Even Francis Galton thought it was a ‘good séance’.įor Galton, this foray into the spirit world was a one-off - he ultimately dismissed Spiritualism as bunk.
The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish.ĭarwin’s cousin, Hensleigh Wedgewood, was convinced. I came down stairs &saw all the chairs &c &c on the Table which had been lifted over the heads of those sitting round it. He continued: How the man could possibly do what was done, passes my understanding. It ‘astounded everyone and took their breath away’, Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to his friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker. The spirits’ arrival was announced by the movement of various items which the medium had placed around the room - a chair, a flute, a bell, a candlestick. Shortly afterwards, a connection to the spirit-world was finally established. Charles Darwin started to find the séance ‘hot and tiring’, so he went to bed. They wanted to make sure the medium didn’t try any ‘jugglery’, as Charles Darwin put it, by banging on the table and claiming it was the spirits.įor a long time, nothing happened. George and his cousin, Hensleigh Wedgewood, positioned themselves under the dinner table for the séance, clinging to the medium’s legs. Darwin’s son George had organized an experimental séance with Williams, to see if there was any truth to his claim that he could contact the dead. At the head of the table sat a famous medium, Charles Williams. The guests included Charles Darwin, the novelist George Eliot, a young classicist named Frederic Myers, and Darwin’s cousin, the statistician Francis Galton.Īfter dinner, they sat around the dinner table in darkness, eyes closed, hands touching on the table. On the 18th of January, 1874, a remarkable dinner party took place at the London home of Erasmus Darwin, older brother of naturalist Charles Darwin.
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