Exports to Britain

Why the Victorians saw ghosts: five

It wasn't long before the rapping-type séances popularised by the Fox sisters in the late 1840s spread abroad—here to Britain. The first emissary to arrive at these shores was Mrs Maria B. Hayden (1826-1883). Born in Nova Scotia, she married one William R. Hayden in a ceremony in Boston in 1850. She was his second wife. Maria's mediumship began in the March or April of 1851, at the age of 25, after a séance held by the Haydens at their Hartford home in Connecticut, New England. The medium they invited to preside over the occasion was an 18-year-old youth, Daniel Home (pronounced "Hume", of whom we will learn more next month). If not his first séance, it was at least one of his very earliest. According to Home in his memoirs, Incidents in my Life (1863), the evening was reported in the local press by Maria's husband, William, who described how Home had managed to move a table about the room without anybody touching it.

As an important aside, William Hayden is usually depicted as a wealthy and influential newsman, congressional reporter, and eventual editor of the Boston Atlas, as well as being a dedicated abolitionist. This view, which has been the prevailing one since the late Victorian period, has recently been challenged by a direct descendant of Maria Hayden, who presents a compelling case that he was in fact a family physician. Based on the very limited evidence I could find of his published writings (one letter to the editor of an American newspaper concerning the couple's first few months in London, which, as you will see, reads exactly like an ordinary letter-to-the-editor), I would tend to agree. Equally, if he were a physician, it would go some way to explain why in later years Maria Hayden herself trained as a doctor, at a time when few women would have the opportunity or receive the encouragement to do so.

After achieving a certain degree of success at table rapping, Maria and her husband set sail for Britain in October 1852 with the sole aim of spreading the spiritualist message. Unfortunately the couple met with a rather hostile reception in London, as the letter written by her husband attests:

"22 QUEEN ANNE STREET, CAVENDISH SQUARE, LONDON, Feb. 4, 1853. Dear Sir– I think I promised, before leaving New York, in September last, to write to you and let you know how we succeeded in England…Thus far we have had much opposition to contend against, but have met with a remarkable few failures. The worst was that of two of Dickens' friends, who paid Mrs. H. a visit a few days after her arrival. They evidently came with the intention of having every thing [go] wrong, and they nearly succeeded to their mind." [excerpt of letter from William R. Hayden to Samuel Byron Brittan, editor of the American weekly periodical The Spiritual Telegraph]

George Henry Lewes, who was later to become the partner of the author George Eliot, played an especially mean trick on Mrs Hayden. Unseen by Maria, he wrote out a question on a sheet of paper: "Is Mrs Hayden an impostor?" The spirit controlling Maria rapped out: "Yes." Lewes went on to claim this as an admission of her guilt.

Though the literary world may not have been kind to her, Maria Hayden was not without her supporters. Both Sir Charles Isham, 10th Baronet of Isham, and Dr Ashburner, one of the Royal physicians, defended her very publicly in the press. Another convert to her cause was Professor Augustus de Morgan, philosopher and mathematician, whose work on logic, differential calculus, and probability is still remembered to this day. This is his recollection of one of the séances he attended:

"At a late period in the evening, after nearly three hours of experiment, Mrs. Hayden having risen, and talking at another table while taking refreshment, a child suddenly called out, "Will all the spirits who have been here this evening rap together?" The words were no sooner uttered than a hailstorm of knitting-needles was heard, crowded into certainly less than two seconds; the big needle sounds of the men, and the little ones of the women and children, being clearly distinguishable, but perfectly disorderly in their arrival." [from Professor de Morgan's preface to his wife's book, From Matter to Spirit, 1863]

It's been said that Maria had a limited mediumship consisting mainly of raps, but, as we've seen in the case of George Henry Lewes, she was also a "test" medium, in that she fielded questions where the answers were known only to the sitter. At least one person was greatly impressed by Mrs Hayden's talents in this regard—the tragedian actor Charles Young. Here is an account of their meeting—though be aware, confusingly it is in fact written by his son, the Rev. Julian Young, some years later:

