Daniel Dunglas Home
Home and his pretty little wife travelled continually, being received everywhere with flattering attention. They reached England in November 1859 after visiting France and Switzerland and seances were held at some of the grandest houses in the country, including those of the Duchess of Somerset and the Duchess of Sutherland. But Home’s social status had undergone a subtle change. He no longer relied on patronage for his keep. His wife was wealthy. She was also the Tsar’s god-daughter. He had, in other words, made a brilliant marriage.
Daniel Dunglas Home
The couple split their married life between Europe and Russia, where Home had made a friend of Count Alexis Tolstoy, who after watching a seance wrote, ‘I would have gone a thousand leagues to see these things.’ But fate demanded a cruel price from Home for his glittering success. After a pitifully few years of happiness Sacha became “, infected with tuberculosis and died in the South of France in February : 1862. Home was overwhelmed with grief.
About this time, to make matters worse, he was coming under increasing attack by the sceptics. It seemed as though everyone had; some idea as to how his phenomena were produced. Some of the most vitriolic remarks came from people who had never been present at a seance. Dickens, for instance, called Home an impostor but refused to watch him. Browning had become almost obsessed with depicting him as a slimy cheat. To help himself get over the death of his wife, Home accepted every invitation offered. He held a series of seances with John Ruskin, returned to America for a spell, back to Europe then on to Russia, where the Tolstoys entertained him at their country home and he was the guest of the Tsar. He returned to England laden with emeralds and diamonds.
Exhausted by constant travel and Russian intensity, he laid low for a time, then there is a report of a remarkable seance at the North Hotel in Aberdeen. Among those who witnessed what happened was a General Boldero and his wife. Mrs Boldero reported ‘The table quivered so violently and the plates rattled so much that General Boldero was obliged to stop eating.’ A large armchair near the fireplace rushed across the room and up to the table, placing itself near one of the witnesses. Everyone thought this to be an astonishing manifestation, as Home had not been into the coffee room where they were at supper till they had all entered it together, and no thread or trickery of any kind could have moved the chair with the precision and velocity with which it left its place.One of Home’s firmest friends and supporters was Lord Adare, son of Lord Dunraven and one of those present on the night of Home’s levitation at Ashley House. He was a Guardsman in his twenties when they met at the end of 1867. Adare, an honest English gentleman, recorded seventy-eight seances but at the end of his life said he was no nearer to understanding what happened than at the time of the recording.
In March 1871 Home submitted himself to a series of investigations by Sir William Crookes, an eminent Victorian scientist and psychic researcher. He began by showing how he could influence a spring balance from a distance, then went on to a dramatic demonstration of his control of fire. Crookes watched as he stirred up a pile of burning coals in a grate with his hand, then, taking up a red-hot lump, as big as an orange, he blew on it until it was white-hot, still cradling it in the palm of his hand.
Crookes both liked and trusted Home. In one celebrated experiment he tested the medium to see whether he could play an accordion through the power of psychokinesis. The accordion was placed in a copper cage and Home was allowed to rest his hand on the end farthest from the keys. The instrument soon began to play. ..and continued even when Home had removed his hand from it.
Everybody had expected Crookes to proclaim that Home was either a fraud or a failure. He was subjected to the most stringent testing, conditions. But Sir William wrote: ‘The phenomena, I am prepared to attest, are so extraordinary and so directly oppose the most firmly rooted articles of scientific belief. …’ In short, he went on to testify that in his opinion Home was what he claimed to be, a remarkable psychic medium. Crookes stuck to that opinion for the rest of his life, in spite of a great deal of derision being hurled at him. He went on to become the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘On a visit to Russia Home met a beautiful dark-haired girl called Julie de Gloumeline, and after the experiments with Crookes he : married her. After this second marriage, which made him financially , independent, he decided to retire from the world gaze. His second marriage was as happy as his first, but from the age of thirty-eight until , his death he only gave seances in small private circles.
Home was received into the Greek Orthodox Church and spent the last years of his life in Russia and the South of France. His old enemy, tuberculosis, caught up with him on June 21, 1886, at the age of fifty- three. He died at Auteuil and was buried in the Russian cemetery at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. A fine bronze bust of him is the first thing : one see on entering the premises of the Society for Psychical research in London.
Tags: Daniel Dunglas Home, Death Of His Wife, Duchess Of Sutherland, Emeralds, God Daughter, Impostor, John Ruskin, Little Wife, Married Life, Mediums, North Hotel, Patronage, Sacha, Sceptics, Seance, Seances, South Of France, Subtle Change, Tolstoy, Tolstoys, Tsar
