Facts in Mesmerism with Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry Into It.. This item is unavailable.Facts in Mesmerism with Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry Into It.

8vo. xii, 575, [1], [16] ads. 2 lithographic plates by Madeley (facing pages 206, 246), errata. Original publisher's blind-stamped green cloth, gilt title; expertly rebacked with original spine laid-on, new endleaves. A few pencil marks. Near fine. First Edition. Grimes calls this work "one of the most widely read and influential of mesmerism texts . . . [the author] refers to mesmerism as an 'imponderable agent' which 'influences' the patient. An 'influence' originally meant 'the supposed flowing or streaming from the stars or heavens of an ethereal fluid acting upon the destiny and character of men' and also an 'occult force.' Townshend used the term to describe how a mesmerist could command this mysterious emission in order to regulate the actions of his subject." — Grimes. / Edgar Allan Poe wrote a review of this authors' book on mesmerism. In the Broadway Journal, April 5, 1845, Poe called Chauncey Hare Townshend's book Facts in Mesmerism (London, 1840) "one of the most truly profound and philosophical works of the day — a work to be valued properly only in a day to come." — see: Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales, Library of America, 1996, p. 412. / "Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798—1868), poet and collector, was a well-connected friend of Robert Southey and Charles Dickens. He became fascinated with Mesmerism while in Germany and went on to popularize it in England. This book, first published in 1840, was his passionate defense of Mesmerism. Developed in the late eighteenth century by Franz Mesmer, Mesmerism was a kind of hypnosis based on the theory of animal magnetism. With its spiritual associations and uncanny effects, it was an extremely controversial topic in the nineteenth century and its practitioners were widely considered fraudsters. Townshend describes in detail the mental states Mesmerism induces, which he identifies as similar to a state of sleepwalking. Perhaps most fascinating are the eye-witness accounts describing experiments carried out by Townshend on the continent, in which he hypnotized his subjects into feeling his own sensations and knowing things they could not know." — Cambridge University Press. REFERENCES: Adam Crabtree; Robert H Wozniak, Animal magnetism, early hypnotism, and psychical research, 1766-1925: an annotated bibliography, 433. See: Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny and Scenes of Writing, Ashgate, 2011, page 66.…