The Rose Valley Collection: The Lost Spirit Photographs of Charles Dickens.

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In June of 2018 a Philadelphia photographer was rummaging through a box of old photographic prints at an antique sale in nearby Rose Valley Pennsylvania, hoping to find empty gutta percha Daguerreotype cases he could use to reframe some images when he came across cardboard a box measuring 22x30x18 inches which held a number of photographic covers and papers. Unbenowst to him, this box, which he purchased for $20, would set the photography world on fire and fill in missing gaps in our knowledge of some of the most interesting people of the 19th century.

This archive, hidden in a barn for a century and a half, is known today as the Rose Valley Collection. It contained twenty-two photographic prints and seven letters between an obscure antebellum Philadelphia photographer and English writer Charles Dickens. The images and accompanying text concerned a previously unknown supernatural incident which helped form the writer’s understanding of the natural world and a revolutionary lost 19th century photographic technique known as Umbratyping.

Over the twenty-four months following their discovery, with a grant from the Susan and Charles Summerfield Foundation the American Society for the Preservation of the Photographic Arts set about meticulously to restore the images to their original splendor, including bringing back the hand coloring that had decorated them and enlarging them from their original contact print size.

This catalogue brings together, for the first time, the images from that collection along with a history of their making.

Sabine Woodford, unrestored print of Manifestation #2 — Portrait of Sir John Thellusson August and Owing with ghost becoming corporeal in a cloud of ectoplasm, circa 1854. Umbratype print, 4x6 inches. Rose Valley Collection.

Sometime in the year 1855 or 1856 Philadelphia photographer Sabine Woodford traveled to England and Scotland for a clandestine meeting with author Charles Dickens, then one of the world’s most famous writers. He carried with him four trunks of experimental and highly sensitive photographic equipment of his own invention. With these cameras, which he called Umbratypes, he had been photographing manifestations from a world beyond ours with the help of one of the world’s most famous mediums for more than a year. Woodford came at the request of Dickens as the novelist sought his help to understand the unraveling of a close friend, Sir John Thellusson, from whom Dickens had been receiving increasingly deranged letters for a period of more than twelve months. Woodford spent three days in London with Dickens and then went on to Thellusson’s estate,Thistlewood Manor, traveling with an antiquarian book-seller friend of Dickens’, August Owing, who was to arrange the transport of Thellusson’s library to London as part of the liquidation of the collapsing estate. Woodford made 40 photographic exposures at Thistelwood over a period of eleven days. Ultimately Woodford, Thellusson, Dickens and Owing fled in a panic with nothing but the clothes on their backs. It had been thought that all the photographic images were left behind.

In an interesting turn of events, a fragment of one of the photos, Manifestation #5, which depicts the spirit of a young woman in repose, was found among the papers of William H. Mumler upon his death in 1884. Possibly the most famous of the early “spirit photographers” Mumler, a former jewelry engraver from Boston was widely believed, both in his time and to this day, to be a fraud, his images little more than double exposures off camera assistants and what is today, common photographic trickery. The discovery of an original work by Woodford in his effects presents a provocative look at what may be the frustrations of an aspiring B-lister who even twenty years later, did not posses the advanced and sensitive equipment Woodford used and spent a career seeing entire into a world beyond his talents.

Woodford’s exposure to spirit photography began a year or two before in 1854 when he clandestinely received in his Chestnut Street studio Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the arctic explorer, and an anonymous young woman in a veil, who entered through a back door and were escorted up the back stairs. Kane was a the time one of the most famous residents of the city and about to embark on his second expedition to the Arctic in search of the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin which would cement his importance.

