Abstract

Soon after modern spiritualism announced itself with the “Rochester knockings” of 1848, tables took on a new and controversial life. No longer were they content to live out their days impassively upholding dishes and glasses and silverware, vases, papers and books, bibelots, elbows, or weary heads. They were changed: they began to move. Tables all over the United States and then in England, France, and other countries commenced rapping, knocking, tilting, turning, tapping, dancing, levitating, and even “thrilling”—though this last was uncommon. So Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan said in her discussion of Daniel Dunglas Home, probably the most famous nineteenth-century medium:It is only in Mr. Home’s presence that I have witnessed that very curious appearance, or process, the thrilling of the table. This takes place for some seconds, perhaps more, before it rises from the floor. The last time I witnessed this phenomenon, an acute surgeon present said that this thrilling, the genuineness of which was unmistakable, was exactly like what takes place in that affection of the muscles called subsultus tendinum.2And the tables did still more. Their actions were a language; and so they came to symbolize “the ‘movement,’ as it has been called,”3 of modern spiritualism. Spirits had chosen the table as an organ of speech.Tables were customarily viewed as objects of economics, aesthetics, utility, diversion, tradition, even theology . Now, though, as Professor De Morgan jokes, “London and Paris were running after tables in a new sense.”4 Tables had become a different kind of thing. Whatever one might think about reports of spiritual communications, the conception of tables had changed. They had become moral objects. 2. C. D. [Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan], From Matter to Spirit. The Result of Ten Years’ Experience in Spirit Manifestations, with a preface by A. B. [Augustus De Morgan] , p. 27. Daniel Cottom is an associate professor of English at the University of Florida. His most recent books are Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation and Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation . This essay is adapted from a work in progress on spiritualism and surrealism