The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Ruth Brandon is a historian and biographer, and this academic book, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, is a critical history of the nineteenth and twentieth century Spiritualist movement, examining its major mediums and figures with particular attention to documented cases of fraud and exposure alongside genuine believers. Its strength is that Brandon approaches Spiritualism as a historian rather than as either a believer or a simple debunker, tracing why the movement appealed to so many people in its era while also documenting the specific frauds that were uncovered at the time. Its limit is that, as a single historian's synthesis covering a large cast of figures across two countries and decades, individual cases receive less depth than a dedicated biography of one medium would provide.