PETER LAMONT is a research fellow in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh. He specializes in the history and psychology of magic and psychic phenomena, and is a past winner of the Jeremiah Dalziel prize in British history. He has also worked professionally as a magician and psychic, and has performed and lectured across the world. His first book, THE RISE OF THE INDIAN ROPE TRICK, was published in 2003 by Little, Brown in the UK and Thunder’s Mouth in the US to wide critical acclaim.

THE FIRST PSYCHIC
The Peculiar Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard

Praise for THE RISE OF THE INDIAN ROPE TRICK

A short, sharp little book… wonderfully entertaining – THE TIMES

A labour of love. Lamont disentangles the gargantuan knot of lies and sets the record straight with a joyful vengeance – THE NEW YORK TIMES

A fascinating, quirky and authoritative investigation into the world’s greatest mystery – Simon Singh

On the evening of Sunday 13 December 1868, a remarkable event took place in the Westminster home of Viscount Adare. A 35-year-old man, whose extraordinary exploits had already made him something of a sensation, floated out of one third-floor window and in through another.

This was the most notorious of many feats performed by Daniel Douglas Home, a lowborn Scot who became an international celebrity by convincing the rich and famous that tables floated, that spirit hands materialized and that he himself could levitate. Home is virtually unknown today, but everybody who was anybody in Victorian society, and many who were not, had a strong opinion about him. He was hated by Dickens, defended by Thackeray, denounced by Faraday and mysterious to Darwin. He was insulted by Tolstoy, praised by Mark Twain and patronized by Napoleon III. When he married a god-daughter of the Tsar of Russia, his best man was Alexandre Dumas. Home was the only subject upon which Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning disagreed. And the question that divided them was the same one asked by the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science: how did he do it?

THE FIRST PSYCHIC investigates the changing fortunes of a man whose life challenged the Victorian obsession with both science and religion, a man who baffled the establishment so much that they coined the word ‘psychic’ to describe him. It is the story of a controversial Victorian celebrity and of the strange and seemingly inexplicable events that occurred in his presence.

Publisher: Little, Brown (UK)
Pub date: 18 August 2005
Length: 320 pages

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