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Notes
1 Throughout the century, on average, 150 out of every 1000 infants died before the age of one (Jalland Citation1996, 120).
2 As Cathy Gutierrez argues, the presence of unbaptized babies in the Summerland helps to articulate one of the major challenges that Christian spiritualism posed to mainstream Protestant theology (Citation2009, 4).
3 Davis returns to these questions frequently, including in his 1877 sequel to A Stellar Key to the Summer-Land, titled Views of our Heavenly Home; see 182.
4 See Rowland for more on the metaphor of the child as a figure of development and how it underwrites many Victorian sciences and disciplines, from psychology and anthropology to evolutionary biology (Citation2012, 16).
5 Christine Ferguson argues persuasively that this paradox contributes to spiritualism's complex and problematic relationship to social justice: “However passionately and insistently Spiritualist reformers might argue for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised on earth, their utopian vision of the afterlife implied that no mundane system of social improvement could ever come close to the impending perfection of the glorious Summerland” (Citation2012, 13).
6 As Logie Barrow notes, lyceum marching was often communal and participatory. This was especially notable in England, where lyceum festivities “had more in them of Shaker ceremonial than of the Board-School regimentation which so many lyceumists must have experienced (or suffered) on most other days of the week” (Citation1986, 198).
7 By 1910, there were 120 lyceums in England with a membership of over 10,000 people (Barrow Citation1986, 195).
8 It is writing like this that leads Ferguson to identify in spiritualist theology the “perfect realisation of the Victorian cult of self-help and the religion of labour” (Citation2012, 91–92).
9 Likewise her age becomes “permanent,” as it were, at nineteen. Marryat explains: “When she reached that age, ‘Florence’ told me she should never grow any older in years or appearance, and that she had reached the climax of womanly perfection in the spirit world” (86).
10 Marryat suffered several incidences of miscarriage and stillbirth during her second marriage. Florence is rather saucy about it all; at one point she complains, “I’m mamma's nurse maid. I have enough to do to look after her babies. She just looked at me, and ‘tossed’ me back into the spirit world, and she's been ‘tossing’ babies after me ever since” (234).
11 Ellenborough's Act in 1803 included the death penalty for abortion after quickening; in 1837 the Offences Against the Person Act (O. A. P. A.) abolished the death penalty but removed the distinction between pre- and post-quickening; updates to the O. A. P. A. in 1861 increased the penalty to life imprisonment and made it possible for women to be prosecuted for self-abortion (Keown Citation1989, 27).
12 See Keown (Citation1989, 53–66) and McLaren (Citation1984, 143–144).
13 A report titled “Talks with ‘Tien’,” published in Light in Citation1897, directly attempts a rewrite: when the spirit “Tien” is questioned about Davis's statement, he responds: “Probably the honoured seer referred to would now give a slightly modified reading to the question asked” (345).
14 One such screed appears in messages delivered to the medium Annie Bright from the spirit of W. T. Stead mere months after his death on the Titanic: “Some women – I may say many women – want to get rid of the child; do get rid of it. Oh, what a harvest of misery such are sowing! Robbed of the chance of earthly development, every one of these children on this side will be an accusing spirit” (Citation1912, 489).
15 For more on the infanticide panic, see Josephine McDonagh (Citation2003, 123–126).
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Notes on contributors
Ashley Miller
Ashley Miller is an Associate Professor of English at Albion College, where she specializes in long-nineteenth-century British literature. She is the author of Poetry, Media, and the Material Body: Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a book project about non-reproductive bodies in Victorian literature and culture.