Raising Spirits

How a Conjuror's Tale Was Transmitted across the Enlightenment

J. Barry

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137378941
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Despite supernatural scepticism, stories about spirits were regularly printed and shared throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This case-study in the transmission of a single story (of a young gunsmith near Bristol conjuring spirits, leading to his early death) reveals both how and why successive generations found meaning in such accounts.

1

Introduction

Abstract: An introduction to the textual history of the story of Thomas Perks from 1703 to 1892, explaining the transmission of the various versions and where it was published/copied.

Keywords: textual history; transmission; manuscripts

Barry, Jonathan. Raising Spirits: How a Conjuror’s Tale Was Transmitted across the Enlightenment, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137378941.

The ‘raising’ of spirits through conjuration has been a central feature of magic throughout the ages, attracting both interest and condemnation in equal measure.¹ In late seventeenth-century England it was not only condemned by the Church (for whom such spirits could only be demons, possibly disguising themselves as beneficent beings), but also illegal under the Witchcraft Act of 1604, not repealed until 1736. Inevitably, therefore, anybody who experimented with such conjuration would be cautious about telling their story. Reports of legal cases against witches (and more rarely against ‘cunning people’, who were not often prosecuted, accused of using spirits to tell fortunes or identify witches or thieves) occasionally mention conjuration, but rarely in any detail. The explosion of publishing in the mid-century revolution had seen editions of several key magical texts, while these and others also clearly circulated in manuscripts; many of the latter have found their way into major collections, but it is hard to identify how they were being used during this period. From the 1650s learned men, mostly clergymen, also began to collect and publish stories of spirits in order to counter the growing tide of scepticism (often associated with the materialism and supposed atheism of Thomas Hobbes) about the very existence of a spirit world at all: even if spirits were demons, then their existence provided proof of the teachings of the Bible and orthodox Christianity about the Devil and (more importantly to them) God, whose Providence permitted such spirits to tempt fallen humans. Judging by popular literature, ordinary people were well-acquainted with the Devil or devils as tempters, but these mostly involved meetings with a demonic figure, not conjurations, and such stories tend to come in highly stereotyped patterns of evil motives (lust, greed, revenge) being exploited by a devil to lead the sinner to disaster (sometimes after repentance and at least partial deliverance from the Devil’s power). It is therefore extremely unusual to find an account, even second hand, by an ordinary person describing their conjuration of spirits in any detail, and one which is not completely shaped by these publishing priorities.

This book is based on a letter (or letters) ‘concerning a Person that convers’t with spirits’ written by Arthur Bedford (vicar of Temple in Bristol) in 1703, regarding his dealings with Thomas Perks of Mangotsfield in the first half of the 1690s, when Perks had reported his conjuration of spirits, the experience of which supposedly led to his early death. Although filtered through Bedford’s perspective, the letter allows us at least some sense of Perks’s experience, and also tells the story in a way which, I shall argue, left it open to varying interpretations, not reducing Perks (nor his spirits) simply to a generic stereotype. The letter, published in two editions in 1704, was regularly reproduced in both manuscript and print, but has never received scholarly scrutiny, despite the interest in Bedford (a major scholar and polemicist) and, of course, in demonology. I will explain the significance of Bedford’s original text and trace its transmission over time, considering the varying motivations of those who reproduced it and the textual alterations entailed. One version of the text is given in the Appendix, together with a list of the others (and an abbreviated title for each, by which they are cited hereafter) and a commentary on how they differ: an edition of all versions will be found online. Though Thomas Perks remains tantalizingly elusive, the successive appropriations of his story exemplify the use (and abuse) of stories of spirits in England between 1703 and the late-Victorian era.

A brief history of the text will clarify the pattern of successive chapters. Bedford, who had previously told the story to many people, including the ‘late Bishop of Hereford’ (Gilbert Ironside), was prompted by Henry Shute (a London clergyman with Bristol links) to write a letter to Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester, on 2 August 1703. A neat later copy (‘Temple’)² is in the Temple parish archives. Shute himself then wrote a letter (‘Shute’) to Fowler on 4 September 1703, based on what Bedford had written separately to him. In 1704 two printed versions appeared, one printed in Bristol (Bonny) naming Fowler and Perks, but referring to Bedford merely as ‘a clergyman of the Church of England, living in Bristol’. This publication, possibly superintended by Fowler, either followed a different version of Bedford’s letter from ‘Temple’ or was compiled using both ‘Temple’ and ‘Shute’. The London edition (Hills) was considerably abridged to fit on a single sheet. A (differently) abridged version (Beaumont) (with Perks called ‘Jerps’) was printed as a letter from Bedford ‘to a friend of his the last year’ in John Beaumont’s An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts, and Other Magical Practices (1705), possibly based on the (lost) letter Bedford had written to Shute.

There is then a gap until two versions emerge, both authenticated by Bedford himself (by then at Hoxton in London) on 1 January 1740. The first (‘Cruttenden’) was sent to the dissenting minister Philip Doddridge by Robert Cruttenden on 10 September 1747. First printed with Doddridge’s correspondence in 1830, it was reproduced (Tatler) later that year in The Tatler, edited by Leigh Hunt. The second version (Chronicle) appeared in St James’s Chronicle of 18 April 1761. Although these versions share characteristics, they also differ. Chronicle adds that the book Perks used for his conjurations was ‘Cornelius Agrippa’s Magick’. There was also renewed interest in Bristol. George Catcott transcribed a copy in 1779, including a similar note regarding Agrippa. As his brother was vicar of Temple, he had access to the parish archives, but his transcription is closer to Bonny than ‘Temple’. Joseph Beck and Stephen Penny conversed in 1760 with a Mangotsfield man who had known Perks and told them another story about Mangotsfield conjuration, preserved by the Beck/Harford family. Penny and his friends were involved in the Lamb Inn witchcraft case in 1762, where the familiar spirit of the suspected witch (herself from Mangotsfield) was called ‘Malchi’, the name of Perks’s spirit. Henry Durbin, whose narrative of the episode (probably written in early 1763) was published posthumously in 1800, appended the Bedford letter (Durbin) to his pamphlet, but gave the trade of Perks or his father (the texts are ambiguous) as being a ‘gunsmith’, rather than ‘blacksmith’ as in all the versions discussed so far. Thomas Perks’s father was a gunsmith so this change reflects knowledge of the family circumstances.

