“Dropping his studies in the realms of proverbial philosophy, that amiable mid-Victorian butt, Martin Tupper, toyed for a time with spiritualism. He attended one of Mrs Hall’s séances, when, with Home as the medium, the company included ‘a countess, the widow of a colonel, and a naval lieutenant’. As a preliminary, they were instructed to ‘kneel down and offer up a prayer’. This appears to have been effective, since the table rose from the floor, raps resounded by the dozen, and Home pulled red-hot coals out of the fire with his fingers. Although he had braved battle and the breeze often enough, such a spectacle was apparently too much for the representative of the senior service. ‘It quite altered his career’, says Tupper, ‘and, soon afterwards, he took Holy Orders’.”

Horace Wyndham, Mr Sludge, The Medium : Being The Life And Adventures Of Daniel Dunglas Home (1937)

“I not only investigated the so-called supernatural powers of the child known as the Infant Magnet, but, on a public stage, during the performance of certain mysterious phenomena by a young lady who shall be nameless, I consented to be locked up in a dark cabinet with that interesting maiden, whose toilette was superb.”

William Manning, Recollections Of Robert-Houdin, Clockmaker, Electrician, Conjuror (1890)

Half a dozen precautions against premature burial:

“The novelist Wilkie Collins always left a letter on his dressing-table adjuring anyone finding him dead to call a doctor and make certain, Harriet Martineau left her doctor ten pounds to see that her head was amputated before burial, the actress Ada Cavendish willed that her jugular vein be cut before interment, and the journalist Edmund Yates did likewise, providing twenty guineas as a fee for the officiating surgeon. Lady Burton provided for her heart to be pierced with a needle, while Meyerbeer arranged to have bells tied to his extremities when he was dead.”

Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers (1972)

Here, for your edification and instruction, are some more absolutely authentic photographs of ectoplasm. It is powerful stuff, remember. Shade your eyes!

“The word ‘ectoplasm’ was not known to the Victorians, and after it was coined by the French spiritualist Charles Richet it vied in favour with ‘teleplasm’ and ‘ideoplasm’. Richet had thought up the term after a seance in 1903.

“There are many descriptions in spiritualist literature of a misty vapour issuing from a medium which sometimes solidifies. When the medium Slade was in Australia in 1878 he produced a cloud-like whitish-grey vapour, ‘Dr’ Monck produced a white patch that turned into a cloudy pillar, and D D Home managed to extrude a variety of clouds that formed into hands. In 1885, Eglinton managed a dingy white-looking substance that swayed and throbbed. Madame d’Esperance, an almost forgotten medium born in 1849 and noted for her looks rather than her phenomena, described the production of ectoplasm as though fine threads were being drawn out of the pores of her skin and woven about her face and hands like a spider’s web. The ‘red, sticky matter’ described by Bournemouth medium, Vincent Turvey, was an unusual variation on the theme, and when Florence Cook was manifesting Katie King the latter ‘was connected with the medium by cloudy, faintly luminous threads’.

“Ectoplasm is supposed to have exuded from any or all of the medium’s orifices, and to have been responsive to light, when it would retract. ‘Ectoplasm’ was captured by an investigator early in this [i.e., the twentieth] century; it burned to an ash, leaving a smell as of horn. Chemical analysis revealed the presence of salt and phosphate of calcium. It is perhaps unfortunate that modern chemists have not had the opportunity to try their skills on this mysterious substance.”

Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers (1972)

Sometimes, ectoplasm could appear inexplicably like a piece of net curtain, as in this 1948 photograph of the Middlesbrough medium Minnie Harrison:

“Spasms (kraempfe) are an affection to which almost all sensitives are especially inclined. Many, especially those of a higher degree, suffer from them severely. They form the last term of the series – stomach-ache, head-ache, fainting, spasm. They may be occasioned by magnets, by terrestrial magnetism, by poles of crystals, by amorphous, unipolar, bodies, either odo-positive or odo-negative, by human odic poles, by the prismatic rays of either the solar or lunar spectrum, particularly the green rays, by down passes, but oftener by up passes, by charging and conduction, whether immediate or approximative, by the mere odic atmosphere, by the psychical action of insult, grief, anxiety, fear, annoyance, jealousy, quarrels, mental exertion, joy, or even dreams. They are most conspicuous in the extremities, solar plexus, and head. They can be artificially excited and calmed, or depart naturally. They often follow a tolerably similar course from the toes through the abdomen to the brain, and thence down the spinal cord, like a pass. In most cases they can be more or less easily calmed by down passes. Hence as they are essentially related to sensitiveness, and immediately dependent on odic motions, they undoubtedly belong to the domain of od.”

From Reichenbach and his Researches : the principal “Laws of Sensitiveness” abstracted from Reichenbach’s work DER SENSITIVE MENSCH, by ALEXANDER J ELLIS, B.A., Trin. Coll., Camb. in The Zoist : A Journal Of Cerebral Physiology And Mesmerism, And Their Applications To Human Welfare, No. LI., October 1855.

