Séances & Spiritualism
belief and the uncanny
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Modern spiritualism began with the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, whose reported spirit 'rappings' of 1848 made them famous, and the craze swept Britain in the 1850s — table-turning parties reached London by 1853. In a typical séance, sitters joined hands around a table in a darkened room while the medium summoned raps, levitations, and 'spirit hands.'
It was grief meeting doubt. An age of industry and new science — Darwin published in 1859 — had unsettled old certainties, and spiritualism promised evidence that the dead survived. The movement drew believers across classes, and even eminent men of science took it seriously: the chemist William Crookes investigated the medium Daniel Dunglas Home in the early 1870s.
Skeptics and fraud-hunters had a field day, and many mediums were exposed as frauds. Yet the séance had revealed something real about Victorian life: a hunger for contact with the lost that neither church nor laboratory had fully satisfied.
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