Michael Joseph Murphy

Mr. Home, 'the Medium' Michael Joseph Murphy

Publisher Marketing: This book is both a biography of the life the Victorian Spiritualist medium Daniel Dunglas Home and a critical analysis of his physical mediumship. Daniel Dunglas Home, (pronounced Hume), (1833 - 1886), was born in Currie near Edinburgh in Scotland and is considered by many to be the greatest physical medium that has ever lived. Producing such phenomena as raps, the movement of tables and chairs, guitars and accordions often playing at a distance from the circle, spirit lights, spirit forms, the elongation of his body, the handling of live coals and levitation, it is claimed he was never once discovered in fraud although his phenomena were investigated by several respected scientists of the day. Home himself claimed that his father was the illegitimate son of Alexander, the tenth Earl of Home, which may have been just an invention by Home to ingratiate himself with the aristocrats with whom he associated with for so much of his life. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so aptly put it when referring to Home's life; "Napoleon the Third provided for his only sister. The Emperor of Russia sponsored his marriage. What novelist would dare to invent such a career?" Some other themes of interest in the book are the investigation and consequent verification of the genuineness of the Home phenomena by the great British scientist Sir William Crookes and Home's enigmatic relationship with Robert and Elizabeth Browning; Robert Browning hated Home with a passion that can only be described as pathological, even using Home as the model for his poem Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium.'