Quite a number of books have been published lately containing, so the spiritualists declare, messages from another world. The reading of these books does not suggest that the ‘spirits or their messages are any livelier or more intelligent than they were nearly seventy years ago, when Charles Dickens came across them.

In The Haunted House, a Christmas story written for All the Year Round, 1859, Dickens begins with the revelations provided by a travelling companion in a railway train. The journey was by night, and the fellow passenger, armed with a pencil and pocket-book, was perpetually listening and taking notes.

‘I have passed the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time now—in spiritual intercourse,’ explained the man—‘a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect’—in the cold light of morning.

The messages had not been rapped on any table, but had been deciphered in the jolts and bumps of the carriage. (Many of us are familiar with the rhythmic utterance of railway engines.) The seance—‘conference’ the goggle-eyed gentleman preferred to call it—began with the greeting : ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’