The ‘gunsmith’ variant appears in two manuscript copies (‘Sharp’) now among the papers of Granville Sharp, a leading slave trade abolitionist; one might have belonged to Granville’s grandfather John Sharp (Archbishop of York) or William Lloyd (Bishop of Worcester), the other being a later transcription of the first. The first printed version with ‘gunsmith’ (Jones) appears in A Relation of the Apparitions of Spirits in the Principality of Wales (1780) by Welsh dissenting clergyman Edmund Jones, which ends with some English cases, including the Perks letter, mistakenly dated ‘2 August 1763’. This may be copied from the same original (now lost) as Durbin and ‘Sharp’. Three manuscripts identical to Jones (‘Bristol’, ‘Vowell’ and ‘Evans’) may be copied from the publication, or one (perhaps used to train evangelical ministers) may be Jones’s source. A similar evangelical purpose inspired the abridged version (Arminian) published in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine in August 1782, also with ‘gunsmith’ but correctly dated. Curiously, later Wesleyan collections did not reproduce Arminian; the only one to feature the story, The Spectre or News from the Dead (1836) by ‘T. Ottley’, reproduced Jones. From Ottley’s book the story was translated into German in 1840.³

A newspaper version of the text including ‘gunsmith’ is included in a scrapbook kept by George Catcott, but its provenance/date is not given. It is essentially identical to a final eighteenth-century publication (Sibly), which appears in the final volume (published in 1788) of A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences (1784–8) by the astrologer Ebenezer Sibly, although Sibly omits two lines which indicate Perks’s doubts about whether astrology could ever achieve ‘mathematical demonstration’. Sibly lived in Bristol c.1784–87 and so may have seen and copied the same newspaper version (or possibly one of them submitted the text to the newspaper; if it was Catcott, it presumably postdated his 1779 transcription discussed above, which still had ‘blacksmith’). Sibly was copied (Raphael) in The Familiar Astrologer (1831) by Bristol-born astrologer Robert Cross Smith (publishing as ‘Raphael’), who noted that ‘I have myself seen a very curious telescope and a very ingenious fowling-piece made by this said Thomas Perks and in my last tour to the west of England (1830) I found numerous versions of this particular account still extant among the peasantry.’ The surviving ‘fowling-piece’ may explain continuing knowledge of his trade. Raphael has a coloured print showing Perks under attack from the spirits, entitled ‘Thomas Perks, Raising a Spirit, to his own Destruction!’ In his Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century (1825), Raphael had referenced both Beaumont and Sibly, and linked the story back to his own family (and to the other Mangotsfield conjuration story, though with different protagonists). It was largely through Sibly/Raphael that the story was noted by later occultists.⁴

Finally, Bedford’s letter entered the Victorian world with a transcription (Ashburner) of ‘Temple’ in the Spiritual Magazine of 1860 provided by John Ashburner, a London physician and champion of mesmerism, phrenology and spiritualism. Through him it was cited by another leading spiritualist, William Howitt, and also by anti-spiritualist writers. The Anglo-Catholic clergyman, Frederick George Lee (using the Penny/Beck account from the Harford family) reproduced Jones/Ottley in his Glimpses in the Twilight (1885) to demonstrate that spiritualism was a dangerous heresy, whose spirits were indeed demons. By contrast the psychologist Lionel Weatherly (1852–1940, born and resident in Portishead, near Bristol, and running a private asylum at Bath) briefly summarized the case (and reproduced the Raphael print) in The Supernatural (1892), which sought to discredit spiritualism and theosophy by presenting all cases of ‘the supernatural’ as either frauds or, as in the Perks case, ‘hallucinations . . . caused by his superstition and belief in the supernatural’.⁵

There must be other versions that I have not discovered.⁶ The story (though not a standard) is reproduced in modern online reportage about the supernatural – mostly from the nineteenth-century texts now digitized by Google Books (or by Cambridge University Press, which has recently reissued both Howitt and Weatherly).⁷ While no single story can raise every issue within the debate on ‘spirits’, the passage of this one through the centuries is sufficiently representative (and fascinating in its protean appeal to many complex and interesting individuals) to exemplify the multi-faceted treatment of spirits over the period conventionally seen as an Enlightenment nadir in the fortunes of such beliefs. I will return in the conclusion to consider what the case has taught us.

Notes

1 For an introduction see Richard Kieckhefer, ‘Magic and Its Hazards in the Late Medieval West’, in Brian Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), pp. 13–31. This volume, together with Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke, 2007), offer a cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Thomas Perks and His Circle
• 3  Arthur Bedford and His Circle
• 4  The Second Phase: Bristol and London 176079
• 5  Evangelical Publishing
• 6  Astrologers
• 7  The Nineteenth Century: Medicine, Spiritualism and Christianity
• 8  Conclusion
• Appendix
• Select Bibliography
• Index