As Philadelphia’s photographer of note Woodford was used to dealing with celebrities, in fact, he had photographed Charles Dickens in 1843 when the author first came to the city, so sneaking someone in for a sitting unobserved was something he did on a regular basis. Woodford made three exposures of Kane and the mysterious woman (all sadly now lost) and promised to have them delivered to Rensselaer, Kane’s suburban estate, the following week. Upon developing the plates though, Woodford found them all to be damaged, the face of Kane’s young companion obscured by a miasma of light. He drove to Kane’s home himself and offered to immediately retake the photographs. He found Kane “sitting in his study, wearing a green tie with a diamond pin” and accompanied by the same young woman who sat on a chez reading a book. Woodford apologized profusely and upon revealing the damaged images was informed by Kane’s heretofore silent guest that they were not, in fact, damaged, but instead revealed “spirits from the next world” which were indelibly bound to the woman, who then introduced herself to the flabbergasted photographer as Margaretta Fox, the medium.

The Fox Sisters and the rise of Spiritualism

Margaretta, called Maggie, rose to fame early in life along with her sisters, Catherine (Kate) and Leah with a series of mysterious occurrences that made the world pause. For days in 1848 a series of loud, nocturnal bangings emanated from the air around fourteen year old Maggie and eleven year old Kate, to the surprise and consternation of first their parents and, ultimately, the entire neighborhood. The girls discovered they could communicate with the rapping and were able to ask questions which the rappings would answer with a simple code. The invisible entity answering their questions called itself “Mr. Splitfoot”, though rapidly a cornucopia of souls opened their minds to the girls.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his History of Spiritualism writes of these early days:

Sometimes they were a mere knocking; at other times they sounded like the movement of furniture. The children were so alarmed that they refused to sleep apart and were taken into the bedroom of their parents. So vibrant were the sounds that the beds thrilled and shook. Every possible search was made, the husband waiting on one side of the door and the wife on the other, but the rappings still continued. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, Chapter 4 “The Hydesville Episode”)

This evolved into what Conan Doyle referred to as a “spiritual telegraph” and the Fox sisters then began a perpetual worldwide tour communicating with the dead.

By the time Maggie arrived in Philadelphia in 1852 and met Dr. Kane at a private séance, she’d already given séances for James Fenimore Cooper, Sojourner Truth and New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley, who’d become something of a guardian to the sisters. They performed regularly in sold out lecture halls to front page headlines and were mobbed by crowds of admirers, but at the time, Maggie was ensconced in the Bridal Suite of Webb’s Union Hotel on First and Arch streets, while a series of curious and wealthy patrons made appointments to contact the spirit world and came through every hour like shoppers at a grocery. Kane visited numerous times, sometimes making multiple visits in a single afternoon. Kane, at least at first, was hoping to contact the ghost of Sir John Franklin, missing in the Arctic since 1845. At the time Kane was thirty-four and Maggie nineteen.

A table levetates during a seance with the Fox Sisters

A table levitates during a séance with the Fox Sisters. From
Les Mystères de la Science by Louis Figuier, Paris 1880. Engraving by
Narcisse Navellier from the drawing by Horace Castelli.

Woodford, Fox and Dickens

Kane and Fox were as large as celebrities got in Philadelphia in 1854 and their courtship, which the Philadelphia Inquirer would later call an “eccentric and tragedy-smitten affair” made them an immediate power couple. Kane had recently returned from his first Arctic Expedition in 1850 and was preparing to embark upon another one, still in search of Sir John Franklin. At famous as both of them were, far more well known was Charles John Huffam Dickens, the preeminent writer of his day, author of A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, and David Copperfield, he was a philanthropist, actor inventor of the cliffhanger ending, and possibly the most famous man alive. Dickens had met Woodford in 1842 during his first American tour and the two had struck up a friendship and became occasional correspondents.

Woodford sent the author copies of the three portraits of Kane and Fox depicting the ectoplasmic manifestations as curiosities and after Kane embarked for the Arctic again in 1855, Woodford began sending Dickens increasing numbers of spirit images he had taken with Fox.

The Umbratype

Particular to Woodford’s success in spectral photography was his early development of what he called the Umbratype, a now lost photographic process decades ahead of its time which allowed images to be recorded on hypersensitized plates in a fraction of the time that more traditional photography methods required — in this case, Woodford was able to expose an Umbratype in under a second, at a time when photographic images required at the very minimum three to five seconds, and sometimes much longer.

“His instrument is highly attuned to the spirit world, capturing light in both the visible and invisible spectrums, spanning this world and the next,” Fox wrote in a letter to Dickens in 1859 (Margaretta Fox Kane, letter to Charles Dickens, November 8, 1859, Mary Evans Bruno Collection, Photographic Society of Rose Valley.) Indeed, Woodford’s photographs captured spirit manifestations nearly a decade and a half before other photographic processes caught up with the Umbratype. Particular to this was the strange material manifestation he photographed in 1854 surrounding Fox. Which he later realized to be a protrusion into our world from the next, later described by Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his exhaustive History of Spiritualism:

This substance has been closely examined by the great French physiologist, Dr. Charles Richet, who has named it “ectoplasm.” These rods are invisible to the eye, partly visible to the sensitive plate, and yet conduct energy in such a fashion as to make sounds and strike blows at a distance. (Arthur Conan Doyle, M.D., LL.D., History of Spiritualism Volume 1, Cassell And Company, London, 1926.)

As Fox and Woodford began to investigate the spirit world with the Umbratype process, their friend Charles Dickens was having his own experiments. Generally thought a skeptic, Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories, most notably A Christmas Carol, but his spirits were usually either comical or moralistic. This changed after the events that took place at Thistlewood. Beginning in 1853 Dickens began to receive a series of ever-increasingly hysteric letter from Sir John Thellusson, begging the novelist to visit and telling of an onslaught of hauntings, mysterious lights, noises, and full materializations that threatened his mental state if not his very life. Dickens was sympathetic but at the time he was hip deep in writing the twenty-party serialized novel Bleak House.

Incident at Thistlewood

Woodford arrived at Thistlewood to find Thellusson and Owing engaged in a uneasy existence. By day Owing cataloged the books while Thellusson fretted, and at night they were regularly wakened by noises which Woodford described as scrapings and wailings, but what unnerved him the most were what he called “quiet shuffling” sounds which seemed to follow them and only were noticeable if one stood still and quiet. But it made sleeping almost impossible. “The shufflings,” he wrote in a letter to his studio manager Charles Grimble, “are ever present at the foot of my bed. For a second, then gone, then just as I thought I might sleep, suddenly, again, like the feet of a person standing right next to my head, restlessly moving.”

Woodford, Owing and Thellusson spend much of the evenings awake in conversation while waiting for the delivery of Woodford’s equipment which arrived on the evening of the third day, after which Woodford began making exposures in earnest, at first hoping only to make a series of portraits of the two, but on developing them he found that they were indeed not alone in the house.

The first photograph, of Owing and Thellusson discussing a volume from the library revealed a figure standing where none had been “we were but three in the whole house,” Woodford wrote, “the servants having long ago been dismissed as Thellusson’s fortune withered”. The manifestation excited Thellusson, confounded Owing and pushed the manor’s owner further to the brink.

The manifestations occurred nightly, persistently, and seemed to center around an old fireplace. As they lost control of the situation, Woodford took a horse fifteen miles to Elgin and telegraphed Dickens who arrived four days later.

There are no contemporaneous accounts of what exactly the novelist did at Thistlewood or, indeed, the circumstances of their leaving, but it disturbed him greatly. “I have never felt so unnerved by a thing,” Dickens wrote to Woodford in an undated letter, c 1858, “or felt my grip on sanity so precarious.” But the author was able to use it for creative purposes “I have written some new ghost stories which are the shadows of the things we experienced at Thistlewood. I enclose a pretty good copy of one, but please do not share it, for the moment let it, and all of this, be our secret.” (Charles Dickens, Letter to Sabine Woodford, c. 1857, Rose Valley Collection.)

