The female thermometer eighteenth centur 179

C H A P T E R SPECTRAL POLITICS: APPARITION BELIEF AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION Where are the soules that swarmed in times past? Where are the spirits? Who heareth their noises? Who seeth their visions? Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, , 1584' W hy we no longer believe in ghosts? In his nostalgic celebration The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897), Andrew Lang blamed the skeptical eighteenth century: "the cock-sure common-sense of the years from 1650 to 1850, or so, regarded everyone who had an experience of a hallucination as a dupe, a lunatic, or a liar."2 Enlightenment thinking—to put it bluntly—made spirits obsolete Keith Thomas takes up a similar theme in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), but develops it rather more ingeniously Men and women of the eighteenth century "stopped seeing ghosts," he asserts, not so much because ghosts came to seem "intellectually impossible" (though this was certainly the case) but because ghosts gradually lost their "social relevance."3 In traditional English society, he suggests, the belief in apparitions performed a powerful community function The idea that spirits of the dead might come back to haunt murderers, locate stolen objects, enforce the terms of legacies, expose adulterers, and so on, functioned as a kind of implicit social control—a restraint on aggression and a "useful sanction for social norms."4 With the emergence after 1700 of new and bureaucratic forms of surveillance—with the rise of an organized police force, grand juries, insurance companies, and other information-gathering bodies—the need for a spectral monitoring agency, composed of ethereal headless 168