Margaret Fox Kane and Her Victorian Love Story
As individuals, Margaret Fox and Elisha K. Kane were both determined romantics pursing their individual dreams. Margaret dreamed of a safe, financially secure home away from her ambivalent feelings about earning a living as a medium. Elisha dreamed of matching his brother Thomas in fame and fortune, despite uncertain health from a childhood bout of rheumatic fever.
Margaret Fox belonged to the trio of Fox sisters who gained worldwide recognition for their supposed ability to communicate with souls in the spirit world by rapping messages from both sides of the divide separating life and death. Elisha Kane sought adventure in rescuing the Franklin Arctic Expedition and discovering an ice-free sea in the Arctic. Victorian era manners and morals also shaped their relationship- including society’s expectation of manly heroes and pure, compliant heroines.
Although he loved her, Elisha Kane hesitated to marry Margaret Fox until she transformed herself enough to earn his love and respect and he didn’t have the courage to defy his family to formally marry her. After his untimely death, Margaret spent ten years fighting for the inheritance Elisha left her, offering his love letters to her as proof of his devotion and commitment. She called herself Margaret Fox Kane until she died in abject poverty in Brooklyn, New York.
When Margaret Fox and Elisha K. Kane joined forces they created a whirlwind of drama during their lifetimes and sparked historical arguments that survived more than a century after their deaths.
Spirit Rapping with a Jewish Peddler and Conducting Séances
Margaret Fox, Maggie to her family and friends, was born in Bath, Canada, in 1833, but by 1848 she and her sister Kate born in 1837, lived with their parents, John D. and Margaret Fox in Hydesville, New York which in later years became a part of Arcadia Township. Their older sister Leah, born in 1814 had already married and left home. The Hyde’s new home had a reputation for being haunted even before they moved into it. Legend said that a Jewish peddler, Charles B. Rosma, had been murdered and buried in the cellar and his spirit refused to leave the scene of his murder.
In late March of 1848, Kate and Margaret Fox and their parents heard mysterious sounds in their home, including knocking and moving furniture. On March 31, 1848, Kate and Margaret decided to challenge the noisy “spirit” by snapping their fingers and daring the spirit to repeat the snaps. The spirit complied.
Next, the girls asked the spirit to rap out their ages. The spirit did so. The Fox girls developed a rap code to signify a yes or no answer to a question or represent a letter in the alphabet. The girls said that the mysterious rapper was the spirit of the Jewish peddler buried in the cellar. The girls told their parents and their parents called in the neighbors to witness the strange events.
Local excitement about the “spirit rapping” grew so quickly that their parents decided to send Kate and Margaret away until the furor died down. They sent Kate to their sister Leah’s home in Rochester and Margaret to their brother David’s home, also in Rochester. The rappings followed the girls and eventually Amy and Isaac Post, long-time family friends, invited Kate and Margaret to stay in their home.
The invitation transformed the rappings from a regional event to one of potential national significance because the Posts believed in such radical causes as abolition, temperance, and equal rights for women. They also believed in Margaret and Kate and spread the word of the rappings among their Quaker friends, who formed the core of early Spiritualists. Even when many of the rappings and mediums were exposed as frauds, Spiritualists like Arthur Conan Doyle soon countered that up to a point, a medium’s own will could influence the supernatural events of a séance.
By 1850, Margaret and Kate Fox had conducted public séances for hundreds of people in New York, people searching for insight into life decisions from stocks to significant others. Many people immediately recognized the significance of communicating with deceased people and many were driven by the need to feel a connection with loved ones who had died. The Fox sisters attracted the attention of famous people in the United States and in Europe, including William Cullen Bryant, James Fennimore Cooper, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Prominent publisher and politician Horace Greely took a special interest in the Fox sisters, introducing them into higher social circles.
In the meantime, Elisha Kane carved himself a niche in his world. He earned his medical degree, fought in the Mexican War, and traveled the world. In 1850-1851, as senior medical officer of the Grinnell Arctic Expedition that Edwin de Haven commanded, he aided in the unsuccessful search for Sir John Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition, although his crew did discover Sir John Franklin’s first winter camp. Dr. Kane vowed to return and resume the search for the Franklin Expedition, but before he returned to the Arctic, he met someone in Philadelphia who presented as difficult a challenge as any Arctic voyage.
