A Time Like the Present

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster.*

Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years,* after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People from a congress of British subjects in America, which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.*

Continue to Part 3

* In 1775, Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) reached the age of twenty-five; but this is really an irrelevance, because Southcott, a farmer’s daughter from Devon, did not begin spreading her semi-Christian prophecies until around 1800, and her following did not peak until 1814. In 1750, a soldier in the Life Guards (royal bodyguards) really did prophesy that the City of London and the City of Westminster would be destroyed on April 9th that year. Dickens has conflated this with another recorded prophecy, this time from 1775, in which it was said that a catastrophic earthquake would swallow up the capital. In the late 1850s, a superstitious fad for seances, table-turning and occult messages had just landed from America, and all this helped to make his readers think that 1775 was a time like 1859.

* The Cock-Lane Ghost was a fraud perpetrated in 1762 in a lane near St Paul’s Cathedral. The supposed ghost, first a woman named Elizabeth Lynes, and then her sister Fanny, caused a sensation, rapping out messages on the ‘one knock for yes, two knocks for no’ principle. Partly through the efforts of Samuel Johnson, it was eventually proved to be an imposture motivated by an unpaid debt and a secret affair. When Dickens was writing his novel, London was agog with the table-turning performances of Daniel Dunglas Hume, a celebrity medium from America. “But for the strong restraining powers of his common sense” wrote John Forster in his biography of Dickens “he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism”. Dickens wrote some accounts of spiritualist gatherings, but of much more value are his superb ghost stories, including The Signalman. See What the Signalman Saw.

* In 1774, a self-governing Congress met at Philadelphia in Great Britain’s thirteen American colonies for the first time; the same body met again two years later to issue the Declaration of Independence. Dickens indicates that this grittily real ‘messaging’ from America should have received more attention than the sensational spiritualist frauds that gripped the press and public at home.

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