Flaxman Low and the Whispering Seance: Reappraising M. P. Shiel’s Psychic Cartographies
In the subtle margins of late Victorian mysticism and early Edwardian horror lies the literary silhouette of Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865–1947), a minor monarch of lost continents, serpent philosophies, and fatal chromatics. Born in the West Indies on the tiny island of Montserrat, Shiel traced his ancestry to Irish stock via his father, Matthew Dowdy Shiel. Educated in Barbados and later in London, he led a life marked by varied literary output, florid prose, and irregular moral circumstances. Despite his prolificacy, Shiel never quite earned a secure berth in the English literary canon. Scholars often orbit him like the comet in his own decadent tale “The Purple Cloud” (1901): drawn into awe, yet remaining appreciably distant.
To those who know him only by his apocalyptic novel “The Purple Cloud,” wherein a solitary man walks through the pink-fumed ruins of humanity, Shiel appears a fevered fantasist—a sort of spiritual cousin to Machen and Hodgson. Yet his short pieces—notably those published under the aura of fin-de-siècle spiritualism—reveal a more epigrammatic and ideatically potent writer. To understand this facet, one must stroll into his collaboration with Louis Tracy under the pseudonym Flaxman Low, allegedly the first psychic detective of English literature.
Flaxman Low, introduced in the 1898 volume “Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low,” represents not only a pioneering figure of occult detection but also an esoteric trapdoor into Shiel’s metaphysical leanings. Though often categorically dismissed as formulaic, many of these stories contain symbolic kernels of a more potent engagement with the ethereal boundaries of cognition and being. In particular, the tale “The Story of B 24” uncannily stirs the reader with certain aphoristic underpinnings: “A thought, once generated by intense human passion, is not a bird bead of the air, but a cormorant of the void, diving into the past to eat.”¹
This sentence, tucked quietly in the folds of a ghost story, unfurls immense poetic implications. It asserts thought not as evanescence, but as a species of active haunting—a returning weight that lives and acts retrogressively. That sentiment, which Shiel deploys in the context of tracing a vengeful spiritual entity, simultaneously invites philosophical meditation. What if thoughts, particularly those configured in vivid languages of loss, guilt, or yearning, construct psychic weather across temporal seams? Are we, then, individuals or merely vessels caught in storms of ancestral premonitions?
At first glance, Flaxman Low appears as a Holmesian hybrid with ectoplasm under his fingernails—a man of science rationalizing spiritual phenomena. But it is this tension between certitude and unknowing in the stories that forms Shiel’s secret quilt of metaphysical longing. Unlike the outright theatricality of Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing or the conceptual aloofness of Blackwood’s John Silence, Flaxman Low is, paradoxically, a Cartesian medium. He quantifies and measures hauntings, yet admits tacitly in numerous stories their final resistance to limitation.
If we examine “The Haunted Woman” (included in the 1898 collection), the narrative tells of a lady of society repeatedly tormented by a spectral presence that tangles her consciousness between dream and reality. Flaxman Low’s eventual diagnosis is less triumphant than grimly unsettling: “Some minds (and they are often the gentlest) resemble not an abode, but a mirror—on which the fears of others come to sketch.”² The passage resigns the empirical ethic of detection in favor of a moral-poetic sensibility—one in which susceptibility to the supernatural is not due to weakness or credulity, but openness, compassion. Thought, therefore, becomes contagious—a virus of the soul with elegant latency.
This mirror-metaphor echoes philosophically with Plotinus’s conception of soul as a reflection through many spheres, touched by both the higher realm of Nous and the lower turbulence of experience.³ In Shiel’s cryptic language, the boundaries between being and isn’t, self and not, crack and fold like tarnished vellum. These rhetorical arabesques—more than the plots themselves—become vessels for contemplative descent.
We soon come to recognize this not as a mere aesthetic but a passionate, if obscure, cosmology. Shiel’s writing from this period lies between dimensions—contemporaneous natural philosophy and occult Romanticism. It is very likely that he admired the works of Bulwer-Lytton, especially “A Strange Story”, for in letters and essays he often exhibits a curious infatuation with the idea of energy having moral valence.
Take again his most persistent symbolic obsession: the color purple. In “The Purple Cloud,” the catastrophic gas that exterminates the world is of a violaceous hue, and yet we are compelled to ask: why purple? Neither carnally red nor vegetatively green, but a regal contamination—echoing perhaps the blend of empirical reason (blue) with mystical passion (red). The color metaphorically signifies consequence born from contradiction—a thematic chord echoed in Low’s quieter tales as well. This philosophical overlay to the spectral makes Flaxman Low’s journals resemble less the files of a detective than the wrinkled marginalia one might find scribbled inside a hermit’s codex.
The philosophical torch is most definitively lit in “The Fear That Walks at Midnight,” wherein the entity is not a ghost at all, but “[…] a fear itself, shaped once in the brain of an ancestor and left there like an old key to a room no longer standing.”⁴ To inherit fear as one inherits a crest or a surname tells us much about Shiel’s quiet existentialism. He suggests that being isn’t just a succession of isolated lived experiences, but a haunted continuum knit together by blind memory—what Deleuze later in a different context called the “virtual.”⁵
If we juxtapose that idea with the Buddhist notion of jegginshe—a shadow-trauma carried across incarnations—we notice a peculiar unity. Flaxman Low’s investigations, then, can be read not as stories about ghosts, but stories about inherited epistemologies of affect. This makes Shiel, largely dismissed as pulp, an unwitting ancestor of affect theory, extending down through Kristeva’s ‘abject’ to the “hauntological” works of Jacques Derrida.
To walk with Shiel is to traverse the uncanny margins between the story and what the story fails to articulate. His language, dandyishly gouty yet pricked with philosophical shrapnel, rewards slow reading. His sentences often behave like ethereal parables, smuggling within them a surreal despondency aligned with no school, no movement. Where else in 19th-century horror do we find sentences like, “That a man may fear his own mind, and will that mind into a wolf, is not entirely outside the mathematics” (“Lord Throstle’s Tale,” 1899)?
Here lies the fort: Shiel, far from being a mannerist dilettante, is perhaps best reconsidered as a metaphysical writer in ghostly drag. His ghastly tales, rather than catering to chills, endeavor to show us the ghost already seated in every thought we dare to repeat.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, psychodrama, hauntology
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¹ Shiel, M.P., “The Story of B 24,” in Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low, Ward, Lock & Co., 1898.
² Ibid. “The Haunted Woman,” p. 114.
³ Plotinus, Enneads, VI.4.16, trans. A.H. Armstrong, Harvard University Press, 1984.
⁴ Shiel, “The Fear That Walks at Midnight,” Ghosts, p. 158.
⁵ Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Zone Books, 1991.