Margaret Fox and Elisha Kane Meet in Philadelphia
In 1852, Margaret Fox and her mother traveled to Philadelphia to demonstrate the rapping phenomenon to the Quakers of that city. Elisha Kane, the Arctic explorer, came to visit them and according to a Brooklyn Eagle article, he immediately fell in love with Margaret, but according to his letters, not so deeply in love that he thought she was perfect. In his letters, he outlined a program of improvement for Margaret that included finishing her education and learning the social graces. He also insisted that she give up spirit rapping and Spiritualism, believing that the three Fox sisters, Leah, Margaret and Kate were committing fraud with their rappings and séances.
Over the next four years, Dr. Elisha Kane and Margaret Fox enjoyed a tenuous engagement. Some sources say that Elisha Kane and Margaret Fox were formally married, while others say that Elisha could not summon the courage to defy the objections of his wealthy and prominent Philadelphia family and marry Margaret for love instead of business interests, the basis for many Victorian marriages.
Dr. Kane’s family and at times Dr. Kane himself, considered Margaret Fox his social inferior and since Victorians did not often marry outside of their class, they opposed the marriage. During the early days of their relationship, Elisha did not appear in public with Margaret because he felt that she was not worthy of him and that her association with Spiritualism and rappings degraded both of them.
Victorian sensibilities again interfered with the relationship of Dr. Kane and Margaret Fox, if his biographer George Corner’s interpretation is correct. According to George Corner, Elisha Kane's friends knew that he was thoroughly in love with Margaret Fox but he didn’t have the courage to defy his family and marry her. Since Dr. Elisha Kane was a national hero, the press and the public had an interest in keeping his image free from any suggestion of dishonor.
In May 1853, Dr. Kane organized and led the Second Grinnell Expedition to the Arctic which left New York on May 31, 1853. Dr. Kane and his crew charted the coasts of Smith Sound, the Kane Basin, and explored further North than any other explorer of the time. He discovered the ice-free Kennedy Channel at Cape Constitution, and then led his men on an 83-day march to Upernavik after their brig Advance froze in the ice. Dr. Kane returned to New York on October 11, 1855.
Although his health continuously declined, Dr. Kane diligently worked on his book from May through August, and in September 1856, he published his two volume book Arctic Explorations. Arctic Explorations sold 20,000 copies before publication and it continued to sell thousands of copies after publication. Besides publishing a bestselling book, Dr. Kane embarked on another endeavor in the fall of 1856.
Margaret Fox Kane– Did They Really Marry?
Dr. Elisha Kane had decided to spend the winter of 1856 in England, promoting his book and discussing a future Arctic expedition with Lady Franklin. Before he left, he wooed Margaret Fox with trip to the opera and a diamond bracelet from Tiffany’s. He commissioned an ambrotype- a portrait similar to a daguerreotype- of Margaret and advised her in a letter, “Don’t be afraid of your neck and shoulders. I want you to look like a Circe, for you have already changed me into a wild Boar.”
In her book The Love Life of Dr. Kane, Margaret Fox wrote that one evening in early October 1856, when Dr. Kane came to call he told her that he felt sad thinking about his impending trip to England. Then he smiled, asking her if she would be willing to marry him on the spot and declaring that “such a declaration, in the presence of witnesses, is sufficient to constitute a legal and binding marriage.”
Calling Kate and Mrs. Fox and two other young women in the house up to Margaret’s third story apartment as witnesses, Dr. Kane pronounced that they were legally married and Margaret agreed that they were married. Dr. Kane added that they would keep their marriage a secret until he returned from England in May when he would be financially secure and able to publicly marry Margaret.
The day before he left for England, Elisha Kane signed a will which the Grinnells witnessed, naming his brothers Thomas and Robert executors and leaving his upcoming royalties to the members of the family that his father choose. Although he specified his family as his mother and siblings, he left an immediate $5,000 payment to his lawyer brother, Robert. When Elisha Kane died, the Grinnells and Margaret Fox claimed he had intended the $5,000 for her.
