The Spiritualist movement began in mid-19th century America with the emergence of ‘mediums’ such as the Fox sisters who claimed to be in touch with a spiritual world inhabited by nonmaterial beings. By 1853, when the song ‘Spirit Rappings’ was published, the first of many ‘rap’ songs (‘Softly, softly, hear the rustle of the spirits’ airy wings’), mediums were appearing all America. One of them was a 22-year-old Scot whose family had emigrated to Connecticut, Daniel Dunglas Home (he believed his father was an illegitimate grandson of the Earl of Home). Home’s mother died in 1850 and his aunt threw him out of the family home because she couldn’t bear the frequent raps which now accompanied his presence.
Mediumship became a viable career in those days, but Home, conscious of being a gentleman, did not charge for seances; instead, in a common solution, he received ‘gifts’. Home returned in 1855 to a Britain in which spiritualism was a growing belief system; he found sympathetic hosts to live with and regular seances to manage. Witnesses would also claim they saw Home float in and out of windows.
This brings us to what Andrew Lang, in Historical Mysteries (1904), called the ‘great Home-Browning problem’. Elizabeth Barrett Browning admired Home and took her husband, Robert Browning, to a seance (at the house of a Mr Rymer). Robert was not an admirer, and was not amused to receive what he called ‘a kind of soft and fleshy pat’ on his knee under the table (rumours about Home’s sexuality abounded). A wreath of clematis floated up from the table and landed on the head of Elizabeth, which possibly amused Robert even less.
A few days later, Home called on the Brownings, but as Lang says: ‘Mr. Browning declined to notice Home; there was a scene, and Mrs Browning (who was later a three-quarters believer in ‘spirits’) was distressed’ (Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, later wrote: ‘Mrs B. shrieks too much . . .I don’t think it necessary to say anything of her “spiritisms” – damn it".
What Happened Next
Psychic research, according to Gladstone, was ‘the most important work being done in the world today’. Others disagreed. After Elizabeth died, Robert published in 1865 a scathing attack on Home, the poem ‘Mr Sludge, the Medium’:
Oh Lord! I little thought, sir, yesterday,
When your departed mother spoke those words
Of peace through me, and moved you, sir, so much,
You gave me—(very kind it was of you)
These shirt-studs—(better take them back again. . .
Home retaliated by alleging that Browning was jealous because the spirits had judged Elizabeth the better poet by awarding her the clematis wreath. Home was later befriended by a widow who gave him a huge sum of money, but then demanded it back when the spirits told her to. The case went to court, where Home complained ‘I was a mere toy to her, I felt my degradation more and more with every day that passed’; The widow said ’I once just put my lips to his forehead. . .But only once. You see, I am not so fond of kissing’. The judge, describing spiritualism as ‘mischievous nonsense’, found against Home, who moved in for a while with the future Earl of Dunraven, whose ‘loins’ he was said to shampoo. Home married twice, and converted twice, to Roman Catholicism (he was expelled from Rome for necromancy) and Greek Orthodoxy, and died in France in 1886.