Visions of an Unseen World

Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth Century England

Sasha Handley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781851968886
• eBook ISBN: 9781317315247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A study of the production, circulation and consumption of English ghost stories during the Age of Reason. This work examines a variety of mediums: ballads and chapbooks, newspapers, sermons, medical treatises and scientific journals, novels and plays. It relates the telling of ghost stories to changes associated with the Enlightenment.

1 RESTORATION HAUNTINGS

On Wednesday, 1 June 1692, a young man, about fifteen years of age, went to his bed. He had no sooner lain down than he heard ‘a Hand sweeping on the wall’. Then it came ‘with a rushing noise on his beds-head’ and ‘stroaked him over the face twice very gently’. Opening his eyes he saw before him ‘an apparition of a woman cloathed in black apparel’. Following this eerie encounter, other members of his family reported seeing the apparition ‘in the same room with a lighted candle’. Perplexed by these unexplained visits, the mistress of this ‘Civiliz’d Family’ wrote to the editors of the bi-weekly periodical the Athenian Mercury. She desired to know ‘what should be the occasion of the disturbance’ and ‘whether it be advisable to ask the question of the apparition?’.¹ Samuel Wesley (father of John), Church of England minister and co-editor of the Mercury, advised the woman to speak to the ghost, find out its purpose and discover how it might be satisfied.²

We already know that the status of ghosts was highly contested in the religious polemic of post-Reformation England, so Samuel Wesley’s advice might appear surprising. His interest in this haunting, however, neatly epitomizes a rehabilitation of ghost stories in Restoration England that peaked in the 1690s, and which forms the subject of this chapter. The years 1660–1700 saw ghost beliefs and ghost stories elevated to public prominence thanks to their congruence with the religious, political, intellectual and social imperatives that followed Charles II’s return to the throne. Although the reality of returning ghosts was not universally accepted, the Restoration period produced the most energetic and public defence of ghost beliefs and ghost stories that Protestant England had ever seen.

The distinctive importance of ghost stories in this period will be described under three main headings. First, the increasingly common adoption of ghost stories by Anglican, and especially latitudinarian, ministers will be examined to show how and why these narratives became so relevant to the religious ideologies of the newly-restored Church. When ghost stories were shorn of popish associations, and linked to sound theological tenets, they were allowed to play a prominent role in shaping the most significant religious battle of the long eighteenth century – the struggle for a balance between revelatory and natural religion, between a faith of the heart and one of the head. Second, the intellectual relevance of ghost stories will be explored through the work of Henry More and Joseph Glanvill. The concept of the wandering dead was compatible with the theology of these men, but they were also interested in these relations because of their relevance to natural philosophy, which was one of the most important intellectual developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ghost stories were rapidly becoming legitimate subjects for philosophical inquiry, and they proved invaluable to a fledgling scientific community that was seeking to justify new empirical inquiries into the natural and preternatural worlds. The final section of the chapter again highlights the relevance of ghost stories to contemporary religious discourse, but the focus shifts away from the public stage to examine the pastoral uses to which these narratives were put in parish communities. Discussion will focus on the 1690s, a decade that saw ghost stories employed as weapons in a clerical campaign to stamp out vice and immorality among the laity, and to revitalize Christianity at grass-roots level. This reforming project cut across denominational boundaries, and it suggests that the categories of ‘conformist’ and ‘nonconformist’, imposed by the Act of Uniformity (1662), obscure common theological ground among a variety of Protestant believers. Richard Baxter’s The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) will be used to highlight clerical engagement with lay perceptions of ghosts, which filled the pages of John Dunton’s long-running periodical the Athenian Mercury (1691–7). Taken together, these texts point to the devotional utility of ghost stories; to the shifting priorities of Restoration Protestantism; and to the prominent position that ghosts occupied within the spiritual world-views of the lay community.

Radical Legacies

Those responsible for the public broadcasting of ghost stories in Restoration England were mostly educated men, but their engagement with these narratives served different interests and objectives. What they all shared, however, was revulsion at the religious, political and social turmoil that had been generated by years of civil war and republican government in mid-seventeenth-century England. In many ways the identity of the Restoration elite was forged by the Puritan revolution of the 1640s and 1650s. The events of these tumultuous years provided the immediate impetus for rhetorical engagements with ghost stories.

The execution of Charles I in January 1649 was perhaps the single most dramatic event in almost two decades of disorder and bloodshed. But the mid-seventeenth century also saw the collapse of civil and ecclesiastical authority, with the abolition of episcopacy, press censorship, the church courts and the subsequent emergence of hundreds of independent and semi-independent congregations. Sectarian groups such as the Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, Muggletonians, Baptists, Seekers and Fifth Monarchy Men rejected the authority of Church government in favour of a guiding spiritual light within.

