Daniel Dunglas Home was born near Edinburgh in 1833 and emigrated as a child to relatives in the United States, where he began giving seances as a teenager in the early 1850s, at the height of American Spiritualism's first great popular wave following the Fox sisters' rappings. He returned to Britain in 1855 and spent most of the rest of his career moving through the drawing rooms of the European aristocracy, giving sittings for figures that eventually included Napoleon III of France and other royal and noble households across the continent, phenomena that reportedly included levitating tables and himself, playing an accordion held in a locked cage with no visible hand upon it, and handling burning coals without apparent injury.
What set Home apart from the era's many exposed frauds was less any single piece of evidence than the accumulated failure, across three decades of hostile scrutiny by skeptics determined to catch him, to produce a conclusive exposure, together with his own insistence, honored throughout his career, on never accepting payment for a sitting, a practice that put him in a different financial and reputational position than the professional mediums his critics could dismiss as simply performing for money. He was expelled from the Spiritualist community itself for a period after a wealthy widow, Jane Lyon, later successfully sued him in 1868 to recover a large gift she claimed he had improperly induced from her, the one serious legal blot on a record otherwise remarkably free of proven deception.