Seeing is (Dis)believing

The backbone of Victorian spirit investigations rested with the credibility of the witnesses who attended spiritualist events such as séances. But how did someone become a credible witness of spirit or psychic phenomena? What were the processes by which their testimonies became trustworthy representations of genuine experiences? This paper explores these questions by examining the visual epistemology of the scientific naturalist and sceptic John Tyndall (1820–1893), as a way of understanding the politics of constructing scientific testimony during the late Victorian period. Visual epistemology can be defined as an embodied practice of observation that moves beyond merely being the physical act of looking at things to include a range of skilled activities. Key to this paper is an attempt to challenge earlier whiggish accounts in the historiography that have perpetuated the myth that science conquered spiritualism in the nineteenth century. Instead, it exposes a more complicated narrative about Victorian science’s uneasy relationship with spirit and psychic phenomena, and raises important questions about the authority and limit of scientific naturalism.