The Knotty Lives of Victorian Soothsayers
About six years ago, I was reading letters from Harriet Beecher Stowe to George Eliot in a locked research room at the New York Public Library. Here, I stumbled on a reference to a woman named Kate Fox. In an 1872 letter, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin told Eliot that she had recently encountered Kate—one of the Fox sisters, a trio of celebrated spirit mediums—at a séance. Stowe’s looping handwriting painted a vivid picture of the young woman conducting proceedings in the darkness, mysterious phosphorescent lights glowing all around her. Immediately intrigued, I set out to learn more about the Foxes.
My library notes from that day would be my entry point into a shadowy Victorian world, full of women who attained fame, fortune, and astounding levels of social and political influence thanks to their supposed abilities to contact the dead. In the years that followed,, a former spiritual healer from rural Ohio, became a highly influential figure on Wall Street, and later the first woman to run for the office of president of the United States. , a Londoner, was nearly confined to an asylum because of her beliefs in the spirit world, but went on to become a household name thanks to her campaigning against archaic lunacy laws. , a fellow Briton, was celebrated as an orator, famed for giving speeches while in a trance; her renown was such that, after Lincoln’s assassination, she was asked to lead New York City’s first public commemoration of the late president, which was attended by thousands.
