Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (26 page)

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!

In other words, in a social context the reformist challenge of mesmerism was not strong enough to overcome the normal Victorian prejudices and assumptions. The chain of volition went one way only, downhill. As a popular ballad of the 1840s has it:

The new Mesmeric sleep is by

Phrenologists directable.

They oft begin it on a boy,

Amusing the respectable.

Upon the rich it comes not o'er,

They're not to it susceptible.

They only Mesmerize the poor

To please the more respectable.

While many mesmerists
felt
themselves to be radicals, then, and even to be ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity on earth, they did not offer a strong enough challenge to the Victorian status quo. In other contexts too the reformist possibilities of mesmerism were too ambiguous to take root. In therapy, for instance, it actually impeded reform. Through the introduction of instruments such as the stethoscope and methods such as percussion, Victorian doctors began to have the means to directly examine their patients' bodies – but only if they could get them to remove their clothes, a breach of propriety which was repugnant to many. Mesmerism, however, with its emphasis on intro-vision and clairvoyant diagnosis, was safer and more modest in this respect. Feminists too were divided. Mary Wollstonecraft denounced London magnetizers in 1792 in her
Vindication of the Rights of Women
as ‘lurking leeches' who invoked supernatural powers to exploit the credulity of ignorant women; but Harriet Martineau and Mary Grove Nichols defended mesmerism as one way for women to reclaim the rights to their own bodies.

So the normal inequalities of Victorian social life remained in place, largely unchallenged by mesmerism. Men were superior to women and children, the upper classes to the lower; this superiority is displayed by a greater strength of moral will, and will is the all-important instrument of a magnetizer. ‘By the exercise of this influence the operator can often overcome the voluntary power of the subject; that which he wills, the subject does … It seems as if there were two human organisms and but one human will whilst the subject is under the influence.' Since this was the usual assumption in the nineteenth century about the way mesmerism worked, doubts about the morality of the enterprise were quickly translated from the Continent to Britain. Could one man take over the will of another? Could he force himself sexually on an otherwise reluctant woman? At one point in Peter Carey's excellent novel
Jack Maggs
, which is set in 1837, a hypnotist's lover feels herself aroused by his control of a dangerous subject, as if submission were in itself sexual. To take just one of many contemporary examples, although the writer Elizabeth Gaskell had very little to do with mesmerism, she was of course aware of it and what was being said about it, and it was precisely this aspect, the possibility of sexual dominance, that worried her and stopped her from investigating further.

The operator exerts his will; because he is healthy, he transmits his health to the sick person (or whatever the operation may be). He can use his will to mesmerize a suitably sensitive subject from a distance. Even the passes a mesmerist makes with his hands were no longer presumed, except by die-hard magnetists, to do anything mechanically, but were simply means for the operator to focus his will and project his influence. Edward Bulwer-Lytton makes amusing hay with the idea of dominance in
A Strange Story
, to give an impression of one of his characters:

Electro-biology was very naturally the special entertainment of
a man whom no intercourse ever pleased in which his will was not imposed upon others. Therefore he only invited to his table persons whom he could stare into the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that beef was lamb, or brandy was coffee, according as he willed them to say. And, no doubt, the persons asked would have said anything he willed, so long as they had, in substance as well as in idea, the beef and the brandy, the lamb and the coffee.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was only following all this through to its logical extension when in his 1888 short story ‘John Barrington Cowles' he said: ‘If there was one man in the world who had a very much more highly developed will than any of the rest of the human family, there is no reason why he should not be able to rule over them all, and to reduce his fellow-creatures to the condition of automatons.' To Conan Doyle's credit he went against the nineteenth-century trend in making the evil and strong-willed mesmerist of his story a woman. And at least one novel of the time – Isabel Romer's
Sturmer: a tale of mesmerism, to which are added other sketches from life
, published in London in 1841 – gave a mesmerist the power not just to seduce women, but even to kill.

Sexual fears were not helped by those like the eminent physician (unnamed in my source) who in delivering the Harveian Oration said: ‘The impostors called mesmerists were the especial favourites of those persons, both male and female, in whom the sexual passions burn strongly either in secret or notoriously. Decency forbids me to be more explicit.' Similar prurient attacks occurred also in the Victorian quarterly reviews, the arbiters of upper-middle-class opinion, such as
Blackwood's
. But then the eccentric Baron Dupotet, who was indirectly responsible for much of the British passion for mesmerism, wouldn't have helped matters either by likening the build-up of magnetic force in an operator to a (male) orgasm:

In his body all is in tumult. The force within reaches his skin, while his heart beats harder and harder, like a drum. When it reaches a pitch, his volcano erupts over the human landscape in an outpouring of lava and a whirlwind of sulphur. Behold! This is how you must use your desires, which are like a fire that glows and shines in you unseen. It is exactly like the act of
reproduction, except that here the emitting organ is the brain … It is necessary … that a fire runs through you, that a kind of erection (which is not erotic) happens that allows an emission of the brain to depart from your being. Your hand must conduct this animated essence, this living magnet, to the chosen surface, and it must immediately establish the spiritual rapport and attraction proper to it. It is not the female organ that receives this emission … but purer and more active elements which the senses cannot see.

