Mediums, Magicians, and the Cabinet

The cabinet's two histories ran side by side from the beginning. Within Spiritualism it framed the era of the great materialization mediums, none more discussed than Florence Cook, from whose cabinet emerged the white-robed figure called Katie King, investigated in the 1870s by the chemist William Crookes, whose favorable testimony remains among the most argued-over documents of psychical research. Alex Owen's study of Victorian mediumship reads the cabinet seance as a theater in which young women, entranced and curtained, briefly commanded rooms of adults in ways ordinary life never allowed them.

Outside the movement, the cabinet belonged to the magicians. John Nevil Maskelyne began his career in 1865 by replicating the Davenport performance openly as trickery, and stage conjurors have kept a version of the act alive ever since; Houdini, late in life, made a public specialty of duplicating and exposing cabinet phenomena, and several celebrated mediums were caught in flagrant fraud when sitters seized the materialized form or lit an unexpected match. The exposures never quite killed the practice, and small circles of physical mediumship still sit with cabinets today, but its great age ended with the Victorians. What survives everywhere is the image: the curtained box from which something comes, half sacred and half showbusiness, which is an honest summary of the seance era itself.