by Peter Raby
His enthusiasm had all the intensity of a conversion. He moved, apparently, from a position of general interest – and Wallace was always open to new ideas, and beliefs – to fervent advocacy in a matter of months. Undoubtedly, he was prepared by his earlier contact with Mesmerism and phrenology. His successful experiments with his pupils at Leicester, and with the Indians of the Amazon, and his faith in phrenological ‘readings’ of his own personality, predisposed him to think that there was a spiritual dimension to existence that could be scientifically analysed, even measured. An initial session on 22 July 1865 in a friend’s house – ‘with none but members of his own family present’ – produced the standard menu of rappings and table shifting.2 He was confident that these signs had not been produced by the physical action of anyone present, and similar happenings were subsequently reproduced in his own home, ‘scores of times’. He moved on to seances with well-known mediums such as Mrs Marshall. What it all might mean was for a future stage of enquiry. But once he had experienced for himself the physical manifestations of tappings and rappings, table tiltings and levitations, names written on blank bits of paper, musical instruments spontaneously producing sounds, and, most wonderful of all, the production of fruit and bunches of flowers, he was convinced that there must be an unseen cause, a force that could not be explained away in conventional physical terms. He was aware that some mediums might be fraudulent; he understood the need for careful, systematic checks. Characteristically, he was inclined to give great credence to events that happened in his own home. In November 1866, Fanny discovered that Miss Nichol, who was lodging with the Sims, seemed to have special gifts. Here Wallace could apply his own tests, secretly stretching thin tissue paper between the table legs, and later constructing a cylinder of hoops and laths, covered with canvas, to protect the table from intruding feet or ladies’ dresses. These conditions quite satisfied him, at any rate, that there could be no human physical interference, and still the table rose. As a scientific enquirer, he assumed that everyone else would agree with him that such phenomena demanded serious investigation.
There was a strongly personal dimension to this supposedly objective curiosity. First, he was more readily inclined to he a believer because his sister Fanny was an active spiritualist. Wallace trusted in the innate ability of individual men and women to work things out by the power of their own unprejudiced intellects – and if these individuals were ‘ordinary’, rather than extraordinary, men and women, so much the better. Throughout his long experience of seances, Wallace’s conviction threshold was lowered whenever he came across some apparent fact or reference involving a member of his family. At one early and significant session with Mrs Marshall, a sequence occurred in which letters of the alphabet, identified by rapping, spelled out first the place of death, Pará, and then the name of his brother Herbert, and finally, at Wallace’s request, the name of the friend who last saw him, Henry Walter Bates. This was the first of a series of what he interpreted as verifying personal communications which, cumulatively, cemented his belief in the essential truth of spiritualism.3 For Fanny and Alfred, the certainty that they were in touch with their dead brothers and sisters formed the bedrock of their spiritualist convictions.
