Ghoul Brittania

by Andrew Martin

  Spiritualism came to Britain from America where, in the early 1850’s, a pair of sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, seemed to be channelling ghosts in a house near Rochester in New York State. The spirit communicated by rapping on a table, or moving objects, including the table itself; chairs were pulled from under sitters, musical instruments played by invisible means. The channelling of spirits was not in itself new. One of its ancient roots lay in the oracles, those places or people from which prophecies emanate. The oracles of Ancient Greece were frequently seeresses, or Sybils, and they would go into disturbing trances when downloading their spirit messages, just like the Victorian mediums, who were predominantly women.

  The ambassadress of Spiritualism to Britain was another American female medium, Mrs W.R. Hayden, wife of a New England newspaper proprietor. Her spirits confined themselves to rapping, and she impressed by her sober demeanour and her intelligence. (She later qualified as a doctor). It was noted with approval that she was always seated at some distance from the tables on which the raps were made. Augustus de Morgan, first holder of the Chair of Mathematics at University College London, tested her when she came to Britain. He brought her into his own home, and the raps spelled out the name of an obscure academic periodical that would have been known only to Mr de Morgan’s dead father, and very few others.

  And so the battle between the sceptics and Spiritualists was joined. It was provoked by the advancement of science, and the publication in 1859 of ‘On the Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin. Where did that leave life after death? In reply the believers tried to give the only irrefutable answer: the production of an actual spirit. For some, the production of a verifiable spirit would mean proof of Christianity, although the Church did not require any such proof, and was embarrassed about the business of seeking it. It had its own licensed angels, thank you very much, and did not want to extend the franchise.

  The battleground was the séance room, and ‘the media’, in the mid-nineteenth century, meant the mediums who could contact ‘the other side’. If you live in a large Victorian house, it is likely that a séance was at some point held in one of its rooms. Go into, say, the dining room, and imagine those people who tried so hard to see what lies ‘beyond the veil’, and who have now gone beyond it themselves, and so presumably know. Picture the ghosts of the ghost-hunters. The circular table is perhaps an antique, dating from those days. Picture, seated around that table, a group of respectable looking people in evening wear. The room is in semi-darkness – illuminated, if at all, by red-shaped lamps. Those assembled – the ‘sitters’ – are holding hands in a way that seems at odds with the formality of their clothing, and they are focused upon one of their number, a person looking perhaps slightly less respectable than the others. This is the medium or ‘sensitive’, and he or she – more often a she, since men are generally not very sensitive – is in a trance state while attempting to channel messages to the sitter from the other side.

  Quite often no messages came through, which was like going to a football match and seeing a nil-nil draw. When the messages did come, they might be ‘written’ out by a planchette – a pen on wheels lightly held by all the sitters, and supposedly capable of writing without conscious direction. They might be encoded in tappings on the table, or they might come directly from the mouth of the medium, in a voice evidently not his or her own, which made people wonder whether mediums were really ventriloquists…

  …And were they highly skilled magicians as well? Because at a really successful demonstration of what was called ‘physical mediumship’ the séance was less a muted chamber piece and more a full-blown symphony. There might be ectoplasm: a luminous white stuff oozing from the medium and resembling in texture old toothpaste. Sitters were warned not to touch any that might appear, for fear of causing some psychic or physical crisis for the medium. Ectoplasm was either the very essence of ghostliness, a sort of umbilical cord connecting life and death, or it was…well, twisted linen covered in phosphorous.

  Everyday objects might appear in the room from nowhere – these were called apports. Things – trumpets, flowers – levitated or flew about the room, including sometimes the very substantial table, or even the medium him or herself; and sometimes – the ultimate coup de théâtre – another person entirely appeared, which is to say: a ghost.

  To prove that they were dead, the spirits had to prove that they had been alive. They might do this by revealing themselves to be phantoms of the eminent; or dead friends or relatives of the deceased. Everyone at the sitting would have known something of the eminent figures, while a few – perhaps just one sitter – would know a great deal about the purported friend or relative. So either strategy had its risks for the fraudulent medium.

