While Houdini's magical performances and Conan Doyle's fictionalized optical illusions reveal a sympathetic synergy in their articulation of a scopic democracy – and in the process undermine modernity's assumed fragmentation of optical space – their very different relationships to spiritualism can be read as a fracture of that sympathy. Moreover, their fierce opposition to one another on the subject of spiritualism illuminates the possible divergent paths of science and vision under pressure from early twentieth-century commodity capitalism and its stress on conformity to spectacular society. This final chapter will consider Houdini's and Conan Doyle's responses to the key site of spiritualist practice – the séance – as a starting point for a more extensive investigation of the role of vision as it crosses from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, or to put it differently, as it shifts from Victorianism to modernity.

Spiritualism's role in British and American culture has been broadly examined by historians. Its gender, racial and class politics, its role as a new religious movement and its relationships to the ‘dominant ideology of the era’, as Molly McGrath puts it, have all been fertile ground for a consideration of the place of the séance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century societies. Spiritualism’s relationship to science has also been investigated, most profi tably by Richard Noakes, and partly as a result of this work, and partly due to the turn towards the periphery in history of science scholarship generally, the séance has gained some cache as an interesting site of scientific contest.