1. PROCURE THE REMEDY AT ONCE AND BE WELL
14 “A rather portly man”: Earl Marble, “The Round Table,” Folio, September 1884, 94.
14 “Those desirous of making purchases”: Edward Hepple Hall, Appletons’ Hand-Book of American Travel (New York: D. Appelton & Co., 1869), 90.
14 “Although a self-made man”: Annual Report of the Perkins School for the Blind (Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1904).
15 “I had the reputation”: Mumler, “The Personal Experiences . . . Part 1,” 1.
15 “being the first to introduce”: Reading (Pennsylvania) Times, May 13, 1869.
15 “I am an engraver”: Mumler advertisement, 1860s, reproduced by Marc Demarest in Chasing Down Emma: Resolving the Contradictions of, and Filling in the Gaps in, the Life, Work and World of Emma Hardinge Britten, http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/2015_03_01_archive.html.
16 “For the cause of suffering humanity”: Ibid.
17 “After a man has passed”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 2,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 16 (January 16, 1875), 1.
17 “magnetism”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 5,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 22 (February 27, 1875), 3.
18 A. M. Stuart: Henry Augustus Willis, The Fifty-Third Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers (Fitchburg, MA: Press of Blanchard & Brown, 1889), 247.
18 “Hair braided to order”: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 30, 1848.
19 “natural clairvoyant”: Mumler, “The Personal Experiences . . . Part 5,” 3.
19 “What is electricity?”: Ibid.
20 “I have seen men faint”: Ibid.
2. LOVE AND PAINTING ARE QUARRELSOME COMPANIONS
24 “I can imagine mama wishing”: Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Samuel F. B.Morse, His Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 41.
25 “There has a ghost”: Ibid.
25 “at least seven hundred dollars”: Ibid., 260.
26 “The only thing I fear”: Ibid.
26 “spread perpetual sunshine”: Samuel Irenæus Prime, The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, LL. D.: Inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Recording Telegraph (New York: D. Appelton, 1875), 146.
26 “Love and painting are quarrelsome companions”: Morse, Letters and Journals, 180.
26 “The more I know of her”: Ibid., 240.
26 “I wish to see the young lady”: Ibid., 207.
28 “He is so harassed”: Ibid., 264.
28 “My Dearest Wife”: Samuel Morse to Lucretia Morse, Feburary 9, 1825, digital image available at https://www.loc.gov/resource/mmorse.009001/?sp=181.
28 “There never was a more perfect example”: Morse, Letters and Journals, 262.
28 “This is Mr. Morse, the painter”: Ibid., 264.
29 “My affectionately beloved Son”: Ibid., 265.
30 “The confusion and derangement”: Ibid., 268.
30 “Oh! What a blow!”: Ibid.
31 “I am ready almost to give up”: Ibid., 269.
3. TIES WHICH DEATH ITSELF COULD NOT LOOSE
33 “It sounded like someone knocking”: “Certificate of Mrs. Margaret Fox, Wife of John D. Fox, the Occupant of the House,” in Ann Leah Underhill, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (New York: Thomas R. Knox & Company, 1885), 4.
34 “The noises were heard”: Ibid.
34 “I do not know of any way”: Ibid., 10.
34 “unhappy, restless spirit”: Ibid., 6.
35 “There must have been a score”: Ibid., 49.
35 “that disembodied human”: “Modern Spiritualism,” Spiritual Magazine, September 1869, 386.
35 “As for the future”: Samuel Byron Brittan, lecture delivered at the Stuyvesant Institute in New York City, November 1850, http://www.iapsop.com/spirithistory/first_public_lecture_on_spiritualism.html.
36 “I soon received letters”: Underhill, The Missing Link, 49.
36 “I well remember the time”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 4,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 20 (February 13, 1875), 3.
38 “in all its varied phases”: Banner of Light, 1, no. 3 (April 25, 1857), 4.
39 “Who are you talking with, mother?”: Theodore Parker (Spirit) and John W. Day, Biography of Mrs. J. H. Conant, the World’s Medium of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Banner of Light, 1873), 19.
39 “She has been the channel”: Ibid., 4.