  ‘By the spring of 1853,’ writes Brian Inglis in Natural and Supernatural, ‘table-tilting had become the fashionable social pastime, even in the Royal residence at Osborne, where the table moved for Victoria and Albert. Under Lady Ely’s hands it fairly rushed about, convincing Victoria that it was no trick, or illusion: magnetism, she thought, or electricity must be responsible.’ Inglis reports a séance attended by the historian Thomas Macaulay. He had started as a sceptic, but was forced to admit that there was ‘rotary motion’ of the table. He could not see how this might be happening, unless the man opposite him, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, had done the pushing.

  Take down from the shelf the biography of your favourite nineteenth-century luminary and look in the index under ‘Spiritualism’ or ‘Supernatural’ or ‘occult’. There will almost certainly be an entry.

  FOUR EMINENT SÉANCE-GOERS.

  1. Anthony Trollope

  In Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World, Richard Mullen records that, in 1840, when he was twenty-five, Trollope was struck down by a mysterious and protracted illness. His mother, Fanny, called in her own doctor, John Elliotson, who had been doctor to both Dickens and Thackeray, and who had taught Dickens mesmerism. (But he was also – mockers take note – the first doctor to use a stethoscope). He gave public demonstrations, in which he practised mesmerism on two particularly receptive subjects, or ‘somnambules’: the Okey sisters. As part of their psychic repertoire, the sisters could predict the chances of a patient recovering according to whether or not they saw a figure called Jack standing by his side. Fanny Trollope, who was interested in the supernatural, asked Elliotson to bring them to Anthony’s bedside to find out whether they could see Jack.

  They could, but only up to the top of his boots, which meant that Anthony would recover.

  Anthony Trollope inherited his mother’s interest in the supernatural, but with a stronger dose of scepticism. He attended at least one séance given by the golden boy of British mediumship, Daniel Dunglas Home (see below). It was in Ealing. Trollope later wrote: ‘Men who cannot believe in the mystery of our Saviour’s redemption can believe that spirits from the dead have visited them in a stranger’s parlour, because they see a table shake and do not know how it is shaken; because they hear a rapping on a board, and cannot see the instrument that raps it…’ He found these manifestations ‘unworthy of the previous grand ceremony of death. Your visitor from above or below should be majestical, should stalk in all panoplied from head to foot – at least in a white sheet, and should not condescend to catechetical and alphabetical puzzles.’

  In The Claverings (1867), the two upper-class twits, Archie and Doodles, speculate while playing billiards about a medium called Madame Gardeloup: ‘If I were a spirit I wouldn’t go to a woman with such dirty stockings as she had on.’

  2. Charles Dickens

  At the start of Dickens’s story, The Haunted House (1862), the protagonist boards a London-bound train in the north at midnight. He sits opposite a goggle-eyed man who is perpetually staring at the back of the compartment ‘as though it were a hundred miles off ’ while taking notes. After some tentative enquiries, the narrator works out that his fellow passenger ‘might be what is popularly called a Rapper: one of a sect for (so
me of) whom I have the highest respect, but whom I don’t believe in.’ The man explains that he has ‘passed the whole night – as indeed I pass the whole of my time now – in spiritual intercourse…’

  ‘The conferences of the night began,’ continued the gentleman, turning several leaves of his note-book, ‘with this message: ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’

  ‘Sound,’ said I; ‘but absolutely new?’

  ‘New from spirits,’ returned the gentleman.

  I could only repeat my rather snappish, ‘Oh!’ and ask if I might be favoured with the last communication.

  ‘A bird in the hand,’ said the gentleman, reading his last entry with great solemnity, ‘is worth two in the Bosh.’

  ‘Truly I am of the same opinion,” said I; “but shouldn’t it be “Bush”’?’

