By popular request of the English community, Home moved on to Florence. There the manifestations were stronger than ever. A grand piano floated up into the air and remained there while a countess played on it; a spirit conversed with a Polish princess in her own language; in a haunted convent, Home conversed with the spirit of a monk—also a murderer—and caused his skinny, yellow hands to materialise. When the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne came to Florence three years later, people were still talking about Home, and Hawthorne collected dozens of well-attested accounts of the phenomena. Hawthorne made the interesting and significant observation:
‘These soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them . . . they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest itself in them.’
This is perhaps one of the most important comments ever made about Home or about spiritualism in general.
Unfortunately, Home’s success began to go to his head. He was not a particularly strong character, and being treated as a messenger from the gods would have been enough to unbalance a far more independent nature. When he went to stay at the villa of a titled Englishwoman who was separated from her husband, former admirers were scandalised—English self-control produces a morbid fascination with sexual scandal—and he began to sense a new atmosphere of hostility. He was attacked on his way back to his hotel and slightly wounded—a sign that the spirits were becoming inefficient or lazy—and on February 10, 1856, the spirits told him that his recent conduct was not worthy of a representative of the other world, and that his powers were about to leave him for a year. A Polish count had invited him to Naples and Rome; Home felt obliged to admit to him that his powers had deserted him. But his luck held; the count insisted that it made no difference, and Home accompanied him to Naples. And in spite of the loss of his powers, he remained a social lion. They came back, as the spirits had prophesied, exactly one year to the day, on the stroke of midnight.
By now Home was in Paris, and had taken the precaution of insuring himself against the disapproval of the Church by becoming a Catholic. His father confessor—recommended by the Pope himself—was less than enthusiastic about the return of the spirits, whom he assumed to be demons—but there was little he could do about it. Neither would Home have wished it, for he was by now a favourite of the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie. His luck aroused widespread envy and hostility, but after the year of desertion by the spirits, he no longer allowed it to go to his head.
After a tour of northern Europe, he returned to Rome, where he met and wooed a beautiful 17-year-old Russian countess named Sacha; they went to St Petersburg (together with the novelist Dumas) and her relatives organised a spectacular wedding. Home was received by the Russian royal family as cordially as by Napoleon III. Unfortunately, Sacha caught his tuberculosis, and died not long after the birth of a son. At least her death was not a separation; Home was able to keep in constant touch with her.
In 1862 his luck again seemed to desert him. The police ordered him to leave Rome, declaring that he was a sorcerer (the spirits made things worse by rapping on the desk of the police chief). For the next four years he again became a wanderer. In 1866, he met an effusive and vulgar old lady with a working-class accent, Mrs Jane Lyon. who told him she wanted to adopt him as her son, and presented him with numerous large cheques. Home changed his name to Home-Lyon. But the two were far from soulmates, and the relationship soon began to deteriorate badly—he found her boringly affectionate and she found him cold. He had a breakdown, and fled to various watering places to take a cure. When he returned to London, he found that Mrs Lyon had transferred her allegiance to a female medium, and was brooding on how to recover her money. She wanted back about £30,000—only about half of what she had given him. She accused him of extortion, and Home was arrested. At the trial in April 1868, she alleged that she had given him the money because he had brought her instructions to that effect from her dead husband; Home’s case was that she had tried hard to seduce him after he became her ‘son’. Mrs Lyon was undoubtedly—as Home declared—vengeful and untruthful, and many of her lies were exposed in court. But a ‘spirit medium’ stood no chance of getting an unprejudiced trial; the judge remarked that if everyone who gave money to a religious charity was allowed to ask for it back, the result would be chaos; however, since spiritualism was a fraud and a cheat he would make exception in the present case, Home was ordered to repay the money. The trial did Home immense damage, strengthening the impression already created by Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge’, that he was a confidence trickster. But the notoriety had one advantage: a reading tour of England drew enormous audiences and helped to recoup his loss.
