Interstitial space and the Spiritualist séance: psychical geography, telephonic imaginary and social possibility in 1870s Britain

ABSTRACT

As the key site in extending the territoriology of Victorian Spiritualism, the domestic séance harboured multiple interstices or interstitial spaces, most notably evident in the spaces in-between sitters and mediums, the various particularities of the séance room (such as spirit cabinets and penetrable walls for spirit materialisation and transport), and the thresholds between the world sitters inhabited and the one with which they sought intimate contact. Notions of interstitial space extended into Spiritualist philosophy when Anna Blackwell wrote in 1871 of a proto-quantum mechanics model of inter-cellular connec-tivity, linking humans to spirits that predated twentieth-century quantum notions of entanglement and nonlocality. The introduction of telephony in Britain further expanded the psychical geography of a Spiritualist imaginary of longdistance communication and provided a new means for spirit contact. In addition, the appearance of the telephone silence cabinet, an interstitial communicative device functioning in a manner similar to that of the séance spirit cabinet, provided conversation privacy through the mediumistic assistance of postal employees. This article contends that interstitial space served as a key component of Spiritualist thought and practice furthering an imaginary of social possibility in 1870s Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Anna Blackwell
• quantum consciousness
• nonlocality
• electroscope
• telephone silence cabinets
• territoriology
• interstitial space

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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John M. Andrick

John M. Andrick is an Independent Scholar associated with the Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent articles on Spiritualism can be found in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2023) and in a forthcoming (2024) edited volume to be issued by Liverpool University Press entitled Cities and Fantasy: Urban Imaginaries Across Cultures, 1830-1930. He is currently preparing an essay on archaeological methodologies relating to the textual descriptions of Summerland found in the writings of American Spiritualist philosopher Andrew Jackson Davis.