"1853, APRIL 19TH. I went up to London this day for the purpose of consulting my lawyers on a subject of some importance to myself, and having heard much of a Mrs. Hayden, an American lady, as a spiritual medium, I resolved, as I was in town, to…judge of her gifts for myself…I was so astounded by the correctness of the answers I received to my inquiries that I told the gentleman who was with me that I wanted particularly to ask a question to the nature of which I did not wish him to be privy, and that I should be obliged to him if he would go into the adjoining room for a few minutes. On his doing so I resumed my dialogue with Mrs. Hayden.
Mr. Charles Young: I have induced my friend to withdraw because I did not wish him to know the question I want to put, but I am equally anxious that you should not know it either, and yet, if I understand rightly, no answer can be transmitted to me except through you. What is to be done under these circumstances?
Mrs. Hayden: Ask your question in such a form that the answer returned shall represent by one word the salient idea in your mind.
Mr. Charles Young: I will try. Will what I am threatened with take place?
Mrs. Hayden: No.
Mr. Charles Young: That is unsatisfactory. It is easy to say Yes or No, but the value of the affirmation or negation will depend on the conviction I have that you know what I am thinking of. Give me one word which shall show that you have the clue to my thoughts.
Mrs. Hayden: Will.
Now, a will by which I had benefited was threatened to be disputed. I wished to know whether the threat would be carried out. The answer I received was correct." [The Spiritualist, November 22nd, 1878]

Despite Maria Hayden's séances being essentially private, domestic affairs, by April she was charging a fee of one guinea (one pound and one shilling; i.e., twenty-one shillings in total) per person to attend them. Newsman or not, in May her husband William did set up a magazine, The Spirit World, the first spiritualist publication in Britain, though it only ran to one edition. The Haydens remained for a year in England, and returned to America at the end of 1853. Maria retained an active interest all things psychic even after becoming a doctor. She was noted for her clairvoyant abilities, as well as her aptitude for psychometry (diving insights by holding an object in her hands).

Although spiritualism may have failed to take root in London, it certainly found a home in Yorkshire when a Mr David Richmond, an American Shaker, brought the art of table-turning to the town of Keighley in the early 1850s. By 1854 "Tea and Table-Turning" had become an indispensable social pastime in the north of England, as the movement rapidly spread to neighbouring county of Lancashire. Funded by his Yorkshire contact, Mr David Weatherhead, at whose home he had first demonstrated table-turning, Richmond set up The Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph in 1855. It proved far more successful than William Hayden's effort as the ground had been better prepared. Spiritualism had finally gained a foothold in Britain, but via the non-commercial domestic route.

Next month: Guess who's coming to dinner?—the extraordinary life of medium Daniel Dunglas Home

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Image:
Queen Victoria, 1887
Photograph by AlexanderBassano (1829-1913)


Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart.

Changing attitudes to death during the American Civil War

Why the Victorians saw ghosts: four

Approximately 700,000 soldiers and civilians lost their lives in the American Civil War (1861-1864) and some 300,000 others were injured. That's more than a million people in total. Although spiritualism was already popular prior to 1861, the fact that so many families were touched by death during this period is clearly the reason why the number of spiritualist followers grew. So this month I'll be looking at one of the lesser contributing factors instead: how the use of a new technology not only changed the way that everybody perceived war, but, for the first time in human history, offered those who'd lost relatives a way to remember their loved ones in perpetuity.

They say that history is written by the victors. They forget to add that, since the dawn of civilization, history has been drawn, painted, carved and cast in bronze by them too. For millennia artists have strived to immortalize great, heroic battles on paper, metal, stone and canvas. Above you will see such a painting, The Battle of Antietam by Thure de Thulstrup, typical of how war was depicted in the mid-nineteenth century. Take a good look at it, because from the mid-1850's on, prints made by using a photographic process called wet-plate collodion radically altered how war was depicted.

The wet-plate collodion process, which was first introduced in 1851, was the brainchild of a man named Frederick Scott Archer. It had some distinct advantages over its two major competitors. Unlike daguerreotypes, which were one-off originals, collodion plates were negatives that could be printed countless times; unlike calotypes (also known as Talbotypes) whose negatives were made of paper, the glass plates of the collodion process gave sharp prints with an extraordinary tonal range that were rivalled only by daguerreotypes. But it also had one major disadvantage. The plates had to be coated in an emulsion and sensitized in a darkroom, exposed in a camera, then developed in the darkroom before the jellied emulsion dried—all in a matter of ten minutes. While this might seem to make it a strange choice for the documenting of wars, the truth is it was the only choice: daguerreotypes could not be printed, and calotypes were only capable of producing flat, sketch-like images.

 

Even so, it required a great deal of ingenuity, dedication and money to go and work on the battlefield, as each photographer needed a travelling darkroom in which to prepare and develop their plates. The one you see here dates from 1855. It belonged to the English photographer Roger Fenton, who used it in the Crimean War. The man seated in the driver's seat is Marcus Sparling, Fenton's assistant. Although from its inception the wet-plate process was used to record a number of wars, it wasn't until 1861 that it was used in a thoroughly planned and organised way. Mathew Brady, a New York photographer of some standing (it is his portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln in the previous post), came up with the idea of founding a company dedicated to documenting the American Civil War. He received Lincoln's blessing in 1861 on the proviso that he finance the project himself.

