VICTORIAN SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY

in terms of an iconoclash, then what motivates "the will to believe" or the "will to
truth" for those who assume these views becomes more important than staking
out a position that such-and-such a phenomenon is true or false with the utmost
certainty?' 5 This chapter will focus on the 'icon' of spirit photography and dismiss
the 'oclash' by simply assuming it was at times a fraudulent form and also a form
that was often received as true. Regardless, however, it can show us things about
Victorian historiography we may have trouble seeing without it- namely, the way
in which constructs of history and time were actively created by Victorian spirit
photography and often presented time as a non-l:iitear concept.
What is striking in the cases of both 1870s spirit photography and 1890s
dorchagraphy is how far a genre - photography - seems to delve into the artistic,
subjective and technically magical. These traits of artistry, individual interpretation
and technical prowess are certainly ones that we associate with twenty-first-century
photography. Not so readily, though, do these assumptions spring to mind when.
considering nineteenth-century photography.
While the question of belief may crowd out other types of inquiry, it is also the
question that precedes serious inquiry. If these images are only illusions, why take
the time to converse with them, find meanings and examine their discourse? The
answer seems to be that, whether or not they involve intentional artifice, they are
highly constructed images which allow both their creators and their viewers to
reconsider what types of history, sociability, order, fantasy and play were typically
Victorian.
In the twenty-first century, our relation to matters of verisimilitude is situated
differently than it was in the nineteenth century. In her essay 'At Home in the
Nineteenth Century: Photography, Nostalgia, and the Will to Authenticity', Jennifer
Green-Lewis argues that the Victorians constitute our idea of the historical past
because photography was invented in the nineteenth century and, thus, our oldest
photographs are of Victorians. In this regard, they take on, perhaps, primarily
a documentary, rather than an artistic, significance. Victorians seem to us real
through their photographs, which stand as a testament to our desire for a stable,
authentic past. This is precisely what Fredric Jameson would see as an example
of our own 'libidinal historicism': in other words, we have a strong desire for a
stable past. 6 I would go further to say that part of how we like to see the Victorians
is as earnest and honest. What seems more likely, however, is that the Victorians
were using spirit photography to perform specific critiques and celebrations of the
historical past.
We may want Victorians to be the past, not to actively structure a representation
of history. 'We have determined the Victorians to be accessible', Green-Lewis
writes, 'thanks to their recognizably familiar representational status ... such that

Ibid., p. 3.
6
Frederic Jameson quoted in Jennifer Green-Lewis, 'At Home in the Nineteenth
Century: Photography, Nostalgia, and the Will to Authenticity', in John Kucich and
Dianne F. Sadoff (eds), Victorian Afterlife: Postmodem Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century
(Minneapolis and London, 2000), pp. 29--48, p. 42.

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in our day-to-day dealings with photographs we rarely make distinction between

a photograph and its subject, and often efface agency altogether.' 7 Conflating
a photograph and a subject, therefore effacing agency in the construction of a
photograph, is precisely what our reality-nostalgic eyes will not let us do when we
are presented with a spirit photograph.
But, instead of rejecting the images as inauthentic, I think we can gain insight
into Victorian views of history and power by seeing them as contiguous with other
Victorian photographs. As Green-Lewis notes regarding common impressions
about Victorians based on photography:

The photographs of the Victorians that have the greatest currency today
seem to be those ... that represent them pretending to be something other
than themselves: dressed as figures from history or poetry, as dairy maids or
mythical characters; undressed in pornographic or pseudoclassical pose; ... or
looking as though they are in paintings and not photographs at all. 8

While, as Lewis implies, these images may be overrepresented in our own catalogues
of Victorian photographs, these types of mythologizing images are also central to
spirit photography in the 1870s. However, while Lewis claims that these types of
theatrically staged images of the historical past are elegiac, I would argue that, when
it comes to spirit photographs, the opposite is occurring. The reason is simple: these
photographs insist that the past is back and continuous with the present, not forever
out of reach. In other words, they claim to capture an actual encounter with the past
rather than the status of replicas or recreations. Now let us turn to the concept of
history presented by 1870s spirit photography before considering the relationship
between photograph and fantasy in 1890s dorchagraphy.

Hudson and Houghton: Interpreting 1870s London Spirit

Photography

Frederick Hudson, one of the three best-known spirit photographers of the time,
had introduced spirit photography to London and, unlike William Mumler of New
York and Edouard Isidore Buguet of Paris, was never put on trial for fraud. 9 While

7
Ibid., p. 31.
8
Ibid., p. 39.
Frederick Hudson first started to produce spirit photographs after he made a
successful one of Mrs Guppy and a spirit in March 1872. The Guppys, in tum, introduced
Hudson to Georgiana Houghton, a spirit painter and spiritualist, who desired an image of
herself with her dead sister Zilla. Her mediumship, sometimes over objects in Hudson's
studio and sometimes over the seemingly nervous Hudson himself, had a beneficial effect
and hundreds of spirit photographs featuring the medium Houghton as a subject ensued

