The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [177]
45: One of the first mediums: Crookes’s meeting with the planchette-wielding medium is reviewed in the Encyclopedia for Psychical Research, 199-201.
48: “We speak advisedly”: Podmore, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, 1:150-52, cites the article in Quarterly Review, Oct. 1871, and the fact that it was written anonymously by the famed physiologist W B. Carpenter. Podmore, himself a notable psychic skeptic, characterizes Carpenter’s attack on Crookes and Varley as “impaired by extraordinary egotism and malevolence.” Crookes lodged a formal complaint against Carpenter with the Council of the Royal Society, forcing it to pass a resolution acknowledging that the statements in the Review had been inaccurate. But the incident did Carpenter no harm; the following year he was elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
49: “a December evening in 1871”: Myers’s thoughts are described in Myers, Fragments of Inner Life; and in Myers’s obituary of Sidgwick in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 15 (1901): 452-62.
3. Lights and Shadows
52: “a much perplexed man”: Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York: D. Appleton, 1888).
53: “worthless residuum of Spiritualism”: The conclusion of Crookes, “Spiritualism Viewed by the Light of Modern Science.”
54: “The impregnable position of science”: John Tyndall, “Address Delivered before the British Association Assembled at Belfast, with Additions” (London: Longmans, Green, 1874). The text can be found at: http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belrast.html.
55: “his warmest sympathies but no more”: Gurney’s first refusal to join in ghost hunting is cited in a letter from Sidgwick to Myers, from Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, 288. Edmund Gurney has long intrigued historians. There are two books that focus on him particularly. Gordon Epperson, The Mind of Edmund Gurney (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), offers a very kind portrait. Trevor H. Hall, in The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1964), portrays the man as extraordinarily unstable. A balanced picture is given in Gauld, Founders of Psychical Research.
55: “those grand mysterious phenomena”: A. R. Wallace, “A Defense of Modern Spiritualism,” Fortnightly Review 15 (1874). 56: “mystery of the Universe”: Gurney to WJ, Sept. 23, 1883, Houghton.
56: their first serious investigation: The Newcastle investigations are described in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick; and Gauld, Founders of Psychical Research, 107-14.
56: Sidgwick’s attraction to Nora Balfour: The courtship and eventual marriage of Henry Sidgwick and Eleanor Balfour is based on accounts in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, 118, 301—306; and, Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1938), 48-50.
59: “prepared to be converted”: Letter from Rayleigh to his mother, written after talking with Crookes and attending a sitting with Kate Fox-Jencken, cited in Oppenheim, Other World, 331. Rayleigh’s overall position on psychical research is outlined in Haynes, Society for Psychical Research, 198-99.
59: “Everything is always better”: Letter to Myers in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, 301; Rayleigh letter to Sidgwick in Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, 50.
59: new fad of “apports”: Wallace wrote up his report on apports in the Spiritualist, Feb. 1, 1867.
60: a very pretty new medium: Among the many profiles of Anna Eva Fay, my favorite is in Eric J. Dingwall, The Critic’s Dilemma (privately printed, 1966), 40-49, which does a terrific job of capturing her as a cheat and a complete charmer. The investigations of the Sidgwick group and interactions with William Crookes are recounted in Gauld, Founders of Psychical Research; Podmore, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, 2:85, and Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, 294.
61: Home took a fierce stand: D. D. Home, Lights and Shadows