Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library's
Victoria College Material Culture Internship Project by Sophia Arts
Material Culture
Haunted Objects and Book Paradoxes
It may seem counterintuitive for a material culture student to be studying Spiritualism. However, I reject the spiritualism/materialism dualism as a simplistic way of explaining Mesmerism and the Spiritualist movement. Spiritualism itself was both constitutive of and constituted by material culture. The books in this collection are more than just a material vessel for the ideas behind the movements, their covers and titles reveal how scholars and the public would have interacted with the ideas.
There is also something to be said about the role that objects played in both fictional and supposedly real ghost stories at the time. The dead most often communicated through domestic objects like tables. Spiritualism turned these common objects into supernatural ones capable of contacting the other world. Of course, this was one of the major critiques of the movement. If spirits had a way to communicate with us after death, why would they choose to do it through something as stupid as a table? However, tables were something nearly everyone would have owned except for the poorest of the poor. It represents the universal appeal of these movements, that one did not have to be an elite or specially chosen to interact with the dead. Rather, anyone could contact spirits from the ease of their living room.
Emma Hardinge Britten. Nineteenth Century Miracles, or, Spirits and their Work in Every Country of the Earth: A Complete Historical Compendium of the Great Movement Known as "Modern Spiritualism" . New York: Published by William Britten, 1884. PRC 00274
This project does not have an explicit thesis, since its purpose is to highlight a few books from the Psychical Research Collection. I did not go through the entire collection with a specific thesis question in mind, rather they were selected from the Flickr Collection my supervisor scanned. I choose books from the Flickr images based on a number of factors. Firstly, I wanted it to have a visually appealing cover or an interesting title. The audience for this project is the general public, and they are more likely to be interested if a book captures their attention visually. The next factor was the available resources on the book, author, or subject of the book, and whether or not there was an scanned version online. Most of the books in this collection are obscure and have little to no useful information written about them. There are also few academic resources relating to many of the topics I was researching. I did my best with the limits I had this semester but much of my basic information is from non-academic, but somewhat reliable sources. However, my analysis is from readings I’ve done on the topics or my own interpretation.
Anonymous. Confessions of a medium : with five illustrations. London : Griffith & Farran, 1882. PRC 00246
Throughout this project, I have learned how different it is to try and exhibit text rather than the material artifacts I am used to learning about in archaeology. The paradox is that text cannot be exhibited as something meaningful just by looking at it, it has to be read. Therefore, curators have to take a different approach than just describing the physical appearance of the artifact. The approach I decided to take was biographical and historical, not in the sense I wanted to create biographies of the authors, rather I wanted to explain the origins and life of the book itself. I did this by combining the histories of the ideas, authors, time periods, places, and impact of the books, along with incorporating connections to current culture. This approach has been criticized by scholars as too simplistic and demeaning by framing the artifact in the context of a human life. However, when I decided on this format for my final project, I wanted it to be accessible to everyone who wants to read it, not just the intellectual elite who care about things like poststructuralist and anthropocentric critique.