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the question of fraud protection was paramount in both New York and Paris, it
did not seem to be so great a concern in London - there were no celebrated legal
cases like the Mumler or the Buguet cases. Perhaps this is because the community
surrounding Hudson's studio did not form to 'prove' spirits to be true, but rather
to widen the circle of family and famous people portraiture to include the spirits
of the dead. The sources I have consulted regarding Hudson's studio, centrally
but not exclusively Georgiana Houghton's Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual
Beings (1882), treat his spirit photographs primarily as mementos. It seems that the
same pleasurable play that marked other forms of spirit communication at that
time also affected the practice of spirit photography.
Spirit images taken in Hudson's studio in the 1870s, and collected in Houghton's
book, are disruptive to us as viewers because they challenge the notion that
Victorian photographs can represent a stable past. Georgiana Houghton was
trained as a painter but temporarily gave up her art after the deaths of several
relatives in the early 1860s. She later returned to painting when she realized she
had a gift for 'spirit painting', or painting abstract forms and designs under the
influence of spiritual presences. Subsequently, starting in 1872, she became quite
interested in spirit photography when she visited Hudson's studio with her friends
Samuel and Elizabeth Guppy, who told her of Hudson's ability to produce spirit
photographs. 10 Writings on spirit photography such as Houghton's discuss spirit
photographs in the 1870s and early 1880s primarily as souvenirs of mediumship
as well as memorialization of the dead, some known to the sitters and others
just famous, who come back for a spirit photograph, not unlike the postmortem
photography popular at the time. Studio photography up through the 1880s
follows the compositional conventions of painted portrait miniatures, which had
been popular as a portrait format by amateurs and professionals through the 1840s.
During the 1840s, the popularization of photography began to supplant painting
in portraiture. Katherine Coombs observes: 'Miniature painting was supplanted in
emotional and cultural life by photography. In a painting by John Everett Millais
from 1871, "Yes or No" (Yale Center for British Art), the heroine does not hold a

over the next four years, leading to Hudson's popularity as well as a book by Houghton
in which she catalogued the spirit photographs and discussed what the practice meant to
her. (This book, Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to
the Material Eye (London, 1882), is discussed in the main body of this chapter.) Later in the
1870s the fortunes of Hudson's studio waned, perhaps due to not being located in Baker
Street, the spiritualist hub of London, and he went out of business. For detailed background
on Hudson and his collaboration with Houghton, see Tucker, Nature Exposed, pp. 84-103;
and Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (London, 2006),
pp. 23-7. In turn, also see James Coates, Photographing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Spirit
Photography, Spirit Portraiture, and other Rare but Allied Phenomena (London, 1911), esp. ch. 2,
'Mr Hudson's Mediumship', pp. 35-56.
°
1
For more background on Houghton, see Tucker, Nature Exposed, pp. 84-103; and
Rachel Oberter, 'Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye: The Abstract Spirit Drawings of
Georgiana Houghton', Victorian Studies, 48 (Winter 2006): 221-32.

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miniature of her lover but a carte de visite, a small photograph on a card.' 11 Not
only did photography supplant portraiture, but photography also continued in the
idiom of portraiture. As Claudia Kidwell and Nancy Rexford write:

Even for portrait photographs, both photographers and sitters considered

it pe1jectly appropriate to arrange reality for the photographic occasion ...
In the 1870s and 1880s photographers often provided painted backdrops
to simulate an attractive setting, whether indoors or out ... The use of such
props and backdrops shows that photographers were consciously working in
a portraiture tradition borrowed from painting. 12

In studio photography of the 1870s, naturalistic settings for sitters were usually
painted and arranged. In other words, there was the assumption that a realistic
setting for sitters had to be actively produced. Many readers and viewers of spirit
photographs in the 1870s, then, did not seem to find spirit photography any more
contrived than studio photography in general - both were highly staged in terms
of the idioms of portraiture. 13
Houghton's book is interesting because it does not just collect the spirit
photographs of Hudson's gallery, but really frames them, providing allegorical
titles for many images and providing interpretative commentary on the
photographs which illustrate the book. Many famous historical spirit personages
grace Hudson's studio in Houghton's account. No contemporary scholarship has
yet discussed spirit photographs of the famous dead, versus those of the familiar
family circle, in any detail. In a sense, Houghton's 1882 book creates the significance
of Hudson's spirit photography by titling and describing his images. Titles of
images often lack proper names, but instead are allegorical. Such photos present
an interesting predicament when they are considered as metonyms of Victorian
London. About half of the images, whether of people or of spirits, fully identify
everyone in the photograph, such as one labelled 'Mr Howitt, his daughter, and
the spirit of his dead son'. But, for other similarly composed images of one to three
sitters, a different type of identification is given. Instead, allegorical or historical
titles are used -for example, 'Alas! for her whose robe of innocence has become a
rag','The Day Star' or 'Joan of Arc' -to represent a range of obscure to well-known
historical subjects. Houghton's labels for Hudson's photographs are framing the
viewers' possible interpretations of the images. These labels also implicitly claim
that the medium's special spiritual insight allows the photographs, visible to alt to
become meaningful because she is the one who titles them.
Another active discussion around spirit photographs involved theories of how
they were produced. How we conjecture they were made, since most current-day

11
Katherine Coombs, The Miniature in England (London, 1998), p. 117.
12 Claudia Brush Kidwell with Nancy Rexford, 'Foreword', in Joan Severa, Dressed for
the Photographer, Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840-1900 (Kent, OH, 1995), p. xii.
13 For a similar discussion, see Sarah Willbum, Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in

Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings (Aldershot, 2006), p. 61.