More about the Zoist soon…

Here is some more from Thomas Chalmers, a master of blithering nonsense wrapped in majestic prose. This is again from Discourses On The Christian Revelation, Viewed In Connection With The Modern Astronomy (1817):

“What we have now to remark is, that the Infidel who urges the astronomical objection to the truth of Christianity, is only looking with half an eye to the principle on which it rests. Carry out the principle, and the objection vanishes. He looks abroad on the immensity of space, and tells us how impossible it is, that this narrow corner of it can be so distinguished by the attentions of the Deity. Why does he not also look abroad on the magnificence of eternity; and perceive how the whole period of these peculiar attentions, how the whole time which elapses between the fall of man and the consummation of the scheme of his recovery, is but the twinkling of a moment to the mighty roll of innumerable ages? The whole interval between the time of Jesus Christ’s leaving his Father’s abode to sojourn amongst us, to that time when He shall have put all His enemies under his feet, and delivered up the kingdom to God even His Father, that God may be all in all; the whole of this interval bears as small a proportion to the whole of the Almighty’s reign, as this solitary world does to the universe around it; and an infinitely smaller proportion than any time, however short, which an earthly monarch spends on some enterprise of private benevolence, does to the whole walk of his public and recorded history.

“Why then does not the man, who can shoot his conceptions so sublimely abroad over the field of an immensity that knows no limits – why does he not also shoot them forward through the vista of a succession, that ever flows without stop and without termination? He has stept across the confines of this world’s habitation in space, and out of the field which lies on the other side of it has he gathered an argument against the truth of revelation. We feel that we have nothing to do but to step across the confines of this world’s history in time, and out of the futurity which lies beyond it can we gather that which will blow the argument to pieces, or stamp upon it all the narrowness of a partial and mistaken calculation. The day is coming when the whole of this wondrous history shall be looked back upon by the eye of remembrance, and be regarded as one incident in the extended annals of creation; and, with all the illustration and all the glory it has thrown on the character of the Deity, will it be seen as a single step in the evolution of His designs; and long as the time may appear, from the first act of our redemption to its final accomplishment, and close and exclusive as we may think the attentions of God upon it, it will be found that it has left Him room enough for all His concerns; and that, on the high scale of eternity, it is but one of those passing and ephemeral transactions which crowd the history of a never-ending administration.”

“I will not be afraid, for I am of more value than many sparrows.”

So wrote Thomas Chalmers in 1817. More from him shortly…

Before I return it to the library, here are two further snippets from The Sun And The Moon : The Remarkable True Account Of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, And Lunar Man-Bats In Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman:

Lewis Gaylord Clark on Edgar Allan Poe : “a mortified but impotent littérateur… an ambitious ‘authorling’ perhaps of a small volume of effete and lamentable trash”.

I am minded to conduct enquiries into Dr Henry Hall Sherwood of New York, a man with “controversial electromagnetic theories” who “would become known for his ‘savage rotary magnetic machine’ which he claimed could cure all manner of diseases from rheumatism to herpes and tuberculosis”. Gosh!

From The Times in 1833, enthusing about the new hydro-oxygen microscope:

“It can, in truth represent objects five hundred thousand times larger in size than they really are. Thus the pores of the slenderest twig and the fibres of the most delicate leaf expand into coarse net work. The external integuments of a fly’s eye, filled with thousands of lenses, appear the dimensions of a lady’s veil – that gentleman yclept the flea, swells into six feet – worms seem like boa constrictors: while the population of a drop of goodly ditch water presents such shapes as Teniers should have seen before he pencilled the grotesque monsters who troubled the sleep of St Anthony.”

Quoted in The Sun And The Moon : The Remarkable True Account Of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, And Lunar Man-Bats In Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman (2008)

An important anniversary occured while I was away in Flanders, and I am very grateful to Richard Carter, FCD, for drawing it to my attention. He writes:

Sadly, Orwell recorded the abandonment of his egg-count in his diary entry for 13th March, 1940:

…Have now lost accurate count of the eggs & shall have to close the egg-account book, which however gives an accurate account stretching over 7 months, useful for future reference. From the milkman’s account it appears the hens have laid 270 eggs since 29.1.40 (6 weeks about). Yesterday 10. It is now difficult to sell eggs, as there is a glut, so shall put some in water-glass.

Orwell’s egg counting lasted much longer than my own pitiful attempt at a squirrel count, and he was surely correct to note how useful it would be for future reference. I am sure all Hooting Yard readers will share my sense of loss, knowing there are no further egg tallies to pore over.

Astute readers will have gathered, not in the Winsletian sense, that I am currently reading And Then There Was No One by Gilbert Adair. (What the cravat is to Pebblehead, and the cape to Tony Buzan, the scarf is to the excellent Mr Adair.) Among the book’s many delights is this list of “adjectival ethereality”, words used by Nabokov in Lolita:

Glossy, furry, honey-coloured, honey-hued, honey-brown, leggy, slender, opalescent, russet, tingling, dreamy, biscuity, pearl-gray, hazy, flurry, dimpled, luminous, moist, silky, downy, shimmering, iridescent, gauzy, fragrant, coltish, nacreous, glistening, fuzzy, leafy, shady, rosy, dolorous, burnished, quivering, plumbacious, stippled…

The greatest parenthesis in literature has already been written, and will never be improved upon. It is from Lolita, where Nabokov writes: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”

But one must always be on the lookout for superb phrases, or complete sentences, in parentheses, and there is a fine example in today’s Guardian. Into her review of The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders, Lucy Hughes-Hallett drops this marvel: “(Rumour had it he kept a tortoise in his sporran.)”

(One day I must set to work on an anthology of great parentheses.)