpreted as an illustration of Philadelphian principles, with the heroine corresponding to Divine Wisdom, or what Jane Lead called the Virgin Sophia.30 Pious and sentimental readers could also find much to admire in Henry Brooke's novel of 1766, The Fool of Quality. The complicated—indeed, interminable—plot concerns the son of an aristocrat who is separated from his family and raised virtuously in a poor farming household. The rambling storyline is punctuated with uplifting incidents of benevolence, as well as with philosophical, moral and political disquisitions, which reflect Brooke's attachment to the theology of William Law and Jacob Boehme. In one exchange, “the Author” is asked, “Do you think there is any such thing in nature as spirit?” His reply, which would have delighted Law, is: “I know not that there is any such thing in nature as matter.” He then elaborates a spiritual version of pantheism: “If one infinite spirit, as is said, fills the universe, all other existence must be but as the space where he essentially abides or exists.” The divine spirit alone preserves the continuity of the universe.31 In spite of his distrust of Boehme, the evangelist John Wesley was so entranced by this novel that he edited a second edition with the assistance of the novelist's nephew, an artist also named Henry Brooke. Wesley omitted “great part of the Mystic Divinity, as it is more philosophical than Scriptural,” but he praised the novel because “it continually strikes at the heart.”32

  The characters in sentimental novels are ordinary human beings, but by the 1760s, critics were calling for more otherworldly stuff. William Duff, who when he was not writing about culture served as a Scottish Presbyterian minister, suggested that the creation of “supernatural characters” like witches and fairies comprised “the highest efforts and the most pregnant proofs of truly ORIGINAL GENIUS.”33 It was precisely because they could not be accepted as real that they were so difficult to make convincing. Duff became a great advocate for the poems of Ossian, supposedly written by a Celtic bard but actually composed by the Scottish writer James Macpherson from ancient fragments.
Although the poems are full of omens, ghosts and spirits of nature, the central figures in them are human heroes. Macpherson actually took a sceptical view of their occult content, even condemning “the ridiculous notion of second sight.”34

  Reticence about the occult began to change in the 1760s. The sentimental novel was succeeded by the genre known as the Gothic, in which supernatural events were frequent and the reader was induced by them to feel apprehension, fear and even terror rather than doubt or revulsion. The Gothic novel owed its genesis in part to a strange incident of 1762, that of the so-called “Cock Lane Ghost.” Elizabeth Parsons, a twelve-year-old girl living in a house in West Smithfield, London, claimed that her room was haunted by the spirit of a former lodger, who communicated through various tappings and scrapings the message that she had been poisoned by her lover. The episode contained several of the main elements of later Gothic fiction, including a young female protagonist whose body became a testing ground for the supernatural as she suffered fits and participated in seances in her bedroom. Methodists, eager for signs of spiritual intervention in human affairs, upheld the girl's testimony, while the general public flocked to the house, seeking edification or simply amusement. More surprisingly, the London literary community became entranced by the goings-on. Samuel Johnson conducted an investigation that produced no sign of the supernatural. His friend the poet, dramatist and sentimental novelist Oliver Goldsmith wrote an account of the affair, debunking the girl's story. Goldsmith acknowledged “the credulity of the vulgar,” but claimed that the public had known all along that it was a trick. In the end, Parsons's father, mother and aunt were imprisoned for the imposture, with her father suffering the further indignity of being pilloried.35

  A century earlier, this would probably have been treated as a case of demonic possession, but by 1762, in London at least, witches were no longer convincing sources of supernatural power. The situation was clearly different in Bristol, where in the same year a case of fits and visions among the three daughters of a local innkeeper led to rumours of witchcraft among the local Methodist community.36 Popular rather than learned phenomena, ghosts were dramatically interesting to a London public that was used to theatrical representations of wonderful events. The “miraculous” British victories in the Seven Years’ War, which was just coming to an end, may have increased the general sensitivity of Londoners to omens and portents. Some, however, were sceptical from the first, including Horace Walpole, son of the former prime minister, who on a visit to Cock Lane was acutely aware of the extent to which the experience resembled a theatre performance. He described it as “not an apparition, but an audition.” He half-expected to see “rope dancing between the acts,” and he commented wittily that “they told us, as they would at a puppet show, that it [the ghost] would not come that night till seven in the morning.”37

  Two years later, Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel. In the preface, the author (who initially maintained anonymity) apologized for the occult elements in his medieval Italian tale:

  Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times, who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but he must represent his actors as believing them.38

  As he claimed to have translated the story from an Italian book found among the papers of a Catholic family, these excuses may have been designed to avert accusations of “popish superstition.” The book did so well, however, that Walpole claimed the second edition as his own work. A new preface compared the plot to the work of Shakespeare, a national icon and safely Protestant author, describing the novel as “an attempt to blend two types of romance, the ancient and the modern.”39 Walpole had accomplished a remarkable literary feat: he had made the occult acceptable by “modernizing” it.