This was no lunatic fringe and many of these idealists were motivated by distaste for the fundamentals of Protestant, and particularly Calvinist, teaching. The avowed infallibility of scripture emphasized by early Protestant reformers led to close and creative readings of the Bible in the hands of freethinking radicals. The Book of Revelation was interpreted literally by the Fifth Monarchy Men, who prepared for the arrival of a new millennium. Others treated its stories as mere allegory, or rejected its authority entirely.³ However, the most consistent criticism was directed towards the Calvinist scheme of salvation. Psychological torment often resulted from the doctrine of double predestination which lay at the heart of this schema, and which stated that the salvation or damnation of human beings was pre-determined before birth. No amount of good works or faith could change the fate that God had laid down for each individual. The result of this was severe emotional anxiety. Quakers George Fox and Isaac Penington and Fifth Monarchist John Rogers were just some of those who suffered anguished thoughts about what lay in store for them beyond the grave. Such distress led some to thoughts of suicide, and others to doubt the benevolence of God, or eventually to challenge established ideas about the reality of heaven, hell or any kind of life after death. Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley rejected the physical reality of an afterlife altogether. He believed that religion served only a repressive social function, and was designed to distract men from their poor situation on earth.⁴ Leveller Richard Overton was also convinced that both body and soul expired at the moment of physical death.⁵ Similarly for the Ranters, personal immortality was not an option. Instead, heaven and hell were merely figurative states that corresponded to the pleasures and pains of the physical body. Indeed, the charismatic Ranter Lawrence Clarkson declared that ‘In the grave there is no remembrance of either joy or sorrow after’.⁶ If body and soul died in the grave, the return of dead souls amongst the living was clearly impossible.

Attacks upon the doctrine of immortality and the post-mortem states of heaven and hell were particularly repugnant strands of the radical manifesto. In 1646 Thomas Edwards condemned no less than eleven heresies relating to mortalism or soul-sleeping in his catalogue of religious heterodoxies known as Gangraena. These notions not only undermined established topographies of the afterlife, but they also posed a threat to the accepted moral values and mores of civil society. The rejection of life after death by the Diggers justified the seizure of common lands at St George’s Hill near London, where an independent commune was established in April 1649. Similarly, the antinomian beliefs of Ranters allowed them to reject the authority of all moral law, which effectively sanctioned a range of hedonistic excesses enjoyed by members of this group.

The ultimate failure of these radicals to secure enduring social, political or spiritual reformations was less important than attempts to re-imagine the world in which they lived. If England had not been completely turned upside down by 1660, freethinking radicals had left an indelible mark that shaped the priorities of Restoration writers, who were eager to restore peace and stability to civil and religious life. It was against this tumultuous backdrop, and the fierce controversies surrounding the nature of life after death, that clergymen, polemicists and natural philosophers helped to generate interest in ghosts and their meanings.

Ghosts and the Restoration Church

Keith Thomas and Ronald Finucane have tackled Restoration-era ghost beliefs as part of broader chronological surveys, but little has been said about the preternatural world in relation to the institutional fortunes of the Church. The excesses of mid-seventeenth-century England provide the key to the polemical adoption of ghost stories by ministers of the newly-restored Church of England. In the early years of its restoration the Church was internally divided and desperate to re-establish its relevance and authority at the heart of English society. The religious and political orthodoxies of the new regime were fashioned in opposition to the ‘enthusiasm’ of the 1640s and 1650s. The events of those years did much to reaffirm the value of clerical supervision, theological moderation and religious conformity. In fact these tenets became key priorities for Anglican ministers seeking to forge a new identity for the Church. In many ways, ghost stories interacted with these goals, helping to shape a new theological outlook that comprehended a healthy balance of both reason and revelation. They also served as vehicles through which to attack the twin spectres of atheism and sadducism that were lambasted in pulpit and print as the most monstrous perversions of the Christian faith.

The label ‘atheist’ was applied not only in its modern-day sense to the denial of divinity, but more regularly to a range of heterodox religious views and displays of licentiousness. It functioned as a catch-all term for people who transgressed the moral and behavioural codes of Christianity. A ‘sadducee’ denoted anyone who denied the resurrection of the body and the existence of spirits – principles that were perceived as inevitable precursors to the denial of God and Christianity itself. The perceived spread of atheism in Restoration England was greatly exaggerated by contemporaries, who used the label as a rhetorical tool with which to attack their enemies. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that a degree of genuine fear about the spread of irreligion and immorality did exist. The publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651 did little to calm these anxieties, since it offered firm theoretical foundation to a fluid body of materialist religious philosophies, which rejected notions of immortality, post-mortem punishment and even the reality of divine intervention.

