The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [176]
I found two books and one dissertation helpful in thinking about the underlying tensions between science and religion at this point of time: Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974); and John James Cerullo, “The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Britain, 1882-1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980).
33: One author who proposed that the universe might have developed: The anonymous author was a Scottish journalist named Robert Chambers; the church’s extremely angry reaction to his 1848 book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation anticipated reaction to Darwin’s work (as Darwin himself noted).
34: Alfred Russel Wallace: Wallace gets a very sympathetic portrait from Arthur Conan Doyle in History of Spiritualism; a complex portrayal in Turner, Between Science and Religion, 68-99; and a fairly critical analysis in Oppenheim, Other World, which includes some discussion of Charles Darwin’s reactions to Wallace’s spiritualist ventures.
Wallace describes his early investigations—and their implications—in a series of writings, including an 1866 pamphlet, The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural, and a letter to the editor of the Times of London, Jan. 4, 1873, titled “Spiritualism and Science.” Links to these and others of Wallace’s writings, including his work on natural selection, can be found on Charles Smith’s outstanding Alfred Russel Wallace page, www.wku.edu/~smithch/.
40: “I feel convinced”: A. S. Sidgwick and E. M. S. Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London: MacMillan, 1906), 187-88.
40: Henry Sidgwick: Sidgwick’s letters and the biographical details of this section come from Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick. The original papers are archived at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University.
41: “When I found out how selfish”: Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, 271-72.
42: the son of a well-to-do Yorkshire clergyman: Myers writes about his life and his place in Fragments of Inner Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (privately printed, 1893; reprint, Society for Psychical Research, 1961).
44: “It may all be true”: Huxley to Wallace, cited in James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (New York: Harper & Bros., 1916), 418; the book also details Wallace’s early investigations of spiritualists and efforts to interest his colleagues. Huxley’s second letter is quoted in Report on Spiritualism, of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society, Longman, Green & Co., London, 1871.
45: William Crookes: Crookes and his psychical research can be found in all good histories of the movement. I also found useful M. R. Barrington, ed., Crookes and the Spirit World (New York: Taplinger, 1972). The detail on thallium poisoning comes from Renee Haynes, Society for Psychical Research, 1882-1982: A History (London: MacDonald and Company, 1982), 179-81. Details of his early experiments are given in his “Spiritualism Viewed by the Light of Modern Science,” Quarterly Journal of Science, July 1870; and “Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual During the Years 1870 through 1873,” Quarterly Journal of Science, Jan. 1874. Crookes’s controversial first report on D. D. Home was titled “Experimental Investigation of a New Force” and was in January 1871; his second (also referenced at the start of chapter 3) was done as the 1870-73 overview. Selected text from these papers and many