| dc.description.abstract | In the mid-1890s the London based Society for Psychical Research dispatched
researchers to the Scottish Highlands and Islands to investigate an extraordinary
power of prophecy said to be peculiar to the residents of these remote regions.
Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, and given in English as
‘second sight’, the phenomenon was most commonly associated with the vision of
future events: the death of neighbour, the arrival of strangers into the community, the
success or failure of a fishing trip and so forth. The SPR were not the first to take an
interest in this pre-visionary faculty, rather they joined a legion of scientists, travel
writers, antiquarians, poets and artists who had made enquires into the topic from the
end of the seventeenth century. This thesis examines the remarkably prominent
position enjoyed by Scottish second sight in the Victorian popular imagination. In
seeking to appreciate why a strange visionary ability was able to make claims upon the
attention of the whole nation where other folk motifs were consigned to the realms
of specialist interest only, this project charts its migration through a series of
nineteenth-century cultural sites: mesmerism and phrenology, modern spiritualism
and anthropology, romance literature and folklorism, and finally psychical research
and Celtic mysticism. Binding these individual case studies together is a cast of shared
actors - Walter Scott, Catherine Crowe, William Howitt, Marie Corelli, Andrew Lang
and Ada Goodrich Freer - and a focus on their common investigative and creative
cultures. My interest is with how the power of second sight, once defined as a
supernatural occurrence tied to the geographically distant and mysterious Scottish
Highlands, comes to be transformed by the close of the nineteenth century, into a
supra-normal facet of the psyche, potentially accessible and exploitable by all. | en_US |