It was no coincidence then that Anglican ministers were among the most animated supporters of ghost stories in these years. Visions of the dead provided a particularly dramatic defence against extreme materialist and mortalist philosophies. They also represented visible and immediate proof of divine intervention, offering assurance of immortality and the reality of an afterlife. Moreover, ghost stories and ghost beliefs were strikingly absent from civil war sectarianism. The logic of ghostly appearances clearly did not fit with those who advocated the death or sleep of the soul in the grave, and even those who maintained belief in an afterlife and divine intervention shied away from recounting tales of returning spirits. When the Quaker leader George Fox was imprisoned in Launceston Castle in 1656, he dismissed rumours among his fellow captives that ‘spirits haunted & walked in Doomesdale’, declaring that he ‘feared noe such thinge for Christ our preist woulde sanctify ye walls’.⁷ In spite of clear interest in the ‘signal judgements’ of God, there is little evidence that early Quakers adopted ghost beliefs as part of their religious world-view, at least on the public stage. Indeed, historian Rosemary Moore has argued that Restoration Quakers deliberately distanced themselves from such preternatural episodes in an effort to dissociate themselves from their civil war forebears.⁸ An episode from the late seventeenth century does however suggest that there may have been a gap between publicly professed Quaker attitudes towards ghosts and more personal reflections. Farrier and Quaker convert Walter Harry reported having met with the ghost of former weaver Morgan Lewis, who wished to reveal the location of some bottoms of wool that he had hidden in his former house. Harry carried out the ghost’s wishes before commanding him ‘in the name of God, that thou trouble my house no more’.⁹ The duty to discharge the wishes of the dead was no doubt more powerful within close-knit community settings, offering an alternative context for the contemplation of ghostly appearances.

Ghost stories had not then been heavily tarred with the brush of enthusiasm, which was an accusation levelled at a wide range of preternatural and supernatural events in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact these narratives appeared to complement a much more moderate religious outlook in the hands of prominent churchmen. Joseph Glanvill was vicar of Bath and chaplain in ordinary to Charles II, and he considered ghost stories to offer standing evidence against both atheists and sadducees.¹⁰ In his Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences (1697), the vicar of Walberton in Sussex, William Turner, eagerly catalogued accounts of the wandering dead and other providential phenomena. This was, he believed, ‘one of the best Methods’ to refute ‘the abounding Atheism of this Age’.¹¹ Turner dedicated his book to John Williams, bishop of Chichester, who may well have approved of his efforts. Turner’s publication was moreover a collaborative effort, since this collection of providences was begun by the Reverend Matthew Poole some thirty years earlier.

Ghost stories did more than defend against atheists, however, and churchmen often credited these relations because they offered proof of the most fundamental Christian beliefs. ‘GOD is a Spirit’ argued Turner. To deny that a vital spirit world existed was to deny that God himself existed.¹² In 1678 Ralph Cudworth was similarly optimistic about the relevance of ghost stories to orthodox Christian beliefs when he claimed in his True Intellectual System of the Universe that ‘If there be once any visible ghosts or spirits acknowledged as things permanent … it will not be easy for any to give a reason why there might not be one supreme ghost also, presiding over them all and the whole world’.¹³ In the same year the Anglican divine Benjamin Camfield reaffirmed Cudworth’s emphasis on the relationship between ghost stories and the Trinitarian consensus of orthodox Restoration theology. The denial of spirits, he believed, led inevitably ‘to the dethroning of God, the supreme Spirit, and Father of Spirits’.¹⁴ Ghost stories were thus explicitly linked to the fundamental Christian doctrines of immortality, resurrection and the tripartite division of the Godhead – beliefs that remained fundamental to the Anglican faith throughout this period. Fervent propagation of ghost stories showed that the religious feeling of the 1640s and 1650s had not disappeared, but was instead redirected towards the defence of the established Church and of Christianity itself. Ghost stories were thus adopted by leading figures within the established Church, and they proved to be crucial weapons in a battle to encourage religious conformity, and to reassert the value of clerical mediation and church governance.¹⁵

Nonetheless, the drive towards religious moderation assumed a number of different forms in which the appropriation of ghost stories was by no means universal. Samuel Clarke, John Toland, Anthony Collins and the third Earl of Shaftesbury were leading figures of an amorphous group of thinkers often termed deists. The most effective antidote to religious fanaticism, they believed, was to advance its opposite – a sober brand of natural religion. In an attempt to demonstrate the rational foundations of faith, Samuel Clarke tried to prove the existence of God, not through Scripture, but by a method ‘as near to Mathematical, as the nature of such a Discourse would allow’.¹⁶ Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1681) included an explanation of the Flood based on mechanical principles, while John Wilkins held that astronomy proved ‘a God and a providence’ and ‘incites our hearts to a greater admiration and fear of His omnipotency’.¹⁷ Deists varied in the intensity of their commitment to natural theology. Early adherents sometimes preserved belief in the immortality of the soul, but rejected revelation, along with the need for divine intervention. Shaft...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Ghosts of Early Modern England
• 1 Restoration Hauntings
• 2 Printing the Preternatural in the Late Seventeenth Century
• 3 A New Canterbury Tale
• 4 Ghost Stories in the Periodical Press, c. 1700–c. 1750
• 5 Confessional Cultures and Ghost Beliefs, c. 1750–c. 1800
• 6 Landscapes of Belief and Everyday Life in Late Eighteenth-Century England
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index