Mr Sludge

The following short passage  is taken from one of my ghost stories set in late Victorian England. All of the characters but one are fictitious. The ‘reveal’ directly follows:

…. Miss Fiske nodded her head as one accustomed to doubt. “Ah we have a Voltaire amongst us; and yet had you been privileged to witness, as I have, the incomparable Daniel Dunglas Home floating from an upper-story bedroom window, passing with complete equanimity across a street seventy feet above—he raised his hat, sir, before re-entering his house by a sitting-room window.” Miss Fiske stared at each of them in turn. “A mystery most profound as is the Lord who allows such things.”

“The problem is, which lord?” the bishop muttered in an audible whisper. Eleanor sighed, sensing

another sermon coming on. 

“This restless doubting; this endless search for meaning in a world capering on the edge of lunacy, truly reflects the emptiness of our Godless time. Where has our puerile faith in technology, progress and profit for profit’s sake left us? Our sweet Lord who for our sins died on a pagan cross is to be replaced by…table rapping?" The bishop sighed deeply.  “This Gaderene rush towards that bleak precipice called progress…how many poor souls have been left behind, crushed beneath the wheels of mammon? How many souls, of the lower orders now find themselves embracing any and every ideology that may alleviate their situation…? How…” 

Laura cut him off. “I have always tended to side with Mr Scrooge on such matters. It was he— correct me if I am wrong my dear Septimus— that dismissed the spirit of poor Marley as a piece of undigested beef.”

The bishop considered the theological implications for a moment and allowed himself a tolerant smile. 

“Is it only through trance that the spirits can be contacted?” Eleanor asked. 

“The less gifted can of course avail themselves of the Planchette.” Miss Fiske shuddered delicately as if to suggest that such devices were little more than ethereal carving knives. “They are I believe quite popular amongst those for whom the other world is but a parlour game. Indeed, I do believe that there is now published ‘Spirit Rapping Made Easy.’” She shuddered again. “Can you imagine?”

            “Consecration in Five Easy Steps, perhaps?” Eleanor smiled sweetly at the bishop then turned again to the still shuddering medium. “Yes, indeed I do sympathise, Miss Fiske.”

Miss Philippa Fiske, though I wish otherwise, is fictional. Daniel Dunglas Home is not fictional, neither by all accounts was his ability to levitate at the drop of a hat.

An intimate account of his powers was given by Princess Pauline Metternich  in 1863 when with fifteen guests they sat around a table in a richly furnished room. “He was very pale,” the princess later wrote, “with light china-blue eyes, reddish hair thick and abundant but not inordinately long.”

Sitting on an armchair, someway from the table, Home sank into a trance. Soon after, taps were heard, sounds came from the chandelier and a chair moved across the room. A posy of violets drifted across the room from the piano and landed on Princess Pauline’s lap.

Some guests felt unseen hands and sensed movement beneath the table. The lights were switched on, the tablecloth removed, and table and floor thoroughly examined. Nothing was found. Suitably impressed, they adjourned for afternoon tea. 

Daniel Home came from a family of seers but as a small boy emigrated to America in the care of his uncle and aunt. His gifts were quickly recognised, so much so he was kicked out of his aunt’s God-fearing home and thereafter spent his life moving from place to place. In August 1852, at the home of a Connecticut silk manufacturer, he levitated several times during a séance, on one occasion touching the ceiling. 

Shortly after, he moved to England where he became a sensation. Lord Brougham, a former Chancellor and the scientist Sir David Brewer, witnessed a table lifting off the floor, an accordion and a handbell sounding without being touched. Despite a thorough investigation no trickery or rational explanation was found.

Between 1871 – 1873 the British scientist Sir William Crookes investigated Home’s ‘powers.’ On one occasion, he placed an accordion within an electrified cage to prevent tampering or fraud. The accordion sounded without Home touching the keys, and Crooke concluded that Home had genuine power.

Charles Darwin, too, was intrigued by Daniel Dunglas Home but was content to sit on the fence: “I cannot disbelieve Mr Crooke’s statement, nor can I believe in his result.”

One of his earliest fans was the poet Elizabeth Barret Browning. Both she and her husband, Robert Browning attended one of his seances in 1855 where ghostly hands placed a wreath of clematis on her head. Robert Browning, on the other hand despised the man, forbidding “this dungball” from his house and later writing a poem about him: “Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium.’”

Despite Robert Browning’s disapproval, Daniel Dunglas Home was famous throughout Europe, conducting seances for Napoleon III of France, Tsar Alexander II and a ‘veritable who’s who of Victorian society.' He died in Paris in 1886 and was buried in the Russian cemetery in that city.