Crookes, Browning, and a Contested Legacy

The chemist and physicist William Crookes, already a fellow of the Royal Society, undertook a formal scientific investigation of Home's phenomena in the early 1870s using instruments of his own design intended to measure force exerted at a distance, and published results describing effects he could not explain by ordinary means, a conclusion that damaged Crookes's own scientific reputation among colleagues who considered the entire investigation methodologically compromised by insufficient controls against sleight of hand, whatever Crookes's genuine scientific standing in other fields. The Crookes investigation remains, to this day, the single piece of evidence Home's modern defenders and his skeptics argue over most, each reading the same published results as either the best case for genuine paranormal phenomena in the Spiritualist movement or the clearest case of an eminent scientist fooled by a skilled performer.

Home's fame reached literary London as well: the poet Robert Browning, deeply skeptical of a seance his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning had found convincing, is generally understood to have aimed his poem Mr. Sludge, The Medium, published in 1864, directly at Home, portraying the medium as a self-justifying fraud even as Elizabeth herself remained a believer until her death. Home retired from active mediumship in the 1870s due to declining health from tuberculosis and died in France in 1886; unlike most of his contemporaries in the profession, no definitive exposure of trickery in his sittings was ever documented, a fact that keeps him, alone among Victorian mediums, a genuinely contested rather than a settled case in the history of Spiritualism.