Dr. Elisha Kane Dies in Havana and Margaret Kane Fights His Family for a Decade
Dr. Kane left for England on October 11, 1856, and after personally giving a report of his expedition to Lady Franklin, he sailed to Havana, Cuba to try to recover his health. He died in Havana on February 16, 1857. His family brought his body to New Orleans by steamer and from New Orleans a funeral train carried him to Philadelphia. A group of mourning citizens greeted him at nearly every platform and his family and friends claimed that only Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train had been longer. Elisha’s family buried him in Philadelphia without consulting or even acknowledging Margaret and her grief.
Margaret Fox Kane noted in her memoir that for a year and a half after Elisha Kane’s death she was too ill and depressed “to bear the light of day.” In August of 1858, she converted to the Roman Catholic faith at St. Peter’s in New York to honor Elisha and she claimed what she believed was her inheritance from the man she considered her husband. When Margaret converted to Catholicism, she had alienated her Spiritualist friends and lost her means of supporting herself, so she needed her inheritance to survive.
Dr. Kane’s family demanded that Margaret relinquish the letters he had written to her, but she refused and sued them for the $5,000 that he stipulated in his will. She insisted that their secret marriage was legitimate and called herself Mrs. Kane for the rest of her life.
In the summer of 1858, Margaret gave her letters to publisher Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet and Joseph La Fume of the Brooklyn Eagle and they helped her write a narrative to connect the letters. By September, Margaret had withdrawn from the letter project, realizing that her manuscript served better as a bargaining chip with Elisha’s family than a memoir. In 1862, she sent the letters to press again and filed a suit in the Philadelphia Orphans Court to collect a widow’s dower.
Her actions forced the Kanes to the bargaining table and they agreed to pay off her debts, give her $2,000, and pay her the interest on the remaining $3,000 that she inherited from Elisha. In return, Margaret agreed to drop the suit against them and place the letters and the book plates in the care of Dr. Edward Bayar of New York. Shortly after Dr. Bayar received the papers, the Kane family reworked the contract, knowing that Margaret couldn’t afford to take them to court again.
Over the next three years the Kane family broke the contract, and when in May 1865, they refused to pay Margaret anything, she proved that they had defaulted on their original agreement. She reclaimed the letters which she published as The Love Life of Dr. Kane in 1866.
Margaret Fox Kane, Medium
Margaret Fox Kane dropped out of the public eye for several years, but she eventually returned to her medium activities and after more than thirty years of struggling with alcoholism, depression, and poverty, she decided to explain them. On October 21, 1888, in a signed confession in the New York World, she revealed the origins of the mysterious spirit rappings in Hydesville. She explained that she and her sister Katie experimented until they could swish their fingers and produce rapping noises with their knuckles, joints, an toes.
She also said that, "A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them. It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: "I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder. Of course that was pure imagination.”
On October 22, 1888, Margaret Fox Kane presented a grand performance in New York’s Academy of Music. In front of large crowed she demonstrated how she could produce a heavy barrage of rapping noises from all corners of the hall. Laughing, she revealed that the rappings came from the clever manipulation of the joints in her toes.
She also wrote another book called The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, to coincide with her performances.
Margaret’s writings and performance brought only temporary fame and she soon she sank back into poverty. Within a year of her performance, she recanted her denial an returned to conducting séances.
In the Papers One Last Time
The New York Times of March 5, 1893, published this notice:
Margaret Fox Kane Destitute
“Margaret Fox Kane, one of the Fox sisters…is sick and destitute at the rooms she has long been occupying at the tenement house, 456 West Fifty-seventh street. Through she is very ill, she will be dispossessed on Tuesday. Titus Merritt…is taking up a subscription among his friends with a view to sending Mrs. Kane to some sort of sanitarium.”
A short obituary appeared in the New York Times of March 10, 1893, which incorrectly identified Margaret as the youngest Fox sister. The obituary noted that she was married to Elisha Kent Kane in 1856 “by the Quaker rite.”
