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