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Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death

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Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian search for life after death is the first full-length biography of Frederic W.H. Myers, leading figure in the Society for Psychical Research and friend and associate of Browning, Gladstone, Ruskin, Tennyson, Swinburne, Henry James, Prince Leopold and other influential Victorians. The book offers a fascinating insight into a key period in the development of Victorian thought. Among many things it covers: 1. Extraordinary Phenomena Myers investigated extraordinary phenomena, much of which is still reported today: out of body experiences and astral projection, near death experiences, poltergeists, gurus like Madame Blavatsky claiming strange powers, mediums both private and public, and haunted houses (for example, the giant warrior haunting a chateau near Heidelberg, the Cheltenham Ghost that was seen by a considerable number of people, and the odd doings at Ballechin House in Scotland which caused a scandal in the press. 2. Life After Death Investigations Myers believed he had virtually proved life after death by a) the link he thought established between hundreds of apparitions and living or dead human beings b) the messages that the outstanding mediums Mrs Piper and Mrs Thompson gave him from his first great love Annie and his intimate friend and co-worker Edmund Gurney which contained information the medium could not know and was delivered in a way highly characteristic of the personality concerned. 3. Automatic Writing Some researchers have claimed that he has returned after death and proved his continued existence through the automatic writings of a number of mediums in England, America, India. These writings continued for thirty years. 4. Romance & Suicide There is also love, tragedy and jealousy in Myers' life. His first great love Annie, a married woman, committed suicide and Myers' wife, a rather possessive person, tried to prevent any detail about this being made public after his death, even though the relationship was platonic. This inhibited the work of researchers who were trying to verify the 'post-mortem' communications from Myers, since, for many years, they could not check the facts. 5. Credibility Myers researches led him to forming a view about human personality and psychology which Aldous Huxley has said is much richer than Freud's

ISBN-13: 9781845402488

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Imprint Academic (IPS)

Publication Date: 11-01-2010

Pages: 392

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

Trevor Hamilton retired from his post in higher education at the end of 2006 to write full time. He has degrees from Oxford, London and Sussex Universityies. He is the author of a well-received biography of F.W.H. Myers, one of the founding figures of the Society for Psychical Research.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements x

Family Trees xi

Introduction 1

1 Keswick to Cambridge 9

Marshalls and Myers at Keswick 9

Cheltenham College and Cambridge 17

2 Life, Love and Letters 33

Myers and Mrs Butler 33

Myers and Annie Marshall 39

Love and Marriage 47

Prince Leopold and Ruskin 65

Man of Letters 71

3 A Career in the Seen and Unseen World 79

Spiritualism and Science 79

The Sidgwick Group 82

The Amazing Mrs Fay 91

Miss Wood, Miss Fairlamb, the Pettys and 'Dr Slade' 94

Myers and Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools 104

4 Myers and the SPR in the 1880s 111

Foundation of the Society for Psychical Research 111

Thought-transference, Telepathy and Mesmerism 118

Myers, the SPR and Madame Blavatsky 129

Phantasms of the Living 138

Automatic Writing, Hypnosis and the Multiplex Personality 148

The Break with the Spiritualists 159

The Death of Gurney 164

Taking up Gurney's Torch 170

5 Myers as Psychologist 179

Myers, the SPR and the International Congresses of Psychology 179

Myers and the Subliminal Consciousness 186

The Subliminal and the Survival Question 193

The Cosmic Myers 195

6 Myers and the Great Mediums of the 1890s 199

The Advent of Mrs Piper 199

An Assessment of Mrs Piper's Mediumship 210

The Physical Mediumship of Eusapia Palladino 213

The Mediumship of Mrs Thompson 221

7 Myers, Haunted Houses and Miss Goodrich Freer 229

Myers, the SPR and Haunted Houses 229

The Arrival of Ada Goodrich Freer 231

The Investigation of Ballechin House 234

The Breach between Miss Freer, Myers and the SPR 238

8 Myers, Science and the SPR 245

A Scientific Approach to Psychical Research? 245

The Collection of Material 247

Appropriate Tools of Enquiry 249

The Judgement of Material 250

The Prioritisation of Physical Explanations over Spiritual Ones 251

The Elimination of Fraud 254

The Place of Experiment in Early Psychical Research 256

The Construction of Testable Hypotheses 258

The Avoidance of Presuppositions and Prejudice 261

The Publication of Results in a Scholarly Format 267

The Problem of Interpretation and Explanation in a World of Contested Expertise 270

9 The Legacy of Myers 273

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death 273

Mrs Myers and the SPR 283

The Cross-Correspondences 292

The Summing Up 302

Bibliography 309

Index 341