Victorian Poetry

DANIEL BROWN

reached the letter "P" a knock was heard. He began again, and the spirits

knocked at the letter "O." I was puzzled, but waited for the end. The next

letter knocked down was "E." I laughed, and remarked that the spirits were

going to make a poet of me. Admonished for my levity, I was informed that

the frame of mind proper for the occasion ought to have been superinduced

by a perusal of the Bible immediately before the seance. The spelling,

however, went on, and sure enough I came out a poet. But matters did not

end there. Our host continued his repetition of the alphabet, and the next

letter of the name proved to be "O"... The knocks came from under the

table, but no person present evinced the slightest desire to look under it. I

asked whether I might go underneath; the permission was granted; so I crept

under the table ... I continued under that table for at least a quarter of an

hour, after which, with a feeling of despair as regards the prospects of

humanity never before experienced, I regained my chair. Once there, the

spirits resumed their loquacity, and dubbed me "Poet of Science." 2

Spiritualist phenomena, such as the table-rappings that Tyndall investi-
gates here, manifest physical effects that the laws of science cannot
explain. An import from the United States, the Spiritualist movement
became immediately and immensely popular in mid-Victorian England.
For a generation whose Christian beliefs were under threat from the
positivist science of Darwin and his peers, Spiritualism offered a credible
alternative to materialistic atheism or reactionary religious conservativism
because it apparently fulfilled the positivist criterion for knowledge by
offering observable evidence of an immaterial human spirit and its life
after death.

The spirit world is justifiably nervous of Tyndall, the fierce public
advocate for the autonomy of science who insisted upon testing such
phenomena as prayer 3 and Spiritualism according to positivist experi-
mental principles. The "spirits" try to placate him by invoking the
Romantic identification of science with poetry. But for Tyndall, the two
fields of cultural activity are quite distinct, and he is accordingly amused at
the prospect of being called a "Poet." He writes that the spirits "dubbed"
him "Poet of Science," as if they were conferring upon him an aristocratic
title. The honorific use of the word "Poet" relegates "science" to a merely
contingent and subject dominion, in a manner similar to Wordsworth's
180 2 "Preface." Principles that are directly opposed to Victorian scientism
and belong to Spiritualism, such as divine inspiration, faith, prophecy, and
transcendentalism, are canonized in Romantic poetry. Here the ghostly
figure of the Romantic poet functions as the real medium between the
spirits and the scientist. But Tyndall of course accepts no such mediation.
Far from looking heavenward for truth, he gets down on all fours and

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