The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  Like a water glass filled from a barrel, Spiritualism was a hokey parlor trick turned into the receptacle for the most intense collective grief the nation had ever known. Some reports suggest two million people became newly interested in Spiritualism in the wake of the Civil War. This figure may have been exaggerated, both by those who embraced the movement and by those who feared it, but nonetheless it speaks to a hunger that apparently was not being satisfied by traditional places of worship.

  While church attendance dropped, private attempts to communicate with the dead soared. The war had left the country in “an impressionable state,” the Banner of Light announced. “Death never was so generally thought of and talked about among the people.” As the English-born Spiritualist Emma Hardinge Britten wrote of the movement whose grip she soon helped strengthen across the United States, “Never in any period of its brief history has it taken so deep and fervent a hold upon the hearts of a mourning people.”

  The time had come, many among Boston’s mediums suggested, to offer the American people the solace of the belief that the sons, brothers, and husbands they’d lost were not gone forever. “Tendrils of love have bound them,” Britten continued, “in ties which death itself could not loose.”

  The first successful portrait photograph. Subject unknown. Samuel Morse, 1840.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Palace for the Sun

  AS A MAN who had endured such a great and sudden loss, Samuel Morse saw immediately the potential of the daguerreotype as a means of holding fast to cherished faces lost and moments that inevitably proved impermanent. As an artist, however, he could not help but look upon Daguerre’s innovation first of all in terms of perspective: a question of distance and how it is perceived. “One of Mr. D.’s plates is an impression of a spider,” he observed. “The spider was not bigger than the head of a large pin, but the image, magnified by the solar microscope to the size of the palm of the hand, having been impressed on the plate, and examined through a lens, was further magnified, and showed a minuteness of organization hitherto not seen to exist.”

  In Morse’s view, this was similar to a comment he had once heard when testing his telegraph by tapping out words in the code that bears his name. “The next word you may write is IMMORTALITY,” an admirer told him. “I see now that all physical obstacles, which may for a while hinder, will inevitably be overcome; the problem is solved.”

  Morse was under no illusion that an invention could bring about the end of death; some physical obstacles could never be overcome. But others could. Photography to Morse was essentially a tool for revealing levels of detail usually obscured by space and time. “In a view up the street,” he explained, “a distant sign would be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be read with the naked eye. By the assistance of a powerful lens, which magnified 50 times, applied to the delineation, every letter was clearly and distinctly legible, and also were the minutest breaks and lines in the walls of the buildings, and the pavements of the street. The effect of the lens upon the picture was in a great degree like that of the telescope in nature.”

  In the grandest sense, the problem photography solved was bridging the distance between the known and the unknown.

  The fact that Daguerre’s invention allowed one to bridge this distance only when an object of interest was as still as the grave barely registered. Almost as an aside to a litany of rapturous praise for the daguerreotypes he had seen, Morse noted of Daguerre’s famous Paris street scene, “Objects moving are not impressed. The boulevard, so constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages, was perfectly solitary, except an individual who was having his boots brushed. His feet were of course compelled to be stationary for some time, one being on the box of the boot black, and the other on the ground. Consequently his boots and legs are well defined, but he is without body or head, because these were in motion.”

  That would be photography’s tradeoff: the ability to immobilize a vital scene allows it to be preserved and enjoyed, seemingly forever. Yet in that very immobility its vitality is lost. If a photograph is at once the product of the “black art,” as its first practitioners called it, and an image “written with light,” as its name suggests, it is so because it is always equally evocative of both movement and paralysis, life and death.

  While meeting in Paris with Daguerre, Morse pressed him on how photography might be applied to human faces. “I specially conversed with him in regard to the practicability of taking portraits of living persons,” Morse said. “He expressed himself somewhat skeptical as to its practicability, only in consequence of the time necessary for the person to remain immovable. The time for taking an out-door view was from fifteen to twenty minutes, and this he considered too long a time for any one to remain sufficiently still for a successful result.”

  Back home, however, Morse disregarded the more experienced image maker’s opinion. He had by then relocated to New York City, and there he began trial-and-error research of his own. The experiments were in some ways simply extensions of those he had performed as a young artist when he was a student at Yale. “I don’t know if you recollect some experiments of mine in New Haven, many years ago,” he wrote his brother, “experiments to ascertain if it were possible to fix the image of the camera obscura. I was able to produce different degrees of shade on paper, dipped into a solution of nitrate of silver, by means of different degrees of light; but, finding that light produced dark, and dark light, I presumed the production of a true image to be impracticable, and gave up the attempt.”

  After being introduced to Daguerre’s superior equipment and techniques, Morse brought his teenage daughter, Susan, and several of her friends to a Manhattan rooftop bathed in light. He then asked the girls to stand very still. Susan had been a subject of his artistic endeavors before. As a young child, she had posed beside her mother and brother; as an adult she would appear in his most ambitious work, a massive painting Morse called The Gallery of the Louvre, in which his daughter sat in the foreground of a canvas depicting more than three dozen masterpieces from the Paris museum. Most strikingly, as an adolescent she was the subject of one of his best portraits. In a painting often called The Muse, she is the image of her mother, the same glow on her pale skin seeming to light the sky behind her.

