{"id":117449,"date":"2017-10-31T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2017-10-31T15:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=117449"},"modified":"2017-11-01T13:59:40","modified_gmt":"2017-11-01T17:59:40","slug":"ghost-club-yeats-dickens-secret-society-spirits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/31\/ghost-club-yeats-dickens-secret-society-spirits\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost Club: Yeats\u2019s and Dickens\u2019s Secret Society of Spirits"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still\u00a0from Fritz Lang\u2019s Dr. Mabuse\u00a0<\/em>(1922).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When it comes to ghosts, belief and outright disbelief are not the only options\u2014or at least they weren\u2019t in nineteenth-century Britain. The Victorians didn\u2019t stick to simple arguments about the existence of ghosts; they also argued about how, when, and why they might exist. Spiritualists attacked spiritualists over whether the supernatural should be classed as natural. Scientists discussed whether psychological or physiological factors were at play. Inventors, politicians, journalists, and madmen joined in, too. Indeed, it was such a popular, multidisciplinary pursuit that its practitioners needed new places to meet, outside of their existing societies, and various organizations were established to debate the boundaries of the immaterial.<\/p>\n

One of these exploratory committees was the Ghost Club. It was founded in 1862 and lasted about a decade, although its history stretches back to a group of Cambridge academics in the 1850s, and it stretches forward, through several resurrections, to now. The earliest days of the club are not well recorded, but we do know that it was small, populated by male intellectuals, and it concentrated on investigating supposed supernatural encounters, with the intention of exposing frauds. Charles Dickens is said to have been a founding member; the first in a procession of writers\u2014including William Butler Yeats\u00a0and Siegfried Sassoon\u2014who joined its ranks.<\/p>\n

Dickens embodied some of the contradictory attitudes of his era and, most likely, of the original Ghost Club as well. It is difficult from a modern perspective to reconcile Dickens the exposer of fraud with Dickens the dabbler in mesmerism\u2014which generally involved putting patients into trances so as to influence the magnetic forces that ailed them. Dickens always refused to be entranced in this way, but he wasn\u2019t above trying it out on others. He boasted in letters of his \u201cmagnetic powers,\u201d and attempted to use them to cure a friend, Augusta de la Rue, of her \u201cspectres.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, Dickens was famous for his ghost stories, such as A Christmas Carol <\/em>and The Signal-Man<\/em>. If the Ghost Club was formed to investigate dodgy mediums it was in part because Dickens had helped to create a fierce, frothing demand for phantoms among his fellow Victorians.<\/p>\n

But Dickens himself was always trying to find ordinary reasons for extraordinary happenings. His mesmeric treatments, as peculiar as they seem today, were intended to heal Madame de la Rue of the \u201cdisease of [the] nerves,\u201d which he believed to be the cause of her apparitions. His stories featured even more prosaic explanations. In the sarcastic Well-Authenticated Rappings<\/em>, Dickens subjects a character to \u201cthree spiritual experiences\u201d that are actually the result of, in turn, a boozy Christmas lunch, a rich pork pie, and an energetic boy acting in cahoots with his sister and her lover.<\/p>\n

Dickens was clearest in his letters. In an exchange with William Howitt, he wrote:<\/p>\n

My own mind is perfectly unprejudiced and impressible on the subject. I do not in the least pretend that such things are not. But \u2026 I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me, or that had not the noticeable peculiarity in it\u2014that the alteration of some slight circumstance would bring it within the range of common natural probabilities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Ghost Club mixed its interest in metaphysics with a healthy appreciation for common natural probabilities. One of its first investigations was of the Davenport Brothers and the popular s\u00e9ance act they brought to London from New York. The two brothers were tied up in a cabinet, then obscured from the audience\u2019s view, whilst various things happened in and around the cabinet that could only have a supernatural cause \u2026 unless, of course, the brothers were able to free themselves from their bindings while hidden from view. But, at a time of such uncertainty and speculation, even magic tricks could look like science.<\/p>\n

Dickens might not have been comfortable with the next iteration of the Ghost Club, which existed between 1882 and 1936, and it might not have been comfortable with him. Among its records, which are kept in the British Library, is a short history that severs all ties with the earlier club:\u00a0\u201cA Club of similar name, founded some twenty years earlier, had come to an end, it had no connection with this 1882 Ghost Club \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

The minutes of the 1882 club suggest, to those who can decipher their maddening cursive, a different sort of organization; one with a set of rules and mannerisms that make it sound more like a gentlemen\u2019s club for ardent spiritualists. This club met at fashionable restaurants, such as Pagani\u2019s on Great Portland Street, with its colorful ceramic facade. The meetings always began with a roll call, which included the names not just of \u201cincarnate\u201d members but also of those who had \u201cpassed on.\u201d And, in the fourth meeting, on January 12, 1883, those present decided on a motto, and noted it down in capitals:<\/p>\n

NASCI : LABORARE : MORI : NASCI<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n

