Who hasn't seen the film production of The Phantom of the Opera? Beautifully imaged, with soaring musical arrangements by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This story, loosely based on George du Maurier's late Victorian novel Trilby, follows a facially disfigured Eric who resides in the basement of the Parisian Opera House. This character sets his sights on Christine, a talented apprentice who unknowingly “inherits” the emotionally tainted suitor. Yet, while many are familiar with Webber's Phantom, few know of George du Maurier's Trilby, the novel that created the original "Svengali" character; a merchant magician in London who uses a young woman with no musical talent to increase his wealth. Seizing the opportunity of financial gain, Svengali uses the Spiritualism of trance to make Trilby sing, and sing beautifully. There's just one problem: Trilby can't sing without him and the trance-like state. But more shocking than the depiction of Trilby and her tenuous singing career, the reality of the Svengali character has become a moniker for evil. Nevertheless, during Maurier’s time, it was actually the writer who found himself placed at the center of this real-life social scandal; harassed by the public’s anxiety over Svengali’s Jewish characterization.

 

          Moreover, in other late Victorian novels and in the context of British Popular Theater, “trance rituals and Spiritualism were exploited as entertainment.” Playwrights like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde began to mirror in an “increasingly satirical way, the pretentious values and behavior that they believed characterized Victorian life.” And when one adds the fact that during this time period, “England changed as much and as dramatically as it had in all of its previous history,” the subject of a ritualized spirit age is shown to burst from its traditional religious practices.  

 

          Thus, subject explores the original novel of Trilby as set against three subsequent works that present different depictions of the Svengali character, who is seen as a person "with evil intent, controls another person by deceit and uses a powerful, pseudo-kindness to manipulate someone into surrendering their independence." Moreover, this character’s ability of enabling Trilby to sing reveals “a social, political, and economic phenomenon,” which suggests that Spiritualism was essentially an arrangement of “facts which now stood revealed” for all to see. Though most Victorians in this pre-modernist era are shown continually engaged in “keeping up appearances,” in reality, their society was becoming unhinged by its obsession with Spiritualism and trance rituals in order to obtain answers to their assumptions that “a human life must make more sense than the surface appearances would suggest.”