The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [39]
“We could find no other convenient term,” explained Myers, “under which to embrace a group of subjects that lie on or outside the boundaries of recognized science.”
Henry Sidgwick, the first president, began on a chiding note, declaring that he and his colleagues had been left no choice but to invent a science, to create a support system for those who wanted to do the work. The SPR came into existence by necessity, Sidgwick said, founded because there were questions—of immortality and of humanity-that demanded investigation. And it was founded, he said, because conventional science had tried to block even the most modest of inquiries along those lines. The normally soft-spoken Sidgwick called that interference “a scandal to the enlightened age in which we live.”
But he didn’t waste undue time on the past; they all agreed that a formidable job lay ahead. Tasks were assigned, with Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney responsible for investigating apparitions and William Barrett heading the thought-transference committee. Nora Sidgwick was put in charge of investigating ghosts, though privately confessing to her husband that she didn’t believe in them.
William Crookes attended that first meeting, as did Alfred Russel Wallace, although the latter had expressed some concern over Sidgwick’s too-skeptical approach to the field. In addition to Nora, the Balfour family was amply represented by Gerald and Arthur Balfour, their sister Evelyn, and her husband, Lord Rayleigh. Aside from the familiar supporters, the society also attracted an impressive array of new faces. The SPR’s membership list grew rapidly to more than two hundred. It included painters, clergymen, politicians, spiritualists, and a cast of writers that ranged from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (at the time Britain’s poet laureate) to Leslie Stephen, editor of the voluminous and influential Dictionary of National Biography (and father of a baby girl, born less than a month earlier, who would become the novelist Virginia Woolf). The society also attracted the essayist and social critic John Ruskin and the Reverend Charles L. Dodgson, who wrote his Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fantasies under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
The American writer Samuel Clemens joined as well. Clemens had gained international acclaim for his 1876 novel of unruly boyhood, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, written under the pen name Mark Twain. The novelist had a specific purpose in joining, entirely removed from his chosen career. He wanted an explanation for a dream that had haunted him for twenty-four years:
In 1858 the Clemens brothers, Sam and Henry, were training to be riverboat captains, working the Mississippi River together on a big, steam-powered paddle-wheeler called the Pennsylvania. On an early June evening, the boat docked in Saint Louis, and the brothers went ashore to visit their sister. After dinner, Henry went back to the Pennsylvania. Sam stayed the night at his sister’s house.
Just as Sam Clemens started to slide into sleep, an image formed, a horrifyingly detailed dream in which he saw his younger brother’s body tucked into a casket. The coffin lay balanced across two chairs. Flowers sprayed across Henry’s unmoving chest, a cascade of white roses with a single red bloom in their center.
Samuel Clemens sat up in bed, gasping, his heart pounding. He stumbled downstairs, half awake, the dream still so real that he was braced against the sight of his brother’s body in the parlor. He’d been almost shocked to find the parlor quiet and dark, its chairs empty of dead men, its air unscented by roses.
Just a dream, he told himself, just a dream.
When Sam returned to the Pennsylvania that morning, his brother was waiting—whole, healthy, a little sleepy in the morning light. But they were separated again; the captain transferred Sam over to help on a companion boat, one that