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viewers consider and some Victorian viewers would have considered them trick
photographs, is quite different from the general contours of a spiritualist's explanation
of the technique. In brief, if we do not believe these photographs to be of actual spirits,
their technique can be explained in a few ways. A' spirit' versus an earthly sitter might
simply be in the studio and remain in the photographic frame for less time than the
sitter. On the other hand, a 'spirit' could have been photographed previously, and
then the plate who reused to photograph the earthly sitter desired a spirit photograph.
Even the fraudulence of images is interesting in terms of how their subjects structure
the past, death and desire. Whether these images capture scenes with ghosts enacting
a scene with living sitters or whether they capture fake ghosts composing scenes,
these images construct a relationship between past and present, mythological and
real, dead and living. Whether the images were authentic does not seem to have been
a central question for many Victorians. In fact, if we think of the images primarily in
terms of their consumers, they fulfilled certain desires that Victorians hoped to find
in such images. By letting go of the question of authenticity, we can inquire into what
was engaging and desirable about the images for their viewers.
Victorian believers, however, did long for a stable image (where death,
for instance, would not bear on the reality of a thing) that could be explained
technically. While spiritualists, then, were less obsessed with questions of fakery,
they did develop many theories of how a spirit photograph would come to
be. 14 Spiritualists who believed in the practice described the technique of spirit
photography as follows. The photograph is under the influence of the sitter, or
medium with the sitter, who is looking back at the camera - it seems as though
the camera was temporarily 'mediumized', and the spiritualist sitter or medium
was the spirit control producing extra images on the plate by force of thought. As
in mediurnship, the physical organization and force of thought of the sitter was
believed to materialize the thought-about spirit or object. In this manner, spirit
photography provided public documentation of personal recollection and longing:
evidence, one could say, for living memory, a literal place for the separation of
death to be answered by life everlasting. The practice was also described through
the trope of literal and figurative development. Fritz, in his book Where Are the
Dead? Or, Spiritualism Explained, notes:

Mr Hudson has taken a great number of spirit photographs, and his rooms for
many months in the summer of1872 were crowded with Spiritualists from all
parts of the country, anxious to be photographed ... The form of a spirit came
out distinctly upon the plate immediately on the likeness being 'developed'. 15

14
As Robert Cox writes, 'Authenticity became virtually the only issue seriously
entertained in the non-Spiritualist press with regard to spirit photographs' while 'the
photographs were read, and possibly produced, under the belief that the specific spirit
represented in the photograph actually existed and, more generally, that spirits as a class
exist'. See Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism
(Charlottesville, 2003), pp. 117-18.

I
I
15
Fritz (pseud.), Where Are the Dead? Or, Spiritualism Explained (London, 1873), pp. 81-2.

365

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THE AsHGATE RESEARCH CoMPANION TO SPIRITUALISM AND THE OccULT

The verb developed not only shows a technical usage of the term flagging the
chemical process of bringing forth the image, but also emphasizes the Victorian
trope of biological and spiritual development. One striking feature of Houghton's
description of Hudson's photography is the likelihood that the sitter will recognize
the spirit that is developed beside him or her on the photographic plate. Interestingly,
even sitters who would gladly admit that the spirit of, say, their dead son did not
resemble the son as he had looked while alive, claimed that the image of the dead
son accurately represented his essence or personality. So, the spirit photograph,
from the beginning, did not require that material and spiritual images be the same,
but only that they would capture the same essence. This, strangely enough, made a
visual record free from recording a consistent visual reality- in some sense a spirit
photo was always already figurative or metaphorical, making it overtly artistic. 16
This seems to make the soul, or essence, of a person something that only can be
recognized through its reception, rather than its presentation. In other words, the
spiritual life of a person does not have a transitive identity but is, instead, created
after the fact by the corroboration of the viewer. This depth of the visual field and
its surrounding poetic logic defies our longing for a stable Victorian photograph.
Accepting the premise that spirit photography can subjectively shape reality, it
becomes fascinating to see what from the past was deemed worthy of saving and
seeing in Houghton's collection of Hudson's photographs. Her collection of images
reveals the didactic logic of spirit photographs by what the photograph claimed
from the dust heap of history. Some of these things, such as a personal narrative of
family membership and organization, are contiguous with how we often practise
informal photography these days - pictures for the family photo album. To take
photographs of dead loved ones is of a piece with this. 17 Of course, Victorians
(who are, in a way, our favorite emblems of cultural excess) did not stop with dead
people they knew. 18 Instead, within spirit photography a celebrity culture arose.
Historically significant religious figures were particularly popular subjects
of spirit photography. For instance, in Houghton's Chronicles, Jairus's daughter,
StJohn the Evangelist, Satan and Joan of Arc are all captured at Mr Hudson's studio.
Houghton was not only the helpful medium for these photos at Hudson's studio,
she also retrospectively gives them meaning and religious significance through
titling the images in her book. Certain inherent factors, such as death, historical
time and the demographic situation of the living (or the dead), no longer matter. If
the Evangelist appears to one, why read the Bible? If Joan of Arc is back, perhaps