  Yet the supernatural events of The Castle of Otranto—including an enormous helmet that falls from the sky, a walking, talking ancestral portrait and a gigantic foot—are silly enough, even by eighteenth-century standards, to make the reader wonder whether the author took them any more seriously than he did the Cock Lane ghost. They are essentially stage effects, designed to cause wonderment, but not belief, on the part of readers. They remind us of how magic had been kept alive on the English stage, even when it was disappearing from print. The witches and ghosts in Shakespeare's Macbeth had been made more striking, although perhaps not any scarier, by William Davenant's 1664 revisions to the play, which added dialogue, dances and songs.40 Witches and magicians were also frequently seen in the operas written by George Frideric Handel.41 These supernatural elements added to the unreal or fairytale quality of the operas; in spite of the complicated machinery of smoke, trap doors and hidden wires deployed to make them astonishing as spectacles, they were not meant to be believed. The occult happenings in The Castle of Otranto operate in the same way.

  The idea that fear could be a pleasurable emotion was typical of the late eighteenth century; it would not have made any sense to an audience of the mid-seventeenth century. Perhaps this was because the late eighteenth-century public had fewer things to be genuinely afraid of, although that explanation seems dubious. While plague and famine were less threatening, war, disease, infant mortality and sudden death would have seemed just as familiar in 1760 as in 1660. More likely, the public had developed the cultural ability to discern between different types of fear, by separating those that arose from the prospect of actual harm from those that involved no bodily danger. This capacity may have been more pronounced among urban audiences, who were more exposed to the theatre and to novels, than among labouring folk in the countryside. The sense of control over fear was analysed by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in an essay of 1773, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror”:

  This is the pleasure constantly attached to the excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects. A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of “forms unseen, and mightier far than we,” our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy co-operating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.42

  Although Barbauld suggests that these reactions are innate, her examples imply that they have been learned through exposure to “strange and unexpected events.”

  The pleasure derived from terror may have been particularly acute among women readers. The rising level of female literacy in the eighteenth century spurred the growth of types of publications that were designed, at least in part, to suit the tastes of women, among them Gothic novels.43 The fear experienced by female characters in these works is often connected with the possibility of rape and the loss of an honourable reputation—a real enough scenario, but one that could create horrified excitement in readers of both sexes, who trusted that deliverance would arrive for the beleaguered heroine in the end. Moreover, by recounting tales that transgressed moral as well as rational boundaries, Gothic novels could be subversive of contemporary gender values, even if they usually returned to stable social and personal relations in the final pages.

  Women were prominent among Gothic novelists. The best known of them, Ann Radcliffe, author of the celebrated Mysteries of Udolpho, was known for employing the device of “the explained supernatural,” where an apparently occult event is ultimately revealed as having natural causes. Her religious background as a rational Unitarian may account for this approach.44 Nevertheless, Radcliffe acknowledged a spiritual aim in her use of occult themes, even if she almost always debunked them. They stirred up terror, which for her was a sublime emotion, and quite distinct from horror—the former “expands the soul
, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” while the latter “contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.”45 The distinction was shared by other writers, and its existence complicates attempts to interpret, not just Gothic novels, but all writings of the late eighteenth century that refer to supernatural events. Were they meant to be taken as possible, or as ways of “expanding the soul” through exercising the imagination?

  The two Gothic writers whose works are most confusing in this respect are William Beckford and Matthew “Monk” Lewis. Younger and wilder than either Walpole or Radcliffe, they treated occult phenomena with an awed reverence that does not allow an easy assessment of how they should be judged. Both were the offspring of Jamaican planter families, whose fortunes were based on the real horror of slavery. One of the richest men in England, Beckford seems never to have regretted the human misery from which his vast wealth was derived. The son of a prominent Tory politician who died when he was ten years old, Beckford was dominated by his mother, whose authority he apparently resented. He was thought to be obsessed with the supernatural from a young age, although the extent of his real interest in magic is questionable.46 He spent much time in Switzerland and Italy, and is supposed to have been initiated into a Masonic lodge in France. Beckford became known for extravagance, especially after holding a lavish coming-of-age party in 1781 at his estate in Wiltshire, followed by an equally splendid Christmas party for which his country house was decorated by the well-known theatrical designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. Three years later, he caused a public scandal when he either horsewhipped or sodomized (or both) an aristocratic young man with whom he was enamoured. Forced to go abroad, where his first wife died in childbirth, Beckford was shocked when, against his wishes, the literary scholar Samuel Henley published an English translation of Vathek, an “Eastern tale” that Beckford had written in French.