Some Sludgey Contexts: Spirit-Mediums of the 1850s
Browning's 'Mr Sludge "the Medium"' (1864)
The image is ‘The Levitation of the Medium and Scotch Seer Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) Rising in the Air Before the Eyes of Stupefied Witnesses, in an Apartment in London’ (unknown French artist, 1860s: advertisement for chocolate).
Browning was in Iove with his wife. She, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was persuaded by ‘spirit mediums’, table-rapping, séances, the whole talking-to-the-dead shebang. Browning, sensibly, was not. He thought spirit mediums frauds, and not very good ones. But through the 1850s séances were everywhere. ‘The Brownings were familiar with the conduct of seances,’ Daniel Karlin explains. ‘The expatriate community in Florence was pullulating with mesmerism, table-turning, rapping, spirit-hands, voices, trances, levitation, and every conceivable variety of drawing-room paranormalia. Many of their friends and visitors were American, and America led the field in sensational accounts of spiritualist phenomena.’ Browning sat-in for a considerable number of such occasions, in Florence and in London.
Elizabeth died in 1861. A few years later, Browning published his lengthy dramatic monologue, ‘Mr Sludge: the “Medium”’ (1864).
One of the most famous spirit mediums of the mid-century was Daniel Dunglas Home, pronounced ‘Hume’:
Some early guests at Home's sittings included the scientist Sir David Brewster (who remained unconvinced), the novelists Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Thomas Adolphus Trollope, and the Swedenborgian James John Garth Wilkinson. As well as Brewster, fellow scientists Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley were prominent contemporary critics of Home's claims. It was the poet Robert Browning however, who proved to be one of Home's most adamant critics. After attending a séance of Home's, Browning wrote in a letter to The Times that: ‘the whole display of hands, spirit utterances etc., was a cheat and imposture’. Browning gave his unflattering impression of Home in the poem, ‘Sludge the Medium’ (1864). His wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was convinced that the phenomena she witnessed were genuine and their discussions about Home were a constant source of disagreement.
In the 1860s, with his wife dead, the yearning to reconnect with her, mediated via his sense of the imposture and fraudulence of spirit-mediums who promised, mendaciously, to effectuate precisely that, prompted Browning to write his lengthy dramatic monologue. As a name ‘Sludge’ brings out the ‘dung in Home’s actual moniker: it’s as close as Browning can bring himself, under the aegis of Victorian respectability, to calling his poem ‘Mr Shit, the Medium’. He also, in a gesture perhaps motivated as much by a kind of superstitious averting as by the exigencies of fictionalisation, shifts Mr Shit’s stamping-ground from London to Boston. But then again, perhaps this was merely a piece of social observation. Spirit-mediums were increasingly a feature in England through the 1850s and 1860s (and indeed through the rest of the century) but they were huge in America, especially in the homes of the affluent on the East Coast: New York, Rochester, Boston. A search for ‘spirit-mediums’ and ‘rappings’ on Google Books for the 1850s throws-up many scores of US publications, books, pamphlets, magazine articles, and a few dozen UK ones.
Browning’s dramatic monologue starts with one of Sludge’s wealthy patrons—the poem’s addressee, whose name we later discover is ‘Hiram H. Horsefall’—having discovered the medium cheating, grasping him by the throat in rage. What follows is Sludge’s apologia pro vita sua. He has a lucrative practice, passing from affluent house to affluent house, performing his various spirit-medium shifts and cheats, pretending to grant the living access to the ‘other side’. He opens by begging his addressee not to expose him:
Now, don't, sir! Don't expose me! Just this once!
This was the first and only time, I 'll swear,—
Look at me,—see, I kneel,—the only time,
I swear, I ever cheated,—yes, by the soul
Of Her who hears—(your sainted mother, sir!)
All, except this last accident, was truth—
This little kind of slip!—and even this,
It was your own wine, sir, the good champagne,
(I took it for Catawba, you 're so kind,)
Which put the folly in my head!
…
Aie—aie—aie!
Please, sir! your thumbs are through my windpipe, sir!
Ch—ch!