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of March 9, 1893, reported that “Margaret Fox Kane, age 59, had died at the home of her friend Mrs. Emily B. Ruggles, 429 State Street in Brooklyn. The article noted that Margaret was in destitute circumstances and was removed to Brooklyn from a New York tenement but a short time ago.”
Margaret and her sister Kate’s rapping experiments with their toes, the complicity of their parents and neighbors, and the human need to believe that their loved ones have survived death and can communicate with them propelled them on a career path they couldn’t have imagined. Margaret’s correspondence indicates that Elisha Kent Kane was the love of her life. She express that love in the Victorian love letters printed in her 1866 book, the Love Life of Dr. Kane.
Despite their love for each other, their society and their family managed to keep Mr. and Mrs. Elisha Kane apart before the finality of death separated them. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that Margaret Fox Kane could not bridge the gap between the living and the dead even though she was a medium who had claimed for years that she had bridged that gap.
References
Braude, Ann. 2001. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-
Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Chapin, David. Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity. University of Massachusetts, 2004.
Corner, George. Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1972
Elder, William. Biography of Elisha Kent Kane. Foster Press, 2007.
Fox, Margaret. The Love Life of Dr. Kane. 1866.
Rubin Stuart, Nancy. The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox . New York: Harcourt, 2005.
Sawin, Mark Horst. Raising Kane: The Making of a Hero, the Marketing of a Celebrity.
Weisberg, Barbara. Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004.
(Canadian writer Wilma Lanio Trebell states that the Fox sisters were born in Consecon, Prince Edward Country, Ontario (then known as Upper Canada). Bath and Bath, New Brunswick, have been incorrectly mentioned as their birth place. The Encyclopedia Britannica and several other sources cite the Bath location as their birthplace.
After the Fox parents reconciled, they went Consecon in Prince Edward County, Upper Canada, where Mrs. Fox’s Rutan relatives on her mother’s side lived. They were United Empire Loyalists. It was here that Margaretta and Catherine Fox were born: Margaretta on October 7, 1833 and Catherine on March 27, 1837. (Source: Weisberg, Barbara. Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism.)
Wells, Richard A. “Manners Culture and Dress of the Best American Society.” King, Richardson, & Co. Publishers. Springfield, MA. 1893
Margaret Fox belonged to the trio of Fox sisters who gained worldwide recognition for their supposed ability to communicate with souls in the spirit world by rapping messages from both sides of the divide separating life and death. Elisha Kane sought adventure in rescuing the Franklin Arctic Expedition and discovering an ice-free sea in the Arctic. Victorian era manners and morals also shaped their relationship- including society’s expectation of manly heroes and pure, compliant heroines.
Although he loved her, Elisha Kane hesitated to marry Margaret Fox until she transformed herself enough to earn his love and respect and he didn’t have the courage to defy his family to formally marry her. After his untimely death, Margaret spent ten years fighting for the inheritance Elisha left her, offering his love letters to her as proof of his devotion and commitment. She called herself Margaret Fox Kane until she died in abject poverty in Brooklyn, New York.
When Margaret Fox and Elisha K. Kane joined forces they created a whirlwind of drama during their lifetimes and sparked historical arguments that survived more than a century after their deaths.
Spirit Rapping with a Jewish Peddler and Conducting Séances
Margaret Fox, Maggie to her family and friends, was born in Bath, Canada, in 1833, but by 1848 she and her sister Kate born in 1837, lived with their parents, John D. and Margaret Fox in Hydesville, New York which in later years became a part of Arcadia Township. Their older sister Leah, born in 1814 had already married and left home. The Hyde’s new home had a reputation for being haunted even before they moved into it. Legend said that a Jewish peddler, Charles B. Rosma, had been murdered and buried in the cellar and his spirit refused to leave the scene of his murder.
In late March of 1848, Kate and Margaret Fox and their parents heard mysterious sounds in their home, including knocking and moving furniture. On March 31, 1848, Kate and Margaret decided to challenge the noisy “spirit” by snapping their fingers and daring the spirit to repeat the snaps. The spirit complied.
