by Thomas Hood (uncredited).
Originally published in Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany (Andrew Spottiswoode) vol.1 (1845).
No. I.
"We seem to have entered the world of dreams and witchery." — Faust.
In these days of revived mesmerism, another, but milder form, of the same intellectual epidemic that raged among our ancestors in the shape of a confirmed belief in witchcraft and demonology in general, with all its attendant cruel persecutions and executions,—when men and women were tortured into confession of impossibilities, and were burnt "quick" for committing them,—it may not be uninteresting to look back at that dark period when witchfires blazed throughout the land, to mark their flickering, their gradual decline, their extinction, and the occasional half-successful attempt to produce their reappearance, though all the stirring brought forth no more than a feeble glimmer that sank before the dayspring of education and truth.
The mine of superstition that lies hid in the human heart, ready to be called into requisition by him who watches the favourable opportunity for applying the machinery of hopes and fears, is inexhaustible. The vein of imposture is not less rich, nor are there wanting
"Eremits and friers,
White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery,"
eager to work both.
How the keen and cunning Mersburgian[1] would chuckle to see the delusion again attempted, and its professors wrecked upon the rocks which he was sufficiently sharp-sighted to weather. In vain do we look in these days, notwithstanding the gullibility of John Bull, for a Monsieur d'Eslon making one hundred thousand pounds by fees from his patients; but who knows what effect might yet be produced by the magnetic tub and pianoforte?
"What was the magnetic tub?"
The magnetic tub, madam, or baquet as it was termed by our lively neighbours in the last century, was a covered large round oaken vessel placed in the middle of the room, filled with pounded glass, iron filings, and magnetised water in bottles, all arranged in symmetrical order. The cover was pierced with holes, through which issued polished iron rods of different lengths, bent and moveable. Around this mystic vase the patients were placed in rows, each holding one of the rods, which she or he—I like to be particular—applied to the part of the body supposed to be affected by disease. They were all tied together in a concatenation accordingly, by a cord which was passed round their bodies, and occasionally, to make the charm grow madder, they formed a second connexion by seizing each other's thumbs: thus the adepts, literally, had the Parisian world in a string. Then the pianoforte, which stood in a comer, and had been highly charged with magnetism, was played, and, sometimes, vocally accompanied by a magnetised performer, whilst the chief magnetiser stood with a polished iron rod in his hand conducting the whole à la Jullien;—a scene worthy of Gillray.[2]
Animal magnetism, homœopathy, hydropathy, and dryopathy—for it seems that a worthy has started up who will not permit his patients to drink, substituting crusts for claret, like brother Peter—are not, however, the only influences of the time; for, even in this matter-of-fact age, and amid this politico-œconomical, utilitarian generation, ghosts are not laid, if we are to believe good and honest witnesses; nor am I of those who will deny that the apparitions have been seen. Some examples will be hereinafter produced, and they who condescend to read these pages shall judge for themselves.
In common with many others, I, Gideon Shaddoe, flatter myself that I have shaken off the trammels of superstition as completely as any unfeathered biped can; but as very different feelings marked my early years, some account of that portion of my life seems to be a necessary prologue.
I was born, before the last century had run out, I am sorry to say, in one of the principal seaports of the west of England, and in a house where a Guinea captain had committed suicide. It was large, and had, originally, been two houses; but an opulent citizen had bought them both, and, defying the reputation of that part of the house where, to use the town clerk's expression, the captain had entered an appearance after suddenly calling on his own trial as a felo-de-se et aliis, threw them into one, and lived in credit and comfort, as the principal apothecary of the place. But here, again, was room for people to talk. There were dark hints of the visits of his apprentices to a neighbouring churchyard, and of a housemaid having been thrown into fits, of which she never properly got the better, from sweeping in her excess of cleanliness too far under one of their beds, and bringing out with the brush a ghastly human limb protruding from a bag—"nothing but an upper extremity," as the trembling apprentice termed it in his defence. Our family succeeded the good apothecary; and I must confess that—in my wanderings down in the spacious cellars, and up in a garret which ran the whole length of the house, used for stowing away lumber, and called "The Herb room," from the use to which it had been applied by the former tenant—I have seen things looking as if they ought to be in the churchyard aforesaid, dangling in bottles dimmed with dust and smoke, that I shrank from examining, though then on the hunt for zoological and mineralogical specimens, which had been put out of the way there, to complete the series in my father's collection: but I am anticipating.