That ‘ch’ is interesting: the physicality of it: a gesture perhaps at the Greek chi, the first letter of Christ’s name. From this opening confession, though partial (‘this was the first and only time, I 'll swear’) Sludge goes on to shift his ground. He only cheated this once, he claims, otherwise he was a genuine medium. Then: he sometimes cheated, but mediums are imperfect transmitters of what they connect and sometimes mischievous or malicious spirits mislead them. Then: he often cheats, but who can blame him? The alternative is penury and anyway his cheating gratifies people, who are given sentimental access to departed loved ones or curious apprehension of the famous dead—Beethoven, Shakespeare, Homer—and what harm was there in giving people these things they want? Then: yes he cheated, but his mendacity was intimately connected to his interlocuter’s patronage, and indeed was nothing compared to the falseness of this, parading Sludge around society, mocking those who doubted or disparaged him, winning notable social capital off the back of Sludge’s performances. Then Sludge claims that there is no deceit in what he does, for everyone understands that he is lying, even if they don’t admit it to themselves: ‘there's a real love of a lie,’ says Sludge, that ‘liars find ready-made for lies they make’. Finally he arrives at a position where lying is styled as a kind of truth. How can anyone know Sludge is lying? How can Sludge himself know? ‘Why, when I cheat,’ he says, at the poem’s end, ‘Mean to cheat, do cheat, and am caught in the act,/Are you, or, rather, am I sure o’ the fact?’ Might is not be that his lies are ‘genuine’ and ‘that every cheat's inspired, and every lie/quick with the germ of truth’? On this audacious final shift the poem ends.
‘Mr Sludge’ is not very much discussed nowadays, as a poem, or indeed liked. Isobel Armstrong argues that ‘because spiritualism is a dead issue, the subject of the poem seems recondite; the confession and self-justification of a quack medium suggest merely a study in eccentric psychology and an exercise in casuistry for its own sake’ [Isobel Armstrong , ‘Browning's Mr. Sludge, “The Medium”’, Victorian Poetry, 2:1 (1964), 1-9]
It is certainly the case that the poem is deeply embedded in the particularities of the spirit-medium craze that swept America and Britain through the 1850s. And Browning’s Sludge is, as well as being a portrait of Hume, a composite of various other celebrated spirit-mediums of the age. Some examples: here Sludge confesses that when he pretends to cathect the words of great men, it was always only just him, so more fool the people who were taken in:
Who was the fool
When, to an awe-struck wide-eyed open-mouthed
Circle of sages, Sludge would introduce
Milton composing baby-rhymes, and Locke
Reasoning in gibberish, Homer writing Greek
In naughts and crosses, Asaph setting psalms
To crotchet and quaver? I 've made a spirit squeak
In sham voice for a minute, then outbroke
Bold in my own, defying the imbeciles—
Have copied some ghost's pothooks, half a page,
Then ended with my own scrawl undisguised.
“All right! The ghost was merely using Sludge,
Suiting itself from his imperfect stock!”
Don't talk of gratitude to me! For what?
For being treated as a showman's ape.
The Milton reference is to an American self-declared ‘mental medium’ (lovely phrase) called Thomas L Harris, who visited London in the latter 1850s, performing seances for various wealthy people in which he recited, amongst other things, poetry inspired by the spirit of John Milton. Some were persuaded that the verse he recited was the echt Miltonic sublime. ‘Mr. T. L. Harris, of America, now in England,’ gushed John Jones, in The Natural and Supernatural; or Man Physical, Apparitional, and Spiritual (London 1861) ‘is a mental Medium—a minister by profession: … when in that [mediumistic] state, in a whisper, he would give out utterances as fast as the amanuensis could write, which for richness of diction, and sublimity of thought, and true poetry, has no equal since Milton shone, and Shakspeare sparkled—two of those works "Lyric of the Morning land," and "The Golden Age," are hailed as the outflow of as divine an inspiration as by Milton.’ ‘A Lyric of the Morning Land’ was published in 1856. This is how it begins:
Why is the red rose sweet?
Say, canst thou tell?
Say, how do glad hearts beat
In earthly shell?
No outward wisdom knows,
No tongue can tell.
No, no, no.
Hearts with love that glow,
Roses while they blow.
Each in twilight dell,
Hid away
From the day,
Neither may
Disclose the spell.
Milton composing baby-rhymes indeed. It doesn’t get any better as it goes on:
There came a fairy blue and sang
O maiden dearer, attend, attend!
When first on earth the violet sprang.
Each earthly maid had fairy friend.
