“ABOVE THE BREATH OF SUSPICION”: FLORENCE MARRYAT AND THE SHADOW OF THE FRAUDULENT TRANCE MEDIUM

Abstract

During the early 1870s, the practice of spiritualism in Britain changed irrevocably as a few select trance mediums claimed to have achieved full-form spirit materializations, rather than the table-rapping and voices heard in the dark that had been accomplished since the 1850s. At the centre of this new controversial practice were two young women, Florence Cook and Mary Rosina Showers, both of whom became the subjects of William Crookes’ notorious series of investigative seances. In their fight to prove their integrity, these trance mediums had an important, but hitherto unexplored, champion, Florence Marryat, a passionate believer and editor of the fashionable metropolitan periodical, London Society. Scholars have recognized Marryat as an important figure in the debate surrounding full-form materializations which raged in the 1870s, and yet her fiction is often peripheral, or simply not considered, in such studies; certainly the articles she published in London Society which explicitly supported Cook and Showers remain unexamined. This article suggests that although Marryat has been somewhat dismissed as a gullible believer, a close reading of London Society reveals that she did, in fact, use her position of author and editor to publish intricate and detailed articles both in defence of and challenging the practice of the trance medium alongside her own carefully structured pro-spiritualist novel There In No Death. Thus, when read in the original publishing context, Marryat's novel serves to illuminate not only the complex debate surrounding trance mediums during the 1870s but also the power of the female editor to engage with and become part of that debate.