During his ‘water cure’ in Malvern, Home had met a young aristocrat, Lord Adare, and during the next year or two he spent much time with him. In 1870, Adare published Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr D. D. Home, perhaps one of the most extraordinary and impressive books about a medium ever written. Adare was an ordinary young Englishman, more interested in hunting, shooting and fishing than ghosts. It was Adare who saw Home float out of one upper-storey window and in at another. He also saw the materialisation of various spirits—including Sacha and the American actress Ada Mencken—and all the other phenomena that Home had been producing for the past twenty years. He saw Home stir up the fire until the coals were blazing, then pick them up in handfuls and rub his face in them—neither his face nor his hair was burnt. He also witnessed Home standing against a wall, where his height was carefully taken (five feet ten inches), after which Home elongated himself to six foot four.
In 1871, Home agreed to be investigated by the young scientist William (later Sir William) Crookes. The anti-spiritualists smiled with satisfaction; they had no doubt whatever that Crookes would finally demolish the conjuror’s reputation. In the event, Crookes was totally convinced, and published a report to that effect—to the disgust of his fellow scientists, who decided that he had been duped. In the controversy that followed, Crookes exploded indignantly: ‘I didn’t say it was possible—I said it was true.’
In the following year, 1872, Home decided it was time to retire. A lawsuit about his wife’s estate was decided in his favour, so he was a Russian landowner. He lived on for another fourteen years, to the age of 53, spending his time between Russia and the French Riviera. He was wasting away from consumption; but with a beautiful second wife, a comfortable income and hosts of admiring friends, his final years were far from unhappy.
The article on Home in Encyclopedia Britannica calls Home an ‘unsolved enigma’. This is true, but not quite in the sense the writer intended. As far as Home was concerned, there was no enigma. He had simply inherited unusual psychic powers from his mother’s side of the family (and he passed these on to his son Grisha). So the spirits were able to operate through him.
As we have seen, this answer failed to satisfy many people who witnessed his feats and accepted their genuineness. Lord Lytton thought that Home somehow caused the phenomena himself. Most modern researchers would probably agree with him, since most of them are unwilling to accept the spirit hypothesis. Yet one thing that becomes very clear to anyone who reads the accounts of Home’s phenomena—as recorded by Lord Adare or Sir William Crookes—is that the spirits are not only the simplest explanation, but in many cases, the only explanation. A large percentage of the phenomena can only be explained if we assume the existence of disembodied intelligences. And at this point, it is necessary to acknowledge that, sooner or later, most investigators of the paranormal are finally driven to the conclusion that spirits almost certainly exist. They do this with the utmost reluctance. It would be far more convenient, and far more logically satisfying, if we could explain all the phenomena in terms of the unrecognised powers of the human mind. Total honesty forces the admission that this is impossible. And this is nowhere more obvious than in the case of Daniel Dunglas Home.
1
. In Autobiography of a Yogi by Parahansa Yogananda, the author describes how a visiting Yogi had told him that a friend was on his way. When the friend arrived, he told of how the Yogi had approached him in the street, and mentioned that Parahansa was waiting for him in his room. At the time this happened, the Yogi had been with Parahansa. From the point of view of a psychical investigator, the case is dubious because we have only the author’s word for it.
1. When I speak of Spiritualism with a capital ‘S’, I refer to the ‘religion’ of that name; spiritualism with a small ‘s’ denotes simply the belief in spirits or life after death.
1. Outspoken Essays, Vol. 1, p. 269, quoted by David Lorimer in Survival?, p. 160.
2. ‘The History of Spiritism’, lecture delivered in Berlin, May 30 1904.
3. Ibid.
5
Enter the Ghost Detectives
CASTING AN EYE over the history of spiritualism, it certainly looks as if the ‘spirits’ made a tremendous and concerted effort to convince the Victorians of their reality. If that is the case, it seems equally clear that they made a miscalculation. The leaders of Victorian public opinion—politicians, intellectuals, churchmen—remained indifferent. And most scientists were intensely hostile. In the decade after the ‘Hydesville rappings’, they made a determined attempt to destroy spiritualism by ridicule.
They were hardly to blame. If they had behaved in any other way, they would not have been Victorians. It was their very best qualities—their sense of excitement about the future, about the tremendous scientific and technical advances, and the possibilities of humanitarian social reforms—that made them turn their backs on the ‘supernatural’. T. H. Huxley expressed this spirit in a burst of magnificent exasperation when someone tried to persuade him to attend a seance: ‘If anybody could endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do.’
