Marie Corelli: Science, Society and the Best Seller

Issues which faced Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include the effects of new scientific theories on traditional religious belief, the impact of technological innovation, the implications of mass literacy and the changing role of women. This thesis records how such issues are reflected in contemporary literature, focusing on the emergence of popular culture and the best seller, a term which conflates author and novel. The first English best seller was Marie Corelli and, by way of introduction, Part I offers a summary of her life and her novels and a critical overview of her work. Part II of the thesis examines how the theory of evolution undermined traditional religious belief and prompted the search for a new creed able to defy materialism and reconcile science and religion. Contemporary literature mirrors the consequent interest in spiritualism during the 1890s and the period immediately following the Great War, and critical readings of Corelli�s A Romance of Two Worlds and The Life Everlasting demonstrate that these novels - which form the nucleus of her personal theology, the Electric Creed - are based on selections from the New Testament, occultism and, in particular, science and spiritualism. Part III of the thesis looks at the emergence of �the woman question�, the corresponding backlash by conservatives and the ways in which these conflicting views are explored in the popular literature of the time. A critical examination of the novella, My Wonderful Wife, reveals how Corelli uses social Darwinism in an ambivalent critique of the New Woman. Several of Corelli�s essays are discussed, showing that her views about the role of women were complex. A critical analysis of The Secret Power engages with Corelli�s peculiar kind of feminism, which would deny women the vote but envisages female scientists inventing and operating airships in order to secure the future of the human race. Interest in Marie Corelli has re-emerged recently, particularly in occult and feminist circles. Corelli�s immense popularity also makes her an important figure in cultural studies. This thesis adds to the body of knowledge about Corelli in that it consciously endeavours to avoid spiritualist or feminist ideological frameworks, instead using contemporary science as a context for examining her work

Free Trade and Family Values: Kinship Networks and the Culture of Early American Capitalism

This study examines the international flow of ideas and goods in eighteenth and nineteenth century New England port towns through the experience of a Boston-based commercial network. It traces the evolution of the commercial network established by the intertwined Perkins, Forbes, and Sturgis families of Boston from its foundations in the Atlantic fur trade in the 1740s to the crises of succession in the early 1840s. The allied Perkins firms and families established one of the most successful American trading networks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and as such it provides fertile ground for investigating mercantile strategies in early America. An analysis of the Perkins family's commercial network yields three core insights. First, the Perkinses illuminate the ways in which American mercantile strategies shaped global capitalism. The strategies and practices of American merchants and mariners contributed to a growing international critique of mercantilist principles and chartered trading monopolies. While the Perkinses did not consider themselves "free traders," British observers did. Their penchant for smuggling and seeking out niches of trade created by competing mercantilist trading companies meant that to critics of British mercantilist policies, American merchants had an unfair advantage that only the liberalization of trade policy could rectify. Following the Perkinses allows for a reconsideration of the Anglo-American relationship in the East Indies, especially China. For example, the special relationships the Perkinses established with the Wu family of Canton as well as the London-based Baring Brothers & Co. proved critical to their success in business. Yet these relationships developed out of the Perkinses' geopolitical position as Americans. Further, the project shows that family life, gendered ideals, and particular visions of the life cycle were central to how Americans came to terms with expanding trade and evolving markets. In the late eighteenth century, Americans began to exalt family as a sentimental unit whose central aims were personal fulfillment and the raising of future citizens. But this new ideology of family masked the institution's continued political and economic utility. Family has never been the promised "haven from the heartless world" of market perils; in fact, well into the nineteenth century it was the opposite: family was a core market institution used for protection from risk and speculation. Even as the Perkinses embraced the speculative potential of commerce and investment, familial and gendered ideals shaped how they understood profit, risk, and even what it meant to be a merchant. Finally, in recent years, scholars have integrated New England into the Atlantic World; I demonstrate the importance of New Englanders in shaping American involvement in Asia and the Pacific as well. The Pacific continues to be a central space of American empire and influence, from former colonies to trust territories. Its history merits a more robust place in American historical consciousness

A modern mecca of psychic forces: the Psychical Science Congress and the culture of progressive occultism in fin-de-siecle Chicago, 1885-1900

The Psychical Science Congress (PSC), held from August 21-25, 1893, was a division of the Science and Philosophy congresses of the World’s Congress Auxiliary held in conjunction with Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition. The first international congress devoted solely to psychical research, the PSC was initially conceived by John Curtis Bundy, editor of Chicago’s progressive spiritualist newspaper, the Religio-Philosophical Journal (R-PJ). Upon Bundy’s death in August 1892, organizational matters fell to Elliott Coues, an internationally famous natural scientist who became chairman of the PSC. The Congress drew into its fold a number of well-known figures of the fin de siècle including: Richard Hodgson and Frederic W. H. Myers of the London Society for Psychical Research; Benjamin Franklin Underwood, a noted freethinker who assumed editorship of the R-PJ following John Bundy’s death and who established it as the official organ of the PSC; Frances Willard, the internationally acclaimed head of the Women’ Christian Temperance Union and America’s most beloved woman leader; Lyman J. Gage, a corporate officer of the Columbian Exposition, president of Chicago’s First National Bank, and spiritualist who hosted séances in his Chicago home; and Lilian Whiting, a noted journalist and New Thought advocate whose uplifting address regarding the spiritual future to come was delivered on the final day of the PSC by her close friend, the actress Kate Field. These and other notable figures with interests in the occult who presented papers at the Psychical Science Congress drew large audiences in the Halls of Columbus and Washington at the Memorial Art Palace (now the Art Institute Building), making the Congress one of the most popular of all held under the auspices of World’s Congress Auxiliary. In the decade from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s Chicago was a center for American occult activity, boasting a number of spiritualist and theosophical organizations along with its own independent psychical research society, the Western Society for Psychical Research (WSPR). Organized in the summer of 1885, the WSPR was the largest urban psychical research society outside of Boston and its officers and membership provided the corps of organizational leadership which would form the local Arrangements Committee for the Psychical Science Congress. Though modeled after the London SPR, the Western Society for Psychical Research could not match the London group’s scientific standards and it practiced a ‘wilder’ variety of psychical research which betrayed its spiritualist leanings. As with the case of the American SPR which expired in 1889, becoming a branch of the London organization, the WSPR expired in 1890, ceasing all investigations of psychical and spiritual phenomena. The Psychical Science Congress, along with the Theosophical Congress, held from September 15-17, 1893 as a divisional congress of the World’s Parliament of Religions, elevated the public’s awareness of spiritualism, psychical research, and theosophy as elements of a progressive occultism which promised not only to heighten mankind’s spiritual and moral development but to accelerate societal reforms which would improve the human condition. As a profound evolutionary force, progressive occultism promised knowledge and understanding of hidden realities and the heightening of individual mental powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, astral travel, and spirit communication among other supernormal and supernatural psychical abilities. But Chicago’s status as a world center for generating psychical forces and drawing leaders of occult doctrines to its environs was short-lived and the promises of progressive occultism were soon appropriated by New Thought commercial hucksters whose primary concern was money-making. The discoveries of the spiritual unknown which psychical science hoped to deliver remained disappointing as the forays into spiritualism and psychical research in Chicago from 1885-1895 appeared to be another variety of the ‘romantic revival’ in which romance, adventure, and philosophical speculation seemed more attractive than the difficult and time-consuming efforts of serious scientific investigation into an occluded unknown. The hope of the Chicago organizers of the PSC that psychical science would take its place among the newly forming social sciences of the late-nineteenth century failed to materialize. However, certain philosophical notions regarding the centrality of spirituality as a central element of reform survived throughout the Progressive Era