By Cecelia Schneeman
Gathered around a worn oak table, two sisters sit, their fingers interlaced as they stare at the table’s center where a candle burns, lighting their faces in flickering shadows of light and darkness. Suddenly, a coded rapping reverberates off the table; the sisters are not alone. The sound, the sisters believe, comes from a spirit from the other world: a man who was murdered inside their house.[1] After hearing this tale told by the Fox sisters in 1848, many a superstitious American and Englishman became infected with ghost fever.[2] This fever proved to be contagious, and despite a confession from one of the sisters decades later testifying that their tale was fictional, spiritualism remained popular, and seances, automatic writing, and ghost sightings persisted.[3] However, just as spiritualism was becoming a catching fad, detective literature, too, was gaining popularity in the public eye. Many scholars have investigated the role of spiritualism in Victorian literature; however, few have explored how Victorian detective literature juxtaposes the immaterial realm with objective experience.[4] This juxtaposition is made evident in Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, especially in her story “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” in which Loveday Brooke debunks a ghost sighting, exposing the foolishness of spiritualism and promoting the value of material logic.
Throughout “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” Pirkis critiques the ghost-sighting fad by using irony and repetition to suggest that the belief in such things is foolish. At the beginning of the story, Brooke reads a newspaper article reporting on a recent ghost-sighting titled “Authentic Ghost Story.”[5] After reading the article’s title, we—along with Brooke—are already questioning the story’s authenticity, with its overcompensating need to define itself as “authentic.” Pirkis does this intentionally, ironically placing “authentic” before “ghost story” to signal to us that we can correctly assume the proceeding ghost story to be anything but authentic, especially when we remember that we are reading detective fiction, a genre that emphasizes the logically explicable, not the fantastically inexplicable. Thus, before we readers know anything about the ghost story, we already know that its origins are likely illogical or contrived, just as the Fox sisters’s story was invented, and so we are meant to scoff at those who believe its verity.
Later in the story, Pirkis makes use of repetition to criticize spiritualism, repeatedly describing the ghost and ghost sighting as “ridiculous.” In fact, throughout the short story, Pirkis uses the adjective no less than seven times in the dialogue of Brooke and Mr. Clampe in reference to the ghost-sighting. For instance, while inquiring about Brooke’s development in the ghost-sighting case, Clampe says, “I am deeply interested in that ‘ridiculous ghost.’”[6] And a few pages later, Brooke tells Clampe that she will “tell [him], step by step, how [she] came to connect a stolen check with a ‘ridiculous ghost.’”[7] In labeling the ghost “ridiculous,” Pirkis is also labeling spiritualism as absurd, suggesting that it invites and deserves mockery because of its irrationality. She suggests that by using “step by step” empirical reasoning and deduction, the seemingly inexplicable may be made explicable.
Pirkis further criticizes spiritualism by asserting that its devotees are weak-minded, unlike the logically minded detective. While explaining how she came to solve the case of the missing cheque and the ghost of fountain lane, Brooke boldly claims that “the world . . . abounds in people who are little more than blank sheets of paper, on which a strong hand may transcribe what it will.”[8] Here, Brooke explains the reason behind why so many people believe in ghosts and ghost sightings: because they are weak-minded and easily susceptible to suggestion. They lack a grounded mind capable of seeing through the facades of performers like the Rev. Richard Steele, the preacher whose sermons made suggestive “persons see an embodiment of his thought at will”— ghost sightings.[9] Pirkis further elaborates on this point when, as the story draws to an end, Brooke concludes,
Don't you think that ghost-seeing is quite as catching as scarlet-fever or measles? . . . Let one member of a family see a much individualized and easily described ghost, such as the one these good people saw, and ten to one others in the same house will see it before the week is over. We are all in the habit of asserting that “seeing is believing.” Don't you think the converse of the saying is true also, and that “believing is seeing?”[10]
In these concluding lines, Pirkis asserts that for the spiritualist, a belief in the supernatural is enough to trick a weak mind into seeing things, which then spreads like a contagion. This sentiment is further corroborated when Clampe says, “Hysterics are catching . . . it’s high time this sort of thing was put to a stop.”[11] Using Clampe’s words, Pirkis speaks directly to the Victorian public, urging her contemporaries—as well as us as readers—to use reason and intellect to see the material truth, like Brooke does, instead of relying on unprovable, subjective, and immaterial experiences as evidence of the spiritual realm.
