Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  Nevertheless, he kept up his acquaintance with General Drayson and kept on reading, widely and hungrily, as he would for the rest of his life. He read the early and influential two-volume Spiritualism by John Worth Edmonds, who had been a judge of the Supreme Court of New York, and George T. Dexter. Edmonds claimed to have been able to keep in contact with his wife for many years after her death. “I read the book with interest, and absolute skepticism,” Doyle wrote. He read Robert Dale Owen’s Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World and Daniel Dunglas Home’s Incidents in My Life. He read another book by Monsieur Jacolliot, chief judge of the French colony of Chandernagore, in India. Though Jacolliot was a skeptic of spiritualism, he conducted a series of experiments, carefully controlled against fraud, with native fakirs, or Hindu religious ascetics. He found that the fakirs seemed to have paranormal powers similar to those of European mediums, causing tables to tip, plants to grow rapidly, and articles to move at a distance. They claimed these powers had been handed down to them from time immemorial, from the ancient Chaldeans. This impressed Doyle, because these were the same phenomena being reported from spiritualists in the Western world, but from an entirely different culture and geographic location. The Europeans could not claim, as they often did, that it was all just American fraud and vulgarity.

  Doyle, perhaps too readily impressed by pedigree, also took note of the caliber of some of the people who had become spiritualists—Alfred Russel Wallace, the great biologist and co-discoverer of evolution; Camille Flammarion, the famous French astronomer; Sir William Crookes, the British chemist and physicist, among many other distinguished people. The opinions of these men were not as easily dismissed as those of the credulous masses.

  * * *

  BUT THE credulous masses were soon to receive a stunning blow to their convictions. On the morning of Sunday, October 21, 1888, stagehands at the three-thousand-seat Academy of Music auditorium, in New York City, trundled a few select pieces of heavy Victorian furniture onto the stage to create “a bare and somber drawing room scene,” in keeping with the tone of that night’s much-anticipated presentation. And it promised to be a barn burner, because Maggie and Kate Fox, whose mysterious “rappings” had touched off the whole spiritualist mania almost exactly forty years earlier, were now said to be taking the stage to renounce spiritualism entirely. The whole thing, they now claimed in a series of inflammatory letters to the New York papers, had been a fraud.

  As soon as the doors were opened at the Academy of Music that evening, throngs of people crowded into the hall—spiritualists and anti-spiritualists, the press, the idly curious, and those simply itching to see a fight. “The great building was crowded and the wildest excitement prevailed at times,” The New York Herald reported. When Maggie walked onstage, pale, somber, and dressed in black, she was greeted with cheers and hisses, the Herald reported. The intervening years had not been terribly kind to the once-comely girl. She appeared to have aged far beyond her fifty-five years; personal setbacks, poverty, ill health, and years of alcohol and drug abuse had taken their toll.

  Standing in front of the expectant crowd, Maggie “put on her glasses, curtsied to the audience, and read slowly and in a voice trembling with emotion her confession,” the paper said.

  “That I have been chiefly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public, most of you doubtless know,” she began. “The greatest sorrow of my life has been that this is true, and though it has come late to my day, I am now prepared to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God!”

  The audience responded with more cheers and more hisses.

  Maggie maintained that the fraud had begun in all innocence, as a child, when she was unable to distinguish between right and wrong. But now that she was an adult and bathed in the light of God, “I am at last able to reveal the fatal truth, the exact truth of this hideous fraud which has withered so many hearts and blighted so many hopeful lives.”

  The next morning, the New York World ran a front-page illustrated story, covering four columns, about what happened next. A plain wooden table, on four short legs, like a sounding board, was brought out onto the stage. Maggie removed her right shoe and put her foot on the table. Then “the entire house became breathlessly still, and was rewarded by a number of little short, sharp raps—those mysterious sounds which have for more than forty years frightened and bewildered hundreds of thousands of people in this country and Europe.”

  A worldwide movement, with millions of adherents, appeared to have been triggered by a child cracking her toe.

  Spiritualists were aghast at Maggie’s recantation, of course. In a hastily arranged private meeting to assess the damage and discuss strategy, an old spiritualist who had known Maggie since 1850 tried to make it all go away by saying that she was “an ill, mentally unstable woman, whose use of stimulants and drugs makes her word undependable and of no account.” But the damage had already been done. News of her “confession” swept across the country.

  Still, the consternation and excitement did not last too terribly long. By now the Fox sisters had become old news. Spiritualism had long ago moved on from its origin story and also from its vaguely unstable founders. So when, a year later, Maggie Fox went public with yet another shocking announcement—this time recanting her recantation—it was too much for many but the most devoted spiritualists to follow.

  “Would to God that I could undo the injustice I did the cause of Spiritualism when, under the strong psychological influences of persons inimical to it, I gave expression to utterances that had no foundation in fact!” she moaned, in a story that appeared in the New York Press in November 1889.

  This time, she explained, she was really telling the truth. The year before, she had falsely claimed that the rappings were a fraud because the materialist enemies of spiritualism had offered her money to say that, and she was so desperate for cash that she had accepted their bribe. Also, she added, having converted to Catholicism, she had begun to worry that the various manifestations might be the work of the devil.