16
For an intriguing treatment of Georgiana Houghton's allegorical spirit paintings
which focuses on the metaphorics of the genre, see Oberter, 'Esoteric Art Confronting the
Public Eye'.
17
Discussing both spirit and postmortem photography, Robert Cox provides an
in-depth analysis of the significance of these practices. See Cox, Body and Soul, esp. ch. 4,
'Angel's Language', pp. 108-35.
18
For a helpful account of Victorian material excess as it pertains to the culture of
mourning and the practice of spirit photography, see Jen Cadwallader, 'Spirit Photography
and the Victorian Culture of Mourning', Modern Language Studies, 37.2 (2008): 9-31.

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of progress and improvement are evident. 21 Congratulatory views on the glories of

British tradition were also emphasized, as when Tennyson wrote, on the occasion
of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in 1886: 'And may yours for ever be I That old
strength and constancy I Which has made your fathers great I In our ancient island
State'. 22 I am not suggesting that in counterdistinction all Victorian spiritualists
thought they were postmodernly self-reflexive and beyond concepts of progress
and tradition. However, our models for Victorians' sense of history and meaning
are often unified and progressive; while often other concepts, such as simultaneity,
chance, millenarianism and revolution, also modelled their sense of history.
Just as we want to conflate photograph and subject when gazing at a Victorian
photo, we similarly may be tempted to conflate Victorian views about history
with the seeming records of everyday life that Victorian photography provides.
Victorians might be using photography primarily as a rhetorical and artistic device
while we desire to read images as realistic. This also explains why, if an image is
not believable to us, we want to consider it in light of representational accuracy
or fraudulence. We may not just fear Victorians are tricking us when we view a
spirit photograph, we also may fear they are theorizing about futurity or using a
representational form metaphorically. In these instances the gaze we cast on them
starts to feel reciprocal, potentially causing us discomfort.
Omnipresent historical figures who can, at will, show up in Hudson's studio
are not commemorated or memorialized, but live (partially) in the present. Their
presence endorses and aggrandizes Hudson's studio and the claims of spiritualism.
Believers frequently felt they were living in a millenarian moment when the
present and the future would meet. On the other hand, they sometimes did not
seem to think that British history or tradition mattered. Consider this quotation
from novelist and spiritualist Florence Marryat in 1894:

There must be a big screw loose somewhere in the various religions presented
to us ... Though history may be sufficient for us, when we are asked to believe
that William the Conqueror landed in England in the year 1066 (because, if
the truth were told, we do not care one jot nor tittle if he ever landed here at
all), it is not enough to rest all our hopes of a future life upon. 23

In this quotation, history, especially religious tradition, does not seem relevant to
salvation for Marryat. However, history showing up in the contemporary moment
literally, in the spirit photograph, might have made the past feel more relevant.
Simultaneity is exciting, generative and chaotic. It also can provide a strong
critique of the received ideas of the day. These Victorians do not seem progressive

21
Quotations from Darwin, Arnold and Tennyson in Carol T. Christ and Catherine
Robson (eds), The Norton AnthologJJ of English Literature, 8th edn, Volume E: The Victorian Age
(New York, 2006), p. 1549, p. 1398.
22
Tennyson in ibid., p. 1626.
23
Florence Marryat, The Spirit World (Leipzig, 1894), pp. 7-9.

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in their historical outlook. Their ideology seems to call the idea of social progress
into question.
Yet, in trying to read the significance of spirit photographs, tensions arise. The
images may seem incredibly reactionary or may seem incredibly progressive.
In the first instance, these photographs may imply that, in the face of modern
liberalism, all of the people who are really influential on a heroic scale are already
dead. Alternatively, if anyone can show up in the studio outside of their original
century of existence, then linear time and the progress of the modern day might
not fully matter. In fact, both of these options - that the past was better or that the
past is not separate from the present- were actively embraced by spiritualists. Do
these photographs represent a mausoleum or can they constitute nostalgia for an
ahistorical modernity? What is the particular mode and expression of desiring the
dead and interacting with the concept of the past?
But perhaps an even larger epistemological threat is the number of smiling
Victorians we find in Houghton's collection of photographs. 24 Granted, especially
for those who appear with a dead relative, a decorous sombre expression usually
prevails. However, those sitters who appear with important historical figures from
days of yore usually just look delighted. Perhaps the best example of this is the
medium who appears with Joan of Arc. His smile is irrepressible; not only is he in
on the secret but he is also part of a special transhistoricat or perhaps ahistorical,
club. If you show up with Joan of Arc in a studio photograph, then you are very
well connected.
While Georgiana Houghton does not extemporize on history per se in her
chronicles, her title, of course, references the traditional genre of history-writing,
the chronicle. History-writing is, historically speaking, chronicle-based -telling the
story of the past in an often legendary mode. The earliest English chronicle, for
instance, is the most famous British example, The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, written
between the late ninth and twelfth centuries mainly in Old English. Chronicles are
a central genre of Western historiography. Many of Houghton's technical remarks
about the process of spirit photography may help us understand the relationship
with the past, or libidinal historicism, that some Victorians experienced.25 Through
a fellow medium, Mrs Tebb, Houghton learns that anyone seeking a spirit
photograph should only wear old clothes, nothing new, and that things with a
woollen texture might be particularly good to wear. Houghton follows up these
observations, noting that:

On my second visit to Mr Hudson, we discussed the suggestions, given

through Mrs Tebb, that some dark thing that had been worn by me should be

24
For a discussion of the jolly affect around some mid-Victorian mourning practices,
such as the funeral parade in London for the Duke of Wellington in 1852, see Cadwallader,
'Spirit Photography', pp. 10-11.
25
For an insightful account of Houghton's anthology of Hudson's photographs that
focuses on a range of interpretative possibilities, see Tucker, Nature Exposed, esp. ch. 2,
'Testing the Unity of Science and Fraternity', pp. 65-125.

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Of course, some spirit sitters are less terrestrially and more celestially defined,
such as the Day Star, also known as Satan (Figure 17.1). Unlike Joan of Arc, Satan
does not appear in a heroic profile but as a duskily robed, black man. Georgiana
Houghton, in an elegant day dress, looks on attentively, her palms pressed together
in an attitude of prayer. The Day Star wears a name badge of sorts depicting an
eight-pointed black star on his sleeve. Satan appears to be roughly the same size as
Houghton. However, unlike Houghton, he gazes directly into the camera, mouth
agape, apparently surprised to be in Hudson's studio. Also, he appears much more
ethereal than Joan of Arc, since he is only materialized from the torso up. In lieu of
legs, he has a very handsome, turned Victorian chair with velvet upholstery. This
Satan has a very spiritual appearance. Far from daunting or tempting, he is partial
and astonished. Is he ashamed to be the Day Star? The racialization of this figure
is noticeable in the photograph. If he is a spirit, then he is not a Caucasian one,
unless, of course, his complexion is devised black-face. Again, the message of such a
photograph is unclear. Does it serve as a warning?- Don't do evil! Or does it reassure
the viewer that Satan isn't so powerful, after all? Perhaps it shows the sitter's fallen
nature. Does it encourage the viewer to see black people as synecdoches for Satan?
Finally, why does the view of the camera make the Day Star look startled and
shocked? Does studio photography of this kind simply make the uncanny forever
canny in a horribly mundane reversal of fortunes? A historically important figure
domesticated by studio photography may well lose a certain je ne sais quai.
Houghton was not exclusively interested in the famous dead. Family portraiture
is another genre that is prevalent in Houghton's collection of spirit photographs.
Nearly half of the fifty-four images in her book show photographs of the living
with dead family members. Several of these contain a living sitter photographed
with a dead mother and often the dead mother in the photograph is less spectral
than the living sitter, such as is the case with the photograph of Alfred Russel
Wallace included here (Figure 17.2). As a pattern of representation this poses an
interesting question. Namely, what sort of work does memory do? In terms of a
person's emotional life, a beloved dead relative may well take up more conceptual
space than one's own body at times. In a culture obsessed with motherhood, dead
mothers occupy a place for a particularly strong form of cultural worship. In these
types ofimages, there is nothing like a mother's love or, for that matter, a mother's
epic presence. In other images, a mother's love and elaborate costume threatens to
entirely eclipse her devoted son, as in the image (No. 31) of a Spanish gentleman
and his mother.
Not only do spirit photographs chronicle the power of family devotion, but they
also showcase a devotion to interpretation. Several images in Houghton's work
could be best classified as moral tableaux. Costuming and situation of a subject
is very important in photographic tableaux, just as they are in theatrical tableaux.
For instance, many readers may recall the tableau performance scenes that figure
in many Victorian novels, including Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda. Deciphering the
meaning of the tableau forms a popular Victorian pastime. In the context of Victorian
fiction, these tableaux symbolize concepts or rituals (regret, death, marriage) that
have some bearing on the action of the novel's plot. A similarly allegorical purpose

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Figure 17.2 'Frederick Hudson, Alfred Russel Wallace and the Spirit of his Mother';
in Georgiana Houghton, Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings
and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (London, 1882).

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is seen in the range of tableaux in Houghton's collection. Their iconography