Next, the girls asked the spirit to rap out their ages. The spirit did so. The Fox girls developed a rap code to signify a yes or no answer to a question or represent a letter in the alphabet. The girls said that the mysterious rapper was the spirit of the Jewish peddler buried in the cellar. The girls told their parents and their parents called in the neighbors to witness the strange events.
Local excitement about the “spirit rapping” grew so quickly that their parents decided to send Kate and Margaret away until the furor died down. They sent Kate to their sister Leah’s home in Rochester and Margaret to their brother David’s home, also in Rochester. The rappings followed the girls and eventually Amy and Isaac Post, long-time family friends, invited Kate and Margaret to stay in their home.
The invitation transformed the rappings from a regional event to one of potential national significance because the Posts believed in such radical causes as abolition, temperance, and equal rights for women. They also believed in Margaret and Kate and spread the word of the rappings among their Quaker friends, who formed the core of early Spiritualists. Even when many of the rappings and mediums were exposed as frauds, Spiritualists like Arthur Conan Doyle soon countered that up to a point, a medium’s own will could influence the supernatural events of a séance.
By 1850, Margaret and Kate Fox had conducted public séances for hundreds of people in New York, people searching for insight into life decisions from stocks to significant others. Many people immediately recognized the significance of communicating with deceased people and many were driven by the need to feel a connection with loved ones who had died. The Fox sisters attracted the attention of famous people in the United States and in Europe, including William Cullen Bryant, James Fennimore Cooper, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Prominent publisher and politician Horace Greely took a special interest in the Fox sisters, introducing them into higher social circles.
In the meantime, Elisha Kane carved himself a niche in his world. He earned his medical degree, fought in the Mexican War, and traveled the world. In 1850-1851, as senior medical officer of the Grinnell Arctic Expedition that Edwin de Haven commanded, he aided in the unsuccessful search for Sir John Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition, although his crew did discover Sir John Franklin’s first winter camp. Dr. Kane vowed to return and resume the search for the Franklin Expedition, but before he returned to the Arctic, he met someone in Philadelphia who presented as difficult a challenge as any Arctic voyage.
Margaret Fox and Elisha Kane Meet in Philadelphia
In 1852, Margaret Fox and her mother traveled to Philadelphia to demonstrate the rapping phenomenon to the Quakers of that city. Elisha Kane, the Arctic explorer, came to visit them and according to a Brooklyn Eagle article, he immediately fell in love with Margaret, but according to his letters, not so deeply in love that he thought she was perfect. In his letters, he outlined a program of improvement for Margaret that included finishing her education and learning the social graces. He also insisted that she give up spirit rapping and Spiritualism, believing that the three Fox sisters, Leah, Margaret and Kate were committing fraud with their rappings and séances.
Over the next four years, Dr. Elisha Kane and Margaret Fox enjoyed a tenuous engagement. Some sources say that Elisha Kane and Margaret Fox were formally married, while others say that Elisha could not summon the courage to defy the objections of his wealthy and prominent Philadelphia family and marry Margaret for love instead of business interests, the basis for many Victorian marriages.
Dr. Kane’s family and at times Dr. Kane himself, considered Margaret Fox his social inferior and since Victorians did not often marry outside of their class, they opposed the marriage. During the early days of their relationship, Elisha did not appear in public with Margaret because he felt that she was not worthy of him and that her association with Spiritualism and rappings degraded both of them.
Victorian sensibilities again interfered with the relationship of Dr. Kane and Margaret Fox, if his biographer George Corner’s interpretation is correct. According to George Corner, Elisha Kane's friends knew that he was thoroughly in love with Margaret Fox but he didn’t have the courage to defy his family and marry her. Since Dr. Elisha Kane was a national hero, the press and the public had an interest in keeping his image free from any suggestion of dishonor.
In May 1853, Dr. Kane organized and led the Second Grinnell Expedition to the Arctic which left New York on May 31, 1853. Dr. Kane and his crew charted the coasts of Smith Sound, the Kane Basin, and explored further North than any other explorer of the time. He discovered the ice-free Kennedy Channel at Cape Constitution, and then led his men on an 83-day march to Upernavik after their brig Advance froze in the ice. Dr. Kane returned to New York on October 11, 1855.
