WHAT DICKENS KNEW 11Germans (85), and in general suggests that one need go no further to account
for apparitional appearances than the human tendency toward heightened
imagination. In the end his review is not so much a rationalist’s dismissal of
spiritual phenomena as a relocation of such phenomena within the normal
operations of the mind-body system. The influence of Dr. Elliotson is once
again palpable, especially when Dickens argues for a serious view of “animal
magnetism” (or mesmerism) as “a power that can heal the sick, and give the
sleepless rest” (87). Thus, while Dickens seems to be a believer on the subject
of spontaneous combustion and a skeptic on the subject of spiritualism, his
positions share a fascination, stimulated by Elliotson, with what we might
now call “alternative” knowledge of the commerce among bodily states,
mental illnesses, and sensory apparitions.
Dickens’s attraction to haunted minds powered the extensive experiments
in mesmerism he performed on Augusta de la Rue for six or seven months
during his family’s residence in Genoa in 1844–45. The de la Rue couple—a
Swiss banker and his English wife—were neighbors of the Dickenses, and
quickly became informal friends. Mme de la Rue suffered from an array of
nervous symptoms that Dickens thought he could treat by hypnotizing her, as
he had seen Dr. Elliotson and others do in similar cases. A strange triangular
relationship developed as he became obsessed by his power to meddle in her
inner life, all the while making meticulous reports in “scientific” language to
Emile de la Rue about what transpired during his wife’s mesmeric slumbers.
It was not long before Dickens had discovered the phantom of an evil
man who haunted and terrified her (it is deeply tempting to imagine that the
phantom was her unconscious projection of Dickens himself ). As Dickens
saw it, he had broken the first link of her disease by destroying the secrecy of
the phantom. “I cannot yet quite make up my mind,” he continues, “whether
the phantom originates in shattered nerves and a system broken by Pain; or
whether it is the representative of some great nerve or set of nerves on which
her disease has preyed—and begins to loose its hold now, because the disease
of those nerves is itself attacked by the inexplicable agency of the Magnetism.”
It would be difficult to articulate his distinction between these conditions,
but he was clearly determined to sound medical. In either case, he thought,
Mme de la Rue’s phantom “must not make head again” (4.254–55). He began
to see himself as the force of good, fighting with all his might against “that
Devil,” who might, he feared, go so far as to threaten his patient “with
revenge against herself and upon me” (4.259). His medical fantasies were
quickly being transformed into fictions of triangular desire and rivalry.
By the time Dickens left Genoa at the end of June, he had convinced
himself that his patient was nearly cured, and that her tormentor was on the