will sometimes bolster received notions of social life and order. Some of these
tableaux seem to work as warnings. For instance, one of Houghton's photographs,
showing a spirit woman in a soiled robe, is titled 'Alas! for her whose white robe
of innocence became a rag'. As in a novelistic or theatrical tableau, the notion of
stasis is also in play, with future life and death outcomes hanging in the balance.
In this photograph (No. 45) an unnamed man, probably the medium, stares to his
left, apparently at blank space; also to his left but somewhat behind him, stands a
woman in a soiled looking, wrinkled robe, with arms akimbo, apparently staring
at the man. The woman seems most likely to emblematize prostitution, although
the image might also be available to an even more metaphysical interpretation. 29
Perhaps the sitter's soul is the' she' with a formerly white robe who is in question.
What is particularly interesting about this image is that the living sitter seems to
see nothing, while the female figure in rags has her head bowed, perhaps in shame,
but also directs a downcast accusing or judging look at the sitter. It is somewhat
ambivalent how this gaze might cast the sitter in a guilty role. Certainly the spirit
looks more like an angry wronged woman than a contrite transgressor, cowed by
shame. Perhaps this shows the role that photography has in providing an idealized,
fictionalized re-enactment of life events.
Some tableaux seem not to warn or judge, but rather to celebrate the very forms
of remembering and catalogging what is past. Two such images are titled 'Angels
and box of treasures' and 'Spirit, with American photographs'. The first image
(No. 29) shows a contented-looking Houghton, with a strangely ethereal skirt,
staring at the camera while above her head float two fairy-sized angels holding
a box of treasures. The miniaturization of the angels and their box is an enticing
detail in this image. Unlike other spirits in these photographs, the angels are tiny.
Miniaturization is a particularly interesting spacialization of the celestial, which
is often conceptualized in an extra-large scale. Real objects, not angels, are very
small in the case of the second image (No. 26), which shows tiny photographs that
help to produce a full-sized spirit. This spirit, statuesque in robes of white, is only
partially materialized, balanced, as Satan was, over the same attractively htrned,
velvet-topped chair. The chair and table by it serve as platforms for a collection of
smali American photographs. It was not unusual in terms of spirit photography for
clients from afar who could not travel to the studio to instead mail photographs of
themselves so that these proxies might appear in the presence of spirits in a new
photograph. In this case, myriad tiny photographs produce a partially materialized
giant spirit. In both this case and that of the angels with a treasure box, the spiritual
gaze and the act of thinking about spirits are rewarded by a returned gaze and
extra-human spiritual images in the studio. Such images seem to cast a devotion to
the past and a belief that the past never dies into a dynamic and engaging scene of
frottage with the ghostly.

29
In fact, Houghton viewed this photograph as depicting the spirit of a deceased
prostitute, who, to avoid possible embarrassment to the sitter, her former client, appears
partially veiled. See Tucker, Nature Exposed, pp. 95-6.

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The continuing belief in spirit photography by spiritualists was not even marred
by the occasionally unethical operator. Even when fraud was proved, or all but, the
faith in the technique and the sense that spirits desire and engineer opportunities
for photographs remained a foregone conclusion in many spiritualist circles. An
excellent example of the resistance and resilience of the practice against doubt is
found in the pages of Borderland, a spiritualist monthly journal of the 1890s. When
discussing the 1875 trial for fraud of Edouard Buguet, the journal notes:

The photographers ofParis were less fortunate; and in1875, one was sentenced
to a year's imprisonment and afine offive hundred francs. This seems to have
deprived the French spirits of their taste for being photographed; for though
they continue to 'manifest,' no photographic record of the fact has been of late
years preserved. 30

This account does not counter the fraud, but does uphold the reality of spirit
manifestations. Although the article quoted here does not claim it, spirits could,
if they so chose, visit fraudulent photographers. After all, they might not hold
earthbound standards for representational accuracy in high esteem. When
discussing other examples potentially pointing to fraudulent photographers,
believers simply reiterate the honesty of the photographer such as Glasgow spirit
photographer David Daguid, who was accused by many of fraud. In fact, several
believers in the practice would say that, while fraud could occur, it usually did not.
The belief perhaps had such strength in part because of the subjective status of
evidence. One famous adherent of the practice, Alfred Russel Wallace, for instance,
shares the following anecdote about receiving a spirit photograph of his mother:

On March 14th, 1874, I went to Hudson's, by appointment, for the first

and only time, accompanied by Mrs Guppy, as medium. I expected that if I
got any spirit picture it would be that of my eldest brother, in whose name
messages had frequently been received through Mrs Guppy. Before going to
Hudson's I sat with Mrs G., and had a communication by raps to the effect
that my mother would appear on the plate if she could ... I recognised none
of these figures in the negatives; but the moment I got the proofs, the first
glance showed me that the third plate contained an unmistakeable portrait of
my mother, - like her both in features and expression; not such a likeness as
a portrait taken during life, but a somewhat pensive, idealized likeness - yet
still, to me, an unmistakeable likeness. 31

I have already discussed this image of Wallace earlier in this chapter (Figure 17.2).
Similar testimonies appear over and over again. Sometimes it is also argued that
soul or spirit appears differently than it did while still in the body. With the highly

30
Borderland, 1.4 (April1894): 355.
31
Alfred Russel Wallace, On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism: Three Essays, 2nd edn
(London, 1881), p. 190, emphasis in original.