Among my first recollections is a dear old nurse, the widow of a Welsh master of a ship, whom we all loved, notwithstanding the doses which her duty occasionally compelled her to throw in. Even now I shudder at the vision of the castor oil warming in the well-polished silver pap-boat that reflected the nursery fire on a frosty morning in front of our cots. The miserable eyes of four of us, of whom I was the eldest, were fixed on that dread vessel as we all whined in concert at the sight, ignorant, as yet, which was to be the victim, till nurse would say in a provokingly cheerful tone, "Come, Master Gideon, you shall be the first horse of the team; you shall have the mayor's powders to-day." Loud were my lamentations, while the other three, ceasing theirs, sat up in their little beds, their eyes glistening through their tears, to see the execution. The reader shall be spared that, with its strugglings and overflowings, and mouth-and-chin scrapings by a dexterous application of the edges of the spout of the boat aforesaid, so that not one fat yellow drop was lost to the patient. This vile potion was always administered under the above name, we being informed that we were a highly-favoured family, and that nobody in all the town, excepting the mayor's children and ourselves, were permitted to take it. The warm oil was bad enough; but when sprinkled with the best muscovado, and forced down our throats us mayor's powders, 'twas too much. I could not swallow the medicine now if my life depended on the sickening glutinous draught.
My health was none of the strongest, and my good nurse would lift me out of my cot when I was restless at night—informing me, however, that I was like the troubled sea—to rock me in her lap till I was lulled to sleep. Some five years had now passed over my curly head; and, upon these occasions, she and an under-nursemaid, also from the principality, would entertain each other with such ghost stories as I have never heard since. Both were evidently true believers; and, all the time, I used to feign deep slumber, greedily devouring up their discourse, till, one winter night, old nurse told a story of such surpassing horror, in requital of a tolerably frightful one which her companion had just related, that pretty Peggy's ruddy Welsh face became pale as death. She proceeded in her dreadful tale of seduction and murder; and just as she was describing, in solemn accents, the appearance of the slaughtered one in the wake of the murderer's ship, gliding stark and stifle in her shroud swiftly, but smoothly on, over the wild sea, which was calmed in her awful path, whilst all around the waves were lashed to their utmost rage amid the war of elements, and the lightniiSg was seen through her form—old Martha happened to look down into my terror-opened eye, which was glaring full upon her. Instantly she broke off into a confusion of nursery songs about
Hubbabubbub,
Three knaves in a tub,
And the beggars are coming to town," &c., &c.,
and I pretended to drop off to sleep again in the hope of hearing the end, which I never did.[3]
After this, not entirely abandoning hope, I frequently affected restlessness, and was as often taken up and nursed by the kind old woman—but no more ghost-stories.
I had, however, learned, in the course of these stirring narratives, all about the Guinea captain's death, and how a black man, with fiery eyes, was beheld squatting on his coffin the night after he was screwed down, and how the captain was still visible occasionally, especially when ships in the African trade came into the port, in that house, the blood streaming from a ghastly wound in his throat, with a cat-o'-nine-tails and shackles in one hand, and a bowl of boiled horsebeans in the other; also, how, in one particular room in which none but the male part of the establishment would sleep, a dead man's arm was to be seen, on the nights when the wind blew from the churchyard, projecting from the wall by the light of the corpse-candle which it clutched.
But, Mr. Shaddoe, you are hardly out of your cradle yet; and are you about to drag us through your school and college days, and inflict upon us the history of your whole career?"
By no means, benevolent reader, I respect thee too much to make thee such a martyr; albeit some passages in my life might provoke a smile, whilst others, perchance, might raise a sigh. I have troubled thee with so much to show at how early an age superstitious notions were impressed on my mind. What I suffered in childhood, in boy-hood, ay, even in early manhood, from those impressions, none who have not undergone the same terrors can imagine. Do I blame the memory of my venerable nurse for making me their slave? No, dear old soul, much as my spirit was shaken, the thrilling emotions arising from some of those horrors far outweighed the suffering. If a man of acute sensibilities and strong passions feels more deeply the pains of life than one who is gifted with less feeling, he enjoys its pleasures with a keener relish. He is not so happy, yet much happier. The youthful Johnson could hardly have felt the presence of the ghost in "Hamlet" more forcibly than I did. I very much doubt whether the witches in "Macbeth," Ariel, Caliban, or Puck, ever touched him as they did me. Even Asmuth made my flesh creep. And how appallingly is the spirit of the Royal Dane introduced: every thought, every word, every accessory in the short colloquy that precedes its appearance so wonderfully wrought up, creating an atmosphere fit for a being not of this world—and all without effort.
