Stratified heavens: growing up in the Victorian afterlife

When American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis wrote in 1868 that there is “an inhabitable zone, or a circular belt of refined and stratified matter in the heavens which recently has been denominated ‘The Summer Land,’” he drew upon advancements in astrology to theorize a very material afterlife (1868b, 18). Davis’s foundational spiritualist theology describes heaven as a Swedenborgian series of ascending spheres, each one increasing in perfection. The afterlife as Davis depicts it is one of endless development, refinement, and progress. Abolished is the idea of heaven as eternal rest: in this deeply Victorian paradise, everything from atoms to immortal souls is working its way upward toward God. And there is perhaps no better guide to the strata of the Summerland than the spirit of an infant. This article investigates the fate of the infant in the Victorian afterlife. I argue that the figure of the infant plays a crucial role in the writings of nineteenth-century spiritualists on both sides of the Atlantic. Believers insisted that lost infants – including ones who died at birth – still had the chance to develop and progress in the afterlife. Depictions of the Summerland offered consolation to grieving parents by describing the nurseries and schools in which the spirits of infants were raised. Those heavenly educational systems were even imported back to earth: the Progressive Lyceum – the spiritualist equivalent of Sunday School – was modeled on visions of education in the Summerland. Yet the spirits of infants who communicated with spiritualists often sent messages that challenged Victorian beliefs about maternity and parentage. Infants in the Summerland raise important questions about what it means to be alive, what it means to be born and unborn – questions that shaped Victorian ideas about reproductive rights, the afterlives of which we still live with today.