MYERS, F[rederic] W[illiam] H[enry]. Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death.

Hypnotism, Trances, and Ghostly Possession

MYERS, F[rederic] W[illiam] H[enry]. Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1903.

Two volumes, 8vo. Original blue cloth, spines lettered directly in gilt; vol. I: pp. xlvi, 700; vol. II: pp. xx, 660, 40 (publisher’s catalogue); numerous in-text diagrams to vol. I; some wear to spines at head, corners lightly rubbed; a little foxing to the first few ff. of vol. I; else a very good set; title-page of vol. I inscribed ‘Lord Swinfen, from Mrs. Frederic W.H. Myers, 1932’, loosely inserted autograph letter (120 x 170 mm) signed ‘Eveleen Myers’ to ‘My dear Carol’ on headed notepaper (12 Cleveland Row, St James’s), dated 7 October 1932, in the original envelope addressed to The Lord Swinfen (see below).

First edition of Myers’s work on the unconscious mind, presented to Charles Swinfen Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen by the author’s wife, Eveleen Tennant Myers, a prolific self-taught society photographer and model for Millais and Watts.

Frederic William Henry Myers (1843–1901) was one of the pre-eminent figures in the late Victorian boom in psychic studies. A founder of the Society of Psychical Research, he made his reputation with the 1888 book Phantasms of the Living, written with Edmund Gurney, which documented over seven hundred sightings of apparitions and attempted to forge a statistical proof of telepathy. He followed it up with a collection of essays, Science and a Future Life (1893), in which he made it clear that his was not a religious quest but a scientific enquiry.

These books exerted a considerable influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that ardent spiritualist who participated in seances with Myers as well as Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Russel Wallace. He wrote that ‘in the great work of Frederic Myers […] psychic science will find its firmest root’ (Hill, Spiritualism: Its History, Phenomena and Doctrine (1913), introduction).

The most important idea in the present work, which was compiled from Myers’s papers after his death, is the ‘subliminal self’, a deep region of the subconscious mind that harbours innate human abilities in telepathy and clairvoyance. The supraliminal, or everyday, consciousness represents a mere fraction of our whole self and psychic potential for good and ill. Fellow parapsychological researchers including William James were highly impressed, and the book received a second lease of life when it was republished in 1961 with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, who described it as ‘an amazingly rich, profound and stimulating book.’ Mainstream psychology, however, has not accepted his findings.

Provenance: Presented by Eveleen Myers to the barrister Charles ‘Carol’ Swinfen Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen, here aged twenty-eight. In 1937 he married Mary Farmar, who was to become better known in later life as the novelist Mary Wesley. Loosely inserted is an affectionate autograph letter referring to another copy of the book that Eveleen intended to send Swinfen from Leckhampton House in Cambridge, erected by Frederic Myers on land leased from Corpus Christi College: ‘I am so sorry I cannot find the volumes of “Human Personality” I wanted to give you. All my books at Leckhampton that I did not give to the family I packed in Boxes at Leckhampton – I hoped to have found them for you – when I was there – but I failed – so please accept this edition, with my love, and forgive me for the delays’. She discusses her summer holidays, sends love to Lord Swinfen’s mother and sister, and complains of depleted strength due to the previous year’s influenza and ‘Dentists!!’.

The association is particularly interesting for the picture it paints of the Myers’ connections in high society, even after Frederic’s death. Eveleen took up photography in 1888 to record her family (including her sister, the artist Dorothy Tennant) and owned several original prints by Julia Margaret Cameron, whose work inspired her photographic compositions, although she stopped after Frederic’s death in 1901; the National Portrait Gallery holds over two hundred of her photographs. The Tate holds portraits of Eveleen Myers by George Frederic Watts (exhibited 1880) and John Everet Millais (1874); the preparatory three-quarter-profile sketch for the latter is now at the National Portrait Gallery.

SKU: 2125414