WON'T LET YOU TRICK ME TRICE
That Devil’s Trick – William Hughes
Professor William Hughes is a teacher and researcher in the fields of gothic literature and medical humanities, currently based at the University of Macau in China after 26 years at Bath Spa University in the UK. Published in 2015, That Devil’s Trick is his study of public perceptions of hypnotism in Victorian Britain via a popular – rather than medical – lens.
I’ve read previous academic works on the history of hypnotism (here and here are two favourites) and I agree with the back-cover blurb that this study is a unique perspective. Hughes traces continental mesmerism’s arrival into Britain as a curious yet privileged layperson might have experienced it; first, perhaps, via the sensational novel Trilby, or through authors and mesmerists Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins; then in mounting, often salacious, press reporting about famed mesmerists/hypnotists; and generally as one of a tangle of ‘miracles’ – from electricity and telecommunications to table-tipping and communing with the dead – that were shaping this great age of human progress.
The book amplifies figures from hypnotism’s past who have been largely forgotten. For instance, the French ‘fad’ for mesmerism was slow to spread to Britain, where popular perceptions of powers of mind were instead more influenced by ‘Perkinism’, an American pseudoscientific metal healing device that was popular in the 1790s. The Irish physician John Bonnoit de Mainaduc, reputedly the first indigenous practitioner of mesmerism in the British Isles, is also given due consideration. Mainaduc was mentored by animal magnetist Charles Nicolas d’Eslon, rather than Franz Anton Mesmer, and so Mainaduc is often a footnote in the Mesmer-Puységur-Braid potted history of hypnotism that prevails.
Baron Dupotet (1796-1881) is another figure to benefit from more than a passing mention. This French mesmerist and esotericist came to London from Paris in 1837 and practised magnetic healing there until 1845. Press reporting on Dupotet’s experiments is fascinating – his socially precarious mesmeric demonstrations featured prostitutes and “effeminate” men as subjects, and allowed chaperoned but unmarried women to attend as witnesses. Press and popular accounts seem clouded in francophobic, xenophobic, and homophobic sentiments, and a moral crusade launched against Dupotet questioned his nobility. That a foreign imposter might infiltrate London society with these grotesque, erotic, intimate role-plays challenged the narrative that these were respectable scientific experiments… It also, of course, provided ample titillation for the imagination beyond the superficial outrage to the social and moral status quo – as hypnotism has a habit of doing. I enjoyed the detail from Hughes that at least one publication calling for Dupotet’s ‘cancellation’ carried advertisements for works of pornographic literature, including the mesmeric-themed masterpiece The Power of Mesmerism: A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies – a Cosmic Pancakes! classic.
Reflecting on Dupotet’s place in hypno-history, Hughes suggests that the “reportage that accompanied [his] private practice is arguably responsible, in part at least, for cementing the connection between magnetism and manipulation in the British consciousness. It is, certainly, instrumental in enforcing the associations that maintained women as both the perfect subject for, and the ideal victims of, the magnetist. […] If [Dupotet] did not shape the future course of British hypnotism by the radical nature of his technique or his explanation for magnetic phenomena, he was at least indirectly responsible for the development of a popular discourse through which the troubling figure of the mesmerist might be conveniently expressed.”
Understood against this backdrop of press fodder and public sexual intrigue, the book also brings fresh perspectives to familiar names. I’ve read a fair bit about physician and mesmerist Dr John Elliotson and his infamous experiments on his ‘star’ patients, the Okey sisters. Elliotson’s name tends to disappear from the story of hypnotism after his sessions with the epileptic siblings – who demonstrated supposed ‘higher’ mesmeric phenomena of clairvoyance, medical clairvoyance, telepathy, and physical crises – were denounced as fraud and fallacy. Regardless of his break with the British medical establishment and his humiliation in the British press, Elliotson remained a leading figure of medical mesmerism and continued to hold parlour demonstrations that were soberly and favourably reported on in the press. It is interesting to me that Elliotson – with a hospital full of vulnerable women in his charge – was subject to far less sexually imaginative scrutiny than Dupotet. Elliotson went on to recruit paid female mesmerists for his Mesmeric Infirmary, established in 1846, at a time when women were debarred from practising medicine. These women were few – perhaps only three, including a “Miss Cooper” – and they provided social proof of mesmerism’s respectability rather than expertise or specific purpose (beyond chaperoning women and children). Similarly, a ladies’ committee was established to advise the Infirmary’s governance board, but this was mostly a charade. It just goes to show how reliant hypnotists are on perceptions management, no matter what miracles, improvements, peculiarities, and perversions they’re actually presiding over.