40 “It is a simple, straight-forward narrative”: Ibid., 3.
40 “SPIRIT RAPPING AND NECROMANCY”: Baltimore Sun, May 12, 1853.
41 “Spiritual phenomena”: Household Words: A Weekly Journal, June 5, 1853, 582.
43 “an impressionable state”: Banner of Light, quoted in Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 50.
43 “Never in any period,” “Tendrils of love have bound them”: Emma Hardinge, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits (New York: printed by author, 1870), 509.
4. A PALACE FOR THE SUN
45 “One of Mr. D.’s plates”: Prime, Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, 26.
45 “The next word you may write”: Ibid., 389.
45 “In a view up the street”: Ibid., 401.
46 “Objects moving are not impressed”: Ibid.
46 “I specially conversed with him”: Ibid., 403.
47 “I don’t know if you recollect”: Morse, Letters and Journals, 129.
47 “They are full-length portraits”: Ibid., 145.
49 “bewildered astonishment”: “Street Saunterings,” unsigned column in Charleston Courier, May 15, 1847.
49 “abortive efforts”: Ibid.
49 “Soon after, we commenced”: Ibid., 146.
50 “As the Daguerreotype was not patented”: Prime, Life of Samuel F. B.Morse, 408.
50 “I learn, with equal astonishment”: Ibid.
50 “mirror with a memory”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic, June 1859.
5. I THOUGHT NOBODY WOULD BE DAMAGED MUCH
53 “Not at that time being inclined”: Mumler, “The Personal Experiences . . . Part 1,” 1.
54 “being acquainted with”: Ibid.
54 “The outline of the upper portion”: “Spirit Photographs: A New and Interesting Development.”
55 “unaccountable,” “the negative was taken”: Mumler, “The Personal Experiences . . . Part 1,” 1.
55 “portrait of a spirit”: Daily Constitutionalist (Atlanta), March 5, 1869, 2.
55 “The picture was, to say the least”: Mumler, “The Personal Experiences . . . Part 1,” 1.
55 “to have a little fun”: Ibid.
56 “This photograph was taken of myself”: Ibid.
56 “I felt, on reading this statement”: Ibid.
57 “It not only gave the description”: Ibid.
57 “mischief”: Ibid.
57 “Here comes Mr. Mumler!”: Ibid.
6. A LOUNGING, LISTLESS MADHOUSE
60 “It is the startling realism”: Daniel O’Connell Townley, “A Head of Christ,” Old and New 4, no. 1 (July 1871), 487.
60 “a series of experiments”: Congressional Globe: Containing Sketches of the Debates and Proceedings of the Third Session of the Twenty-Seventh Congress 12 (1843), 324.
61 “it would require a scientific analysis”: Ibid.
61 “Every object in it”: “Editor’s Drawer,” Harper’s Magazine 38, no. 227 (April 1869), 715.
61 “You will have an artist for a neighbor”: Ibid.
62 “jewelry, miniature, and surgical case manufacturer”: The New York City Directory (New York: John Doggett, 1844), 47.
63 “a lounging, listless, madhouse air”: Charles Dickens, American Notes for General
Circulation (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 51.
63 “The moping idiot”: Ibid.
64 “sufficiently contiguous to each”: Documents of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York (New York: Childs and Devoe, 1836), doc. 113, 600.
64 “Make the rain pour down”: Dickens, American Notes, 52.
64 “The scenery upon it”: Documents of the Board of Aldermen, 599.
65 “Violent battles are frequent”: Prison Association of New York, Second Report of the New York Prison Association (New York: The Association, 1846), 37.
65 “a handsome building”: Enoch Cobb Wines and Theodore Dwight, Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada Made to the Legislature of New York, January 1867 (Albany: Van Benthuysen & Sons, 1867), 107.
65 “The gag has sometimes been applied”: Dorothea Lynde Dix, Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States (Philadelphia: Joseph Kite & Co., 1845), 14.
7. MY GOD! IS IT POSSIBLE?
70 For a brief account of J. W. Black’s experiments in aerial photography, see Wilmington (North Carolina) Daily Herald, October 19, 1860.
70 “The cow pasture character”: Daily Patriot and Union (Boston), October 18, 1860.
