Talking to the Dead: Spiritualism, Haunted Historians and the Gendered Imagination during the 'long nineteenth century'

This paper explores how late 19^th- and early 20^th-century authors used spiritualism and occult practices in their work as historians, biographers, and social scientists.

 During the fin de siècle, Anglo-Americans sensed that women, more than men, could access the spirit-world thanks to their sensitivity, maternal instincts, and religious fervor. In practice, female mediums typically claimed to help others talk to departed children, spouses, and kin during séances and occult transactions.

 This paper examines how psychical contact with the dead was not simply a private, personal practice, but was also part of the historical method for both female and male authors. Some, including the teachers Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846-1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863-1924), centered their entire projects on occult transactions—in their case, seeing the ghost of Marie-Antoinette at Versailles. Others, including the San Francisco popular historian and novelist, Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948), recounted how she had dreams and a sense of hauntings that helped her interpret her archival materials on the history of California, or the unknown family background of Alexander Hamilton; sometimes, these night-time visits even led her to follow new archival leads.

 Finally, the paper examines the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and others at the Society for Psychical Research in assessing spiritualists’ historical claims. Despite their enthusiasm for the spiritualist historical method, these men challenged female authors’ psychical claims, believing they resulted from misapprehension, gullibility, wishful thinking, and other “irrational” traits.