Spellbinding.

Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 451pp. $30.00 (cloth).

There is something titillating about mesmerism, as the jacket illustration of Alison Winter's book clearly shows. A buxom, young, white woman in her underclothes is propped, eyes closed, in a chair; her head is flung back, exposing her neck and partially revealing her bosom; luxuriant, golden, curly locks fall unconfined to her waist. She is an abandoned vision in pink and white and peach tones. Around her cluster sober, bearded men in black, their attention focused on her passive and vulnerable body. Move the scene back in time by about seventy years and one might expect a Gothic romance to be nestling between these covers rather than a social and cultural history. Such an expectation would be well-founded, for Gothic romances and mesmerism prove to have had similar relationships to the cultures in which they briefly flourished, and both still appeal to our love of the fantastic. Perhaps this is one reason why many of the issues dealt with in this long and fascinating study have also surfaced in recent crit icism of the "Gothic." It has become a critical commonplace to look to the marginal, the popular, and the ephemeral for information about other cultures, and this is what Alison Winter has done. She has used the history of mesmerism in nineteenth-century Britain as a cultural mirror, reflecting contemporary attitudes toward class, authority, science, sexuality, and foreign policy.

Winter, however, does not regard mesmerism as marginal. Her declared intention is to change its current status as a marginalized "cultural excrescence," treating it "not as a body of doctrine but as a diverse, fragile set of practices whose meaning was very much up for grabs" (10). She begins by identifying and rejecting existing critical models that treat mesmerism as the forerunner of either hypnosis or psychoanalysis, or that consider it only in relation to what has since emerged as standard medical practice. Instead Winter demonstrates how popular mesmerism was throughout the early- and mid-nineteenth century, creating a legacy of tropes, situations, and vocabulary that had a profound effect on developing sciences and scientific investigation.

The evidence she has amassed is formidable. Case histories, advertisements, caricatures, political cartoons, private journals or scrapbooks, and contemporary journalists' reports are mingled, creating the inescapable impression that one could not travel anywhere in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century without encountering people under the spell of mesmerism. The breadth of her references, and the eighty-seven illustrations scattered throughout the book, bear eloquent testimony to Winter's thesis that mesmerism was a strong and pervasive influence on the culture of the time -- as well as communicating the author's enthusiasm for her subject, which occasionally leads her into excesses. For example, a picture of a contemporary operating theater, or the carefully annotated political cartoons showing Victoria and Peel as successful mesmerists (thus demonstrating the power of the mesmerizer and the inferiority of the mesmerized subject), are exciting testimonies to her argument; whereas portraits of Dionysius Lar dner or Thomas Wakley, or even the playbill showing Charles Dickens as an actor in a private performance of Inchbald's Animal Magnetism, are of marginal interest. Winter's technique is reminiscent of her description of Theodysius Purland's scrapbook. He was a permanent practitioner of mesmerism at the London Mesmeric Infirmary in the 1850s who created a record of his experiences and acquaintances, embellishing his descriptions with calling cards, handwriting samples, loosely related pictures, and other ephemera. A certain sense of reality is forced upon the reader by the presence of this engaging (though not always strictly relevant) evidence, however. We can connect the tales to real people and real places in a way that storytelling alone would not allow.

Winter's own storytelling is almost as good as the pictures. She builds her argument by telling us all the details we would really like to know. We learn about the actual techniques of a mesmerist from a journalist's description of the trials and successes of one of the first foreign mesmerists to -- as Winter puts it -- get off the ferry in 1837. Baron Charles Dupotet de Sennevoy brought mesmerism to London; making passes over the bodies of his subjects, who then mimicked the actions of the mesmerizer, and prescribing remedies. Other fascinating details include a brief description of the work of Charles Wheatstone, a professor of experimental physics and the inventor of the stereoscope and the "enchanted lyre" (a harp worked by striking piano keys in the next room), as well as an investigator into dreams. Winter's magisterial command of the subject and her intimate knowledge of the players is evident in every brief, illuminating comment, dealing not just with mesmerism or the history of medicine but also (a s in the portrait of John Elliotson as an avant garde medical hero) sartorial details: Elliotson is shown in the forefront of fashion, wearing trousers.

This wealth of spellbinding detail creates a rather gossipy relationship between author and reader -- particularly since much of the evidence relates to intimate surgical operations. We learn, for instance, that Madame Plantin's relatively painless breast amputation in 1828, achieved while she was under mesmeric influence, was considered an amazing success -- despite her death shortly afterward. We learn later, in the chapter dealing with the uses of mesmerism in India, of the enormous sizes of the cancers that were successfully excised. One scrotal cancer is recorded at a mind-boggling seven feet in circumference and two feet round its neck.

There is more to this book, however, than a mass of detail appealing to the prurient. The course of the use of mesmeric techniques in colonial India, as Winter interprets it, brings together and highlights all the issues connected with the use of mesmerism in Victorian Britain. Mesmerism in Britain "officially" declined, Winter convincingly asserts, because the relationship between mesmerizer and subject was too intimate. Chemical anesthesia was embraced as an alternative because it was less personal, and hypnotism was preferred over mesmerism for the same reason. Anyone could mesmerize or be taught to do so. Few mesmerizers, therefore, were doctors and most were from the working or lower middle classes. Relations between mesmerizer and subject could be even more problematic when a native filled one of the roles. When natives were patients, mesmerism was introduced to them as a kind of magic -- superior power and knowledge of the white race. Its use promoted a serene atmosphere in the operating theater and m ore importantly, during recovery. Native workers were also cheap and plentiful. They could easily be trained to use mesmeric techniques in the wards. As the case histories of the O'Key sisters show, being in the trance state could confer temporary freedom and power upon the patient, but Winter does not give us any evidence that this kind of behavior was common in the Indian hospitals. What is evident, however, is that as soon as native workers were successfully mesmerizing sahibs and their families, the hierarchy of power was reversed. The intimate, potentially sexual relationship between mesmerizer and subject -- so evident in the cover illustration, which comes from an early twentieth-century patent medicine advertisement -- was not permissible.

Mesmerism declined but still exerts the same spellbinding power that attracted the Shelleys, Dickens, De Quincey, Wilberforce, and other prominent figures in the nineteenth century. Whether Winter has rescued it from its marginal status is debatable: simply proving that almost everyone read, talked about, and even practiced mesmerism for at least thirty years is not enough. The same argument could be made for Gothic romances, which were equally popular for a comparable length of time, and also dealt with power, authority, gender roles, and class status. Wanting to stress the absolute significance of one's previously ignored subject is a symptom of the Ph.D., and that is the only negative element remaining in what is otherwise a very successful transition from dissertation to book. Winter's history is an enthralling read for anyone who enjoys reading about the quirks of real people.