Vomiting Truth

On a furiously brilliant poem by Robert Browning

Just think the blank verse these people have exuded

— Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, October 1880

Last month, while wrapping presents, I watched “A Ghost Story for Christmas” from 1974. This was a BBC adaptation of M.R. James’s “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”. In the opening scenes, I was startled by a literary ghost: an allusion to a long-forgotten poem.

The set-up was this: an aristocratic young man, in Victorian Oxford, asks his tutor (Michael Bryant) to attend one of the spiritualist seances with which his widowed mother is obsessed. The tutor, a learned cleric, undermines the uneducated medium by demonstrating that the supposed spirit of a medieval abbot does not speak Latin or French. He then slaps the medium on the back, causing him to cough up a voice-altering whistle, and declares:

The medium’s wife, thinking he has got their name wrong, replies:

The name’s Tyson.

To which the tutor grandly replies, as he draws back the curtains:

Feeling curious (not always a wise thing to feel about an M.R. James story), I went and looked up the original later that night. There was no reference to Browning, and no spiritualist framing, at all — it was all the invention of the screenwriter, John Bowen.

But it left me with something to read over Christmas: Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue, “Mr Sludge the Medium” (1864), which at 1525 lines is both a spectacularly extended character sketch and an elaborate piece of revenge.

Daniel Dunglas Home was, in his day, the psychic everyone could name — the Victorian equivalent, for children of the Seventies and Eighties, of the spoon-bending Yuri Geller. Home was born in Scotland in 1833, but grew up on the East Coast of America, where he began to perform as a medium. In 1855, his fame took him to Europe, where he met Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Both were poets — but on the subject of spiritualism, Robert was a sceptic, while Elizabeth was a believer.