Elsa Richardson

University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH), Faculty Member

Queen Mary, University of London, Centre for the History of the Emotions, Faculty Member

Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Trust Library, Research Bursar

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Chancellor's Fellow in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Strathclyde, affiliated with the Centre for the History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH).

Current research focus lies with histories of nutrition, alternative dietary cultures, mental stress and gastric disorder in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. One project, funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, is titled 'The First Health Food Empire: Eustace Miles and Life Reform, 1900-1930' and uncovers the untold story of Britain's first health food pioneer. In addition, following a Research Bursary from the Wellcome Trust, I am also examining the nineteenth-century history of vegetarianism and the impact of meat-free philosophy on developing medical understandings of nutrition and the stomach. This is with the aim of developing a long-term research project looking at the cultural and medical story of the working lunch in nineteenth-century cities, alongside a popular history of the vegetarian movement in Britain and America.

Broadly, I tend to work at the intersection between the medical and cultural history and my research considers the relation of heterodox practices, beliefs and movements to mainstream society and culture, with particular focus on the interaction between medicine and the imagination, science and the supernatural, psychology and the occult. My first monograph, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017, examined the place of extraordinary visionary experience in the Victorian scientific and popular imaginary. Specifically, it investigates the phenomenon of secod sight, a species of foreknowledge associated with the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and describes how tales of this strange visionary ability came to impact on the formation of psychological theories, scientific methodologies and dominant cultural forms.

Outside of this project, I have researched and published on women’s life writing, British modernism, vegetarianism in fiction, performance and psychology, feminist consciousness-raising and psychoanalysis.
Phone: 0141 444 8243
Address: School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde Glasgow, United Kingdom

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Talks by Elsa Richardson

Overtaxed Brains and Anxious Stomachs in the Nineteenth-Century City

This paper asks what the nineteenth-century’s anxious eaters, neurotic dieters and unhappy diners... more This paper asks what the nineteenth-century’s anxious eaters, neurotic dieters and unhappy diners reveal of the historical conditions of emergent cultural modernity. Examining the traffic in metaphors of consumption, overload and disease between the body and the city, this research examines how the hallmarks of modern life were imagined to impact on gastric health. The Victorian stomach demanded the attentions of dieticians, surgeons and gastroenterologists, but it also attracted frequent interest from psychiatrists, public health officials and social reformers. Bound to the rest of the body through a network of nervous connectivity, the organ was thought to possess a particularly significant connection to the mind. Over the course of the nineteenth century a new understanding of the stomach’s sympathy with the emotions emerged, one that emphasised the negative consequences of overwork and anxiety on this important partnership.
Exploring connections between the stomach, the urban environment and the world of work, this paper investigates how narratives of overwork, mental strain and digestion became intertwined in popular and medical discourse. Specifically, it considers the fate of the office worker. Reading specialist periodicals like The Postal Clerk’s Herald and The Clerk, alongside the depictions of overworked London clerks that appear in novels like George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) and the dedicated medical writing on the poor dietary habits of office employees, this paper examines the causal connections drawn between the mental strain of office work –the concentration, rapidity and precision each task demanded— and the curse of gastric ill health.

‘Hypnotism, Criminal Suggestion and Medical Experimentation’,

'Sun-Fired Foods and Nutritional Science: Eustace Mills and Vegetarian Reform'

This paper examines the impact of the life-reform movement on understandings of nutrition and wel... more This paper examines the impact of the life-reform movement on understandings of nutrition and wellbeing in interwar Britain. Often framed as a response to the horrors of World War One and sold as a corrective to the pressures and anxieties of industrial modernity, life-reform advocated fresh air, exercise, sub-bathing, cleanliness and nature as crucial components of good health. Reformers also emphasised the importance of good digestion and pressed the value of so-called ‘sun-fired’ foods ---wholegrains, fruits and vegetables--- over the convenience of canned goods and the temptations of mass-produced meals. With this came a renewed interest in the benefits of vegetarianism as an alimentary route back to ‘nature’ and as an antidote to the over-refined comforts of the urban world. This renaissance was further aided by advancements in nutritional science that revealed vegetables to be rich in essential vitamins and by public health campaigns that emphasised the need for fresh food.

The life-reform movement also created a consumer market for health-related products and publications that promised to restore the nation’s flagging ‘vitality’. One figure who successfully exploited this new consumerism was Eustace Miles, a vegetarian reformer well-known as the owner of meat-free restaurants and health food shops in London, and as the author of advice literature like Keep Happy (1919) and Self-Health as a Habit (1920). Using Miles as a key example, this paper considers the popularity of vegetarianism as a revitalising and scientifically-verified diet might reveal of broader cultures of body management in the interwar period.

