This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Death has never entirely stopped the living from trying to continue a conversation with their loved ones. Today, AI-powered deathbots and a growing range of "grief tech" bring to market several ways that consumers can recreate the voices of the deceased.
They open new commercial opportunities and experiences alongside uncomfortable questions about whether grief should be profitable. Yet long before AI made it possible to simulate (and charge a premium for) a familiar voice, the spiritualist movement that swept across Victorian Britain negotiated issues of credibility, authenticity and commercial exploitation while transforming one of humanity's most enduring desires into something marketable. Our research into the business history of spiritualism in 19th-century Britain suggests that the similarities go deeper than a shared fascination with communicating with the dead.
Victorian Britain is often remembered as an age of industrial progress, scientific discovery and astonishing feats of engineering. Department stores, arcades and luxury brands fed a growing appetite for shopping. Yet the Victorians were also fascinated by ghosts, the supernatural and the macabre.
These tendencies might first be written off as a contradiction—the perseverance of premodern supernaturalism among an increasingly modern society. But a closer look reveals that the technologies that transformed Victorian commerce and entertainment also helped make ghosts visible, reproducible and profitable. Large-scale plate glass production, advances in illumination and optical physics (the scientific study of how light behaves and interacts with matter around us) allowed for the staging of phantasmagorical illusions like Pepper's Ghost, while photography could apparently capture the dead.
Gothic fiction prospered and cheap paperbacks called penny dreadfuls traded heavily in tales of the strange, the sordid and the supernatural. The supernatural was not simply surviving on the margins of industrial modernity; it was finding new opportunities within it. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek offers a useful explanation, arguing that societies are sustained partly through an "underside" of practices and desires that appears to contradict their official values.
This underside can provide outlets for what the official values exclude, helping people live with the wider social order. Žižek calls this the "obscene supplement": the provocative and discomforting underbelly that a society struggles to acknowledge even while relying on it. Victorian spiritualism helps us understand how this obscene supplement could become commercially productive.
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