Hello and welcome to Bad Gaze podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.

Today we have a special

episodes and it's fantastic to welcome to the show Avery Curran. Avery is a writer and researcher.

She finished an MA in Victorian Studies in 2021 and has recently finished a PhD on spiritualism

and queerness in the 19th century. So, right of my street. She was born in New York City and currently lives

in southeast London with her girlfriend and their cat. What's the cat called? Claudine after the

Colette novels, which is really pretentious. Oh, no, fantastic. I love Colette. It's great.

Talking of novels, your first novel, Spoiled Milk, is out now. And I think it touches on some of the things we're going to talk about today.

Is that right?

Yes, it does. But I said it in the 1920s rather than 19th century to save myself the two gigantic 19th century spiritualism war ducks. Okay, great. Yeah, let's get on with it. Who are we talking about today? So we're talking about Daniel Dungless Hume, who is a medium in the 19th century, a spiritualist medium,

and who was the subject of one of the chapters of my PhD, who led the most wild and bizarre life where he behaved very badly sometimes and was behaved very badly too at other times.

So if you're working on spiritualism in any academic capacity, you come across Hume pretty early.

Like every time we go to a conference and somebody says, what do you work on?

And I mention his name.

That's the one where they're like, ah, him, this guy.

His biographer, yeah, one of those ones that really pops up everywhere.

And his biography, Peter Lamont. Yeah, the main guy. So he writes about this, this guy in his biography. And in the

very beginning, he says, if it were possible to go back in time just once and witness an event

from the past, I would choose to attend a seance with Hume. For me, he is the most interesting

person who ever lived.

He is more interesting than Jesus, Caesar, or Napoleon, who immediately spring to mind as interesting dead people.

To me, that honestly sounds about right.

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