The Prophetic Imagination: Andrew Lang and Scottish Second Sight

In Cock Lane and Commonsense (1894) Andrew Lang details the hallmarks of a supernatural visionary... more In Cock Lane and Commonsense (1894) Andrew Lang details the hallmarks of a supernatural visionary capacity. In cases of the ‘second sight’, he writes, ‘the percipient beholds events occurring at a distance, sees people whom he never saw with the bodily eye, and who afterwards arrive in his neighbourhood; or foresees events approaching but still remote in time’. Known in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh, this species of prophetic seeing is one most frequently observed in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. Second sight fascinated Lang and the subject recurs throughout his work on comparative anthropology, folklore, history, literature and psychology. What is offered by these multiple readings is a contradictory interpretation, one that at times confirms the ‘sight’s’ deep affinity to place and national imagination, and elsewhere insists upon it as a phenomenon common to all human experience.
Making use of unpublished letters and manuscript materials, this paper frames Lang’s schizophrenic reading of the second sight tradition as intricately bound to his identification of Scotland with romance and the supernatural. Despite residing in England for most of his working life, the Oxford-educated litterateur retained a strong sense of a peculiarly Scottish identity or geist born of a unique vernacular culture. This sense of northern exceptionalness precipitated theoretical inconsistencies in his anthropological thinking, but it also prompted the formulation of a theory of the imagination mapped through temporal and geographical coordinates. This paper will explore prophetic vision as a form or analogue of creative inspiration, one that reflects Lang’s complex engagement with what he described as his ‘primitive racial inheritance’ and presses us to consider his characterisation of Scottish culture as somehow ‘out of time’ with the evolutionary present of the late nineteenth century.

Imagining the Imagination: Unconscious Creation in the Order of the Golden Dawn

This paper considers how theories of the imagination and of the mythopoetic shaped new understand... more This paper considers how theories of the imagination and of the mythopoetic shaped new understandings of the unconscious at the fin de siècle. More specifically it examines the peculiarly active unconscious pursued by members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. An elite society that provided initiated adepts with training in the practices of tarot divination, astrology, geomancy, scrying and astral travel, the Golden Dawn engaged the unconscious as a key element of their practical magic. My interest lies with how members of this magical society came to conceive of the unconscious as simultaneously psychological/interiorised and as a force capable of dictating or re-shaping exterior reality.

Refusing the Unconscious? Second Wave Feminism and Psychoanalysis

In a letter to her publisher in 1886 Marie Corelli asked, ‘Do you notice what an immense eagernes... more In a letter to her publisher in 1886 Marie Corelli asked, ‘Do you notice what an immense eagerness there is at the present day to read anything connected with religion and psychology?’ The author’s best-selling novels— which synthesised social, religious, evolutionary and occult themes—suggested that she had already taken note of the period’s intellectual and cultural climate. Yet the extraordinary commercial success of Corelli’s metaphysical fables were set in sharp relief by the critical mauling that greeted each new publication. Condemned as sentimental trash by contemporary commentators, Corelli nonetheless garnered a broad and loyal readership, and in this paper I will consider the role of psychiatric discourse in securing this popularity. Focusing on two of the author’s earliest novels, 'A Romance of Two Worlds' (1886) and 'The Soul of Lilith' (1892), my paper investigates Corelli’s incorporation of experimental psychology’s tropes—hypnotic states, buried consciousness, collective memory and extrasensory powers—into a unique vision that attempted to answer the moral and religious concerns of her readers.

Marie Corelli’s Immortal Souls: Spectacular Selves and Anti-Realism in A Romance of Two Worlds, Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self and The Soul of Lilith’:

In her recent biography, Annette Federico suggests that Marie Corelli’s ‘strict defence and prese... more In her recent biography, Annette Federico suggests that Marie Corelli’s ‘strict defence and preservation of a carefully designed image are attached to her love of romance and her distaste for literary realism’. While other commentators have interpreted the best-selling author’s refusal to be photographed and her use of doctored official portraits as evidence of overweening female vanity, Federico places Corelli’s self-fashioning within a broader late-Victorian debate concerning the claims of objective certainty and subjective impression. Remarkably responsive to the cultural and intellectual concerns of the period, Corelli drew a vast readership through her synthesis of social, religious, evolutionary and occult themes. Most interesting is the author’s incorporation of pseudo-scientific and emergent psychological discourses into these fantastical narratives. At the turn of the nineteenth century, while Corelli’s fame was at its peak, the British psychology was struggling to find a coherent institutional form. Essential to the discipline’s progression was the highly experimental work of The Society for Psychical Research. Bridging the gap between continental schools and British physiological science, the SPR’s investigations into trance states, hypnotism, telepathy and spiritualist phenomena, posed a significant challenge to the theories of hereditary degeneration that had come to dominate the field. Expanding on Federico’s assessment of Corelli’s anti-realist propensities, my paper charts the connections between psychical research’s role in troubling materialist constructions of the psyche and Corelli’s exploration of phenomena such as collective memory, psychic splitting, extrasensory powers and embedded consciousness.

