Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  It was soon discovered that some people were ‘mediums’, who could help the spirits manifest and communicate. Nor were enthusiasts slow to make use of mesmerism in this context, since mesmerism was believed to unlock precisely the kinds of latent faculties that might allow someone to be a medium. But the incredible excitement which spiritism generated in the States swamped mesmerism, and by the middle of the 1850s it was a dying art. Not that spiritism was alone in sounding the death knell of mesmerism, but since it occupied the same field, so to speak, it usurped the place of mesmerism in the hearts and minds of the public. At the same time, developments both at home and abroad were putting the final nails in the coffin of mesmerism. In the States La Roy Sunderland, for instance, came to much the same negative conclusions about magnetism as James Braid did in Britain, stressing that mesmeric passes and any ideas of magnetic fluid were of considerably less importance than the subject's suggestibility and the operator's will. Then before long mesmerism in America was pushed further into the background by New Thought, a revival of church-going Christianity, and the rise of psychology departments in universities, which claimed the study of the mind for themselves and denounced all fringe psychologies. A few, like William James, recognized the importance of mesmerism as a precursor of modern psychology, but most of the new researchers were too nervous of their position to be able to give it any credit at all.

  The final factor was the discovery, in 1842, of the anaesthetic properties of ether. J.V.C. Smith, writing in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal for 1847, celebrates the banishment of mesmerism and, incidentally, gives us a vivid picture of the practice of mesmerism in its heyday in the States:

  Before the discovery of the new use of ether, the country swarmed with traveling mesmerizers who lectured in every town and hamlet in New England – and made such high pretensions, that gentlemen who presumed to question the honesty of the vagabonds, made themselves quite unpopular with the vulgar multitude. It was one of the great boasts of the magnetizers that they could prepare the system, by their extraordinary manipulations, or by an active mental influence, so that the body would be insensitive to pain. Whole scores of silly girls were exhibited in public, on platforms, pricked with needles, had their toes crushed and teeth extracted, of all which they were represented to be wholly unconscious … Of late, however, the mighty boasters have disappeared … How can this falling off be explained by those noisy men and women who were offensively busy in propagating the marvels of mesmerism one year ago? A few remnant signs are observable about our city, like these: ‘mesmeric examinations here’, ‘all kinds of diseases investigated by an experienced clairvoyant’, etc. Which are a reproach to the intelligence of the age, to the good city in which they are to be seen, and a mortifying evidence of the ignorance that passes for wisdom.

  And so mesmerism passed into oblivion in the States after a brief history, stretching only from Poyen's tours at the beginning of the 1830s to the early 1850s.

  6

  ‘Mesmeric Mania’ in the United Kingdom

  The whereabouts of Franz Anton Mesmer in the 1790s are more or less unknown, with the result that various rumours have sprung up over the years. One is that he spent some time in England, but I'm sure this is false; at any rate, there is absolutely no evidence to support it. The first mesmerist known to have practised in England is a man called John Bell, who had learnt the art in Paris, and lectured in London and the provinces in the middle of the 1780s. Then in 1787 or 1788 one of d'Eslon's pupils, called Dr J.B. de Mainauduc, arrived from France and began to teach, at a very high price: he charged 25 guineas for a course of fifteen lectures. De Mainauduc had previously lived in Ireland, and had been a medical student in London.