71 “Boston looks very much”: Ibid.
72 “Love at First Sight”: Eastern Carolina Republican (New Bern, North Carolina), January 12, 1848.
73 “Puritan of the most exalted type”: Osborne Perry Anderson, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper’s Ferry (Boston: printed by author, 1861), 9.
74 “peculiar medium”: Spiritual Magazine 4 (January 1863).
74 “It behooves us as Spiritualists”: “Boston Spiritual Conference,” Banner of Light 12, no. 11 (December 6, 1862), 5.
75 “mechanical contrivance”: Mumler, “Personal Experiences . . . Part 1,” 1.
75 “All I can say to Mr. Black,” and dialogue following: Ibid.
8. SHE REALLY IS A WONDERFUL WHISTLER
81 “bumpology”: See, for example, Brooklyn Evening Post, July 8, 1842, 2: “Dr George W. Ellis . . . Professor of Phrenology . . . undertook to hold forth on bumpology ‘in all its various branches.’”
82 “moral insanity”: Marmaduke Sampson, Rationale of Crime, and Its Appropriate Treatment: Being a Treatise on Criminal Jurisprudence Considered in Relation to Cerebral Organization. Considerably enlarged by Eliza Farnham with her extensive notes and with 19 engraved portraits from daguerreotypes made by Mathew Brady for this publication (New York: D. Appleton, 1846), 21.
82 “The form of head possessed”: Ibid., 7.
83 “No. 1 is the head of a very depraved person”: Ibid., 8.
83 “some of the most daring burglaries”: Ibid., 9.
84 “except a little bread”: Fayetteville Weekly Observer, November 3, 1856.
84 “An old Pole”: “A Hero’s Fate,” Poughkeepsie Journal, February 17, 1844.
85 “The Blackwell’s Island ferry”: Osage County Chronicle, October 15, 1882.
85 “Dressed in a striped uniform”: Dickens, American Notes, 77.
85 “the officers of the Penitentiary”: Sampson and Farnham, Rationale of Crime, xx.
86 “examining the heads”: New York Evening Post, August 23, 1837.
86 “a man of great determination”: Sampson and Farnham, Rationale of Crime, 156.
87 “Before his mind became deranged”: Ibid., 157.
87 “a half-breed Indian”: Ibid., 158.
88 “A Jewess of German birth”: Ibid., 160.
89 “quackery” and “humbug”: New York Observer, November 7, 1846. Also quoted in Madeleine B. Stern, “Mathew Brady and the Rationale of Crime: A Discovery in Daguerreotypes,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 31, no. 3 (July 1974), 132.
89 “THE PHRENOLOGICAL CABINET”: New York Times, September 18, 1851, 3.
90 “use of improper books”: Prison Association of New York, Report of the Prison Association of New York, Vol. 3 (New York: The Association, 1847), 50.
9. NO SHADOW OF TRICKERY
93 “He says he cannot see”: The Liberator (Boston), November 21, 1862.
93 “Do you see any spirits present?”: “Hon. Moses Dow,” Facts 1, no. 4 (December 1882), 420.
94 “I have seen several pictures”: The Liberator, November 21, 1862.
94 “One of the most frequently repeated”: William Mumler, “The Personal Experiences of William Mumler in Spirit Photography, Part 7,” reprinted in Banner of Light 36, no. 26 (March 27, 1875), 3.
94 “This is a remarkable fact”: Ibid.
96 “Those ominous, long pine boxes”: Richmond Whig, May 22, 1865.
96 “The corpse was placed in the casket”: “Express Operations During the War,” Express Gazette, May 15, 1897, 137–38, cited by Jim Schmidt, DeadConfederates.com, September 24, 2011, https://deadconfederates.com/2011/09/24/can-you-hang-around-a-couple-of-minutes-he-wont-be-long/.
97 “The instrument was handled”: Evelyn P. Goodsell, Some Reasons Why I Am a Spiritualist (Hartford: Williams, Wiley & Turner, 1861), 35.
97 “a boy seated, and intently reading”: Benjamin Coleman, letter to the Spiritual Magazine, February 1863, 86.