Pathological Performance in Charlotte Mew's 'A White Night' and 'Mark Stafford's Wife'

Civilised Dining and Savage Vegetarianism: Meat Eating and Gender in Late-Nineteenth-Century Lost World Narratives

"Despite being, as the Westminster Review noted in 1852, ‘a small recurring topic’ in newspapers ... more "Despite being, as the Westminster Review noted in 1852, ‘a small recurring topic’ in newspapers and journals, vegetarianism received limited attention from Victorian writers of fiction. When vegetarian characters did appear, in texts such as Eliza Lynn Linton’s Christopher Kirkland (1885), they were typically sidelined as formulaic representations of bohemian or teetotal eccentricity. Vegetarians do, however, appear to have established a small but significant role in late-nineteenth century lost world narratives. Defined by Bradley Deane as the ‘perverse offspring of the imperial romance and the Utopian novel’, fictions such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) and H.G Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), explore the vegetarian movement’s allegiance to the modern and the progressive. Working within a similar generic framework, Haggard’s Ayesha: The Return of She (1905) and When the World Shook (1919) employ the movement’s nineteenth century associations in order to explore wider anxieties concerning consumption and its relation to constructions of masculinity, the threat of the New Woman and British imperial identity. In this paper I explore the ways in which vegetarianism was employed by these authors to address concerns of the period.
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Madness as Performance and Performance as Madness: Unstable Selfhood and the Actress in Late-Victorian Popular Fiction

Anna Cora Mowatt’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Mimic Life: or Before and Behind the Curtain (1... more Anna Cora Mowatt’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Mimic Life: or Before and Behind the Curtain (1855), details the fate of an actress playing Ophelia who finally succumbs to the madness of her character, her role on stage merging with her life offstage. Exploiting the frequently implied connection between actresses and emotional instability, Mowatt’s text conflates the female experience of madness with theatricality and spectacle. Troubling the boundary between playing and embodying madness, A Mimic Life appears to call into question the division between authentic and inauthentic emotional states: can one become mad through the performance or faking of certain emotions? By the latter half the nineteenth century, the trope a woman driven mad by a life on the stage provided popular fiction with one of its most reliably sensational narratives. Charting the appearance of mentally afflicted actresses in several works of Victorian fiction—with primary focus given to George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1885) and Lillian Spencer’s Star Crossed: The Life and Love of an Actress (1888)—my paper will assess the role of the emotionally fluid actress in forming and disrupting notions of selfhood in the period. Expanding on Cary M. Mazer’s contention that, throughout the nineteenth century there existed, ‘a genuine fear of a woman actually acting…of being corrupted by the very transgressive act of becoming someone else, of finding within herself other selves to become’, my paper will consider the theatre, the popular novel and the asylum as comparable emotional spaces, engaged in a dialogue over these dangerous ‘other selves’ and their potential to splinter the unified or authentic self.

Hysterical Performers and Pathologised Spectators: Empathy and Theatricality in the Late Nineteenth Century

Books by Elsa Richardson

Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century: Prophecy, Imagination and Nationhood (Palgrave, 2017)

Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, and given in English as ‘second s... more Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, and given in English as ‘second sight’, the phenomenon was most commonly associated with the prophetic seeing of events to be transacted at a later date: the death of neighbour, the arrival of strangers into the community, the success or failure of a fishing trip and so forth. This book seeks to understand the remarkably prominent position enjoyed by Scottish second sight in the Victorian popular imagination. In seeking to appreciate why this might be, why a strange visionary ability was able to make claims upon the attention of the whole nation where other folk motifs were consigned to the realms of specialist interest only, this project charts its migration through a series of nineteenth-century cultural sites: mesmerism and phrenology, modern spiritualism and anthropology, romance literature and folklorism, and finally psychical research and Celtic mysticism. Binding these individual case studies together is a cast of shared actors and a common focus on the investigative and creative cultures operating in a particular historical moment. My interest is with how the power of second sight, once defined as a supernatural occurrence tied to the geographically distant and mysterious Scottish Highlands, comes to be transformed by the close of the nineteenth century, into a supra-normal facet of the psyche, potentially accessible and exploitable by all.