  If his rooftop experiments were another way of summoning the dead, they were less successful. As he described the resulting images, “They are full-length portraits of my daughter, single and also in group with some of her young friends. They were taken out-of-doors, on the roof of a building, in the full sunlight, and with the eyes closed. The time was from ten to twenty minutes.” These daguerreotypes have been lost, as has his first successful image, the Church of the Messiah, near Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, which undoubtedly stood as still as the cross no matter how long the artist needed to capture its image.

  His only surviving daguerreotype is a portrait of an anonymous young man, taken in 1840. It’s not known how long the subject had to stare motionless and unblinking into the camera, but much can be read in his expression. The way his pupils catch the light suggests the eyes are on the verge of tears. While most early photographic portrait artists used a vise-like apparatus that kept the head immobilized to prevent blurring, the young man’s stillness seems all his own.

  Despite this young man’s impressive talent for maintaining a frozen expression during the long exposure of Morse’s copper plate, the stillness required of subjects remained a barrier to taking living portraits. Seeing an opportunity in an obstacle, some photographers found the unmoving dead to be a perfect subject. This phenomenon had reasons practical—corpses don’t blink—as well as commercial. For nearly half a century, posthumous memorial photographs became popular keepsakes for grieving families. To have an image of a child who died in infancy perhaps later served as the only indication that a brief life had indeed occurred. Even if taken after the child’s last breath, a photograph wa
s proof that the sleepless nights and early mornings were not a fantasy; it was evidence of a real son or a real daughter, no less missed though he or she otherwise left no trace.

  That capturing an image seemed to have something to do with death went largely unspoken, yet half-serious suggestions of necromancy were often applied to the first generation of photographers. Writing twelve years after Daguerre’s announcement of his invention, an American newspaper columnist speculated that the “bewildered astonishment” of the first human to look upon his reflection “could scarcely have exceeded the incredulous surprise with which even the most enlightened and scientific individual would have hearkened a dozen years since to a suggestion of the possibility of fixing and rendering permanent the impression upon a mirror.” This work of “apparent necromancy” was “effected through the penetration, patience, and perseverance of the thaumaturgus of the age, Daguerre.”

  To call the original photographer a “thaumaturgus,” a miracle worker, while simultaneously pondering his possible “necromancy” was to suggest his work was not merely a technological marvel, but a death-defying mystery whose alignment with the dark arts or the light remained to be seen.

  It was said that the immediate result of the desire to produce lifelike portraits was “abortive efforts” by “an awkward squad of bunglers, whose crude attempts . . . presented a confused chaotic or distorted resemblance of the human countenance divine,” but Morse continued his quest. He tried endless variations of chemical treatments and grades of metal, hoping to make possible an exposure window of a duration long enough to allow natural light to fix an image to the plate, but not so long that the open eyes of his subject would dry out and trigger a fit of tics and fidgets, wasting both materials and sunlight.

  Morse enlisted another budding daguerreotypist, New York University professor of chemistry John William Draper, and together they constructed an innovative studio that they called “A Palace for the Sun.” Within its clear walls they inadvertently created a major commercial enterprise and an indelible part of American culture. “Soon after, we commenced together to take portraits,” Morse said, “causing a glass building to be constructed for that purpose on the roof of the University. As our experiments had caused us considerable expense, we made a charge to those who sat for us to defray this expense.”

  With that, the portrait photography business was born.

  “As the Daguerreotype was not patented, but was free to all who would master the art,” Morse’s nineteenth-century biographer explained of the explosive growth that followed, “a large number of young men, with the enterprise of American youth, flocked to Professor Morse to be instructed in the mysteries of the process, that they might traverse the country and reap the first fruits of its introduction.” One such budding student of photography wrote to Morse in 1840: “I learn, with equal astonishment and gratification, that you have succeeded in taking likenesses in ten seconds with diffused light. Pray reveal to me the wondrous discovery!”

  Soon enough, Morse’s discoveries were learned by thousands of working image makers who opened portrait studios across the nation. The millions who posed stiffly in their sitting rooms, acting dead before the camera for the sake of creating a living memory, also learned the artist’s secret: stillness is photography’s treasure, but it is also its price.

  A photograph, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the 1850s, is a “mirror with a memory.” Yet the irrevocable nature of the change it had wrought on memory and forgetting, experience of the past and expectations of the future, suggested that the notion of sight as limited and time-bound would soon be forgotten. While photography was “the most audacious, remote, improbable, incredible” of all the marvels of the century, Holmes feared that in the sudden way its indelible images were becoming ubiquitous, “it has become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself.

  “We are wondering over the photograph as a charming novelty,” he added. “But before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates from the time when He who ‘never but in uncreated light / Dwelt from eternity’ took a pencil of fire from the hand of the ‘angel standing in the sun,’ and placed it in the hands of a mortal.”