  ‘It came to me “Bosh,’” returned the gentleman.’

  According to the stranger, there are seventeen thousand four hundred and seventy-nine spirits in the railway carriage, ‘but you cannot see them’. They included Pythagoras, and John Milton who had repudiated the authorship of Paradise Lost and ‘had introduced, as joint authors of that poem, two unknown gentlemen, respectively named Grungers and Scadingtone.’

  3. Arthur Conan Doyle

  Speaking as a writer of crime fiction, I would find Doyle insufferable if he’d just gone about basking in the glory of his unbeatable Sherlock Holmes stories. Instead, he proved his imaginative genius by creating that ruthlessly sceptical ‘desiccated calculating machine’ Holmes, while he himself was able to believe in almost anything. As Michael Coren writes in his biography of the man, ‘For the last ten years of his life Conan Doyle effectively became the missionary-in-chief of world Spiritualism’ – which he regarded as ‘the basis for all religious improvement’ of ‘a thoroughly material generation’.

  Doyle had been converted in the mid-1880’s by Alfred Drayson, a distinguished solider, mathematician and astronomer. (In tribute to Drayson, the master-criminal Moriarty – Sherlock Holmes’s intellectual rival and nemesis – is both a mathematician and astronomer).

  Doyle became a regular séance-goer. In 1918 he attended, in France, a séance given by Eva C, who was the most famous medium in the world at the time, and vouched for by Professor Charles Richet, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1913. Eva C’s trademark was the production of ectoplasm, and by special dispensation, Doyle was allowed to touch the stuff: ‘The ectoplasm I saw upon Eva, the much-abused medium, took the form of a six-inch gelatinous material across the lower portion of the front of her dress. Speaking as a medical man, I should say that it was more like a section of umbilical cord, but it was wider and softer. I was permitted to touch it, and I felt it thrill and contract between my fingers.’

  Doyle’s son, Innes, had died of pneumonia contracted at the battle of the Somme. Doyle felt that he had re-encountered the boy at séances, and so he became the figurehead of the Spiritualistic wave that followed the war. His book of 1918, The New Revelation revealed, according to ‘The Times’, an ‘incredible naiveté’, and Doyle did seem infinitely credulous. For instance, he believed it might be possible for him to collaborate on literary works with the spirits of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad. (How could that have worked contractually, I wonder?)

  He also endorsed the Cottingley Fairies.

  In 1920, fifteen-year old Elsie Wright, and her cousin, ten-year old Frances Griffiths, claimed to have seen fairies dancing at the edge of a beck at Cottingley near Bradford, and produced photographs taken by Elsie to prove it. The fairies in the picture looked suspiciously fairy-like, but Doyle believed the girls. (Some sixty years later, Frances said, ‘From where I was I could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I’ve always marvelled that anybody ever took it seriously.’)

  Nothing takes away from Conan Doyle’s moral integrity, but his gullibility undermines the sceptical assertions of the characters in the handful of ghost stories that he wrote. The narrator in ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ condemns the ‘absurd outbreak of superstition’ among a ship’s crew given to ‘spectral alarms’. This is hard to take from a man who believed that the Wright-Griffiths fairies merited an immediate public enquiry.

  4. Arthur Balfour

  Balfour was the languid, aesthetic and cynical Conservative Prime Minister of 1902-1905. My father used to quote with approval Balfour’s characteristic utterance: ‘Nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all.’ Yet he was curious about the supernatural. At times of political crisis, he could generally be found either stretched on a sofa reading a novel, playing golf, or dabbling in trying to contact the dead. From 1875, he arranged séances with a variety of mediums at his home at 4 Carlton Gardens SW1. In 1896, he became the President of the Society for Psychical Research (see below), a move that would be inadvisable in any rising politician of today. In Arthur James Balfour, Kenneth Young quotes Balfour’s as writing: ‘On July 30th 1911 Mrs B came to dinner at Carlton Gardens to talk occult with Gerald and me.’ Young observes: ‘This was at the height of the constitutional crisis.’