"Tis now struck twelve, get thee to bed, Francisco.
Fran. For this reliefe much thankes: 'Tis bitter cold,
And I am sicke at heart.
Barn. Have you had quiet guard?
Fran. Not a mouse stirring."
* * * * *
"Barn. Last night of all,
When yond same starre that's westward from the pole
Had made his course t'illume that part of heaven
Where now it burnes, Marcellus and my selfe,
The bell then beating one--
Mar. Peace, breake thee off:
Looke where it comes againe."[4]
At school I absolutely revelled in my dog's-eared Virgil, when I was put on in the sixth book of the Æneid. Well do I remember my master--
"I knew him well, and every truant knew"--
who had found out my failing, and had home with my stammering over the first of Horace's Satires with more than a pedagogue's patience, till I was first considerably basketed, and then regularly planted, exclaiming, "This will never do: try to construe that, you incorrigible little witchfinder," presenting me the eighth satire at the fourteenth line, and stopping me at the thirty-sixth. The Rev. Basil Burch, better known among his irreverend and tingling scholars as "Black Cat," was surprised at my fluency; and Canidia saved me.
Could 1 have relished the Pharmaceutria of Theocritus, or the witch-scenery of Apuleius, "Faust," "The Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," or "Manfred"—to say nothing of Monk Lewis, "William and Margaret," or "Mary's Dream"—if old Nurse had not taught me how to feel them in the very marrow of my bones? A question not to be asked.
The subjects of the present psychological musings naturally, or, if you will, unnaturally, arrange themselves under the heads of Dreams, Apparitions, and other impressions affecting the mind and body, Witchcraft, and Demoniacal Visitations.
Locke well says, that the dreams of sleeping men are all made up of the waking man's ideas, though, for the most part, oddly put together and, indeed, nothing can come of nothing. Sometimes, but rarely, the dream of the sleeper—for there are waking dreams—is not only vivid but consecutive, as in the celebrated case of Coleridge. The poet was in ill health and retirement in a wild country, for England; had taken an anodyne, and fell asleep in his chair at the moment when he was reading the passage in "Purchas's Pilgrimage," describing the locality where Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, with a stately garden, so that ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed within a wall. Coleridge relates that he continued in profound sleep, at least of the external senses, for about three hours, during which time he had the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if, as he observes, that can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the v/hole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the well-known lines, as musical as ever flowed from poet's pen. It is evident that the impressions, though vivid, were not deep; for, at the moment when the poet was writing, he was unfortunately called out by a person on business, and detained by that person above an hour. On his return to his room he found, to his no small surprise and mortification. "that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast; but, alas! without the after-restoration of the latter." The silver chord was broken for ever.
But, far more frequently, the dream is an odd jumble,—a thing of shreds and patches, often, indeed, going on smoothly to a certain point, and then suddenly thrown out of joint,—presenting such unexpected images as an enormous kaleidoscope, containing dead men's bones instead of bits of coloured glass, might combine.
I dreamed that I lay on the smooth yellow sand of the shore in a calm and lovely summer night, with my face on a level with the unruffled surface of the blue sea. Between me and the full moon, which appeared to rise out of its bosom and rest on the horizon, fleets of paper nautili and Portuguese men-of-war spread their living and brilliant sails as they careered along to the music of the wreathed shells that were scattered around. Ever and anon a distant chorus, as of sea nymphs, would steal over the waters spangled with the reflected stars, and at last I slept soundly.
Again my dream recommenced. The moon had gone down, and a few lingering stars were just beginning to wax pale before the glorious sun which was rising behind me. Out of the sea, just where the moon had previously appeared, gradually arose the completely spread train of a gigantic peacock, every fibre in its gorgeous plumage glittering in the sunbeams till the entire bird appeared to stand upon the edge of the surface of the now green ocean. The peacock quivering its depressed wings, brandishing its train-feathers, and trampling with its feet, ran backwards—and so that brilliant appearance vanished into space.