  One way or another, then – through lectures or the translation of French pamphlets – magnetism was known in Britain before the nineteenth century, but it seems to have aroused little interest. Most notices of mesmerism at this time tend to be scornful, and to praise the common sense of the British people for not falling prey to such a silly fad, as their Continental neighbours had. A pamphlet written in 1790 by John Pearson, called A Plain and Rational Account of the Nature and Effects of Animal Magnetism in a Series of Letters, exemplifies the tone in which much of the attack was couched. For example, he imagines a politician using mesmerism to put an opponent to sleep ‘by the eloquence of his fingers’ or to throw him into a mesmeric crisis. If both political parties were to avail themselves of this, parliament ‘would exhibit a motley scene of members sound asleep, or rolling in convulsions’. Dr Haygarth's refutation of Perkinism (discussed in the previous chapter) also brought mesmerism into disrepute. There was hardly enough interest to sustain the country through the drying up of French sources during the Revolution. The practice of mesmerism effectively died out altogether, apart from a very few isolated spots of interest, and was only really revived around 1835. The revival was largely due to the work of J.C. Colquhoun, who translated the report of the favourable Parisian commission, and wrote books of his own on the subject, knowledge of which he had acquired in Germany. These books sowed the seeds for future interest, and were the first in a torrent of pamphlets and books in the later 1830s and 1840s. The most famous and widely circulated of these books was Facts in Mesmerism by the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798–1868). Townshend was a friend of Charles Dickens and other influential members of society, but it was the clarity of his book which enabled it to gain such popularity both at home and abroad.

  It was largely through his influence, as well as the undeniable interest of the subject, that mesmerism was on the lips of every learned person for the best part of twenty years in Britain. Consider just a few of the Victorian luminaries (I choose those whose names are still well known today) who are known to have dabbled or experimented in it, or at least commented on it: Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell from the world of literature; Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and Alfred Russel Wallace from the world of science; Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Richard Whately, Bishop of Dublin; and William Gladstone from politics.

  Mesmeric Performers and Their Social Implications

  But it was not only the written word which spread the gospel of mesmerism in early Victorian Britain. These books and the debate they aroused were restricted to the upper classes, to their salons and drawing rooms. A more important conductor of information to the masses was performance, by the ‘small army of mesmeric performers, whose lively presentations carried the controversy to a much wider audience than could be reached through publications’. These performers should be seen in the context of the popularity of accessible lectures on and demonstrations of scientific subjects; the best lecturers, like the sophists of fifth-century Greece, travelled from town to town, and their arrival was eagerly anticipated. Canny advertising helped too. Mesmeric performances were often billed as perfectly respectable – to forestall but also to arouse the idea that a male mesmerist imposing his will on a young lady subject might be at all naughty. In Britain, as elsewhere, the popularity of these itinerant lecturers on mesmerism was also assisted by the tradition of itinerant mountebanks, vendors of nostrums, who entertained with their sales pitches as well as offering their patent medicines.

  Phrenology was an especially popular subject. A host of phrenologists toured the country in the 1820s and 1830s and paved the way for mesmerism, since the two subjects seemed to complement each other. The claims of mesmerism about the powers of the human mind and will seemed credible in the light of the revelations of phrenology, and both were ideally suited for public performance: phrenological demonstrators could ‘read’ a head, while magnetizers could place someone in a trance. Phreno-mesmerism, the combination of phrenology and mesmerism, an American import, made an especially good display. Phrenologists assumed that different mental and emotional traits were located in different parts of the brain. The mesmerist, having put his subject into a trance, pointed at or touched the part
of the skull that concealed, say, Veneration – and lo and behold! The mesmerized subject began to pray! A skilled phrenologist would play a skull like an organ. The subject was taken very seriously, and was considered to be more scientific than mesmerism. There was even a proposal that leeches should be applied to the Larceny and Deceit areas of criminals’ brains in order to suck off their criminal tendencies. Phreno-mesmerism had its more serious side, then, and we may guess that many a lecturer will have turned serious at this point to expatiate upon the limitless blessings of the whole magnetic field, which became known simply as the New Science.