  THE HIGH POINT OF BRITISH SPIRITUALISM

  Daniel Dunglas Home was the most convincing medium or Victorian times and possibly any other. He was fabled for his ability to levitate while in touch with the spirits.

  His portrait hangs above the fireplace in the lecture hall of the College of Psychic Studies in Kensington, which was established at the height of Spiritualism, and of which more later, but for now I will mention that I was given a tour of the College by its administrator a few years ago, and when we were on the third floor she pointed at one tall window and said, ‘That’s the window that Daniel Dunglas Home flew out of during a séance…’ We then walked up to the fifth floor, where she pointed to another window: ‘And that,’ she said, ‘is the one he came back in by.’ There are several other buildings in London where the same stories are told.

  D.D. Home was born in Scotland in 1833, the illegitimate product of the family that would give us the Conservative Prime Minister, Alec Douglas Home. Like the Prime Minister, Home pronounced his name ‘Hume’ but he was above such worldly concerns, or did a good job of appearing to be so. He was raised by an aunt in Connecticut, America, where he predicted the death of his closest friend, and his own mother. Unexplained rapping noises began to occur in his presence, and at nineteen he levitated for the first time. His aunt kicked him out of the house, and he stayed for a while with a Swedenborgian minister called George Bush. He began to give séances in America, and his trademark was the appearance of floating disembodied hands.

  In 1855 he sailed to England – for his heath, oddly enough. (He was tubercular). He lived in Cox’s Hotel in Jermyn Street, whose proprietor was sympathetic to spiritualism. The above-mentioned Edward Bulwer-Lytton was at one of Home’s early London séances: the table levitated, one of the hands appeared, and an accordion was played in mid-air. What Bulwer-Lytton saw influenced the ghost stories he would write. The poet Robert Browning and his poetess wife Elizabeth attended another of Home’s séances, and also left highly impressed. But soon afterwards, Robert Browning decided he did not believe what he had seen; that trickery must have been involved. For example, the apparent sounds of table rapping could have been caused Home’s dislocation and relocation of his toe joints. In 1864, Browning published his famous anti-Spiritualist poem, ‘Mr Sludge the Medium’:

  As for religion – why, I served it, sir!

  I’ll stick to that! With my phenomena

  I laid the atheist sprawling on his back,

  Propped up St Paul, or, at least Swedenborg!

  In fact, it’s just the proper way to baulk

  These troublesome fellows – liars, one and all,

  Are not these sceptics? Well, to baffle them,

  No use in being squeamish: lie yourself!

  …which Home could afford to shrug off, since he was by now the golden boy of British Spiritualism: an intelligent, good-looking, thoroughly pr
esentable young man who gave his demonstrations free (although this is not to say that he did not receive payment in kind), and was willing to do so in a good light (although he did prefer darkness).

  He seems to have had a sort of willowy, fey charm. Conan Doyle, a fan – and, of course, a medical man – described him as ‘blue-eyed and auburn haired, of a type which is peculiarly liable to the attack of tubercule, and the extreme emaciation of his face showed how little power remained within him by which he might resist it.’ He was a frock-coated David Bowie, in short.

  Home moved for a while to Florence, where he levitated a table for Napoleon III. On returning to England in 1859, he gave a series of weekly high society séances at the behest of Mrs Milner Gibson, wife of the President of the Board of Trade. And in the mid-1860’s, he embarked on a run of well-lit, closely documented and monitored séances for Lord Adare, an army officer and journalist, and his father Lord Dunraven, astrologer and archaeologis. Phenomena continued to occur. Home levitated, disembodied voices muttered while he talked (so it couldn’t have been ventriloquism), and Lord Adare reported that, while lying down, Home ‘elongated’ by eight to ten inches, and then ‘sank to some eight or ten inches below his normal stature’. (The Sybils of Ancient Egypt had been said to elongate while entranced).