William de Morgan’s A Likely Story has long passages in which pictures talk.
The main subject, Reginald Aiken, ekes out a living as a painter by picture restoration. One of his jobs, a seicento portrait, talks to old Mr Pelly about its subject and her adventures in Italy. Mrs Euphemia Aiken later hears a photo of the portrait telling her that Reginald isn’t such a bad fellow after all.
These occult narratives are hedged about with scepticism and qualifications: were they dreams, or the voice of the unconscious, or perhaps just a sort of self-hypnotism? A young friend of Mr Pelly’s ponders on the meaning of his experiences.
“It was the action of his brain, my dear, not his own doing at all ! Let me see — what’s it called ? — something ending in ism.”
“Hypnotism?”
“No ! Oh dear, I shall remember directly …”
“Mesmerism?”
“No, no! — do be quiet and let me think. …”
“Vegetarianism?”
“You silly girl! I had just got it, and you put it out of my head . . . There ! . . . Stop ! . . . No ! . . . Yes — I’ve got it. Unconscious Cerebration!”
The Psychomorphic, a psychic investigation society, investigate Mrs Aiken’s narrative and sagely conclude that, “failing further evidence, we are justified in placing this story in section M 103, as a Pseudo-real Hyper-mnemonism.”
William and Evelyn de Morgan were both associated with Spiritualism. William’s mother Sophia was a medium his sister Mary claimed to communicate with the dead. Lois Drawmer has analysed the Spiritualist content of Evelyn’s paintings, which intensified as she got older (above).
Contemporary with the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Spiritualist craze was associated with progressive politics of the sort that the de Morgans supported, like women’s suffrage and pacifism. Spiritualism was not thought to be inconsistent with science, not least with the theory of evolution, which was extended to the evolution of spirits after death and which explained the superiority of their knowledge to that of the living. Even the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace was a Spiritualist. A Likely Story is dedicated to The Scientific Enquirer.
MARSHALL COLMAN 