Although his health continuously declined, Dr. Kane diligently worked on his book from May through August, and in September 1856, he published his two volume book Arctic Explorations. Arctic Explorations sold 20,000 copies before publication and it continued to sell thousands of copies after publication. Besides publishing a bestselling book, Dr. Kane embarked on another endeavor in the fall of 1856.
Margaret Fox Kane– Did They Really Marry?
Dr. Elisha Kane had decided to spend the winter of 1856 in England, promoting his book and discussing a future Arctic expedition with Lady Franklin. Before he left, he wooed Margaret Fox with trip to the opera and a diamond bracelet from Tiffany’s. He commissioned an ambrotype- a portrait similar to a daguerreotype- of Margaret and advised her in a letter, “Don’t be afraid of your neck and shoulders. I want you to look like a Circe, for you have already changed me into a wild Boar.”
In her book The Love Life of Dr. Kane, Margaret Fox wrote that one evening in early October 1856, when Dr. Kane came to call he told her that he felt sad thinking about his impending trip to England. Then he smiled, asking her if she would be willing to marry him on the spot and declaring that “such a declaration, in the presence of witnesses, is sufficient to constitute a legal and binding marriage.”
Calling Kate and Mrs. Fox and two other young women in the house up to Margaret’s third story apartment as witnesses, Dr. Kane pronounced that they were legally married and Margaret agreed that they were married. Dr. Kane added that they would keep their marriage a secret until he returned from England in May when he would be financially secure and able to publicly marry Margaret.
The day before he left for England, Elisha Kane signed a will which the Grinnells witnessed, naming his brothers Thomas and Robert executors and leaving his upcoming royalties to the members of the family that his father choose. Although he specified his family as his mother and siblings, he left an immediate $5,000 payment to his lawyer brother, Robert. When Elisha Kane died, the Grinnells and Margaret Fox claimed he had intended the $5,000 for her.
Dr. Elisha Kane Dies in Havana and Margaret Kane Fights His Family for a Decade
Dr. Kane left for England on October 11, 1856, and after personally giving a report of his expedition to Lady Franklin, he sailed to Havana, Cuba to try to recover his health. He died in Havana on February 16, 1857. His family brought his body to New Orleans by steamer and from New Orleans a funeral train carried him to Philadelphia. A group of mourning citizens greeted him at nearly every platform and his family and friends claimed that only Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train had been longer. Elisha’s family buried him in Philadelphia without consulting or even acknowledging Margaret and her grief.
Margaret Fox Kane noted in her memoir that for a year and a half after Elisha Kane’s death she was too ill and depressed “to bear the light of day.” In August of 1858, she converted to the Roman Catholic faith at St. Peter’s in New York to honor Elisha and she claimed what she believed was her inheritance from the man she considered her husband. When Margaret converted to Catholicism, she had alienated her Spiritualist friends and lost her means of supporting herself, so she needed her inheritance to survive.
Dr. Kane’s family demanded that Margaret relinquish the letters he had written to her, but she refused and sued them for the $5,000 that he stipulated in his will. She insisted that their secret marriage was legitimate and called herself Mrs. Kane for the rest of her life.
In the summer of 1858, Margaret gave her letters to publisher Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet and Joseph La Fume of the Brooklyn Eagle and they helped her write a narrative to connect the letters. By September, Margaret had withdrawn from the letter project, realizing that her manuscript served better as a bargaining chip with Elisha’s family than a memoir. In 1862, she sent the letters to press again and filed a suit in the Philadelphia Orphans Court to collect a widow’s dower.
Her actions forced the Kanes to the bargaining table and they agreed to pay off her debts, give her $2,000, and pay her the interest on the remaining $3,000 that she inherited from Elisha. In return, Margaret agreed to drop the suit against them and place the letters and the book plates in the care of Dr. Edward Bayar of New York. Shortly after Dr. Bayar received the papers, the Kane family reworked the contract, knowing that Margaret couldn’t afford to take them to court again.