Unlike many scientists who became more or less intrigued by the phenomena, Wallace was wholly transparent in his attitude. He had been present when inexplicable things took place. Other men of integrity, many of them initially doubtful, had testified to similar experiences. They were entitled to be believed. If he, Wallace, was satisfied that a table had moved without human agency, or a bunch of flowers had been inexplicably introduced into a room – ‘15 chrysanthemums, 6 variegated anemones, 4 tulips, 5 orange berried solariums, 6 ferns, of two sorts, 1 auricula sinensis, with 9 flowers – 37 stalks in all’, fresh, cold, dewy – others should accept at least the possibility. Naturally, there might be frauds and conjuring tricks, but enquirers should be open-minded; not everything need be a fraud. There had already been many well-publicised attempts to examine the phenomena scientifically: Michael Faraday, for example, had investigated table-turning, and Wallace was likely to have read his account in the Athenaeum in 1853; William Carpenter, the same year, had provided a rational explanation of ‘intelligent raps’. But once Wallace was on the track of a new idea, he was not going to be put off by received opinion, or hide behind an assumed scepticism. So much new knowledge and understanding was flooding into the world, it seemed entirely logical to him that fresh insights into the nature of reality should become available, even if they might at times manifest themselves in slightly bizarre forms. Through the autumn and winter of 1865, he pursued his researches. On 8 December 1865, he was invited to an evening at the house of John Marshman, the Provincial Emigration Agent for Canterbury, New Zealand. Joining Wallace were Dr William Carpenter, Registrar of the University of London, and former Professor of Forensic Medicine at University College, and Samuel Butler, recently returned from New Zealand: a formidable clutch of spectators. Carpenter, a Unitarian who firmly rejected the idea of miracles, was a close friend and colleague of Huxley; Butler, a professional scoffer, had lost his orthodox Christian faith and was, temporarily, under the influence of Darwin. Butler’s note of the occasion was tart and dismissive: ‘Transparent humbug. A. R. Wallace and Dr Carpenter both there: the former swallowing everything, the latter contemptuous as well he might be.’4 This was years before Butler had taken up the cudgels with Darwin and, by association, Wallace, on what he came to see as their mistaken theory of natural selection, so he had no particular axe to grind; though his general attitude may be gathered from a much later letter, which mischievously refers to Wallace’s career as a hunter–naturalist: ‘If ever a spirit-form takes to coming near me, I shall not be content with trying to grasp it, but, in the interests of science, I will shoot it.’5 Wallace, if not swallowing everything, was prepared to taste again and again. He settled down to research a very different kind of article, ‘The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural’.
In the New Year of 1866, Wallace was visiting Richard Spruce once more, and spending as much time as possible with Annie Mitten, the eldest of the four daughters. The Mittens were a much easier family for Wallace to get on terms with than the Leslies, and the relationship was considerably helped by the mutual friendship of Spruce. As William Mitten was a pharmacist, his business kept him tied to his home village, until his second daughter, Flora, the first woman in Britain to qualify as a pharmacist, was able to relieve him. He was only four years older than Wallace, and the shared pleasures of walking and botanising in the country helped to make Wallace feel part of the family. As he described the affair in his autobiography, rather in the terms of an eighteenth-century novelist, ‘This similarity of taste led to a close intimacy, and in the spring of the following year I was married to Mr Mitten’s eldest daughter, then about eighteen years old.’6 She was, in fact, twenty. After their wedding in April 1866, they spent the honeymoon at Windsor, and then returned for a little to St Mark’s Crescent, where Wallace’s ailing mother also lived.
In June, though, they were back at Hurstpierpoint. ‘I am here to eat fruit and gather orchids for another two or three weeks,’ Wallace confided to Newton, explaining why he would be unable to contribute to the Ibis before October. ‘I am at present in a very transitional state of existence, and cannot yet determine whether I shall finally pitch my tent in London or the Country.’7 Finding a solution to that problem would become a major theme in Wallace’s life: since his early childhood at Usk, he had seldom stayed a year at any one address, and longed to put down roots. Meanwhile, he celebrated with one more lotus-eating excursion, spending a month in north Wales at Llanberis and Dolgellau. Wallace loved Wales, and now, with Andrew Ramsay’s The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales in hand, he and Annie traced ‘the fine examples of ice-groovings and striations, smoothed rock-surfaces, roches moutonnes, moraines, perched blocks, and rock-basins’ in the valleys around Snowdon.8 Not so adventurous in his mountain-climbing
as Huxley and John Tyndall, Wallace was an energetic ‘high walker’, and would happily pursue his twin enthusiasms of alpine plants and Ice Age traces in Wales, the Lake District, and Switzerland.
