Daniel Dunglas Home

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.

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.