The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [15]
He spoke in memory of his brother Wilkie, dead at the age of thirty-eight, largely due to the long-term crippling damage of battle wounds. But he spoke for himself too. Rabid partisans and empty quacks? William James could never abide people who pretended that there could be an honorable stand without honesty behind it.
Now, don’t, sir! Don’t expose me! Just this once!
This was the first and only time, I’ll swear,—
Look at me,—see, I kneel,—the only time,
I swear, I ever cheated ...
The year was 1864, the Civil War yet burned in the United States, and William James was in his third year at Harvard when Robert Browning published that bitter portrait of the archetypal professional medium.
Browning’s wife, Elizabeth, had died three years earlier, after years of illness. He admitted that he would not have published the poem during her lifetime. She was too ardent a believer, laughingly describing herself once as a follower of every goblin story. “Smile,” she wrote to her sister, “but such things are so indeed.”
Browning indulged her, his lovely, hopeful, delicate wife, with whom he had eloped to Italy in 1848. Theirs was one of society’s more famous romances—the young Robert Browning courting the acclaimed poet Elizabeth Barrett. Gossips whispered of her possessive father’s fury, their flight in the middle of the night, their romantic idyll in Italy. The marriage lasted thirteen years, until her death in 1861. She wrote some of her best poetry when they were together, including Sonnets from the Portuguese, with all its soaring romanticism and famous lines: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
Browning himself wrote only sporadically during the marriage. After her death, though, he threw himself into a series of intense and emotional story-poems, collected in 1864 into a book called Dramatis Personae. Among them, the poem “Mr. Sludge, the Medium” stood out like a thistle in a cluster of red velvet roses, a spiky blast of rage in the midst of love and longing and loss.
In Browning’s poem, Mr. Sludge first begs to have his mediumistic tricks kept secret and then defiantly confesses anyway: he hired children to listen at the keyhole and pass along information about clients. He made ghost hands appear above the table by fixing padded gloves onto a rod attached to his shoes. He used phosphorus to make spirit lights glow during his seances.
To turn, shove, tilt a table, crack your joints,
Manage your feet, dispose your hands aright,
Work wires that twitch the curtains, play the glove
At end o’your slipper,—then put out the lights.
As the medium trade grew, its flaws and its frauds had become more obvious. The Davenport Brothers, after their popular triumph over Harvard academics, had brought their cabinet show to England, only to be caught in some obvious chicanery with ropes. In Liverpool, an angry audience had smashed their cabinet to pieces, later selling the splinters as souvenirs. Ira Davenport called it “a nauseating example to all foreigners of ‘ow the average Englishman does things at ’ome”, and the brothers took their act to the Continent.
But later Ira would reveal many of their better rope tricks to the magician Harry Houdini. The fact was, too many actual Mr. Sludges existed, and too many of them shared their secrets. Professional magicians and actors took to the stage, performing to packed houses, showing that they too could conjure like the Davenports, or, as one theater poster declared, could reproduce “All the Tricks of the Spirit Conjurers.”
One female medium was found to have an ingenious wire dummy, covered with a thin skin of rubber, which could be inflated during a dark séance to resemble the “spirit” form of a small child. Deflated, it could be folded and worn as a stylish bustle, neatly concealed in her skirts. Others hid thin packets of clothing—preferably cobweb-fine French muslin—in their undergarments. The cloth was made bright in spots by luminous oil, made of phosphorus and ether. The oil glowed only faintly in the dark, but bits of glass or paste diamond sewn into the