Solomon's Secret Arts (48 page)

Such passages remind us that the widening sphere of eighteenth-century discourse was not inherently rational, however much emphasis it may have placed on making subjects sound reasonable.
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Sibly presents himself here as an empiricist, because he values “experience” over “abstract reasoning.” After all, he had analysed the chemicals and seen their effects in practical trials. His endorsement of magic was apparently upheld by strict methods of inquiry. What more did members of the public need to convince them that his Solar Tincture could conquer death?

Sibly certainly belonged among those marketers of ineffective remedies whom Roy Porter has labelled “quacks,” but he was not necessarily a charlatan.
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To read his books alongside his advertising claims can only lead one to conclude that he believed in what he was doing, and that his stupendous assertions were based on real conviction. The same might not be said of other patent-medicine pedlars, most of whom were neither astrologers nor spagyrists, even if their
potions and pills sounded alchemical. John Ching was an apothecary of Cheapside and maker of “Worm-destroying LOZENGES, for Fits, Pains in the stomach, Pains in the Head or Side, and for Pale, Languid and Emaciated Appearances in young Persons.” Like many iatrochemical remedies, Ching's Lozenges contained mercury and were poisonous. After they killed one young man at Hull in 1803, the victim's grieving father, a printer by trade, published a pamphlet denouncing them.
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Attacks on quackery were not uncommon, but in spite of them the late eighteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the number of patent medicines, which were heavily marketed through advertising. Dr Samuel Solomon of Liverpool claimed to have spent £5,000 a year on publicizing his highly successful “Balm of Gilead,” a large bottle of which cost as much as a guinea. His tireless self-promotion rested on claims that he had solved age-old mysteries. The “Balm of Gilead,” designed to cure nervous disorders and “Female complaints,” was “extracted from the SEED of GOLD, which our alchymists and philosophers have so long sought after in vain.”
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Solomon presented himself as a scientist, but the appeal of his advertising undoubtedly rested on the notion that he had found the Philosopher's Stone.

The use of advertising for specifically occult purposes was also widespread, a point underlined by the editor of a collection of London handbills from the 1770s and 1780s. “That the occult science called white magic, and the study of astrology, flourishes among us, is evident,” observed the anonymous compiler. The collection included an advertisement for W. Lacy of Bartlett Buildings, Holborn, who offered “ASTRONOMICAL and ASTROLOGICAL Demonstrations” for ladies and gentlemen, including the drawing-up of nativities. Lacy would show “how and at what time any animal or plant is under the celestial rays, which is sufficient to convince unbelievers that astrology is not a vain opinion (as some think).” An inventor as well as a seer, Lacy had already announced his “new invented astronomical machines” in the
St. James's Chronicle
, a newspaper for the elite. More traditional in her approach was “Mrs. Corbyn from Germany,” who “undertakes to answer all lawful questions in Astrology, in a very particular manner.” From nine in the morning to nine at night, she was available at her home in Stanhope Street, Clare Market, where she would “give an account of absent persons either by sea or land.” Clearly, her customers included the wives and sweethearts of military and naval personnel. Far more impressive international credentials were presented by Mrs Edwards, who “in Hungary, Russia, China, and Tartary, has studied the abstruse and occult sciences, under the most learned SAGES, AUGURS, ASTRONOMERS and SOOTHSAYERS.” She was willing to advise ladies on “all ADMISSIBLE QUESTIONS IN ASTROLOGY” from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., at 22 Crown Court, Russell Street, near the seedy but popular Covent Garden market.
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The use of advertising demonstrates that these astrologers did not simply depend on neighbourhood connections or verbal recommendations in order to raise business. None of them was linked to an almanac or had been apprenticed to a famous astrologer. Two of them were women. These facts provide a contrast with the previous century, when the astrologers whose names appeared in print advertisements were almost without exception men, and most were almanac compilers. No self-respecting English astrologer of the seventeenth century, moreover, would have claimed to have studied abroad (especially in Catholic lands), and they were more likely to design talismans than machines. The celestial science was becoming more cosmopolitan as well as more competitive and up to date in its publicity.