Brady employed 23 men, each of whom he equipped at enormous expense with a travelling darkroom. He spent approximately $100,000 on making some 10,000 plates, all of them bearing his name though few were actually taken by the man himself. His first collection of prints, entitled "The Dead of Antietam", was exhibited at his New York gallery in the October of 1862. The effect on the American public could not have been more startling. Where Roger Fenton had deliberately shied away from photographing dead bodies, Brady's employees did not. The dead, in fact, made excellent subjects, as exposure times for this period were upwards of several seconds, which ruled out the possibility of capturing live combat. The grim realities of death that were barely touched upon in painted scenes such as the one that heads this post could no longer be ignored.

 

 

While this caused a massive shift in the public's consciousness and understanding of war, it is probably the carte-de-visite photograph, the wet-plate's smaller, humbler cousin, that contributed more to the spurring on of spiritualism during this period. Cartes-de-visite were made on the same glass plates, but with a special camera that had eight separate lenses, each of which could be uncovered singly to give the sitter eight different poses, or uncovered collectively to give eight practically identical versions of the same pose. Once printed, the photos were cut up and pasted on to sturdy backing-cards, to be sent home to sweethearts, family and friends. As unimaginable as it may seem, this is the first war where ordinary enlisted soldiers were able do such a thing. Prior to this, having a likeness made before going off to die in battle (and remember, as photography was in its infancy, we're talking about drawings or paintings) was beyond the pocket of most.

When the war ended in 1864, the U.S. government declined to buy Brady's extensive collection of photographs, as he had hoped they would. The public, who had had their fill of death, had grown weary of his images. He was forced to sell his New York City studio and go into bankruptcy. Although Congress granted him $25,000 in 1875, for the rest of his life he remained in debt and died penniless in the charity ward of a New York hospital in 1896.

 

Next month: exporting spiritualism abroad

Images:

Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862.
Thure de Thulstrup (1846-1930); published 1887

The artist's van
Photograph by Roger Fenton (1819–1869), 1855; digital ID cph.3g09240 from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division

Confederate dead at the Battle of Spotsylvania, May 18 1864

Lt. Col. Walter R. Robbins, 1st New Jersey Cavalry, date unknown
Carte-de-visite by Good and Stokes Ltd, Trenton, New Jersey
New Jersey Department of State

Christian A. Fleetwood in uniform, 1884
Carte-de-visite, photographer unknown
Library of Congress

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Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart.

A séance in the White House

Why the Victorians saw ghosts: three

In the early 1860s, Washington, D.C. was not the place that we picture today. The Washington Canal, which flowed into the Potomac River a little to the south of the White House, was used as a cesspit and sewer, the stench of which permeated the presidential mansion every summer. One contemporary summed it up neatly: "The ghosts of twenty thousand drowned cats come in nights through the South Windows". Pestilence reigned, and not even the White House was exempt from its grip, as Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, discovered to their cost when their third son, Willie, contracted typhoid fever and died in the February of 1962.

By the start of June, as summer arrived, Mary Lincoln insisted that the family quit the city and relocate to their favourite retreat, a former plantation a few miles north of the capital that had been redeveloped by the banker George Riggs as an estate to house former military men: The Soldiers' Home. It was here that they stayed until mid-November, in the humbly-named but really rather grand Riggs Cottage. Although the cottage was light and airy, as the estate was set on a higher elevation than the neighbouring city, it was often far from peaceful. In addition to the braying of nearly two thousand mules stabled nearby, there was also the din of drums, rifles and band practice to contend with from Lincoln's hundred-strong presidential guard.

Despite the noise and the disruptions of war, the Lincolns entertained regularly. One particular guest that summer, at Mary's invitation, was a man calling himself Lord Colchester, a trance medium who claimed to be the illegitimate son of an English duke. In her desire for some form of contact from her beloved son, Willie, and her second-born, Eddie, who had died some years earlier, Mary was only too keen to avail herself of his services. And so she arranged for a séance to be held in the Riggs Cottage library.

As the participants seated themselves around the table, Colchester produced a number of musical instruments—a banjo, some bells and a drum—and laid them out on top. Everybody held hands and the lights were extinguished. At first nothing happened. Then came some loud raps, some scratching sounds, the twang of the banjo. Strands of hair were pulled; people's skin was pinched. Mary was delighted.

Lincoln was sufficiently concerned by this séance to ask Dr Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, to investigate. Unable to determine exactly how Colchester managed to produce his phenomena, he turned to the journalist, Noah Brooks, for help. Brooks, who, after the death of his wife earlier that year, had been sent by the Sacramento Daily Union to cover the Lincoln administration, had been readily accepted into the Lincoln household as if he were a long-lost friend. And quite a friend he proved to be.