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THE AsHGATE REsEARCH CoMPANION TO SPIRITUALISM AND THE OccuLT

personal status in this framework of evidence, the practice thrived even in the
context of acknowledged cases of fraud, a knowledge of how double exposures
were produced, and a difference between the appearance of someone's spirit and
how he or she looked while alive.
The identity and evidence of a spirit, then, was based on interpretation, sympathy
and individual perception. In this regard, the practice was an aesthetic one and, by
the 1890s, an increasingly interpretatively subjective one. The practice allows for
the living sitter to help recreate their dead loved one in person, rather than only in
memory. Additionally, since no one is perfect, perhaps it also allowed their dead
loved ones to come back new and improved, better than when alive. Certainly in the
world of the Victorian novel there are hardly any relatives or friends who could not be
dramatically improved upon, whether by fashion or by education. Many characters
who die in fiction, for instance, have serious problems like poverty and depravity,
or more minor flaws such as disability, disease or meanness. Death does not have
the power to stop personal growth, change and improvement in the world of spirit
photography as it does in the world of literature. The focus in some contemporary
scholarship that primarily reads spirit photography through a Victorian culture of
mourning may oversentimentalize the complex emotions that living people hold for
the dead. Some people might have wanted better relatives back from the dead or
might have wanted a more beautiful lover or child. Some might simply have desired
to make the acquaintance of those they did not know in life - to be seen with the
historically significant from other times or places -to have achieved a wider fame.
These images require that we look simultaneously at a photograph as a work of
art, a record of a moment and an active construction of historical truth. Focusing
on the industry and artistry of spirit photography strangely makes the Victorians,
as Victorians, slip in and out of focus. And, literally, a soft focus even became more
typical of spirit photography as the century progressed.

Imagination and Impressions: Dorchagraphy in the 1890s

Spirit photography was conceptualized and explained in a sophisticated w~y\ with
the advent of dorchagraphy in the mid-1890s, a type of spirit photography. that
consisted of taking a picture without a camera. A gifted person could concentrate on
an image in his or her mind and have this image transfer by touch to a photographic
plate. This also presents a link between thought and essence that was present in
Wallace's discussion of spirit photography. Dorchagraphy, in fact was also termed
'Thought Photography', highlighting the connection between photography and
active visualization. While this was a technical departure from earlier 1870s spirit
photography, such as was practised in Hudson's studio, certain principles remained
constant. The discourse surrounding dorchagraphy in the 1890s continued to be much
the same as it had been in Hudson's day, marked by an abiding desire to believe and
a practice of making the past sometimes appear in the present as a novelty. However,
dorchagraphy was described by a technology increasingly reliant on imagination.

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 VICTORIAN SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY

Sensibility, magnetism and touch supplanted the camera's power in this newly
described technology: 'The discovery first made by Mr Traill Taylor, subsequently
verified by Mr Glendinning, that for the production of psychic pictures no camera
is necessary, is now established beyond all controversy ... ' 32 Mr Glendinning33 goes
on to note that:

... the term dorchagraphy is perhaps not sufficiently descriptive, but it may suffice
... to apply to writings, symbols, or pictures obtained on sensitive photographic
plates without the use ofa camera and without the aid oflight, or ofany apparatus
for the production ofelectric cunents or X rays. Psychic writings, drawings, and
paintings known as 'direct' may also, of course by called dorchagraphs. 34

If a camera and light are not involved, how is such a picture made? Of course,
~J:hereacler may also wonder if it is a picture at all or why, if not, it chooses to appear
on a photographic plate. Here it is helpful to recall the distinct understanding
of photography in the nineteenth century. Rosalind Krauss, in discussing the
late-century writing of nineteenth-century photographer Nadar, writes, 'We insist
on something like an ontology of photography so that we can deal with it. But
Nadar's point is that among other things, photography is a historical phenomenon
and therefore what it is is inseparable from what it was at specific points in time.' 35
In further explaining Nadar's conception of photography, she writes that 'Nadar
fixes' on 'the physical proximity which is its absolute requirement, on the fact
that ... photography depends on an act of passage between two bodies in the
same space'. 36 This act of passage, in turn, leaves a trace that was the 'material
object become intelligible ... Standing rather peculiarly at the crossroads between
science and spiritualism, the trace seemed to share equally in the positivists'
absolutism of matter and the metaphysicians order of pure intelligibility, itself

32
Borderland, 4.1 (January 1897): 27.
33
Andrew Glendinning, originally a Glasgow merchant, was also known as an avid
spiritualist and investigator of spirit photography. He closely followed the career, for
instance, of the Scottish working-class medium and photographer David Duguid and
was acquainted with other leading spiritualists, including J. Traill Taylor and W.T. Stead,
who founded Borderland. Glendinning, in addition to publishing The Veil Lifted: Modern
Developments of Spirit Photography (London, 1894), which examined spiritualism and spirit
photography, was a frequent contributor to Borderland in the late 1890s. He was an abolitionist
in the 1850s and 1860s, and an opponent of scientific materialism and of intolerant theology.
Perhaps most notably, he was a proponent of the vegetarian and fruitarian movements in
the late nineteenth century, opening some of the first vegetarian restaurants in London as
well as publishing a vegetarian cookbook, the Apple Tree Cookery Book & Guide to Rational Diet
(London, 1902). He died in October 1910. For more information, see Coates, Photographing
the Invisible, pp. 73-6; and Tucker, Nature Exposed, pp. 109, 120-22.
34
Borderland, 3.3 (July 1896): 313.
35
Rosalind Krauss, 'Tracing Nadar', October 5, Photography (Summer 1978): 29-47, p. 30.
36
Ibid., p. 34.