  The Frenchman Charles de Lafontaine (1803–88) was one of the earliest of the magnetic showmen. De Lafontaine was the black sheep of a noble French family, who wanted to become an actor before discovering that he had magnetic powers. Specializing in demonstrating hypnotic anaesthesia and deafness, he attracted large audiences in London (but less enthusiasm further north) when he toured in 1841 and 1842 with a young French boy who was his trance subject. His eccentric appearance – he dressed in black, and had a long, bushy beard and a piercing eye – and the dramatic tests he performed to prove the boy's insensibility to pain guaranteed him a ready audience, despite his difficulties with the English language. Spellbound by the subject's ability to have his arms pierced by pins without apparent pain, and to have a pistol shot ring out by his ear without hearing it, they were then introduced to some of the more arcane phenomena, such as clairvoyance, and lectured on the relationship between mind and body, and between operator and mesmerized subject. Once, a callous member of the audience, convinced that the whole thing was fraudulent, jabbed a scalpel into the boy's thigh to test his analgesia – and failed to elicit the cry of pain he had been expecting!

  But more usually the lecturer would be a native Englishman, either touring the country, or one who had established a name for himself in his home town. Some achieved national fame. Spencer Timothy Hall (1812–85), originally a Nottingham stocking-maker, toured all the major towns between Northampton and Edinburgh, attracting audiences of up to 3,000 people. For a few pennies, education and entertainment could be had by anyone, whether they were gentry or common folk. Names, now long forgotten, include H. Brookes, who toured the southern counties in 1843, and W. J. Vernon, who lectured before an audience of 1,000 at the Greenwich Literary Institution, and then took his show on the road in 1843 and 1844. He had an entourage, including a doctor and two children who were his mesmeric subjects. Dr Owens would lecture on the history and theory of mesmerism, while Vernon mesmerized the children and demonstrated their powers. The twelve-year-old girl lifted a 200-lb man and read while blindfolded; the boy specialized in playing cards while blindfolded. Vernon aroused considerable controversy, and encouraged it. Like other itinerant lecturers, some of his performances took the form of debates, with votes being taken by the audience at the end. Not a few of the mesmeric showmen used their displays also as a way to advertise their abilities, in order to attract private patients. Mesmerism in the 1840s and 1850s was not restricted to public halls, but could be found in the parlours of practising therapists and the drawing rooms of high society, where mesmeric conversaziones took place. But as the 1840s wore on, lecturing gave way almost entirely to performance, debate to showmanship focusing on the more dramatic and esoteric aspects of mesmerism.

  The prices charged for such performances kept them within the reach of less well-off people. Sometimes working-class men themselves, the showmen's venues were public meeting rooms and working-men's clubs, pubs and temperance halls. Part of the attraction of such displays was undoubtedly their social subtext. Since the model of magnetism was extreme inequality of will, such that the operator imposed his will on his subject, it was a short step from there, and one taken by many, to declare that the operator had moral and intellectual superiority to his subjects. In the 1830s this notion was perpetuated by the fact that the subject was invariably of lower social standing than the medical operator, but in the 1840s it became clear to people from all walks of life that they could, if they had the opportunity, mesmerize the local duke and duchess. What then became of their traditional superiority, if their will could be shown to be less than a steelworker's?

  One amusing case involved Jane, the wife of the renowned Scottish intellectual Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). Though famed for her intelligence and satirical wit, Jane seems to have been liable to the usual prejudices. The Carlyles, who had long been resident in London, arrived one day at a tea party to find a mesmerist at work, a man who, Jane later wrote to her uncle, dropped his ‘h's and showed his lower nature in his animal-like eyes. He was specifically claiming, in front of his upper-class audience, that mesmeric influence consisted of moral and mental superiority. Jane rose to the bait and challenged him to try to mesmerize her. He took hold of her hand and set to work.

  I looked him defiantly in the face as if to say, you must learn to sound your H's, Sir, before you can produce any effect on a woman like me! and whilst this or some similar thought was passing through my head – flash – there went over me from head to foot something precisely like what I once experienced from taking hold of a galvanic ball, only not nearly so violent. I had the presence of mind to keep looking him in the face as if I had felt nothing and presently he flung away my hand.

  So who won the contest? A dead heat, I'd say. And another high-society presence, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, echoed Jane Carlyle when she said that mesmerism is ‘advocated by women without principle, and lectured upon by men who drop their h's’.

