Pseudoscience

We have seen that the Victorians were right about the benefits of seaside air for a range of ailments. It wasn’t only the briny air of the English seaside which could effect such cures, however. And it wasn’t just these ailments which the Victorians hoped to cure. In Jules Verne's early 1870s novel ‘The Floating City’, the abused wife and love interest is taken to a place of natural beauty and fresh air full of water droplets to recover her mental health...

“The Niagara ... is the principal resort of English and Americans in the warm months. They come here to breathe, to be cured by the sublime spectacle of the Falls"

“Since we brought her to breathe this fresh air in this quiet place, the doctor has discovered a sensible improvement in her condition. She is calm, her sleep is tranquil.”

The ‘madness’ which the lady in question was supposed to have had was the result of cruelty at the hands of an abusive husband – a nervous disorder which benefitted from rest and removal to a quiet, calm location.

The novel contains references to more dramatic nature cures, too. One of its characters, a doctor, first relates his own personal experience then gives another example of a natural electrical cure ...

“I was struck by lightning in my bed on the 13th July, 1867, at Kew, near London, and it cured me of paralysis in my right arm, when the doctors had given up the case as hopeless.”

“there are many very authentic facts which prove that thunder surpasses the most skilful physicians, and its intervention is truly marvellous in apparently hopeless cases."

"A peasant in Connecticut, who was suffering from asthma, supposed to be incurable, was struck by lightning in a field, and radically cured.”

Jules Verne was ny no means alone in his interest in such things. Charles Dickens was a great believer in mesmerism, which was all the rage at the time. His family doctor, the distinguished physician John Elliotson, conducted experiments and taught Dickens techniques such as making movements around the head with the hands in order to induce a magnetic sleep. Dickens experimented on his family and friends and proved ‘an extraordinarily powerful magnetiser.’

Based on the theoretical existence of a natural energy which could be transferred, mesmerism was originally termed ‘animal magnetism’. Some stressed its spiritual rather than physical benefits, allying it with spiritualism. This was particularly attractive to women, who were regarded as more spiritual than men, but included scientists and inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alfred Russell Wallace amongst its adherents.

In Jules Verne's novel, it is suggested that the character Ellen could sense the presence of a loved one ‘by a magnetic communication’. In this case, not a departed loved one but a former lover actually nearby aboard ship.

Dickens rejected spiritualism but his interest in mesmerism and phrenology influenced his writing, inspiring supernatural and psychological elements in his stories.

Another pseudoscience which influenced Victorian writers was physiognomy, the belief that personality, including moral character, could be determined by reading a person’s outward features. Jules Verne’s novel contains examples...

“His features were stamped with a look of general hatred, which neither a physiognomist, nor physiologist could mistake”

There are detailed descriptions of characters in novels by Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte, as well Dickens, which conform to the idea and readers would have expected this. It offered certainty in an uncertain world but was little more than stereotyping - racism and the stigmatising of illness and disability - in its equation of beauty with virtue.

Articles published during the 1860s argued that large databases of photographs would eventually allow physiognomists to classify types of features and types of people. Sensation novels took their lead from such debates, highlighting threats to bodily legibility such disfigurements and disguises. Plots often involved stolen, mistaken or assumed identities.

Both Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins challenged and subverted the idea in their work, showing characters misinterpreting one another and highlighting both the complex nature of character and the ways in which appearances could be deceptive. Hardy, who was interested in Darwin’s work on evolutionary biology, used unconscious physical reactions such as fleeting changes in countenance to denote emotion rather than a straight decoding of features. He, too, subverted the idea of physiognomy and showed how it could be misleading.

Read more on Dickens & Mesmerism ..

Read more on Physiognomy in 1860s novels..