Speech of Henry Irving preceding his imitation of the Davenports February 25, 1865, at the Manchester Athenæum, Manchester, England.
“Ladies and gentlemen:—In introducing to your notice the remarkable phenomena which have attended the gentlemen, who are not brothers, who are about to appear before you, I do not deem it necessary to offer my observations upon their extraordinary manifestations. I shall therefore at once commence a long rigmarole for the purpose of distracting your attention, and filling your intelligent heads with perplexity. I need not tell this enlightened audience that the manifestations they are about to witness are produced by occult power, the meaning of which I don’t clearly understand; but, we simply bring before your notice facts, and from these you must form your own conclusions. Concerning the early life of these gentlemen, columns of the most uninteresting description could be written; I will mention one or two interesting facts connected with these remarkable men, and for the truth of which I personally vouch. In early life, one of them to the perfect unconcern of everybody else, was constantly and most unconsciously floating about his peaceful dwelling in the arms of his amiable nurse, while, on other occasions, he was frequently tied with invisible hands to his mother’s apron strings. Peculiarities of a like nature were exhibited by his companion, whose acquaintance with various Spirits commenced many years ago, and has increased to the present moment with pleasure to himself and profit to others. These gentlemen have not been celebrated throughout the vast continent of America, they have not astonished the civilized world, but they have travelled in various parts of this glorious land—the land of Bacon—and are about to appear in a phase in your glorious city of Manchester. Many really sensible and intelligent individuals seem to think that the requirement of darkness seems to infer trickery. So it does. But I will strive to convince you that it does not. Is not a dark chamber essential to the process of photography? And what would we reply to him who would say ‘I believe photography is a humbug, do it all in the light and we will believe otherwise’? It is true that we know why darkness is essential to the production of a sun picture; and if scientific men will subject these phenomena to analysis, they will find why darkness is essential to our manifestations. But we don’t want them to find out, we want them to avoid a common-sense view of the mystery. We want them to be blinded by our puzzle, and to believe with implicit faith in the greatest humbug in the nineteenth century.”
C
Lord Adare’s Story.
That is the way Spiritualistic chroniclers tell this story, but Lord Dunraven, in a letter to the Editor of The Weekly Dispatch, London, Eng., March 21, 1920, gives quite a different version of the occurrence, and because of its intrinsic worth as refutation of the loud claim made by Spiritualists I am reproducing the entire article including head lines:
“MEDIUM’S ENTRY BY WINDOW
“WHAT I SAW AT ASHLEY HOUSE
“By Lord Dunraven.
“My attention has been drawn to accounts of a debate on ‘Spiritualism’ on March 11 between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mr. Joseph McCabe, in which the latter is reported to have described the alleged wafting of Mr. D. D. Home from window to window as one of the greatest pieces of trickery to be found in the whole Spiritualistic movement.
“Assuming the substantial accuracy of the report, I, as the sole survivor of those present on the occasion, think it my duty, in justice to the dead, to mention the facts as recorded by me at the time.