Keeping in Touch: An Anthology of the Victorian SeanceMain MenuIntroductionFurther ReadingI - Spiritualism and Its BelieversII - Ambivalent SkepticsIII - Scoffers and FraudsIV - The Private SeanceV - The Public SeanceWork CitedMegan Brueningb3bbdc9bd1941527cc9ff27849ef1a643abdd7d3
The Dark Seance
12016-11-23T12:34:42-05:00Megan Brueningb3bbdc9bd1941527cc9ff27849ef1a643abdd7d3713plain2016-12-16T21:03:12-05:00Megan Brueningb3bbdc9bd1941527cc9ff27849ef1a643abdd7d3John Lawson’s “The Dark Séance” (published in The Era Almanack in 1906) is a wonderful short comic piece. Lawson attends a séance and when discovering that the medium has not yet arrived, tries to impersonate the medium and utterly fails to persuade the audience of this identity. This piece is included partly for its novelty (most comic treatments of the séance did not follow this plot) and also because it illustrates how criticism of the séance was significantly devoted to mocking the interpretive abilities of the public at large. Many critics in this section thus reveal a deep anxiety over the epistemological practices of society at large, explaining (through their debunking of mediums) what chaos these shaky practices can lead to.
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12016-11-23T13:04:29-05:00Megan Brueningb3bbdc9bd1941527cc9ff27849ef1a643abdd7d3III - Scoffers and FraudsMegan Bruening3plain2016-11-23T13:07:10-05:00Megan Brueningb3bbdc9bd1941527cc9ff27849ef1a643abdd7d3
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12016-12-14T13:09:10-05:00Megan Brueningb3bbdc9bd1941527cc9ff27849ef1a643abdd7d3Newspaper and Magazine AccountsMegan Bruening1Genreplain2016-12-14T13:09:10-05:00Megan Brueningb3bbdc9bd1941527cc9ff27849ef1a643abdd7d3