The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [16]
Such exposes delighted the critics of the spiritualist movements. Scientists rejoiced in what they hoped would lead to a new skepticism. And religious leaders, dismayed to find spiritualist churches the fastest-growing houses of worship, renewed their efforts to discredit the movement. In a book called Spiritualism Unveiled, a prominent theologian described spiritualists as wife beaters, sexual deviants, and anti-Christian: “They are as unlike in their moral influence as are Christ and Belial.”
For the moment, it was the latter accusation that most irked the spiritualists, and they were quick to hit back with their own perspective on the morality of the day. “Are those who play tricks and fling about instruments spirits from Heaven?” inquired one spiritualist newspaper in an impassioned editorial. “Yes, God sends them, to teach us this, if nothing more: that He has servants of all grades and tastes ready to do all kinds of work and He has here sent what you call low and harlequin spirits to a low and very sensual age.”
BUT ROBERT BROWNING wasn’t writing only about the Davenports and their ilk when he penned “Mr. Sludge.” As everyone knew—at least, everyone in literary circles—the talented, amoral, fluently devious Mr. Sludge was a barely disguised caricature of Daniel Dunglas Home.
Home had returned to England after a sweep across Europe so successful that the Roman Catholic Church charged him with witchcraft. While in Russia, he had married a young goddaughter of the tsar with due pomp (the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, stood as best man, Alexei Tolstoy as groomsman). Respectability had done nothing to alter Home’s ethereal, inexplicable nature. He was “Stranger than Fiction,” according to a magazine article about him written in 1860, still widely considered the best description known of the medium—and the best counter to Browning’s long-standing dislike of the man. The magazine writer described a sitting with Home in which the medium “rose from his chair, four or five feet from the ground.... We saw his figure pass from one side of the window to the other, feet foremost, lying horizontally in the air. He spoke to us as he passed, and told us that he would then return the reverse way and re-cross the window, which he did.”
This description appeared in a new British literary magazine, The Cornhill, edited by the famously sharp-tongued writer William Makepeace Thackeray, whose 1848 novel Vanity Fair had established him as a man more than willing to skewer pretensions. Yet Thackeray not only approved the article, he wrote an editor’s note vouching for the “good faith and honorable character” of its author. Thackeray had friends in scientific circles. He had no doubt they were unhappy; he found himself accused, outright, of being complicit in the spread of spirit fraud. When confronted by one furious scientist, Thackeray simply cited his own experience: “It is all very well for you, who have probably never seen any spiritual manifestations to talk as you do; but had you seen what I have witnessed, you would hold a different opinion.”
To his believers, Home offered something that neither irate scientists nor resentful poets seemed able to counter. He boasted a flamboyant mystic appeal that the staunch mainline Protestant churches of the establishment of America and Britain—Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Methodists—neither could nor would attempt to match. Perhaps most powerfully of all, he and his counterparts offered a glimpse of possibilities through open doors that their critics—churchmen, skeptics, and scientists alike—would slam without a glance.
This was the reality that William James, scientist and scholar, saw as he made his way from his father’s shuddering