98 “Babbitt’s Cytherean Cream of Soap”: Louisville Daily Caller, May 17, 1850.
98 Boston Chemical Soap Powder: Burlington (Vermont) Weekly Free Press, May 11, 1860.
99 “This is to certify”: Banner of Light 12, no. 12 (December 13, 1862), 4.
10. A CRAVING FOR LIGHT
101 “There is hardly a block”: William M. Bobo, Glimpses of New York City (New York: J. J. McCarter, 1852), 120.
101 “the beggars and the takers”: “Things in New York,” Brother Jonathan, March 4, 1843, 250.
102 “the standing-place for all kinds”: J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies and Volunteer Fire Departments of New York and Brooklyn (New York: M. Crane, 1885), 12.
102 “ill-looking, ungainly, rambling structure”: New York Times, July 14, 1865.
102 “paltry collection of preposterous things”: New York Times, March 18, 1868.
103 “As in every art and science”: Gurney advertisement, quoted in Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat, Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 231.
103 “FIRST PREMIUM NEW YORK”: New York Tribune, January 8, 1845.
104 “I felt a craving for light”: Robert Wilson, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 8.
105 “The President and Cabinet,” “This collection embraces,” “This establishment is”: United States Commercial Register: containing sketches of the lives of distinguished merchants, manufacturers, and artisans, with an advertising directory at its close (New York: J. Belcher, 1851), 36.
106 “composite photography,” “I have taken a gentleman’s picture”: October 1853 circular, reprinted in Photographic Times: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine, January 13, 1888.
107 “Poetry is in decline”: Louisville Daily Courier, reprinted from the Albany Evening Journal, November 27, 1852.
11. THE MESSAGE DEPARTMENT
113 “battery”: Parker and Day, Biography of Mrs. J. H. Conant, 36.
113 “Mr. Berry conceived”: Ibid., 98.
113 “so thoroughly depleted”: Ibid.
114 “At first the manifestations”: Ibid., 103.
114 “the nicely adjusted magnetic surroundings”: Ibid., 104.
115 “The great unpopularity of Spiritualism”: Ibid., 108.
115 “The Spiritualists, or at least some of them”: Boston Daily Evening Transcript, April 8, 1862, cited in “Envisioning the Civil War,” http://www.iapsop.com/spirithistory/envisioning_the_civil_war.html.
116 “I’ve got somebody I want to speak to” and other dialogue purported to be spoken by the spirit of John Dixon: Banner of Light 12, no. 18 (January 24, 1863).
117 “Captain?” and other dialogue purported to be spoken by the spirit of
Philip Guinon: Ibid.
118 “There is much that is genuine”: Banner of Light 12, no. 14 (December 27, 1862).
119 “On the evening of October 11”: Banner of Light 12, no. 11 (December 6, 1862).
119 “The next evening, October 12”: Ibid.
12. A BIG HEAD FULL OF IDEAS
125 “large,” “strong,” “mighty”: Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Vol. 3 (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 234.
126 “I have seen human degradation”: Report from the Select Committee on the Health of Towns (London: House of Lords Seasonal Papers, 1840), xii–xiii.
127 “In the lower lodging houses”: Ibid., 61.
127 “The employments of these Children”: A Supplementary Index to the Life of Robert Owen (London: Effingham Wilson, 1858), 27.
128 “by means of the united capital”: “Documents Related to the Founding of the Clydesdale Company,” in James T. Hair, ed., Iowa State Gazetteer (Chicago: Bailey & Hair, 1865), 135.
128 “every stalk of corn”: Joseph Hooker, quoted in Edward Porter Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 252.
129 “like the war horse”: American Journal of Photography, August 1, 1861, quoted in James Horan, Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera (New York: Crown, 1955), 39.
131 “a spiritualist’s cabinet on wheels”: E. F. Bleirer, preface to Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (New York: Dover, 1959), vii.
132 “enlightening the public”: Alexander Gardner, quoted in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (London: Academia Press, 2009), 251.
133 “With this exhibition”: Karl Marx, quoted in George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Routledge, 2015), 136.
133 “half starved by its own toil”: D. Mark Katz, Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of Alexander Gardner (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 5.
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