OPINION
As I previously wrote for The BFD, human foibles of class and prejudice persist even on the spiritual plane. It’s notable, for instance, that ‘past lives’ invariably show a bit of cachet: everyone’s an Egyptian priestess; no one’s a plumber from Grimsby. Similarly, ghosts are notably posh in their tastes, preferring to haunt manor houses and castles, rather than slums and housing commission projects.
The reasons for this are less supernatural and far more grounded in contemporary social trends. The fashion for spiritualism and haunted manor houses accompanied the rise of the nouveau riche and the dissipation of liquid wealth leading to aristocratic families selling off their estates to the parvenus from trade.
Prior to that, though, for nearly a century the sophisticated upper classes spurned ‘popular superstitions’ – precisely because they were popular.
Parliament repealed laws against witchcraft in the 1730s, replacing them with bans on pretended magical powers. Yet, [historian Thomas Waters] argues, for nearly a century after that, many educated middle- and upper-class Britons continued to openly admit to believing in ghosts and witchcraft. Through the 1810s, there were numerous cases of clergymen and aristocrats publicly discussing such supernatural phenomena with real concern.
“Not until the 1820s and 1830s was belief in witchcraft, ghosts, and divination perceived as scandalous,” Waters writes.
In the 1820s, the phrase “popular superstition” gained currency, suggesting that magical beliefs were the province of the uneducated masses.
In other words, ‘popular superstition’ was a phrase loaded with the same type of supercilious sneering as ‘populism’ does today, in political affairs.
Just as the great and good (just ask them) today furrow their brows over ‘misinformation’, ‘right-wing extremism’ and ‘conspiracy theories’, the elites of the early Victorian era harrumphed at the superstitions of the grotty peasants. There was a thriving trade in a kind of spiritual Disinformation Project.
Newspapers reported with dismay on outbreaks of anti-witch vigilantism and called for clergy and other respected figures to put a stop to it. A new genre of public lecture emerged, in which educated experts debunked ghost stories and other superstitions. Book reviewers often attacked collections of ghost stories unless they explicitly debunked the tales.
Antiquarians began studying fairy lore, ghost stories, and magical practices and customs, giving a broad audience a view of superstitions as cultural artifacts while attempting to dispel belief in them. Often, this meant laying out the psychological and natural phenomena that might lie behind stories of ghosts and apparitions. One scholar even decried the practice of baking hot-cross buns on Good Friday for good luck, writing that it was “undoubtedly a relic of superstition and ought to be abolished.”
Their motivations were little different to today’s pseudo-academic sneerers: they needed to prove they were better than the Great Unwashed.
[Newspapers] needed juicy topics, yet editors were also eager to present their papers as rational, respectable sources of factual information.
“Accounts of the extraordinary escapades of witchcraft and ghost believers interspersed with a little critical commentary fitted the bill exactly,” Waters writes.
More broadly, in the 1820s and ’30s, many in the middle and upper classes were watching with horror as working-class masses fought exploitative work situations, rioted against poor laws, and demanded a greater share of political power. The focus on “popular superstition” emphasized the need for education to bring mass opinion in line with the “rational” worldview of the elites.
Until the worldview of the elites, as we have seen, suddenly became much less rational.
In the later Victorian period, Spiritualism emerged as a more respectable way of believing in ghosts.
JStor Daily
Which was, in fact, little more than the spiritual version of the elites’ credulous gibberings today about the shades of Hitler and Mussolini lurking in every corner of the internet.