But when the less waspish investigators could be persuaded to listen to the ‘chatter of old women and curates’, they often found it unexpectedly interesting. We have already encountered the schoolmaster Alfred Russel Wallace, who was a total sceptic and a disciple of Voltaire; when he went to listen to a lecture on mesmerism, he was sufficiently intrigued to try it out on his students. One boy proved to be an unusually good subject; seeming when placed in a trance to ‘tune in’ to Wallace’s mind. Fifteen years later, Wallace became famous as the man who had, together with Charles Darwin, discovered evolution by natural selection—and who, moreover, had allowed Darwin to take priority. In 1865, Wallace attended a seance at the house of a sceptical friend, and witnessed a heavy table moving and vibrating—in broad daylight—while raps resounded from around the room. That convinced him. A year later, he met an enormous young lady named Agnes Nichols, and watched with incredulity as the elephantine girl floated up into the air. Agnes could also produce ‘apports’—objects that fell from the air—and when Wallace asked if the spirits could produce a sunflower, a six-foot sunflower with a clod of earth round its roots fell on to the table. Agnes’s spirits never did things by halves; on another occasion when someone requested flowers, what looked like the whole contents of a flower shop cascaded from the air. But their most spectacular feat occurred in Highbury on January 3, 1871, when Agnes herself (now married to a man called Guppy) became the ‘apport’. She was seated at the dining-room table doing her accounts when she vanished as if the ground had swallowed her. Four miles away in Lambs Conduit Street, some ardent spiritualists were seated at a table with their eyes closed, begging the spirits to vouchsafe some small manifestation. There was an almighty crash that caused screams, and when someone struck a match, the mountainous Mrs Guppy was found lying on the table, still clutching her account book. But again, the spirits had miscalculated. The story of Mrs Guppy floating four miles certainly caused widespread hilarity, but it didn’t bring thousands flocking to the Spiritualist churches.
Wallace had no doubt that Mrs Guppy could convince the sceptics, so he invited three of the most hostile—Professor W. B. Carpenter, Professor John Tyndall and G. H. Lewes, the husband of novelist George Eliot. Carpenter came, sat silently through a cannonade of raps, then went away without comment; he never came back. Neither did Tyndall, whose only comment was ‘Show us something else’. Lewes simply refused to come, as did T. H. Huxley—this was the occasion when Huxley remarked that he simply could not ‘get up an interest in the subject’.
Yet in spite of the refusal of scientists to believe their own eyes and ears, psychic phenomena remained a thorn in the flesh of Victorian intellectuals. After all, it was the business of science to explain mysteries, not ignore them. Some scientists—such as William Crookes, discoverer of the element thallium—developed a bad conscience about it, and decided to conduct their own investigations. When Crookes saw a concertina in a cage playing music of its own accord, while Daniel Dunglas Home held it up by one handle, he knew that he was dealing with unknown forces. His ‘credulity’ caused much head-shaking among his colleagues. And later, when he decided that a young lady called Florence Cook—whose guide, Katie King, materialised and walked round the room—was genuine, some of them whispered that Florence had become Crookes’s mistress as the price of his co-operation.
The mathematician Charles Dodgson—who wrote Alice in Wonderland—was another who felt that the phenomena ought to be explained, not dismissed. He wrote to a friend in 1882:
‘That trickery will not do as a complete explanation of all the phenomena . . . I am more than convinced. At the same time, I see no need as yet for believing that disembodied spirits have anything to do with it . . . All seems to point to the existence of a natural force, allied to electricity and nerve force by which brain can act on brain. I think we are close to the day when this shall be classified among the known natural forces . . .’