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THE AsHGATE RESEARCH CoMPANION TO SPIRITUALISM AND THE OccuLT

resistant to materialist analysis.' 37 Applied to dorchagraphy, perhaps it - like

spirit photography - is simply providing another type of indexicality, a distinct
trace, like a photograph, that both requires and resists interpretation and which
is differently viewed now than it was then. Poised between the material and the
metaphysical, the dorchagraph might represent spirit or perhaps it is difficult to
interpret it beyond what it meant to its creators.
Regarding the specific technique of producing such an image, one French
dorchographer provides a fairly esoteric explanation. M. Baraduc claims:

The vibrations of this Living Soul induce in the cosmos a motion analogous
to itself, in its polarizations either towards material concretion, since the soul
makes its body, or towards the more subtle conditions of spirit to which it
serves as the luminous envelope. 38

This does not explain why the soul chooses a photographic plate, but does
provide a materialist analogy: just as the soul makes its body it can also accrete
on a plate in order to make a dorchagraph. In this sense, the image might be like
a soul making a body or like the invisible world creating the material world, a
prevalent Swedenborgian belief that persisted throughout the period.39 This
hypothesis distinctly grants the invisible world agency through the mechanism of
the photographer's body, rather than through the mechanism of the camera. Like
so many other aspects of spiritualism, including spirit photography, dorchagraphy
also became a social rage:

A new fad has seized upon society. Thought photograph clubs have been
formed, with surprising and sometimes startling results. By fixing the gaze
upon an undeveloped photographic plate, or even holding these plates in the
hands, figures of persons and forms of a very extraordinary character have
been produced when these plates were developed. 40

Perhaps bits of extra soul accumulate when people hold hands or think?
Dorchagraphy was a technology that had techno replaced by onto. Photograp]1s
are suddenly existential, just about thinking or being. They are also much more
subjective - one could say, much more impressionistic.
In fact, just as spirit photography had followed the conventions of portraiture
earlier in the century, it seems, too, that dorchagraphy was tied to artistic practice
and the popularity of Impressionism as a late-century style for painting.

37
Ibid., p. 35.
38
Borderland, 4.1 (January 1897): 31.
39
For a discussion on Swendenborg's philosophies of the invisible world, see Krauss,
'Tracing Nadar', p. 39; and Willburn, Possessed Victorians, p. 75.
40
Borderland, 4.1 (January 1897): 29.

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 THE AsHGATE REsEARCH CoMPANION To SPIRITUALISM AND THE OccuLT

Figure 17.3 'Dorchagraph or Thought Photograph', Borderland, 3.3 (July 1896),

p. 315.

Glendinning relates of this dorchagraph:

I then took another plate from my pocket and asked Mrs D[uguid] to hold it with
me, and she said she thought it would be useless to try to obtain pictures with "·
her as she was not a sensitive; however, she consented to try, and we obtained
several interesting and novel pictures ... No 5 is one of those so obtained. 43

Itwould seem that, where the spirit is willing, this new style of photo-making is no
work at alt just an untrammelled venue for the soul to express its passing fancies.
At the same time, it is a highly artistic piece, white on black, fluid lines that have
curling trajectories and which combine in concert to make a shapely and winsome
still life of thought and fancy - a composition. This photo shares something in
common with the appearance of automatic writing as well, but without a hand
gripping a pen and poised above paper. Thinking seems to trump all technology.
Something deeply subjective and artistic is at play. Impressionism affects a
description of spirit photography because it foregrounds the importance of the
sitter's or medium's impressions, just as it was in impressionistic literature and art.
More than ever, 1890s spirit photography is an effect produced by desire and its
expression as a goat stronger than a wish. Dorchagraphy seems to pave the way

43
Borderland. 3.3 (July 1896): 315.

380
 VICTORIAN SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY

for other new 'graphies', t.oo. For instance, one that remained popular through the
1970s is chromography, the bands of colour, or aura, that some psychics claim can
be seen around every person. First pronounced by Theosophist Charles Leadbeater
in his illustrated book, Man Visible and Invisible, 44 this concept remains a part of
popular lore today.

Conclusion
At the end of the nineteenth century, with such technologies as dorchagraphy, the
nostalgia evidenced by spirit photography in the 1870s, became an increasingly
personal and blurry occasion. A spirit image might represent itself without a
medium, without a process, and without a camera, studio, or sitter, only with a
fancy - only a thought. This might be expression outside of language, perhaps.
History, so prominent in mid-century spirit photography, fades from view as it is
replaced by the eternal present of a wilful mind.
Spirit photography allows the term 'Victorian' to be reviewed and newly
envisioned. What if many Victorians, as those pictured within spirit photographs,
were both progressive and millenarian? Both communitarian and solipsistic?
Serious and funny? Real and fake? Natural and artificial? Sincere and irreverent?
In touch and out of this world? Credulous and incredible? Photographs, unlike
other media that we immediately see as representational, such as art, literature
and music, take us by surprise. Spirit photographs are not just about verity, loss or
wish-fulfilment. They are primarily about stealing a glimpse at a greater array of
social forms, historical outlooks and private desires. In these images, Victorians can
seem very much like us.

I
44
Charles Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible (Wheaton, IL, 1903).

381