Author: Deborah Blum
Publisher: The Penguin Press
Price: £17.99
Isbn: 9781594200908

The undeniably catchy title of Deborah Blum’s study of the early years of psychical research gives a somewhat misleading impress­ion of what her book is actually about. Her protagonists – a group of scient­ists and scholars of the calibre of Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Sidgewick, Oliver Lodge and William James – were, by and large, concerned with investigating the possibility of life after death, but ‘ghost hunters’ conjures up a partic­ular image of vigils and techno­logy which is far from how they went about it.

Blum skilfully, if selectively, weaves together the various strands of activity on both sides of the Atlantic. The result is an entertaining read that brings to life the characters who pursued psychical research against feroc­ious oppos­ition, and with a single-mindedness and energy which – and this is the book’s central point – puts the current generation to shame.

Despite the author’s Pulitzer Prize for science writing, this is not intended as a scholarly book, rather a piece of hist­or­ical journal­ism. For instance, Blum occasionally provides narratives which, although derived from first-hand accounts, are retold in her own words. And within the terms she sets for herself, she succeeds in depicting something of the personalities of the first generation of scientific psychical researchers and the issues they had to navigate in their attempt to put the new discipline on a firm footing.

Although William James is supposed to be the focus, it soon becomes clear – though it is never made explicit – that actually he was not really central to the development of the subject, which was largely going on in Europe. Blum covers a great deal more than James’s contribution, but the book would have been improved if she had delved more deeply and widely in the archives, as it sometimes betrays a lack of familiarity with the (admittedly copious) literature. Her sources are, by and large, secondary, and not always particularly new. Primary ones are largely confined to the American Society for Psychical Research and the Houghton Collection of James’s correspondence at Harvard. She does not seem to have visited the Society for Psychical Research’s extensive archives at Cambridge University Library, even though she acknow­ledges the Wren library at Trinity College.

Such selectivity is demonstrated in a sketchy treatment of French hypnotism, for example, in which Charcot and Janet get about a paragraph apiece and Blum refers the reader to a few pages from Brian Inglis’s Natural and Supernatural, Gordon Epperson’s The Mind of Edmund Gurney and Charles Richet’s Thirty Years of Psychical Research, but not Eric Dingwall’s encyclopædic Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena: A Survey of Nineteenth Century Cases, an entire volume of which is devoted to France, nor Alan Gauld’s A History of Hypnotism.

The lack of a bibliography is an annoyance, forcing the reader to wade through endnotes to find the first reference to a publication – and these are not always complete. For example, Blum says simply (p129) that “Perhaps the most publicised attack in England [on Phantasms of the Living] appeared in the magazine Nineteenth Century in August 1887, in a lengthy article devoted to discrediting the docu­ment­ation that Gurney and his co-authors had used to establish their ghost stories”, but does not give the author’s name (A Taylor Innes) or the article’s title (“Where Are the Letters?: A Cross-Examination of Certain Phantasms”). She refers the reader to a number of articles by William Crookes first printed in science journals in the 1870s, not mentioning that they were collected together in a handy form in Crookes’s Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism.

There are other odd little lapses: Catherine Crowe, author of The Night Side of Nature, was not Scottish but from Kent; the governess in The Turn of the Screw is not engaged by the children’s father, who is dead, but by their uncle. Cambridge does not have a campus, but 31 colleges dotted around the city. More seriously, she invariably calls the SPR the British Society for Psychical Research, as if that is its official title, whereas it needs no modifier, as it was first in the field. Unforgivably, it is listed in the index under B as “British Society for Psychical Research (SPR)”.

Considering the book is about the growth of organised psychical research and how it fared while William James was alive, i.e. until 1910, the formation of the SPR itself in 1882 is very sketchily handled, and Edmund Dawson Rogers is left out completely (but then, the Spiritualists in general hover around the margins with little attention paid to them). Nor, surprisingly, is Axel Munthe’s story of Myers’s death in Rome included. Myers and William James had a pact that whoever died first would attempt commun­ic­ation with each other. James was present at Myers’s death, but could not bring himself to stay in the room. Instead, he sat outside, and when Munthe left the room after Myers had expired, he found the grief-stricken James in a chair, a notebook open on his knees, the pages blank.

Despite these and the other strange lacunæ that litter the book, Ghost Hunters is a highly readable account of a period in which the search for evidence of life after death attracted some of the liveliest minds of a generation, and Blum captures something of the excitement of their quest.