  Historian Roger Cooter has linked mesmerism with one of the most important social movements of the time: ‘That in the nineteenth century mesmerism was perceived in Britain as a means to anti-establishment ideology and epistemology is nowhere better illustrated than through the adoption of mesmerism by Owenite socialists in the early 1840s after they had come into contact with phreno-mesmerism.’ They immediately recognized the humanistic possibilities of mesmerism, and realized that if it was left in the hands of the medical profession these possibilities would be lost. Over the next few years working-class people flocked to the Owenite Halls of Science to witness mesmerism. Owenism collapsed in the mid-1840s, but for a few years it was one of the major instruments of the perpetuation and popularization of mesmerism in Britain. Owenites believed that access to education would enable the working man to assert his own dignity and self-reliance, and they were looking for a subject that did not already come with bourgeois baggage. Mesmerism fitted the bill. First, it was democratic: it had not been pre-packaged for presentation to the lower classes and it appeared to involve active experimentation by everyone. Skill, not expensive equipment, was what was required, so that working-class men like Spencer Hall could become professional practitioners. Second, Owenites believed that character was determined by external circumstances, and mesmerism appeared to reinforce this idea since in the mesmeric state the subject could not act except at the suggestion of the operator. Third, mesmerism included a non-hierarchical spiritual doctrine.

  Mesmerists often aligned themselves with Protestants and nonconformists against Catholics, who were more wary about scientific progress. And mesmerists agitated in the pages of the Zoist, the most important British journal dedicated to the subject, for other reforms as well: they took a stand against animal experimentation and capital punishment, and supported reforms in education, sanitation, slum housing and prisons. Their reforming zeal sometimes became an attack on professionalism in general (especially, of course, on their enemies in the medical profession), and an espousal of the natural faculties of the working man. Spencer Hall wrote, for instance, in the first issue of his journal Phreno-Magnet (founded in 1843, the same year as John Elliotson's Zoist), that when rejected by the prejudices and snobbery of professionals, mesmerism would appear ‘in quarters least expected – among the humble and unconventional masses of the country – those whose only facilities for receiving or dispensing information were the passive faculties with which Nature herself had f
urnished them for the purpose … It remained for a Mechanics’ Institution to be the first large conventional body that would dare to have its name identified with Phreno-Magnetism.’ Mesmerism was sometimes seen as a working-class invasion of the hallowed halls of medicine, entry into which was otherwise restricted to those with the money to pay for their education.

  But the greatest impulse to reform came from the educated upper classes, and was therefore often rather paternalistic in attitude. Elliotson, the supreme advocate of mesmerism in Britain, himself criticized Spencer Hall as not being sober enough to be a true champion of the New Science. Others, like Lord Morpeth and Lord Adare, still assumed the whole social hierarchy as a matter of divine right. Like most Victorian reformers, their target was the lower classes: they needed saving from themselves, and these Whig peers felt they knew just how to go about it. Schemes were hatched, for instance, to cut down the rate of divorce and domestic violence by allowing only those who were phrenologically matched to marry. Philanthropically, they dispensed mesmeric cures in the same way that others were dispensing temperance tracts. It is noticeable how (apart from mavericks like Hall) mesmerism throughout the nineteenth century largely conformed to social expectations: landowners hypnotized their labourers in France, men hypnotized women, the educated hypnotized the uneducated. Lord Adare became president of the Bristol Mesmeric Institute, while Lord Morpeth extended his sway further than Castle Howard when he was chosen as one of the governors of the London Mesmeric Infirmary, which ran from 1849 until the middle of the 1860s, with two permanent mesmerists on its staff, W.J. Vernon and Theodysius Purland. Although it may be easy now to deride such well-meaning mesmeric philanthropy, it was possible to do so even then, as when the North of England Magazine wittily suggested that landlords could feed the poor by entering into a state of mesmeric sympathy with them, such that when the landlords ate the poor would taste the food!