Notes on Dr. Alistair Finch
Dr. Alistair Finch (c. 1800–1875) occupies a peculiar and significant place in the Bennet Archive. He was never a correspondent and likely never knew of Bradbury Bennet’s existence. Yet, as the husband of Adelaide Finch and a leading London proponent of mesmerism, he appears in Bennet’s journals more frequently than almost any other public figure, serving as Bennet’s quintessential intellectual antagonist—a symbol of the very “faddish certainty” and “theatrical pseudoscience” Bennet so thoroughly disdained.
Our knowledge of Dr. Finch is triangulated from three primary sources: Bennet’s scathing journal entries, the weary and elliptical references in Adelaide Finch’s letters, and public records such as newspaper advertisements and pamphlets from the period.
The Public Mesmerist
In the public sphere of the 1840s and 50s, Dr. Alistair Finch was a celebrated figure. A trained physician, he abandoned conventional medicine to become one of London’s most charismatic practitioners and lecturers on the subject of “animal magnetism” or mesmerism. His fashionable London salon, managed with perfect grace by his wife Adelaide, became a hub for artists, intellectuals, and society figures eager to witness his demonstrations.
Advertisements in publications like The Illustrated London News promise evenings of “scientific wonder,” where Dr. Finch would demonstrate the power of the “ethereal fluids” to induce trance states, cure nervous ailments, and even perform acts of clairvoyance. Bennet, who attended one such lecture in the early 1840s, described it in his journal as “a masterclass in stagecraft, where the credulity of the audience was the primary phenomenon on display.”
Bennet’s Intellectual Foil
For Bennet, Dr. Finch was not a simple charlatan; he was a more dangerous specimen—an educated man who had wilfully traded empirical rigour for popular acclaim. Bennet meticulously collected Finch’s pamphlets, annotating them with critical, often sarcastic, marginalia. He saw Finch’s theories, which blended genuine medical terminology with speculative metaphysics, as an intellectual poison, an affront to the principles of Natural Philosophy.
When Mrs. Finch occasionally alluded to her husband’s work in her letters, referring to it as “another season of public demonstrations,” Bennet’s replies were always carefully neutral. His journal, however, served as his true outlet, where Dr. Finch becomes an almost allegorical figure representing the intellectual decay of the age.
The Private Man
The private Alistair Finch remains an enigma. Adelaide’s letters paint a portrait not of a villain, but of a man lost to his own public persona. Early in their marriage, she hints, he may have been a genuinely ambitious, perhaps even sincere, researcher. However, over time, his desire for scientific validation appears to have been supplanted by a craving for the adulation of the salon.
She writes of him with a profound, melancholic distance, describing a man who had “become the most fervent believer in his own cult.” Their marriage, as pieced together from her correspondence, was a social contract devoid of intellectual or emotional intimacy. She was the perfect hostess for a theatre she privately found absurd; he was the celebrated performer, seemingly oblivious to his wife’s profound intellectual isolation.
Dr. Finch thus serves as the silent, off-stage force that both necessitated and defined the unique nature of the Finch-Bennet correspondence. He created the “salon full of shadows” from which Adelaide sought a “record of light,” and in doing so, inadvertently fostered the very intellectual sanctuary that stood in direct opposition to everything he publicly espoused.
Editor’s Note: While Bennet’s disdain for Dr. Finch is palpable, it is crucial to view Finch within his historical context. Mesmerism, while now thoroughly discredited, was a subject of serious, if often misguided, inquiry in the 19th century, touching upon legitimate questions of psychology and the power of suggestion. Finch was a master showman, but he was also a product of an era grappling with the boundaries between science, medicine, and the unexplained. - Dr. E. Reed