A sign of this trend was the successful breach of the Stationers’ Company's monopoly on astrological publishing. Until 1775, the almanac trade remained firmly in the hands of the Company, which continued to exploit it in the old-fashioned way, by strictly controlling the compilation, printing, distribution and sales of its most lucrative wares. The annual profits from almanac sales had risen from a few hundred pounds in the early eighteenth century to around £2,000 in the last decades of the century. In 1775, the Company was stunned when the Court of Common Pleas ruled that it did not have an exclusive right over the printing of almanacs. Following this legal setback, it failed in its attempt to persuade Parliament to limit the damage by allowing no further almanac publishers, although it managed to raise the stamp tax on paper so as to discourage further competition.
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The Company also responded to the loss of its privileges in more positive ways. Almost at once, it increased the level of advertising for its almanacs in newspapers. After 1786, the Company paid Charles Hutton, a respected professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, to compile the astronomical information for its almanacs, at a handsome annual salary of 130 guineas.
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The same almanac titles, however, remained in circulation throughout the late eighteenth century, although some of them were not particularly popular. Among the dozen or so book almanacs published by the Company in this period, only one was extending its sales and making a healthy profit:
Vox Stellarum
, first compiled by Francis Moore and later famous as
Old Moore's Almanac
. Since at least 1768,
Vox Stellarum
had been selling far more copies than all the other book almanacs combined. In 1800, for example, it reached sales of almost 340,000, compared to 71,000 for its competitors. The steady rise of
Vox Stellarum
occurred in spite of inflation which drove up the cost of a copy from 9 pence in 1781 to 16 pence in 1798.

Why was
Vox Stellarum
a runaway bestseller among late eighteenth-century almanacs? While its rivals had been largely purged of astrological or occult
material, and filled instead with puzzles, poetry or general information,
Vox Stellarum
remained a traditional source of predictions and was “profound in occult science,” as William Hone later wrote, disparagingly.
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Every issue contained planetary directions, short prognostications, a table showing “The Dominion of the Moon in Man's Body,” essays on the main events of the upcoming year (often supported by quotations from Nostradamus) and “An Hieroglyphic, alluding to these present Times,” offering what amounted to a graphic prophecy. The 1777 volume, for example, contained a depiction of “a City in Flames” and the advice “that Perjury, Rebellion, Treachery, &c. make Nations to mourn, as surely as they do Families or private Persons.”
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Britain was already fighting a rebellion in the American colonies, so this was hardly a revelation, but the promise to divulge secrets through a “Hieroglyphic” doubtless added to the mysterious allure of the almanac.

Vox Stellarum
was compiled by a genuine astrologer, Henry Andrews, who was paid a measly £20 for his work in 1800, and according to his son never received more than £25. A pirated version of his famous almanac appeared for a few years after 1789, which further testifies to its success. The Stationers’ Company was not eager to create competition for Andrews, and when Thomas Jackson of Newcastle, Staffordshire, who styled himself “Student and practticer [
sic
] in Astrology,” proposed to them a new almanac containing “Astrological Observations” in 1773, he apparently received no encouragement.
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Vox Stellarum
would remain the leading source of astrological predictions until well into the nineteenth century, eliciting scandalized comments from respectable printers and publishers, who denounced the Stationers as “the only Company that gives bread to conjurors.”
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Who read almanacs in the late eighteenth century? The Stationers’ Company itself provided a clue in presenting its complaint against competitors, arguing that their criminal actions would endanger simple rural souls: “as most of the Almanacks are Sold in the Country, Sedition and Scandal will hereafter inflame the Minds of many Persons who now seldom see a News Paper or a Magazine.”
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The snobbish inference is reminiscent of the prosecuting counsel's question at the
Lady Chatterley's Lover
obscenity trial in 1960: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” It reveals, however, a fundamental point. The rural market was crucial to almanac sales, as is suggested by the number of provincial newspapers in which the Company advertised its wares after 1774. Country folk may indeed have been the main audience for
Vox Stellarum
, although there is no reason to think that it sold poorly in London or other large towns, as it was also advertised in Manchester, Bristol and Leeds. The Scottish market, however, had been largely abandoned, and advertising space was purchased in only one Aberdeen newspaper.
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Through almanacs,
the commercialized London book trade of the late eighteenth century was reaching into the far corners of the English, if not of the Scottish, realm.

