Victorian spiritualism capitalised on the desire to transcend death to create new ways of making money

The desire to reconnect with lost loved ones has long created commercial opportunities, write JAMES CRONIN and SOPHIE JAMES

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DEATH has never entirely stopped the living from trying to continue a conversation with their loved ones.

Today, AI-powered deathbots and a growing range of “grief tech” bring to market several ways that consumers can recreate the voices of the deceased. They open new commercial opportunities and experiences alongside uncomfortable questions about whether grief should be profitable.

Yet long before AI made it possible to simulate (and charge a premium for) a familiar voice, the spiritualist movement that swept across Victorian Britain negotiated issues of credibility, authenticity and commercial exploitation while transforming one of humanity’s most enduring desires into something marketable.

Our research into the business history of spiritualism in 19th-century Britain suggests that the similarities go deeper than a shared fascination with communicating with the dead.

Victorian Britain is often remembered as an age of industrial progress, scientific discovery and astonishing feats of engineering. Yet the Victorians were also fascinated by ghosts, the supernatural and the macabre.

These tendencies might first be written off as a contradiction — the perseverance of premodern supernaturalism among an increasingly modern society. But a closer look reveals that the technologies that transformed Victorian commerce and entertainment also helped make ghosts visible, reproducible and profitable.

Large-scale plate glass production, advances in illumination, and optical physics (the scientific study of how light behaves and interacts with matter around us) allowed for the staging of phantasmagorical illusions, while photography could apparently capture the dead.

The supernatural was not simply surviving on the margins of industrial modernity; it was finding new opportunities within it. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek offers a useful explanation, arguing that societies are sustained partly through an “underside” of practices and desires that appears to contradict their official values.

This underside can provide outlets for what the official values exclude, helping people live with the wider social order. Zizek calls this the “obscene supplement”: the provocative and discomforting underbelly that a society struggles to acknowledge even while relying on it.

Victorian spiritualism helps us understand how this obscene supplement could become commercially productive.

Spiritualism is the belief that the dead can be contacted through people known as mediums. It emerged in the US in the late 1840s, following claims from self-styled mediums, the Fox sisters, that spirits communicated with them through mysterious knocks.

Spiritualism reached Britain through visiting US mediums. Seances, public demonstrations, specialist publications and objects such as “spirit cabinets” helped create a movement with its own celebrities and commercial networks.

An article appeared in The Times in 1872 expressing surprise that among “a generation which boasts itself to be one of exact science,” spiritualism had developed such interest. In our interpretation, spiritualism offered access to something apparently missing from a society increasingly focused on producing, acquiring and displaying “things”: evidence that there was more to life than the material world. Yet spiritualism seemed to make that offer through more things: paid encounters, purchasable photographs and advertised products.

This is where Zizek’s obscene supplement becomes revealing. A society’s apparent opposites can provide ways of living with its demands without fundamentally changing them. Spiritualism offered an escape from Victorian commercial culture while drawing people into new forms of consumption. Making that offer convincing required careful management.

Spiritualist publications warned that mediumship could not be bought. Nevertheless, mediums had livelihoods, publishers needed subscribers and organisers needed to cover costs. Mediumship was therefore presented as an exhausting and often dangerous duty whose selfless practitioners deserved to be paid fairly for their services.

To protect the movement’s brand, mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home would publicly refuse direct payment for seances. Instead, he accepted gifts, hospitality, travel opportunities and material support from wealthy patrons, while other mediums requested expenses and a moderate fee proportionate to their clients’ means. Commerce became easier to accept when presented as support for a higher calling.

Scientific credibility also required balancing. Spiritualists welcomed scientists’ involvement, approximated scientific and philosophical language, and used technical equipment to make extraordinary claims appear worthy of serious attention.

Photography was particularly useful. A supposedly objective technology could produce images presented as evidence of spirits. Its dependence on darkroom processes also supplied a useful analogy for why seances required darkness. An account in Medium and Daybreak described a photographic seance near Newcastle in 1880. The correspondent alludes to the importance of darkness, not to conceal any trickery but to mitigate the “trying effect of daylight” on ghosts’ “materialisation.”

The Victorian fascination with communicating beyond the grave may seem distant from our technologically sophisticated present. Yet contemporary forms of “digital necromancy” reveal a remarkably familiar tension: the desire to transcend the limits of human existence continues to generate new income streams.

As with Victorian mediums, today’s grief-tech entrepreneurs operate within a delicate relationship between emotional need, technological credibility and commercial legitimacy. The promise of connection may be sincerely offered and deeply meaningful to those who seek it, even as that same promise becomes a source of profit.

Perhaps this is the more unsettling legacy of Victorian spiritualism: desires that appear to challenge a society’s dominant values may, in fact, help sustain the very structures they seem to resist.

Rather than unsettling the established order, they can create new opportunities for its continued flourishing. The ghosts of Victorian capitalism, it seems, have never quite stopped doing business.

James Cronin is professor in marketing and consumer culture studies at Lancaster University; Sophie James is lecturer in security and protection science at Lancaster University.

This article is republished from theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. It has been slightly edited for length.

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