Perhaps Pirkis’s most interesting critique of spiritualism takes the form of Maria Lisle, who, I’d like to argue, is the real ghost of “The Ghost of Fountain Lane.” You see, according to Osinska, “Ghosts [materialize] in a variety of ways and [in] different settings. Their presence is marked by ‘recurrent apparitions’ called hauntings,” and “predominantly, spirits tend to visit solitary and remote places, away from the hustle and bustle of the community.”[12] If we analyze Maria in light of these spectral characteristics, we see that she easily fits the definition of a ghost. In a conversation with Brooke, Mrs. Brown elucidates these qualities in Maria when she explains, “Do you see that old summer-house over there in the vicarage grounds—it stands between the orchard and kitchen garden—well, every evening at sunset, out comes Maria and disappears into it.”[13] Later she states, “We shall frighten Maria to death if she sees us so near her haunt.”[14] Here, Maria functions as a “recurrent apparition” at the summer-house, appearing every eerie evening, just as a ghost might appear in a graveyard or haunted mansion when the sun retires. Furthermore, Maria chooses as her “haunt” the “lonely old”[15] summer-house, a building Brooke describes as being “considerably out of repair, and most probably was never entered by anyone save Maria Lisle, its unswept, undusted condition suggesting colonies of spiders and other creeping things within.”[16] This summer-house, then, accurately serves as Maria’s haunting ground, a solitary hideaway from the material world.
So how does this spectral depiction of Maria function as a critique of spiritualism? Well, by having Maria assume the role of the ghost, Pirkis implies that all ghost sightings have a material explanation. Maria is not some specter that inhabits a realm between the spiritual and material worlds. She is a living, breathing woman who, if she existed outside the ivory pages of Pirkis’s story, we could see and touch. And so, through her characterization of Maria, Pirkis implores her readers to think critically and rationally—as a detective would—to see that the world we live in is material, not supernatural.
Endowed with a logical mind, Loveday Brooke debunks a series of ghost sightings, a demystification that serves to critique the fad of spiritualism prevalent in Victorian society. Throughout “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” Pirkis makes use of irony and repetition to condemn spiritualism as inauthentic and ridiculous, while also attributing the popularity of the fad to devotees’ weakmindedness and irrationality. Pirkis further critiques spiritualism by characterizing Maria as the real ghost of this ghost story, thereby suggesting that the seemingly phantasmal may always be explained through logical reasoning. The foregrounding of spiritualism in Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, and detective fiction more broadly, highlights the importance of reason in a world that was becoming increasingly infected with superstition.
Notes
[1] Christian Sheppard, “Believing and Debunking Spiritualism with Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini in Tony Oursler’s Imponderable,” Religious Studies Review 43, no. 3 (2017): 244.
[2] Jeffrey J. Franklin, Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 31.
[3] Ibid., 245.
[4] Scholars who have studied spiritualism in Victorian literature include Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982); Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996); and Srdjan Smajic, Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[5] Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (New York: Dover, 202), 155.
[6] Ibid., 171.
[7] Ibid., 174.
[8] Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 177.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 180.
[11] Ibid., 174.
[12] Dorota Osińska, “Bringing Ghosts Down to Earth: Depictions of Spiritualism in the Victorian Popular Press,” Polish Journal of English Studies 7, no. 1 (2021): 23.
[13] Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 166.
[14] Ibid., 167.
[15] Ibid., 168.
[16] Ibid., 167–68.