Hardly Paradise Lost. ‘Locke reasoning in gibberish’ speaks to a celebrated series of seances held in New York in 1851, where John Locke supposedly attended. Transcripts of these were published by Edwin W. Lewis as The Spiritual Reasoner (1855). Locke’s statements constituted Bible readings, platitudes or sheer oddness. A sample:
March 3, 1851.—Locke, the English philosopher, gave the 4th chapter of James, 7th, 11th, and 17th verses: ‘Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.’ After the reading of these verses was finished, he spelled: 'I want you to practise these teachings.' In answer to a question what the word devil meant in the 7th verse, he spelled, ‘Resist evil.’ March 19.—Locke came and spelled: ‘to cultivate an even temper is the first step towards heaven.’ He then then told us that light was spreading in Warsaw, in Poland. … He said: ‘can a child with all its purity understand algebra?’
These seances were famous, much discussed, and in some quarters much criticised. William Robert Gordon’s A Three-fold Test of Modern Spiritualism (1856) was an attempt to debunk them: going through the testimony in detail and noting how unlike Locke’s actual writing it is, as well as pointing out errors and impossibilities—for example, Lewis declares that on March 13th 1852, Locke ‘introduced another spirit by spelling out the name “Nott”: said it was Dr. Nott, formerly of Union College. The Dr. conversed with us upon the deep responsibility of his station while in the body. Then Locke introduced Robert Burns the poet.’ Gordon points out that Dr Nott was still alive: ‘not out of the body yet, nor out of Union College!’ [288]
Spiritualists liked to summon Locke, as well as Plato (who always spoke English, when brought to the séance-y table), Newton and Francis Bacon, precisely because these were names associated so strongly with science and rationality. ‘Spiritualists also drew on the ideas of Francis Bacon, Anton Mesmer, and Emmanuel Swedenborg in presenting Spiritualism as science as well as religion’ [Erika White Dyson, Spiritualism and Crime (Columbia 2010), 14]. Sludge does the same, though, in his ignorance, he gets things wrong:
If Francis Verulam
Styles himself Bacon, spells the name beside
With a y and a k, says he drew breath in York,
Gave up the ghost in Wales when Cromwell reigned,
(As, sir, we somewhat fear he was apt to say,
Before I found the useful book that knows)—
Why, what harm 's done?
‘Francis Bykon’ is Browning’s joke at Sludge’s American accent: he has heard the name spoken but never seen it written down—until, that is, he gets hold of the ‘useful book’ and can modify his claims for the spirit speaking through him. Sludge can only do Sludge: if he’s presenting as a famous person, then the famous person will be Sludgey. For instance: Beethoven. Sludge may promise a new piano sonata from beyond the grave, but all the listeners will hear is those few US tunes Sludge can bash out on the keyboard, slightly modified: ‘knowledge strained/To half-expression through his ignorance’:
Suppose, the spirit Beethoven wants to shed
New music he 's brimful of; why, he turns
The handle of this organ, grinds with Sludge,
And what he poured in at the mouth o’ the mill
As a Thirty-third Sonata, (fancy now!)
Comes from the hopper as bran-new Sludge, naught else,
The Shakers’ Hymn in G, with a natural F,
Or the 'Stars and Stripes' set to consecutive fourths.
This is a reference to another American medium, Sarah Brooks. Originally from Buffalo, Miss Brooks toured the East Coast giving performances by famous dead composers. Her trick was to put the piano backwards against the wall, so that the keyboard was inaccessible to her, and then call-down the spirit of—say—Beethoven, to perform upon the instrument—presumably, an accomplice would strike the strings inside the instrument.
The piano-forte is placed with the keys to the wall, and she stands either at the end or on that side opposite the keys. The music performed is unknown to her or any one present, and is produced in a most remarkable manner on the strings inside the instrument, where it would be impossible for the medium to reach them, were she so inclined. But the music also is of so extraordinary a character that no human being in the flesh could produce it. As described to us by an ear-witness, the music of ten grand pianofortes as ordinarily played upon, would not make the noise which is produced by this invisible power on one. [‘A.M.’ What's O'Clock? Modern Spiritual Manifestations (1851), 27]
Alternately she might actually play the piano, claiming to her audience that ‘she did not know a note of music, and had never played a tune upon the piano in her life.’ Then she would play a ‘new’ Beethoven Waltz, ‘in a style that would do credit to one well advanced in music’, the listeners being impressed by how much the performance reminded them of ‘Sweet Home’, ‘Bonnie Doon’ and ‘Last Rose of Summer’.
In all this, Browning is not merely gesturing at the kinds of impostures in which mid-century spirit-mediums indulged, he is quire precisely working them into his poem. Sludgeness abounds.