Over the next three years the Kane family broke the contract, and when in May 1865, they refused to pay Margaret anything, she proved that they had defaulted on their original agreement. She reclaimed the letters which she published as The Love Life of Dr. Kane in 1866.
Margaret Fox Kane, Medium
Margaret Fox Kane dropped out of the public eye for several years, but she eventually returned to her medium activities and after more than thirty years of struggling with alcoholism, depression, and poverty, she decided to explain them. On October 21, 1888, in a signed confession in the New York World, she revealed the origins of the mysterious spirit rappings in Hydesville. She explained that she and her sister Katie experimented until they could swish their fingers and produce rapping noises with their knuckles, joints, an toes.
She also said that, "A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them. It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: "I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder. Of course that was pure imagination.”
On October 22, 1888, Margaret Fox Kane presented a grand performance in New York’s Academy of Music. In front of large crowed she demonstrated how she could produce a heavy barrage of rapping noises from all corners of the hall. Laughing, she revealed that the rappings came from the clever manipulation of the joints in her toes.
She also wrote another book called The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, to coincide with her performances.
Margaret’s writings and performance brought only temporary fame and she soon she sank back into poverty. Within a year of her performance, she recanted her denial an returned to conducting séances.
In the Papers One Last Time
The New York Times of March 5, 1893, published this notice:
Margaret Fox Kane Destitute
“Margaret Fox Kane, one of the Fox sisters…is sick and destitute at the rooms she has long been occupying at the tenement house, 456 West Fifty-seventh street. Through she is very ill, she will be dispossessed on Tuesday. Titus Merritt…is taking up a subscription among his friends with a view to sending Mrs. Kane to some sort of sanitarium.”
A short obituary appeared in the New York Times of March 10, 1893, which incorrectly identified Margaret as the youngest Fox sister. The obituary noted that she was married to Elisha Kent Kane in 1856 “by the Quaker rite.”
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of March 9, 1893, reported that “Margaret Fox Kane, age 59, had died at the home of her friend Mrs. Emily B. Ruggles, 429 State Street in Brooklyn. The article noted that Margaret was in destitute circumstances and was removed to Brooklyn from a New York tenement but a short time ago.”
Margaret and her sister Kate’s rapping experiments with their toes, the complicity of their parents and neighbors, and the human need to believe that their loved ones have survived death and can communicate with them propelled them on a career path they couldn’t have imagined. Margaret’s correspondence indicates that Elisha Kent Kane was the love of her life. She express that love in the Victorian love letters printed in her 1866 book, the Love Life of Dr. Kane.
Despite their love for each other, their society and their family managed to keep Mr. and Mrs. Elisha Kane apart before the finality of death separated them. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that Margaret Fox Kane could not bridge the gap between the living and the dead even though she was a medium who had claimed for years that she had bridged that gap.
References
Braude, Ann. 2001. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-
Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Chapin, David. Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity. University of Massachusetts, 2004.
Corner, George. Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1972
Elder, William. Biography of Elisha Kent Kane. Foster Press, 2007.
Fox, Margaret. The Love Life of Dr. Kane. 1866.
Rubin Stuart, Nancy. The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox . New York: Harcourt, 2005.
Sawin, Mark Horst. Raising Kane: The Making of a Hero, the Marketing of a Celebrity.
Weisberg, Barbara. Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004.
(Canadian writer Wilma Lanio Trebell states that the Fox sisters were born in Consecon, Prince Edward Country, Ontario (then known as Upper Canada). Bath and Bath, New Brunswick, have been incorrectly mentioned as their birth place. The Encyclopedia Britannica and several other sources cite the Bath location as their birthplace.
After the Fox parents reconciled, they went Consecon in Prince Edward County, Upper Canada, where Mrs. Fox’s Rutan relatives on her mother’s side lived. They were United Empire Loyalists. It was here that Margaretta and Catherine Fox were born: Margaretta on October 7, 1833 and Catherine on March 27, 1837. (Source: Weisberg, Barbara. Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism.)
Wells, Richard A. “Manners Culture and Dress of the Best American Society.” King, Richardson, & Co. Publishers. Springfield, MA. 1893