  “When I made those dreadful statements I was not responsible for my words,” Maggie said this time. “My belief in the philosophy and phenomena of Spiritualism is unshaken. Its genuineness is an incontrovertible fact.”

  But by now almost no one was listening. The publisher Isaac Funk, who had conducted psychic sessions with Maggie, later wrote, “So low had this unfortunate woman sunk that for five dollars she would have denied her mother.”

  Both Maggie and Kate, ridiculed and discredited, now seemed to sink into the oblivion born of a kind of shunning. Kate eventually died of a stroke and end-stage alcoholism, in a shabby apartment in New York City, on July 2, 1892. Maggie, in similarly desperate straits, put an ad in Banner of Light asking spiritualists to help contribute to her care. All of $86.80 came in.

  Eventually, Maggie wound up bedridden in a tenement house on Ninth Street, in lower Manhattan. A physician from the Medico-Legal Society of New York, a woman named Dr. Mellen (who was not a spiritualist), attended to her for several hours a day. And she made a curious observation.

  “Mrs. Fox Kane [her married name] was unable to move hand or foot,” Dr. Mellen was quoted as saying in a published account called Rappings That Startled the World. “There was not a closet in the place nor any other hiding place of any kind. And yet the knockings were heard now through the wall, now through the ceiling, and again through the floor. They were heard in response to questions [a] woman put to her guide, as she expressed it. And she was as incapable of cracking her toe-joints at this time as I was.”

  Maggie slipped away on March 8, 1893. She was given a respectful burial by the few spiritualists who remembered her.

  * * *

  DOYLE BEGAN visiting mediums and participating in séances, and some of the messages that came through, he noted archly in his memoirs, “were not always absolutely stupid.” Others appeared to be completely bogus. One long, detailed message came th
rough from a spirit who said he had died in a fire in a theater at Exeter and asked that Doyle write his family, in a place called Slattenmere, in Cumberland. Doyle dutifully did so, and the letter came back, “appropriately enough, through the dead letter office.”

  Was it all nonsense and clumsy fraud?

  Doyle took up the matter with General Drayson, whom he greatly respected. Drayson explained that “the truth is, every spirit in the flesh passes over to the next world exactly as it is, with no change whatsoever. This world is full of weak or foolish people. So is the next.” In Drayson’s view, Doyle had stuck his head into the next world, in amateurish séances with no particular aim, and had drawn the attention of a few “naughty boys” on the other side, who fed him blather and nonsense. “Go forward and try to reach something better,” the general advised. So Doyle kept trying. By now, he wrote, “I was still a skeptic, but at least I was an inquirer.”

  He found his way into more sober séances, with more reputable mediums, and was sometimes astonished by long, anguished, remarkably detailed stories from “spirits” who claimed to have crossed over. Even so, despite the detail, Doyle wondered, “what proof was there that these statements were true? I could see no such proof, and they simply left me bewildered.”

  Though he was usually too poor to hire his own medium, one day he hired an old man who had a reputation for psychic power. The old man came to Doyle’s flat and, surrounded by a small group of people, went into a heavy-breathing trance. Then he gave each person a message. When he turned to Doyle, he said abruptly, “Do not read Leigh Hunt’s book.” Doyle was startled: Earlier that same day, he’d been wondering whether or not he should read a book by the English essayist Leigh Hunt. Once again, there it was—some seemingly inexplicable bit of evidence, a glimmer of starlight from afar, that suggested a world outside the known world of rationality and science. Doyle took this as proof of telepathy (though nothing more) and in 1887 went to the trouble of writing a short piece about the incident for the spiritualist newspaper Light. It was the first time he would go public as a student—though still an agnostic one—of the new “science” of spiritualism.

  In 1893, Doyle’s father, Charles, passed away in the Crichton Royal Institution, a sad, gentle ghost in a lunatic asylum. Three weeks later, Doyle joined the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR). By now, he had become preoccupied with studying the claims of spiritualism and began to associate with eminent men who were also deeply involved in spiritualist studies. In the SPR, he was to meet such celebrated men as Sir Oliver Lodge, a physicist who held key patents in the development of radio; Arthur Balfour, who later became prime minister of the U.K.; and F. W. H. Myers, a classics scholar turned scientist who wrote a number of important books about psychic research, including Phantasms of the Living and the massive two-volume Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, in which Myers argues that any model of the human mind must encompass not just normal psychological processes but also the shadow realm of the paranormal—telepathy, mediumship, even psychokinesis (the movement of objects at a distance). Doyle called the book “a great root book from which a whole tree of knowledge will grow.”

  Unlike the all-too-credulous “New Age” devotees of the 1960s, who seemed willing to hitch their star to any passing fancy, Arthur Conan Doyle and his colleagues of the late nineteenth century were serious and sober-minded men.

