A Daguerreotype from Massachusetts
by Emily Suzanne Clark
My email dinged in August of 2020. A collector of daguerreotypes with an interest in Spiritualism wanted my take on a recent purchase of his. The collector hails from Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, and had bought a large lot of images, including the one in question. He knew nothing of its provenance, nor did the previous owner.
Daguerreotype purchased by a collector in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts as part of a large lot of images. Photographer, sitter, location, and date unknown. Digital image shared with author in August 2020.
The young woman, serious-faced, sat for her daguerreotype photograph next to a small table covered in an ornate cloth. Atop that sat a book. That text, a large cloth-bound volume, read “Revelations by A.J. Davis the Clairvoyant” on the spine. She wore a refined dress in a dark color, trimmed with white lace, accompanied with jewelry. I sometimes wonder if her face strikes me because it looks a bit like we could be related in some far-off manner.
An object lesson encourages the student to consider the artefact in a variety of ways. This image provokes a series of reflections and further questions. While I’ve not been able to hold the daguerreotype in my hands, feel its weight, trace my fingers along its frame, or smell it, it still fills my mind. Who was she? Why that expression? Why that book? What prompted the visit to the photographer’s studio? Pursuit of these questions, despite the fact that I cannot know the answers, is not a fool’s errand.
Was the woman a Spiritualist? I think it’s likely. Andrew Jackson Davis, the famous Poughkeepsie seer and trance speaker, did not publish a book titled Revelations. And so, the woman’s text was likely a copy of his 1847 book The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, a book that became an important text for Spiritualists after the 1848 Rochester rappings. Furthermore, white women were the demographic most likely to engage Spiritualism in the nineteenth century. Was the woman in mourning? Maybe, she appears to be in black. That with the text in question could signal a desire to reach through to the other side. Though it’s a creative leap, maybe she visited a medium, received a message from a loved one, read Davis’s work, felt closure, and wanted to commemorate the event. This led her to seek out a photographer to capture the important moment in her life. All that is speculation, but then again, object lessons ask questions of us and lead us to further questions still.
Why the table next to her? Do tables tell us something about American religion? I would guess that the table had been at the photographer’s studio and likely featured in many daguerreotypes captured there. Maybe the photographer included it to create a more interesting image. I’ve been told about the photography “rule of thirds” and the importance of orientation in an image. And portraiture paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often featured objects of the home with their subjects to reflect class and personal interests. But she could have also sat with the book in her lap or with her hands folded in her lap rather than having one resting on the table’s edge touching the book. The table, then, seems intentionally included in the image by the sitter, perhaps for simple comfort or perhaps for reasons more personal.
What makes an object part of American religion? When we think of religious objects, we typically think of materials specifically made for use in religious settings or objects featuring overt religious imagery. A simple table does not come to mind when asked for objects of American religion. However, the table looks significant here. This woman sat touching a copy of a trance speaker’s work sitting atop a simple table. Tables were an important component of Spiritualism. The séance table. The levitating table. The table rather than the patriarchal pulpit.
This object lesson then invites us to consider the utterly mundane as part of American religion. Early theorists of religion might have placed a line between the sacred and the profane, but the daguerreotype here questions that line and asks questions of permeability.
Emily Suzanne Clark is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University where her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of religion, power, and social identity in America. Her first book, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), examined the politics of speaking with the dead. Her current book project investigates American Spiritualism and materiality. She also co-edited Race and New Religious Movements in the USA: A Documentary Reader (Bloomsbury Press, 2019).