That evening in the dimly-lit library, with the medium's selection of musical instruments set out before them, the company once more joined hands and again the lights were extinguished. Suddenly the sound of a drum was heard, hovering high above their heads. This is Noah Brooks's own account of what happened next:

"Loosening my hands from my neighbors', who were unbelievers, I rose, and, grasping in the direction of the drumbeat, grabbed a very solid and fleshy hand in which was held a bell that was being thumped on a drum-head. I shouted, 'Strike a light!' My friend, after what appeared to be an unconscionable length of time, lighted a match; but meanwhile somebody had dealt me a severe blow with the drum, the edge of which cut a slight wound on my forehead. When the gas was finally lighted, the singular spectacle was presented of 'the son of the duke' firmly grasped by a man whose forehead was covered with blood, while the arrested scion of nobility was glowering at the drum and bells which he still held in his hands."

Undeterred by the events at the Soldiers' Home, on her return to the White House in November Mary sought solace at the two-storey Georgetown home of a Mr and Mrs Cranston Laurie and their daughter Belle, at what was then 21 First Street (3226 N Street today). Mr Laurie was chief clerk of the Post Office Service and many of his spiritualist acquaintances held equally high government posts; Mrs Laurie and her daughter were both trance mediums of some renown. On New Year's Day 1863, Mary Lincoln revealed to a friend that she had attended a number of séances there, and that Mrs Laurie had made wonderful revelations to her about her dead son, Willie, and had received communications that her husband's cabinet was full of enemies plotting against him for their own ends.

However, according to Nettie Colburn Maynard in her memoir "Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?", published many years later in 1891, it was Nettie herself who acted as medium, and not Mrs Laurie or Belle, on the evening of February 5th 1863 when President Lincoln accompanied his wife to one of the Lauries' popular séances. When Lincoln asked the spirit she had channelled about the current situation regarding the war, she writes that he received the following reply:

'…That a very precarious state of things existed at the front, where General Hooker had just taken command. The army was totally demoralized; regiments stacking arms, refusing to obey orders or to do duty; threatening a general retreat; declaring their purpose to return to Washington. A vivid picture was drawn of the terrible state of affairs, greatly to the surprise of all present, save the chief to whom the words were addressed. When the picture had been painted in vivid colors, Mr. Lincoln quietly remarked: "You seem to understand the situation. Can you point out the remedy?"'

The remedy suggested was that he go to the front in person, taking with him his wife and children, and, avoiding the high-grade officers, seek out the tents of private soldiers and enquire into their grievances. In other words, that he should show himself to be "the Father of the People".

Although Nettie Colburn Maynard may have been embroidering the truth somewhat (many if not most of her claims are rather doubtful, and there are reports—though these too are dubious—that it was the Lauries' daughter Belle who acted as medium on that night), in the simple matter of the president's attendance at this séance, I think this at least is true, for something certainly triggered the extraordinary event that came next. Barely seven weeks later, on the 23rd of April, 1863, President Lincoln—a lifelong skeptic—organised his own séance…in the White House.

The evening was attended by his wife, a reporter from the Boston Gazette, two of his Cabinet Secretaries, Stanton and Welles. His medium of choice was a man named Charles E. Shockle. The séance began with a few loud raps and a false start or two, but eventually Shockle came through with a message from Henry Knox, George Washington's Secretary of War: "Haste makes waste, but delays cause vexations". When Lincoln asked when the revolt would be put down, Knox replied that a lively discussion held between Washington, Franklin and Napoleon had produced a variety of answers, which he then went on to summarise for the president. This is reportedly Lincoln's rather wry response:

"Well, opinions differ among the saints as well as among the sinners. They don't seem to understand running the machines among the celestials much better than we do. Their talk and advice sound very much like the talk of my cabinet."

It was a tongue-in-cheek skeptic's comment. Quite why Lincoln held his séance is anyone's guess, but the inclusion of a reporter from the Boston Gazette among the party—and not his trusted friend Noah Brooks—suggests that he may have contrived it as a publicity stunt, and one in which he was unwilling to involve his friend. And yet the article that subsequently appeared in the Gazette was reprinted in Brooks's Sacramento Daily Union some two months later.

Mary Todd Lincoln was to remain in the thrall of spiritualism for the rest of her life, and we will be revisiting her occasionally, as she still has a part to play in its story.

Next month: The Civil War—how the war itself and an emerging technology both contributed to the rising tide of spiritualism

Image:

Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-1882)
Photograph by Mathew Brady (1822-1896), 1861

Find out more at michaelgallagherwrites.com and Goodreads


Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart.