Stainton Moses in London: the moving dining table, the private circle and the notebooks

Moses was born in Lincolnshire in 1839, studied at Oxford and became a Church of England clergyman. He later taught at University College School in London.

Edward T. Bennett’s account dates the beginning of the reported physical phenomena to 1872 and the sustained automatic-writing record to 1873.

His circle was small. Dr Stanhope Templeman Speer and his wife were central participants, with F. W. Percival among the occasional sitters. The sessions were private rather than a public stage performance.

This setting shaped the record. Friends watched together, exchanged interpretations and kept notes. Moses’s own writings became a major part of the material later readers had to assess.

Bennett reproduces Serjeant Edward William Cox’s description of an episode at his Russell Square residence in June 1873.

Moses had come to change clothes before they attended a dinner party. With time to spare, they went to the dining room. Cox opened letters while Moses read The Times.

The table was large and heavy, standing on a carpet. Cox described the room as well lit and the table uncovered. Moses sat sideways, with his legs away from the space beneath it.

The ordinary purpose of the visit is part of the account’s appeal. The men were not initially arranging a séance; they were waiting for the next part of their evening.

According to Cox, loud raps began on the table, followed by shaking and swaying. It then moved several inches.

He looked underneath to check for contact. The two men stood on opposite sides, away from the edge, and held their hands above it.

The account goes on to describe further movement across the carpet and the raising of one side and then the other. At their request, the end was said to rise to meet a hand held above it.

Cox emphasised the table’s weight and the difficulty of moving it in an ordinary trial. These details were his way of making the episode measurable rather than merely describing a feeling that something unusual had happened.

Cox was interested in a force associated with a living person rather than necessarily a visiting spirit. Bennett notes this distinction when introducing his testimony.

That is an important feature of the case. Agreement that a table had moved did not require agreement about the cause.

The vocabulary of ‘psychic force’ offered one framework for discussing the events. A spiritual interpretation offered another. Participants in the nineteenth-century debate could be enthusiastic about observation while remaining divided over its meaning.

The Russell Square account therefore belongs to both the history of séance claims and the history of attempts to describe them in the language of forces, measurements and conditions.

The larger records contain repeated descriptions of tables tilting or rapping when sitters withdrew their hands. They also describe objects apparently arriving in a room, scents, lights and writing.

Bennett organises the material by type of phenomenon, rather than treating it as a single uninterrupted evening. This helps explain why a summary of Moses can seem to contain an extraordinary concentration of events.

One reported writing experiment used a torn corner to identify a sheet of paper. Participants later fitted the pieces together and endorsed the result. The small physical procedure was meant to tie a remarkable claim to an identifiable object.

These circle accounts provide context for the London episode. The map does not place every event in the notebooks inside Cox’s dining room.

F. W. Percival’s description of a March 1874 sitting records scented air moving around the group, a change in its force, drops of liquid and finally a larger quantity falling onto hands and the table.

The participants experienced the atmosphere as strongly enough scented that they wanted fresh air afterwards. The account gives smell and touch a place beside the better-known table movements.

Other passages describe lights of different sizes and appearances. Bennett identifies dates and the people whose notes he is reproducing, rather than presenting all the material as his own experience.

Keeping the named recorders visible is useful. It allows a reader to distinguish Moses’s account, Cox’s account and another sitter’s description within the same wider history.

Moses died in 1892. His literary executors, Charles C. Massey and Alaric A. Watts, allowed Frederic Myers to examine a large body of manuscripts.

Bennett describes thirty-one notebooks: twenty-four concerned automatic writing, four recorded physical phenomena and three contained retrospective material and summaries. Additional notes from the Speers formed another strand.

Myers selected material for two substantial articles in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Bennett’s later book directs readers to those volumes and builds much of its discussion from them.

The archive’s scale explains Moses’s continuing importance. The case is not held together by one anecdote alone, but by a long record whose different authors and dates can be followed.

Moses was involved in the early Society for Psychical Research but withdrew in 1886, dissatisfied with its treatment of material he regarded as important. He also edited Light and published works including Spirit Teachings.

Those activities show how private experiences moved into public debate: through notebooks, selections, periodicals, books and disagreement within organisations.

For comparison, Florence Cook and Katie King centres on William Crookes’s London observations. Raymond Lodge follows a later family’s records of mediumship.

The Russell Square scene remains an especially vivid doorway into Moses’s world: letters being opened, a newspaper being read and a table that its two observers said abruptly stopped behaving like an ordinary piece of furniture.

1839: Moses is born.

1872: Bennett dates the beginning of the physical phenomena.

June 1873: Cox’s Russell Square account.

1873 onwards: the automatic-writing record develops.

1886: Moses withdraws from the SPR.

1892: his death precedes Myers’s examination of the notebooks.

Later publication: Bennett gathers the accounts with references to the SPR articles.

Edward T. Bennett, The Physical Phenomena Popularly Known as Spiritualism — Public-domain account, especially chapter VI; reproduces Cox, Percival, Moses and Speer material and identifies the relevant SPR volumes.