Table Rappers: The Victorians and the Occult

by Ronald Pearsall

The Victorian age was the most haunted of all. At dark seances spectators goggled at spirit hands descending form above, and fondled 'spirits' who had coyly emerged from cabinets. The age of reason had done away with the supernatural. But the Victorians wanted it back and they made certain they got it. Astrology and fortune-telling enjoyed a boom, and in country districts the witches and the cunning men plied their arts, selling and casting spells, and applying the evil eye. The Table-Rappers deals with all aspects of the Victorian occult - the credulity of believers certain that a thing of gauze and muslin was their dead aunt, the venom of the professional mediums who sabotaged each others' seances, and the still unexplained phenomena - levitations, the fire test where mediums handled red-hot coals, and strange materialisations where both spirits and mediums were in the room at the same time. Behind all the heavy breathing in darkened rooms, the implausible spirit photographs, the interminable dotty table-rapping and inconsequential scribbling on slates, lay a whole world of absurd tricksters, well-meaning dolts, credulous gulls and some unforgettable characters.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Research, Spiritualism, Ghosts, Victorian, Paranormal

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Ronald Joseph Pearsall was an English writer of books on wide range of subjects.

Reviews

[Dianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overview of the spiritualist movement in America and Great Britain during the Victorian period. Dry in places, but overall informative and worth the effort (if you like this kind of thing).

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a funny book, perhaps unintentionally. It has many humorous merits:
- It's about the "spiritualist" movement in Victorian England, a delightfully kitschy and silly thing;
- The author is a member of the Society for Psychical Research, so he'll conclude that some events were probably telepathy
- The author is a British man writing in the Seventies, and is amazingly elitist and condescending in his writing.

If you find any of that funny, this is the book for you. It's gossipy and weird and mostly anecdotal, although Pearsall does include quite a few quotes from primary sources. The trick is that most of these sources are from the 1880s and 1890s, so good luck finding them in a library, probably.

Overall, 3 stars. YMMV, and it will probably not convince you that ghosts are real. It might convince you that bored British nouveau-riche folks were really easy to fool if you were a servant or peasant or working person.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book does hold interesting information. However, half the time I couldn't quite make out how much influence the author was trying to curl around the subject matter, and I found his summation at the end to be a little...confusing, I guess we could say. If you're interested, it's worth paging through, though. It's just a bit dry.

[Vincent T. Ciaramella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book but it fell flat. The authors writing style mixed with the anecdotal nature of the text just didn't mix well. I started to skim the book towards the end. I ended up giving it to a friend who LOVES this stuff and maybe he'll get more out of it than me.

[Boris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book dealing with the paranormal I had read back in the late 70's. I found the prose confusing and at times wasn't sure exactly what point the author was trying to make. Spiritualists and incidents would be mentioned in passing and I was not sure whether from the author's perspective they were real or fraudulent events.

Various names that I am now familiar with would appear with no context or background which made the impression of simply reading names at random from a telephone book.

The author draws both correct and incorrect conclusions. I was surprised that he endorsed D.D. Home as real (which I agree with) but the Fox sisters and Eusapia Paladino as frauds (who seemed quite real if one reads the actual accounts of the sitters). As a Brit it seems he was much less familiar with the American scene and would draw conclusions on very slim information.

The book covers social and cultural trends like mesmerism and Theosophy which are tangential to spiritualism and the paranormal.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Victorian age was the most haunted of all. At dark seances spectators goggled at spirit hands descending form above, and fondled 'spirits' who had coyly emerged from cabinets. The age of reason had done away with the supernatural. But the Victorians wanted it back and they made certain they got it. Astrology and fortune-telling enjoyed a boom, and in country districts the witches and the cunning men plied their arts, selling and casting spells, and applying the evil eye. The Table-Rappers deals with all aspects of the Victorian occult - the credulity of believers certain that a thing of gauze and muslin was their dead aunt, the venom of the professional mediums who sabotaged each others' seances, and the still unexplained phenomena - levitations, the fire test where mediums handled red-hot coals, and strange materialisations where both spirits and mediums were in the room at the same time. Behind all the heavy breathing in darkened rooms, the implausible spirit photographs, the interminable dotty table-rapping and inconsequential scribbling on slates, lay a whole world of absurd tricksters, well-meaning dolts, credulous gulls and some unforgettable characters.

[Julie Staniford · Rating 4 out of 5]

At last I've found a good book on Victorian spiritualism. Well-written and well-researched, this is extremely easy to read with many insights into spiritualist practices and--even better--spiritualist frauds and how they were perpetrated. Very occasionally I felt like the author's personal prejudices edged their way into what was otherwise a very balanced text, but this didn't happen often enough to dampen my enthusiasm.

On the whole, a really interesting read.