That was the ideal aim: to track down this unknown force and stick a label on it. This was the truly Victorian way of banishing this revival of witchcraft. The only problem was that the spirits often converted the sceptics who were trying to disprove their existence. There was, for example, the embarrassing case of the American Congressman Robert Dale Owen, son of the great social reformer Robert Owen. The latter had been a lifelong freethinker—until he encountered the American medium Mrs Hayden. And then, at the age of 83, he declared himself a Spiritualist. His son, another freethinker and social reformer, was furious, and decided that the old man was senile. He was, at the time, American chargé d’affaires in Naples. In 1856, the Brazilian ambassador persuaded him to attend a seance in his apartment, and there Owen saw the table moving without human agency. It was, he decided, merely an ‘electro-psychological phenomenon’. But he wanted to know how it worked. So he spent the next two years reading books on mesmerism and ‘animal magnetism’, and attending seances. He met Home, who had lost his powers at the time; but the stories of Home’s powers made him feel that he should at least consider the possibility that spirits were responsible for the phenomena. As a result, he became convinced, and wrote a book called Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World that achieved the same popularity as Mrs Crowe’s Night Side of Nature. Footfalls deserved its popularity; it was an exhaustive, carefully argued book, full of the latest discoveries in modern science, and of some highly convincing cases of clairvoyance, precognitions, poltergeists and ‘phantasms of the living’. But it is doubtful that it convinced a single scientist.
What finally turned the tide in favour of spiritualism was not scientific evidence, but the deep Victorian craving for religious certainty. Nowadays the chief affliction of the intellectuals is angst, a kind of free-floating anxiety. In the Victorian age, it was Doubt with a capital ‘D’. One of the great Victorian bestsellers was a novel called Robert Ellesmere by Mrs Humphry Ward, about a clergyman who experiences Doubts and feels obliged to resign his living. We find the idea slightly comic—Evelyn Waugh poked fun at it in Decline and Fall—but that is because we
take doubt for granted. We can scarcely imagine what it was like to be born into the blissful certainty of a respectable Victorian household—certainty about salvation, about the inspiration of the Bible, about the truth of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Victorian children were brought up to believe that Adam was created in precisely 4004 BC, and that any kind of doubt on religious matters was as disgraceful as being a drunkard or a prostitute. So when Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) argued that the earth was millions of years old, Victorians felt as shocked as if an active volcano had appeared in Trafalgar Square. It was from that point that they began to be undermined by Doubts.
One of these unhappy questioners was Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Trinity College, Cambridge. Doubt tormented him like a nagging tooth all his life. In 1869, at the age of 31, he even felt obliged to resign his fellowship at Trinity because he could no longer subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. His fellow dons sympathised, and, the moment the religious tests were dropped, reappointed him. He went on to write a celebrated book on ethics that ended with the statement that all man’s attempts to find a rational basis for human behaviour are foredoomed to failure.
Sidgwick’s pupils regarded him as a kind of Socrates. There were many brilliant young men among them, including Arthur Balfour, a future Prime Minister, Edmund Gurney, heir to a Quaker fortune, and Frederick Myers, the son of a clergyman. Myers, another Fellow of Trinity, also felt obliged to resign because of Doubts.
One evening in December 1869, Myers paid his old master a visit, and they went for a walk under the stars. It was the year in which Sidgwick had resigned his fellowship, and inevitably, the subject of religion came up. Although neither of them could still call themselves Christians, neither of them could accept that the universe is a great machine and that human beings have been created by pure chance. It was Myers who asked, with a certain desperation, whether, since philosophy had failed to solve the riddle of the universe, there might be just a chance that the answer lay in the evidence for ghosts and spirits. Neither of them felt much optimism, but Sidgwick went on brooding about the idea—particularly when, in the following year, Crookes announced that he intended to investigate Daniel Dunglas Home. The attacks on Crookes outraged their sense of fair play, and in 1873 they formed a loose association for the investigation of spiritualism and the paranormal. Myers became a school inspector, which left him time to attend seances. But at first he found it discouraging work; he began to wonder whether there was something about him that made the spirits stay away. Then he had an experience that convinced him. He attended a seance with a medium named Charles Williams—at one of whose seances Mrs Guppy had landed on the table—and a hand materialised in the air. Myers held it in his own, and felt it grow smaller and smaller until it faded away, leaving nothing behind. That could not be trickery. Myers now began seeking actively for more evidence. Together with Edmund Gurney, Arthur Balfour, Sidgwick and Lord Rayleigh—the scientist who discovered the element argon—Myers became a dedicated ‘psychical researcher’. They were joined by a remarkable clergyman, Stainton Moses, who was also an automatic-writing medium. His obvious genuineness reinforced Myers’s conviction.