Sir John did not survive the experience, dieing within a fortnight, succumbing to what Woodford described as “an inability to ever sleep again.” (Sabine Woodford, Letter to Charles Dickens (draft), c. 1857, Rose Valley Collection)

Images From the Rose Valley Collection

“On my first evening at Thistlewood I exposed some Umbratype plates with no thought other than lessening the tension in the air. Sir John seemed frazzled and excitible. In the first image I created, a simple portrait of Sir John and Mr. Owing revealed the powerful manifestations in Thistlewood as a nearly fully manifested spirit appeared in the background of the photo, appearing like a child, seeming very interested in Mr. Owing.”

— Sabine Woodford, undated letter to Charles Dickens (draft) circa 1854

Sabine Woodford, Manifestation #1 — Portrait of Sir John Thellusson and
August Owing with ghost becoming corporeal in a cloud of ectoplasm,
circa 1854. Umbratype print, 11x17 inches. (Restored) Rose Valley Collection.

“Sir John, his senses more attuned from so much time spent in the manor house felt the spirits’ presense far more palpably than we did at first. He was uneasy, mistrusting, constantly asking for Dickens. Mr. Owen attributed it all to the gloom and isolation — at first in any event. But as I began to develop the Umbratypes we became rapidly aware of just how closely the appirition was paying attention to us.”

— Sabine Woodford, undated letter to Maggie Fox (draft) circa 1854

Sabine Woodford, Manifestation #2 — Portrait of Sir John Thellusson,
August Owing with ghost becoming corporeal in a cloud of ectoplasm,
circa 1854. Umbratype print, 11x17 inches. (Restored) Rose Valley Collection.

The manefestations clearly were strongest in several places in the house. And on the fourth night, I waited as my watch ticked past midnight and was rewarded — if I can use that word — with the full physical manefestation of a spectre which tried for some eleven minutes to materialize in a great, swirling cloud of ectoplasm.

— Sabine Woodford, undated letter to Maggie Fox (draft) circa 1854

Sabine Woodford, Manifestation #3 — ghost becoming
corporeal in a cloud of ectoplasm, circa 1854.

“We became increasingly certain that the manifestations were centered around the fireplace in the old east wing of the house. Sir John had decided that, with our added courage, he could confront the spirit that had been tormenting him for so long. I set up four Umbratype apprattus’ and we removed the boards from the wooden doors which had kept the west wing shuttered for nearly fifty years. There was a dank smell about the place — there remaned no remnants of past occupants, not a stick of furniture or scrap nailed to the wall. Sir John and Mr. Owing, with a lit candle, proceed into the wing were we were immediately met with a caucophany of loud rappings, and finally a blast of light from the fireplace — the largest ball of ectoplasm I have ever seen. A spirit fully manifested and approached Sir John who was not able to keep his nerve. I grabbed my equipment and led the others in fleeing from the rooms. Would that we had your calm head there, and your ability to communicate with the dead.”

— Sabine Woodford, undated letter to Charles Dickens (draft) circa 1854

Sabine Woodford, Manifestation #6 — ghost materializing in a fireplace
with August Owing and Sir John Thellusson, circa 1854.
Umbratype print, 11x17 inches. (Restored) Rose Valley Collection.

Sabine Woodford, Manifestation #7 — Ghost materializing in a fireplace, circa 1854.
Umbratype print, 11x17 inches. (Restored) Rose Valley Collection.

Sabine Woodford, Manifestation #8 — August Owing and Sir John Thellusson, August Owing
with fully corporeal ghost, circa 1854. Umbratype print, 11x17 inches. (Restored) Rose Valley Collection...

The Haunting
By Hugh Janes, adapted from Charles Dickens
Directed by Jared Reed

A spine-chilling play based on several original ghost stories by Charles Dickens.

February 5 to March 1, 2020

TICKET PRICING
Previews: $20
Regular Ticket: Mondays through Thursdays $25, Fridays $30, Saturdays and Sundays $39
Senior Discount: Mondays through Thursdays $25, Fridays $30, Saturdays and Sundays $36
Age 30 and Under: $25 any performance

Ghost stories will be shared in the gallery starting 45 minutes before every performance.