  Unidentified woman (probably Hannah Mumler) and an unidentified spirit image. William Mumler, 1860s.

  CHAPTER 5

  I Thought Nobody Would Be Damaged Much

  THE CIVIL WAR had been raging for nineteen months, but William Mumler was not yet convinced that the swelling ranks of the dead walked among the living. Despite Hannah Stuart’s unignorable magnetism and the tantalizing possibility of feeling electric currents coursing through his tissue at her touch, he held fast to the default skepticism of his scientific mind. “Not at that time being inclined much to the spiritual belief myself,” he said, he thought nothing of having fun at the Spiritualists’ expense. While no Dickensian wit, he considered himself as “being of a jovial disposition,” and so was not above the kind of gentle ribbing Household Words had directed at the residents of his city. As far as most Spiritualists were concerned, he said, he was “always ready for a joke.”

  When it came to Hannah and her particular beliefs, however, there would be no jabs or jeers. For her, he wanted only to be helpful. If she asked him, as she did one Sunday in August, to organize developing chemicals in her darkroom and test the camera’s focus, he could only say yes.

  He had gone to the studio in the morning, Paul Revere’s sixty-year-old church bell ringing out its call to prayer from the tower of the nearby South Church. As the Sabbath was still protected by law even in this increasingly eclectic and permissive age, all the other shops on Washington Street were closed. No one buying watches or monogrammed silver at Bigelow Brothers, no rolls of wallpaper to maneuver around as he passed by Samuel H. Gregory’s shop.

  After Mumler organized the chemicals, the morning light called out to him. He had lately been spending so much time in Mrs. Stuart’s studio that he had learned the basics almost by osmosis. Somewhat coyly describing his ongoing infatuation and the artistic ambition it had inspired, Mumler acknowledged “being acquainted with, and somewhat interested in, parties engaged in the photographic business. By often witnessing the operation,” he said, “I became familiar with the process of taking a picture.”

  He arranged a chair in the usual place where a sitter might pose, choosing a spot bathed in natural light, supplied to most studios by large windows cut in the ceiling for the purpose. Then he prepared the photographic plate, a process that itself had the air of conjuration about it. First he evenly coated the glass with collodion, a solution of ether and other chemicals mixed with cotton fibers barely visible to the eye. Next he bathed the plate in silver iodide before placing it in a container blocking all light until the instant of exposure. In front of the lens, a wooden slat waited to be removed to let in the sunlight that would fix the image on the glass. When all was prepared, he pulled the black cover from the camera and stepped quickly in front of it. He stood straight and still beside the chair, waiting a full minute before he moved an inch.

  As he developed the negative in the darkroom, he thought he had made some mistake. Posed on the chair, which in the adjoining sitting room remained as empty as it had been all morning, sat a girl made of light.

  One person who saw it at the time described Mumler’s unexpected companion in detail. “The outline of the upper portion of the body is clearly defined, though dim and shadowy,” Dr. H. F. Gardner, the same Spiritualist who brought the Fox sisters to Boston, wrote. “The chair is seen distinctly through the body and arms, also the table upon which one arm rests. Below, the waist (which apparently is clothed in a dress with low neck and short sleeves) fades away into a dim mist, which simply clouds the lower part of the picture.” The photographer pictured, Dr. Gardner added generously, was an “active, rather athletic looking man,” who gave every appearance of having just set the picture-m
aking process in motion and then jumped into position before the lens. No fraud, his assessment suggested, would ever be so hastily concocted.

  After he had seen it himself, Mumler found the image “unaccountable” and assumed he had improperly prepared the glass plate. It was possible, he noted, that “the negative was taken upon an old glass that had previously been used for the same purpose, but had been insufficiently cleaned.” It was exactly the kind of careless error an amateur like himself would make.

  When he told Hannah, however, he became less certain.

  Not only was it a “portrait of a spirit,” she said; it was the image of one “who had left her body behind yet had taken this method of communicating with those yet in bondage to the flesh.”

  “The picture was, to say the least, a novelty,” Mumler admitted. He transferred the glass plate image to paper, to show to any friends who might stop in to see him at the engraving shop; presumably his old sense of humor about such things returned when he was not moved to suspend his disbelief in Hannah’s presence.

  Dr. Gardner happened to pay him a visit some days later. As Mumler would recall, he decided to show the prominent Spiritualist the image of the ghost child, “to have a little fun, as I thought, at his expense.”

  Mumler no doubt knew of the doctor’s previous embarrassment involving dubious metaphysical manifestations, and so this recollection of his motives suggests either an uncharacteristic cruelty or, more likely, a lingering ambivalence about what exactly had happened when he had stood alone in the sunlight of 258 Washington Street. In any case, Dr. Gardner detected no malice in Mumler, and asked the budding photographer to write a brief account of the picture’s creation on the back of the card-stock image.