  (Which is not to say that they were not sometimes fooled by phony mediums and quacks of one sort or another.) They were asking the most profound questions that humans had ever asked and attempting to subject ephemeral phenomena to the sort of scientific proofs that were rarely if ever applied to religious beliefs. It was “proof of immortality” that they were searching for, and it would distinguish spiritualism from the old religions, Doyle came to believe. In that sense, spiritualism would come to represent not a frightened, Luddite retreat from the era of enormous, sometimes bewildering technological and scientific progress—radio, the telephone, the telegraph, electric lights—but an answer to it.

  If communication with the dead could be proven, spiritualists believed, theirs would become the world’s first scientific religion.

  * * *

  AT THE same time as Doyle was delving deeper and deeper into the mysteries of spiritualism—and, it’s fair to say, encountering the frauds and flimflams that often surrounded it—he was also pursuing a literary career.

  And now, quite to his own surprise, it was beginning to look as though the literary life might supplant the life of a doctor. It might even pay better.

  In a grainy black-and-white Movietone film, recorded not long before his death in 1930, Doyle responded to the two questions that people had asked him over the course of his long, highly public life. One had to do with how he had gotten interested in so-called psychic phenomena and spiritualism in the first place—a subject that was to consume most of his time and energy during the latter days of his life. The other thing, of course, had to do with the creation of Sherlock Holmes, the eccentric sleuth of 221B Baker Street.

  Seated in a garden with his little dog, nattily attired in suit, tie, vest, and boater—a Scottish gentleman down to his watch fob—Doyle chuckled a bit when he explained that, curiously enough, both things had developed at about the same time in his life, when he was a young, not-very-successful doctor in Southsea. It was not true, as many people later said of him, that his interest in spiritualism began after the death of his son Kingsley, in 1918. It had in fact begun decades earlier, as a young man in his twenties, with General Drayson’s table-tipping experiments, his own vast reading, and his own direct experience with mediums and séances.

  It was during those same early days in Southsea that he had also developed an appetite for reading detective stories, he told viewers of the Movietone film. He was especially fond of the three Edgar Allan Poe stories, including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” that featured the crafty sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. Poe was, in fact, the undisputed father of the modern detective story—a “model for all time,” as Doyle put it. But Doyle had a problem with most detective stories that appeared in pulp magazines. “I was a young doctor at the time, and of course I had scientific training,” he said. “It always annoyed me that the detective always seemed to get at his results by some sort of lucky chance or else it was not quite explained how he got there.… That didn’t seem to me quite playing the game, and I thought he was bound to give his reasons, why he came to his conclusions. So I began to think of turning scientific methods as it were onto methods of detection.”

  It was then that he remembered old Joe Bell, his surgery professor in medical school, with his extraordinary ability to diagnose a patient with little more than eerily astute observation—a fleck of mud on the shoe, a telltale bruise on the knuckle, a revealing mannerism.

  “Naturally I thought if a scientific man like Bell were to get into the detection business, he wouldn’t do these things by chance, he would build the thing up scientifically. So having once conceived that line of thought, you can well imagine that I had, as it were, a new idea for a detective, and one which interested me to work out.”

  Thinking of a fictional disguise to wrap around Joe Bell, he began to imagine a gaunt detective named “Sherrinford Hope,” a collector of rare violins, a worldly philosopher, and a man with his own chemical laboratory. Eventually, he changed the name of his hero to Sherlock Holmes, at least partly due to his admiration for the doctor-philosopher Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom he had long admired. Mr. Holmes strutted onto the world’s stage for the first time in 1887, in a short novel called A Study in Scarlet. The illustrations, oddly enough, were by none other than Charles Doyle, still confined to the lunatic asylum. (Though they weren’t very good, they depicted Sherlock Holmes as having a beard like himself, almost as if he wished he were Holmes.) Doyle, who was twenty-seven years old when he wrote it, had dashed off the novel in less than three weeks. The title came from Holmes’s description of the story’s murder investigation as his
“study in scarlet”— “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” (The story, originally called “A Tangled Skein,” had been repeatedly rejected until being accepted by Beeton’s Christmas Annual, where it appears to have been barely noticed at all. In fact, had Doyle not kept writing about Sherlock Holmes, the man in the deerstalker hat would probably have vanished without a trace.)

  But Doyle had another clever idea, this one about marketing: the idea of serializing the stories, each one complete in itself, but with the central character of Holmes carrying through them all. He sold the idea to The Strand Magazine, and in 1891 Sherlock Holmes began making monthly appearances in the magazine, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” “A Case of Identity,” and many others. (In all, there are fifty-six stories and four short novels in the Sherlock Holmes “canon.”)

  “I thought of a hundred little dodges as you may say,” Doyle recalled in the Movietone film, “little touches by which [Holmes] could build up his conclusions, and then I began to write stories on those lines. At first they attracted very little attention, but after a time … they began coming out month after month … people began to recognize that it was different than the old detective, that there was something there that was new. And they began to buy the magazine and it prospered and so I may say did I, and we both came along together and from that time Sherlock Holmes took root.”

  It was a typical Arthur Conan Doyle comment—a modest, understated aside. He hated pretensions. He did not mention that Sherlock Holmes would eventually become one of the most famous fictional creations in all of modern popular literature.