The Spiritualists: The Story of Florence Cook and William Crookes

Trevor H. Hall's The Spiritualists: The Story of Florence Cook and William Crookes, published by Duckworth in 1962, is a critical historical study reassessing the celebrated Victorian mediumship of Florence Cook and the physicist William Crookes's investigations of it, arguing that Crookes was deceived, or complicit, rather than that Cook's phenomena were genuine. Its authority rests on Hall's detailed archival research into the case and its long standing as a major skeptical reference on the episode. It is a specifically critical reassessment written from a skeptical historical standpoint, so a claim about the case is best read alongside Spiritualist sympathetic accounts of the same events as well, since the historical record itself remains disputed.