Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884) is best known for her book with the snappy title Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye. Interblended with Personal Narrative (E. W. Allen, 1882), and the plates from it, featuring sitters with sprit extras, have been frequently reproduced. The year before, Trübner had published a more general book by Houghton on her involvement in the Spiritualist movement, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance. It had been labelled ‘First Series’, and E. W. Allen issued a further instalment alongside Chronicles. This ‘Second Series’, as Houghton termed it, of Evenings at Home has now been republished by Victorian Secrets. The editor, Sara Williams, has added an introduction, a chronology, basic bibliography, and a useful selection of articles by and about Houghton and her work from the contemporary press (including a review by H. P. Blavatsky of Chronicles that appeared in The Theosophist), as well as annotating the text. Williams adds some of the context necessary to understand how, despite Houghton’s rather sad and straightened circumstances, she could remain positive about her own life and the life to come.
Houghton was a spinster who lived in genteel poverty, with her mother until the latter’s death in 1869. That was a terrible year which also saw the deaths of Georgiana’s brother George and of her nephew Charlie, the son of her beloved sister Zillah who had died in 1851. What stands out in the chronology is the extent to which death touched her: of the ten Houghton siblings, seven predeceased Georgiana, and her interest in Spiritualism was sparked in 1859 by the possibility of mediumistic communication with Zillah. Her Spiritualism was always consonant with her strong Christian beliefs, and Biblical references are scattered throughout Evenings at Home. As Houghton, quoting herself in conversation, says, “…we both look to the Bible as the original evidence of Spiritualism and as still to be our landmark.” Mediumistic and scriptural communications were for her mutually reinforcing.
The second ‘series’ of Evenings at Home is a record of Houghton’s activities covering the years 1870–1881. It is a valuable source for understanding the Spiritualist movement during this period, though Houghton’s complete absence of critical insight into her experiences as a sitter in the séance room means her accounts need to be treated with extreme caution. Spiritualism was a gregarious pursuit, and Houghton clearly enjoyed the status she had obtained within the movement. As well as the social aspect of séances, which included stopping for supper and a chat, she was ‘at home’ one afternoon each week, when she would receive like-minded visitors with whom she could discuss her brand of theology. She describes séances with friends such as Mrs Guppy of “aerial transit” fame, and by employing an autobiographical approach she is able to demonstrate how strongly her ardent Spiritualist beliefs provided a framework for her life.
While the second volume of Evenings at Home refers to spirit photography (and in particular her close association from 1872 with spirit photographer Frederick Hudson, the focus of Chronicles), it emphasises her earlier water colours painted under spirit influence. Their production was automatic, and Houghton disclaimed any conscious involvement in the content, which shifted from stylised fruits and flowers to pure abstraction, “sacred symbolism” as she calls it. A lengthy section is devoted to the exhibition of 155 of her paintings she organised in 1871, at considerable financial cost. The exhibition, entitled Spirit Drawings in Water Colours, went on for four months at the New British Gallery in Old Bond Street in London. It was a mammoth undertaking for her, not only arranging the venue and catalogue, but framing the pictures for display, and removing them afterwards, a task she insisted on doing personally. She attended the gallery daily in order to discuss the pictures’ meanings and her method of production, to promote the doctrines of Spiritualism, and probably to have more company than would normally be the case in her domestic solitude. She describes some of these visitors, including the foolhardy Darwinist who attempted to convert her to evolution but whose “specious arguments … bothered me not for one moment.” Sadly, while many of her paintings were for sale, she only sold one, and her friends had to have a whip-round to help her out (her precarious financial position is a recurring theme).
The pictures would now be characterised as outsider art, or even abstract expressionism before its time, and the marked contrast of their style to prevailing notions of realism in Western art perhaps accounts for their lack of success during her lifetime. Yet as Rachel Oberter notes in her 2005 article on Houghton (‘Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye: The Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton’ in the journal Victorian Studies, which reproduces some of the pictures, though unfortunately in black and white), Houghton’s watercolours in a sense were representational; she gave them specific titles, and for her the apparent randomness of line and colour represented a higher reality, interpreted through automatic writing by the spirit guides who had communicated the pictures to her.
Williams quotes the ever-optimistic Houghton as she muses in Evenings at Home on the future:
There have been three great epochs in my annals, divided into decades. In 1861, came the drawing mediumship, to open into all the rest.—In 1871, the exhibition of those ten years of work.—And now, in 1881, this most comprehensive labour of all! [i.e. Evenings at Home] — I cannot but speculate — what will the next decade evolve? what shall I do in 1891?
Sadly this tireless worker for Spirit did not live to see 1891, but she has left, in the watercolours, the photographs and the books, a window into the world as she saw it. Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance is a valuable document for anyone interested in the Spiritualist movement of the period, and, and it is good to see part of it back in print, with the addition of supplementary material. Renewed interest created by Victorian Secrets’ initiative may even stimulate further research into Houghton’s watercolours, and there is certainly scope for a full-colour book collecting together her surviving artworks and the automatic writing accompanying them.
A bibliographic note on the Victorian Secrets edition: There are two versions of the Victorian Secrets edition of Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance. When first issued in 2013, the introduction did not refer to the fact that there had been two ‘series’ of Evenings at Home, with different contents, and this was a reprint of the second. Williams’s ‘Note on the text’ (p.19) originally stated: ‘Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance was first published in London in 1881 by Trübner. In 1882 a second edition was issued by E. W. Allen of London to coincide with their publication of Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena.’ (There is a minor difference in the subtitles of the two series, neither included in the Victorian Secrets edition: the First Series is subtitled ‘Prefaced and welded together by a species of autobiography’; the Second has the slightly less cumbersome ‘Welded together by a species of autobiography’.)
Leslie Price drew attention to the confusion between ‘series’ and ‘edition’ in Psypioneer, March 2014, p.88, having himself been reminded by Dr Marco Pasi of the fact that a different volume had been published in 1881, and the 1882 book was not a second edition of it. Subsequently, Victorian Secrets added ‘Second Series’ to the title page of their edition, retaining the 2013 date, but adding ‘revised 2014’ to the colophon. Williams’s introduction was amended (p.7) to note that the Victorian Secrets edition reprinted the second of the two series; and the ‘Note on the text’ was amended to read: ‘Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (Second Series) was first published in London in 1882 by E. W. Allen of London to coincide with their publication of Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena.’ The covers of the two Victorian Secrets versions are identical.