From James Esdaile to James Braid, you will find valuable insights into hypnotism’s key figures and their contributions to ‘That Devil’s Trick’ (a quote from Trilby). For me, the book perfectly captures mesmerism’s arrival in Britain as an elitist and secretive, semi-occultist, movement, but which offered myriad more mysterious possibilities, including, for example, new ways of experiencing literature. Newspaper advertisements inviting “respectable” ladies and gentleman to learn of this new “continental” science must have been quite the thrill to peruse. And, as it took hold, evocative contemporary accounts of séances, which brought together odd mixes of London society – male and female, young and old, well and ailing, respectable and hired – under the auspices of some flamboyant French magnetist, must have been simply mind-blowing. That mesmerism and hypnotism courted British medical credibility is testament to the zealous efforts of a few medical men rather than their methods and apparent results (which have since been largely disproved). And yet positioning hypnosis as nobly and predominately a medical adjunct and/or self-help tool remains central to its story. For instance, World War II blurred the lines between entertainment and hypnotherapy in the UK and beyond; 1990s British TV hypnotist Paul McKenna segued into self-help, creating a NLP-paved path for many a ‘showman’ trainer/guru keen to follow in his lucrative footsteps; while also-British “psychological illusionist”, mentalist, and hypnotist Derren Brown often draws on medical/psychological ‘infotainment’ references in his storytelling – eg, a suggestible subject endures an ice bath as part of his journey to being hypnotically conditioned as an assassin.
But, for me, those medical/physical feats are neither the whole, nor the ‘rightful’, story of hypnotism. And I love that Hughes, specialist in the study of Dracula author Bram Stoker, takes his readers on an enjoyably semi-linear journey through these clashing realities, in fact and in fiction, and via popular press reporting. Mesmerism spun multiple spider webs of possibilities above Victorian Britain’s popular imagination, but invariably the layperson sees only the single spider dangling from a single thread. To fear an imaginary villain like Svengali, or to revere an individual practitioner such as Braid is a simpler conclusion to process and uphold. I doubt Victorian society was ready for hypnotism to be more than a staid story of solitary white male power, whatever the medical promises and/or policing of Britain’s press at that time. But what about now? Women (and minorities) have only ever been subjects, victims, supporters, and sideshows in the story of hypnosis so far. It strikes me that to simply replicate Dupotet-style séances, bringing together consenting strangers for undefined experiments in hypnotic suggestions behind closed doors, would be just as sensational and taboo today as it was in the 19th century. If sex, death, transcendence, and devilry were off the cards (as per the *cough* very proper Victorian days), what more could these collaborative ‘waking dream’ role-plays be..?
I imagine such an experiment would be in constant peril of becoming an orgy, no matter the best efforts of the hypnotist and/or participants! The off-the-record recollections of 1990s-2000s entertainment hypnotists/mentalists I’ve spoken to who worked the Club 18-30 crowds spring to mind, of young people (mostly women) simulating sex acts and orgasms, or urinating on stage… In that respect, hypnosis surely is The Devil’s Trick; ‘The Hypnotist’ is a reflection of those who perceive him, and sexual intrigue and the fullness of our human unravelling will always feature in the minds of those on the outside looking in. Now, is that because hypnotism is extricably linked to sex..? Or is it simply because Victorians found flamboyant Frenchmen invoking the (magic) word of “hypnosis” sexy?!
As a woman, who is therefore notable in hypnosis only by dint of my gender, it is, of course, not for me to say! Instead, I shall leave the final words to an account of one of Dupotet’s séances:
“Two or three persons were in the room mingled with the strangers, who explained as well as they could the mysteries of the Professor’s proceedings. A number of patients were present, who appeared to fall into convulsions or sleep when the finger of the magnetiser was directed towards them. They then spoke a vast quantity of nonsense, which the confederates tried to persuade the audience was the effect of Animal Magnetism. The price of admittance to this show is half-a-crown. Ladies had better remain away.”