Or, for the rest of us:<\/p>\n

BE BORN : WORK : DIE : BE BORN<\/small><\/p>\n

This second incarnation of the Ghost Club was founded in the same year as an even more prominent organization, the Society for Psychical Research\u2014but the SPR published both its proceedings and a journal, while the Ghost Club kept its activities secret. This meant that its members could talk freely with each other about their experiences, in full confidence that their conversations would never leave the restaurant with them. According to the minutes for a meeting held in 1930, one member told the others of how, \u201cby psychic means,\u201d he had been given \u201can entirely new diagnosis of and entirely new prescription for the treatment of cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems self-evident that W. B. Yeats would become involved with this rambunctious group. He was first invited as a guest, and he demonstrated the depth of his arcane knowledge by giving a speech on \u201cFairy Beliefs,\u201d which he believed were \u201csimply Spiritism happening not round tables but in the fields.\u201d A\u00a0month later, on July 5, 1911, he was duly elected as a member.<\/p>\n

Yeats\u2019s contributions to the Ghost Club are connected, in some intriguing ways, to his poetry. During the years of his membership, and with the help of his wife Georgiana, he redoubled his experiments in automatic writing. She would hold a pencil to a piece of paper and, while in a semiconscious state, scrawl down the words of invisible messengers. At first, she did this as a trick on her husband (as Brenda Maddox observes in Yeats\u2019s Ghosts<\/em>, \u201cthe messengers seemed at times to have been reading Marie Stopes\u2019s Married Love<\/em>, a highly popular book that stressed the husband\u2019s duty to give his wife sexual satisfaction\u201d). Later, she would claim, she did it sincerely. Yeats ended up telling the Ghost Club of the \u201clessons in Philosophy he had received from a group of beings on the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n

These \u201clessons\u201d were later developed into Yeats\u2019s great, sprawling\u00a0Vision<\/em>. Or perhaps they developed from it. As the Yeats scholar Tara Stubbs discovered when she delved into the Ghost Club archives, there are so many parallels between his contributions to the club and his writing that it \u201cmight be almost too convenient.\u201d The meetings could effectively have been part of his drafting process.<\/p>\n

Dozens of other writers have joined the Ghost Club and found inspiration there. After it was reconstituted for a third time, one of the finest authors of English ghost stories, Algernon Blackwood, became a member. The elderly Sassoon did likewise during the club\u2019s fourth spell, when his thought and his poetry turned to the heavens. At one point, Aldous Huxley was even considered for its presidency.<\/p>\n

There are still writers among the current membership of the Ghost Club; along with, in the words of its media officer, Andreas Charalambous, \u201clecturers, barristers, librarians, doctors, members of the police force, public figures.\u201d They retain some customs from the days of Yeats\u2014including the roll call of both the living and the dead, which now takes place annually on All Souls\u2019 Day\u2014but they have also reconnected with the days of Dickens. The club now traces its history back to 1862, and makes investigation a large part of its work. It has become the sum of all its pasts.<\/p>\n

The Ghost Club has reconnected with Dickens in spookier ways as well. During an investigation of the Clydesdale Inn, seven years ago, one of its members sensed what the official report called \u201ca connection to Charles Dickens\u201d\u2014and, indeed, the author had stayed there once. There are many who will scoff at this incident. Dickens himself may have put it down to a bad slice of pie. But, as Halloween approaches and the trees turn skeletal, perhaps we can afford to set aside our certainties for a moment. \u201cDickens, is that you?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Peter Hoskin is an arts journalist who lives in London.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  When it comes to ghosts, belief and outright disbelief are not the only options\u2014or at least they weren\u2019t in nineteenth-century Britain. The Victorians didn\u2019t stick to simple arguments about the existence of ghosts; they also argued about how, when, and why they might exist. Spiritualists attacked spiritualists over whether the supernatural should be classed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1296,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7554],"tags":[5368,31392,7282,16452,31388,6359,1203,31385,6696,1146,14717,31391,5725,31386,31389,31387,8928,31390],"class_list":["post-117449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-2","tag-a-christmas-carol","tag-a-vision","tag-aldous-huxley","tag-algernon-blackwood","tag-augusta-de-la-rue","tag-cambridge","tag-charles-dickens","tag-ghost-club","tag-ghosts","tag-halloween","tag-hypnotism","tag-married-love","tag-mesmerism","tag-siegried-sassoon","tag-society-of-psychical-research","tag-the-signal-man","tag-w-b-yeats","tag-yeats-ghosts"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGhost Club: Yeats\u2019s and Dickens\u2019s Secret Society of Spirits<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Founded in 1862, the Cambridge Ghost Club lists Dickens, Yeats, and Siegfried Sassoon among its elite members.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/31\/ghost-club-yeats-dickens-secret-society-spirits\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ghost Club: Yeats\u2019s and Dickens\u2019s Secret Society of Spirits by Peter Hoskin\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 31, 2017 \u2013   When it comes to ghosts, belief and outright disbelief are not the only options\u2014or at least they weren\u2019t in nineteenth-century Britain. 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