Sentimentality and Terror

Commercialism was not the only force that transformed the occult. The last forty years of the eighteenth century witnessed a cultural trend towards the expression of sentiment in literature and the visual arts. This had its roots in the evangelical revival, as well as in the enlightened validation of natural rather than artificial feelings. The notion that everyone shared the same “sensibility” was built on George Cheyne's studies of the nervous system and David Hartley's theories of human nature. To be sure, one was not supposed to give way to vulgar passions: sensibility was governed by inherent goodness and benevolence. The acceptable sentimental repertoire limited itself to what was noble and uplifting: love of God, family, country, humanity. “
Sentiment
,” wrote an anonymous novelist in 1785, “is a refinement of moral feeling, which animates us in performing the dictates of Reason, and introduces many graces and decorums to the great duties of Morality.”
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Sentimental writing had a connection with mysticism from its inception. Samuel Richardson, author of the novels
Pamela
and
Clarissa
, was a friend of Dr Cheyne and printed works by both William Law and John Byrom.
Clarissa
has even been interpreted as an illustration of Philadelphian principles, with the heroine corresponding to Divine Wisdom, or what Jane Lead called the Virgin Sophia.
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Pious and sentimental readers could also find much to admire in Henry Brooke's novel of 1766,
The Fool of Quality
. The complicated—indeed, interminable—plot concerns the son of an aristocrat who is separated from his family and raised virtuously in a poor farming household. The rambling storyline is punctuated with uplifting incidents of benevolence, as well as with philosophical, moral and political disquisitions, which reflect Brooke's attachment to the theology of William Law and Jacob Boehme. In one exchange, “the Author” is asked, “Do you think there is any such thing in nature as spirit?” His reply, which would have delighted Law, is: “I know not that there is any such thing in nature as matter.” He then elaborates a spiritual version of pantheism: “If one infinite spirit, as is said, fills the universe, all other existence must be but as the space where he essentially abides or exists.” The divine spirit alone preserves the continuity of the universe.
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In spite of his distrust of Boehme, the evangelist John Wesley was so entranced by this novel that he edited a second edition with the assistance of the novelist's nephew, an artist also named Henry Brooke. Wesley omitted “great part of the Mystic Divinity, as it is more philosophical than Scriptural,” but he praised the novel because “it continually strikes at the heart.”
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The characters in sentimental novels are ordinary human beings, but by the 1760s, critics were calling for more otherworldly stuff. William Duff, who when he was not writing about culture served as a Scottish Presbyterian minister, suggested that the creation of “supernatural characters” like witches and fairies comprised “the highest efforts and the most pregnant proofs of truly ORIGINAL GENIUS.”
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It was precisely because they could not be accepted as real that they were so difficult to make convincing. Duff became a great advocate for the poems of Ossian, supposedly written by a Celtic bard but actually composed by the Scottish writer James Macpherson from ancient fragments. Although the poems are full of omens, ghosts and spirits of nature, the central figures in them are human heroes. Macpherson actually took a sceptical view of their occult content, even condemning “the ridiculous notion of second sight.”
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Reticence about the occult began to change in the 1760s. The sentimental novel was succeeded by the genre known as the Gothic, in which supernatural events were frequent and the reader was induced by them to feel apprehension, fear and even terror rather than doubt or revulsion. The Gothic novel owed its genesis in part to a strange incident of 1762, that of the so-called “Cock Lane Ghost.” Elizabeth Parsons, a twelve-year-old girl living in a house in West Smithfield, London, claimed that her room was haunted by the spirit of a former lodger, who communicated through various tappings and scrapings the message that she had been poisoned by her lover. The episode contained several of the main elements of later Gothic fiction, including a young female protagonist whose body became a testing ground for the supernatural as she suffered fits and participated in seances in her bedroom. Methodists, eager for signs of spiritual intervention in human affairs, upheld the girl's testimony, while the general public flocked to the house, seeking edification or simply amusement. More surprisingly, the London literary community became entranced by the goings-on. Samuel Johnson conducted an investigation that produced no sign of the supernatural. His friend the poet, dramatist and sentimental novelist Oliver Goldsmith wrote an account of the affair, debunking the girl's story. Goldsmith acknowledged “the credulity of the vulgar,” but claimed that the public had known all along that it was a trick. In the end, Parsons's father, mother and aunt were imprisoned for the imposture, with her father suffering the further indignity of being pilloried.
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