The sea now became covered with fog-smoke, and, when it partially cleared away, the water changed into a sort of chaotic, thick, slab gruel, out of which human limbs were continually projecting into a lurid sort of twilight. Presently the same light showed the whole surface alive with myriads of human heads of immense proportions. Suddenly these emerged, were reversed, and every one with hideous contortion began to play on a monster double-bass. Whilst I was endeavouring to find out how these topsy-turvy, grimace-making features contrived to play—and a horrible din they made—without hands or arms, I awoke to the bellowing of a great spasmodic street-organ upon wheels.
Now this confusion, in which fancy was busy, uncorrected by judgment, arose from bygone zoological, pictorial, and musical recollections, combined with reminiscences of dissections. I could, on waking, trace every one of the phantasms to their prototypes, distorted though some of them were, and assisted in that distortion by external sounds and the rebellious state of the gastric Archæus, who,—thinking fit to take offence at a light supper of lobster-salad, champagne, and Roman punch—had summoned the monstrous assemblage.
1. Anton Mesmer "first saw the light," as the biographers express it, at Mersburg, in Swabia, in the year 1734.
2. His "Metallic Tractors" will occur to most of our readers; but some of them may not remember Perkins's instrument, for which he took out a patent, nor his publication on "The Efficacy of Perkins's Metallic Tractors in various Diseases of the Human Body and Animals; exemplified by two hundred and fifty cases from the first literary characters in Europe and America. With a Preliminary Discourse in Refutation of the Objections made by Interest and Prejudice to the Metallic Tractors." Bold words these last: but Dr. Falconer and Dr. Haygarth, of Bath, settled the question; for the former made tractors of wood, which exactly resembled the metallic tractors in appearance, and both the physicians operated with them on a number of patients m the Bath Hospital, producing the same effects, precisely, with the real and the fictitious instruments.
3. The other day I stumbled upon the following morsel in a curious collection of old ballads, penes me. The incidents arc not unlike Old Martha's story, as far as it went. "The Sailor's Tragedy" commences with an account of his beguiling "the female sex," with the usual consequences to two, one of whom he made his wife:—
The other being left alone,
Crying "You false deluding man.
By me you've done a wicked thing,
Which public shame will on me bring."
Then to a silent shade she went.
Her present shame for to prevent,
And soon she finish'd up the strife,
And cut her tender thread of life.
She hung herself upon a tree;
Two men a hunting did her see;
Her flesh by beastes was basely tore,
Which made the young men weep full sore.
Straight they went and cut her down.
And in her breast a note was found;
This note was written out at large:
"Bury me not, I do you charge.
"But on the ground here let me lie,
For every one that passes by,
That they by me a warning take.
And see what follows ere too late.
"As he is false, I do protest
That he on earth shall get no rest;"
And it is said she plagu'd him so,
That to the seas he's forc'd to go.
As he was on the mainmast high,
A little boat he did espy;
In it there was a ghost so grim,
That made him tremble every limb.
Down to the deck the young man goes
To the captain his mind to disclose;
"Here is a spirit coming hence,
0 captain, stand in my defence!"
Upon the deck the captain goes,
Where soon he spv'd the fatal ghost;
"Captain," said she, "you must, and can,
With speed help me to such a man."
"In St. Helen's this young man died,
And in St. Helen's is his body laid."
"Captain," said she, "do not say so,
For he is in your ship below.
"And if you stand in his defence,
A mighty storm I will send hence,
Will cause you and your men to weep,
And leave you sleeping in the deep."
From the deck did the captain go.
And brought this young man to his foe:
On him she fixed her eyes so grim,
Which made him tremble every limb.
"It was well known I was a maid,
When first by you I was betray'd;
I am a spirit come for you,
You beguil'd me once, but I have you now."
For to preserve both ship and men,
Into the boat they forced him;
The boat sunk in a flash of fire,
Which made the sailor's all admire.
All you who know what to love belong.
Now you have heard my mournful song,
Be true to one whatever you mind,
And don't delude poor womankind.
Such was the rhyme and reason that satisfied our ancestors.
4. We quote from our carefully-cherished old folio: in the multitude of editions there may be safety; but we are satisfied with the original wisdom.