After attending the British Association meeting in Nottingham, where he chaired the anthropological section, Wallace settled down in London for the winter. He was soon absorbed within his former network, and rejoined the cycle of scientific meetings at his favourite societies. He had sent some eggs of two species of leaf insects, and a walking-stick insect from Java, to Kew, and Hooker was rearing them in the hothouses; he would be over to see them as early as he could.9 In January, he took the chair at a meeting of the Zoological. But he was most active in pursuing his enquiries into spiritualism. He had his pamphlet, ‘The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural’, printed for private circulation and sent off copies to friends and to scientific colleagues, including Darwin: spiritualism, he argued, was a new branch of anthropology. He also bombarded them with invitations to attend seances with Miss Nichol, and was extremely disappointed by their refusal even to come and observe. ‘Before finally deciding that we are all mad,’ he begged Huxley, but without much confidence,
I hope you will come and see some very curious phenomena which we can show you, among friends only. We meet every Friday evening, & hope you will come sometimes, as we wish for the fullest investigation, and shall be only too grateful to you or any one else who will show us how and where we are deceived.10
This was Wallace’s habitual line, though in practice he liked to lay down the ground rules, and robustly resisted all suggestions as to how he might be misled. Huxley was not to be inveigled, having made his own position crystal clear in 1853, when he lambasted the whole ‘Witch Sabbat of mesmerists, clairvoyants, electro-biologists, rappers, table-turners, and evil-worshippers in general’.11 To his friend he was more courteous. Although his refusal was absolute, he was ‘neither shocked nor disposed to issue a commission of lunacy’ against Wallace, but he really could not get up any interest in the subject: ‘I never cared for gossip in my life; and disembodied gossip such as these worthy ghosts supply their friends with, is not more interesting to me than any other.’ He had half-a-dozen investigations of infinitely greater interest, and any spare time would be devoted to them. ‘I give it up,’ he concluded, softening his refusal, ‘for the same reason I abstain from chess – it’s too amusing to be fair work and too hard work to be amusing.’12 His message was clear: Wallace was wasting his time, when there were far more urgent and significant matters to be dealt with.
Edward Tylor, the anthropologist, was equally curt in his response, while the physicist John Tyndall dismissed the material in Wallace’s book as second hand, and poured scorn on the quality of the spiritualist practitioners: ‘It is not lack of logic that I see in your book, but a willingness that I deplore to accept data which are unworthy of your attention. This is frank – is it not?’13 Carpenter did attend once, experienced nothing more than a few raps, and did not bother about a repeat performance. Tyndall, too, turned up, refused to remain passive as requested, but sat some distance away from the table and joked. Again, there was just some desultory rapping, and that was the end of Tyndall’s participation. G. H. Lewes declined outright. Wallace persisted with Huxley, hurt by the reference to ‘gossip’; he could not let such apparent flippancy pass, arguing, ingenuously, that he too had no interest in ‘gossip’, but he was intensely interested in ‘the exhibition of force where force has been declared impossible, and of intelligence from a source the very mention of which has been deemed an absurdity’.14 This was proper scientific work. Huxley remained unmoved.
Wallace was by no means an isolated figure among the Victorian intelligentsia, let alone among scientific thinkers, in his fascination with the paranormal. William Crookes conducted a lengthy investigation in the 1870s, and convinced Francis Galton that there was matter ‘well worth going into’; Darwin’s cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood was an ardent spiritualist, and Wallace attended seances with him in London. Darwin himself was present at one later seance attended by, among others, Hensleigh Wedgwood, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot and Galton, though he left before the furniture began to move around, commenting later, ‘The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe such rubbish.’15 Huxley attended another seance with the same medium, Williams, and was able to reassure Darwin that he was an impostor. Other scientists, George Romanes among them, were more intrigued than they publicly admitted. An amused interest in spiritualism was acceptable, even attendance at a series of enquiries if pursued with sufficient scepticism and scientific objectivity; but Wallace, though professing an open mind, certainly behaved like an ardent believer from a very early stage.
