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WILLIAM STAINTON MOSES (Fig. 1) is well known within the Spiritualist community, not only for his books Spirit Identity (1879) and Spirit Teachings (1883) but also the many pamphlets and articles he wrote under the name "M. A. (Oxon.)."1 Arthur Conan Doyle, the best known late-Victorian literary author to engage Spiritualism with few reservations, featured Stainton Moses as one of four "great mediums" of the period in his 1926 book The History of Spiritualism. Referencing Stainton Moses as an Anglican clergyman and a medium who used automatic writing, Conan Doyle wrote: "There is no writer who has left his mark upon the religious side of Spiritualism so strongly as the Reverend Stainton Moses. His inspired writings confirmed what had already been accepted and defined much which was nebulous."2 other literary authors from the period, including H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Andrew Lang engaged Spiritualism with more skepticism.3 Frank Podmore extended this more skeptical view to Stainton Moses in Modern Spiritualism (1902), stating that "all the marvels" displayed by Stainton Moses as a medium "were, in fact, produced by the medium's own hands" and that he had "deliberately ... entered upon a course of systematic trickery."4
In recent decades, academic scholarship has focused less on the legitimacy of mediumship and more on Spiritualism as culturally significant because it reveals Victorian concerns about the decline of religion, the rise of science, and individuals' agency within this changing world. This scholarship has achieved a good balance between recognizing men and women in the movement but has given relatively little attention to Stainton Moses's work.5 He held important roles as a medium with advanced skill in automatic writing; a participant in Spiritualist organizations such as the British National Association of Spiritualists and the London Spiritualist Alliance; and an influential contributor to the periodical Light, through which he established authority for Spiritualism when threatened by alternative spiritual movements, especially Theosophy. Additionally, his engagement with social scientific organizations of the late-Victorian period such as the Psychological Society of Great Britain and the Society for Psychical Research shows how elite, male Spiritualists negotiated other perspectives about the material and immaterial worlds and reasserted a Spiritualist perspective in this discussion.6
The Ghost Club, an all-male club founded in 1882 by Stainton Moses...