Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism

Feminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate.

Sacrifice in Service to Truth

Victorian men of science struggled to address a central question of nineteenth-century British thought: how do fallible human beings recognize truth? Their solution, embodied within the principles establishing the British Association for the Advancement of Science, focused on a stable set of selfless epistemic virtues—patience, humility, diligence, disinterest, self-control—that provided moral stability amid the relentless advance of new and revised theories of physical reality. But if well-founded ideas flow from virtuous practices, did it not follow that dangerously unsound ideas stem from vice? For this reason, a widely shared commitment to virtuous conduct meant that intellectual disagreements often degenerated into accusations of immoral behavior. This essay explores the complicated role of epistemic virtue in Victorian science by examining three towering products of the University of Cambridge: John Herschel, Adam Sedgwick, and William Whewell.

“The wrathful sunset glared…”: The Krakatoa Sunsets in Victorian Science and Art

The eruption of Krakatoa on August 27, 1883 was an event both tragic and spectacular. Thousands of lives were lost; sea waves and atmospheric disturbances were detected around the globe. Billions of tons of volcanic ash were thrown into the atmosphere producing multi-coloured sunsets caused by the scattering of light by aerosol particles. The paper discusses the ways in which these so-called Krakatoa sunsets, which were experienced by most of the world, were reflected in Victorian scientific and artistic discourse. The accounts included in the section “Descriptions of the Unusual Twilight Glows in Various Parts of the World, in 1883–84” of the Royal Society report The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena (1888), and selected poems by Alfred Tennyson, Charles Algernon Swinburne, Robert Bridges, and Mathilde Blind are analyzed to trace Victorian responses to the remarkable optical effects of the Krakatoa eruption.