His argument went something like this: a number of intelligent, truthful people have experienced phenomena which, they believe, cannot be explained either by orthodox causes or by coincidence; some of these effects may undoubtedly have been obtained by trickery, but a proportion remain unaccounted for. For the most part those involved are people of good faith. If they think there must be another explanation, it is reasonable to suppose there is one. We do not understand how it all works, but one logical explanation is that there is another – and ‘higher’ – order of beings, of existence, in the universe. Certain people are able to put us in touch with that higher order. Wallace, a spiritually minded man who had long ago abandoned orthodox religious belief, was not to be easily deterred from seeking proof that man was inherently different from the rest of the animals, even if it led him into strange company.
The little book he had written became itself a site of validation. Inside the cover of Fanny’s own copy, she records the following:
This book was written by my brother Alfred and with 24 others was laying on my table they had been there 4 days and I had not made time to give them away. – one morning, I had been sitting at my table writing, and left the room for a few minutes when I returned the paper parcel was opened and the books laying on chairs & tables in every direction – I immediately called my friend the medium and told her of it, we then said do write out what is the meaning of this, though I can guess, they are to be distributed & not lay here idle, Yes Yes 3 knocks, then was rapped out, this sentence, ‘One for my sister Frances, I have marked it’ upon this I opened one of the books & looked through the leaves & soon found marks with red crayon which I had on my table. I then said if you could do this while the book was shut you could write my name on this book while it lays under my hand, in a few minutes I opened the book & found Frances Wallace written. I said now dear spirit write my marriage name, I shut the book & in 2 minutes opened it again & the second name was written Frances Sims.
Decr 1866 fS16
The passage marked with red crayon is:
There is only to some minds a high improbability, arising from the supposed absence of all proof that there are such beings. Let direct proof be forthcoming, and there seems no reason why the most sceptical philosopher should refuse to accept it. It would be simply a matter to be investigated and tested like any other question of science.
Wallace maintained consistently that the truth would be revealed by observation and experiment.
If he needed the supporting testimony of a powerful thinker, he could find one in his hero Robert Owen, who had been converted to spiritualism in 1853, and believed that the revelations were harbingers of ‘a great moral revolution … about to be effected for the human race’.17 Wallace, following Owen, believed fervently in ethical progress, in perfectibility, in the inherent potential for good in humanity: spiritualism, and spiritual manifestations, were the faint but palpable signs that there was purpose in the world.
The other persuasive advocate, from Wallace’s perspective, was Robert Chambers, author of Vestiges, whose letter reached out to include Wallace as a man of science who admitted ‘the verity of the phenomena of spiritualism’, and congratulated him on having ‘leapt the ditch’:
I have for many years known that these phenomena are real
, as distinguished from impostures; and it is not of yesterday that I concluded they were calculated to explain much that has been doubtful in the past, and when fully accepted, revolutionise the whole frame of human opinion on many important matters.
After regretting Huxley’s impatience with the subject, Chambers concluded: ‘My idea is that the term “supernatural” is a gross mistake. We have only to enlarge our conceptions of the natural, and all will be right.’18 This was the quality of affirmation that Wallace sought. He would have been much happier if he could have persuaded some of the scientific hierarchy to join him; and Cambridge seemed a potential source of support: ‘Do you know anything about the “Cambridge Ghost Club”,’ he enquired of Newton, ‘& can you ascertain if C. Kingsley is a member?’19
The regular Friday evenings at Westbourne Grove continued, in addition to other seance-tastings. Spruce, safe in Sussex, quizzed Fanny Sims: ‘I presume you continue to deal in the spirit line – a branch of business unknown here.’ He reported that one evening, feeling ‘unusually light’, he
… set to and danced several steps of a hornpipe, by the space of 10 minutes, to the great astonishment of my ‘nuss’! … I have since in vain attempted to repeat this saltatorian experiment & at the present moment I might as well try to fly as to dance. Now, if you could connect this singular phenomenon with any incantations of your magic circle, it wd. go far to convince me that one living body may act on another at a distance beyond the limit of possible perception by the senses.
