Testimony and Narrative on the Supernatural in the Work of Catherine Crowe, the London Dialectical Society and Edward William Cox

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the role of testimony and the production of narrative in supernatural research in the mid to late Victorian period (1848-1879). It focuses on the work of Catherine Crowe and Edward William Cox as two examples of amateur researchers into a discipline dismissed by a rising materialist physiology that had cemented its institutional authority, largely dismissing objective validity of supernatural occurrences. It also examines the role of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society’s work on Spiritualism as a remarkable example of a new method of investigating Spiritualist phenomena. Crowe as specialist in writing and Cox as a legal expert, sought to use their specialisms of expertise in human behaviour to argue for the experiential validity of supernatural phenomena. This was done by adopting a scientific model but also by a defense of testimony as a reliable form of evidence, especially when put in an accumulative narrative of many similar testimonies. A large part of the thesis is taken with non-fiction with the exception of Crowe where realist methods of investigation and supernatural narratives are incorporated into her fictional work. This is done to show Crowe’s method of portraying veridical supernatural phenomena as part of a realist narrative. The 19th century also witnessed the rise of societies and increasingly specialized disciplines of knowledge. This thesis will chart the concurrent rise of this amongst the aforementioned as a unique example of non-spiritualist or skeptic researchers seeking a new method through language and methods. From Crowe one saw the domestic researcher, the Committee showed the rise of a group of researchers and finally with the Psychological Society, an actual society devoted to exploring the phenomena outside of Spiritualist and skeptic discourses. It is a study of testimony as data and how that data became narrative and information.