I have said that in the early years of the nineteenth century the practice of mesmerism almost died out in Britain. But there were those who retained an interest in its theory, and many of them belonged to the Romantic movement. It was no impediment to them that mesmerism came to England tainted with the French Revolution – that was a positive plus. They saw Mesmer not as a great innovator, but as someone who had found a way to harness an immutable power, which might be identified with God or Nature. Like many mesmerists, the British Romantics had a millenarian streak, and thought that a new age of spirituality was imminent. Mesmerism was seen not just as a painless method of healing, accessible to all, but also as a means for contacting a reality higher than the mundane one to which humans had hitherto been condemned, and as a complete new science of life, the universe and everything. It was a new revelation, a new dispensation. It would help us to usher in a new age of peace and fraternity. For the Romantics, none of this meant that they were prepared to endorse mesmerism
tout court
, but they were certainly prepared to give it a hearing.

One of the main sources of knowledge of mesmerism for the Romantic circle was Robert Southey's
Letters from England
, written in 1807 under the pseudonym of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, in order
to maintain the conceit that as a foreign visitor to the country he could be objective about its customs. Letter 51 is an ‘Account of Animal Magnetism', which is in fact a summary of de Mainauduc's lectures. Although de Mainauduc was not quite an orthodox follower of Mesmer, he was a physicalist, and a great deal of Southey's Letter is taken up with a description of the cosmology and physics of magnetism. He explains how man is a microcosm of the universe, and that just as every part of the universe is giving off ‘emanations' as energy is constantly circulated throughout its parts, so we humans emit particles too. The mind is superior to the body, and the will can direct these emanations as required. Free circulation of energy is health, obstruction ‘must occasion derangement in the system and be followed by disease'. The theory and practice of medical healing through magnetism then follows, sometimes accompanied by details which reveal astonishing confidence:

The pathology is soon explained. The impressions produced upon the fingers of the examiner by the stone, will be heaviness, indolence, and cold. Burns and scalds produce heavy dull pricking at first; when inflammation has taken place, great heat and sharp pricking, but indolent numbness from the centre. Rheumatic head ache occasions pricking, numbness and creeping or vermicular motion, heat if the patient be strong, cold if he be relaxed. Inflammation caused by confined wind produces intense heat, pricking and creeping; the heat is occasioned by the inflammation, the pricking by the wind acting against the obstructed pores, and the creeping by the motion of the wind from one part to another. Pus communicates to the hand of the examiner such a feeling of softness as we should expect from dipping the hand in it, but combined with pricking, from the motion which the wind contained in it makes in its endeavours to escape. Diseased lungs make the fingers feel as if dough had been permitted to dry on them, this is called clumsy stiffness. Pleurisy occasions creeping, heat, and pricking; deafness; resistance and numbness. Contracted nerves announce themselves to the examiner by a pressure round his fingers, as if a string was tightly bound round them; cases of a relaxed habit by a lengthened debilitated sensation, diseased spleen, or ovaries, by a spinning in the finger ends, as if something were twirling
about in them. The impression which scrofula produces upon the practitioner, is curious and extraordinary: at every motion which he makes, the joints of his fingers, wrists, elbows and shoulders crack. Worms excite creeping and pinching; bruises, heaviness in the hands and numbness in the fingers.

It is clear from Southey's account that part of the attraction of magnetism was that it purported to be a complete physical system of the universe, occult and therefore giving secrets to initiates. And in fact de Mainauduc's success in London was due in part to his being taken up and supported by a group of Swedenborgian mystics and alchemists. Southey thinks this is all ‘quackery' and calls de Mainauduc's references to God and Jesus ‘blasphemy', but nevertheless he did provide an account of mesmeric theory and practice which contained enough meat for his peers to get their teeth into.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a lifelong interest in animal magnetism, but could never make up his mind about it. Its influence on
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
is obvious:

He holds him with his glittering eye –

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years' child:

The Mariner hath his will.

But after attending the lectures of J.F. Blumenbach in Göttingen in 1798–9, he was convinced that there was no reality to the apparent phenomena of mesmerism, and he deleted the more overt references to it from the poem, which was first written in 1797 and 1798. However, in 1817 he heard that Blumenbach had reversed his scepticism, and this reawakened Coleridge's interest. In 1820, in a note on Southey's
Life of Wesley
, he recorded how he had investigated ‘zoo-magnetism' for nine years, had read widely and never passed up an opportunity to question eyewitnesses, and yet remained uncertain, ‘in a state of philosophical doubt' about it, as he would say in 1830. The 1820 note carried on:

Were I asked, what
I
think, my answer would be that the evidence enforces scepticism and a
non liquet
; too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of imposture or casual
coincidence; too fugacious and unfixable to support any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a correspondent faculty in the human soul.