![]() The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the social reformer Robert Owen, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace and the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle were just a few more passionate believers in the power of seances. The Rossettis were by no means the only Victorians committed to a belief in the occult. William Rossetti was a diligent civil servant with a strong sense of probity and an eye for detail, and what he gave us in this little notebook was an unparalleled insight into the Victorian spirit world. And so, like many people curious about spiritualism, we remain mystified by the bizarre accuracy of some of the messages coming from the spirit world through these diaries. Some of the most remarkable manifestations involve figures of whom there is no evidence yet whose accounts have been confirmed recently through the archival research of the editors of this volume. Many of the spirits that William said rose from the dark were artists, often responding accurately to being asked about when, where and how their deaths had occurred. On another, their Italian father, Gabriele Rossetti, was reportedly summoned and addressed the brothers in his native Italian. According to William, on one occasion their uncle, Gaetano Polidori, once Lord Byron’s doctor, correctly confessed that he had died by suicide. Many others feature dead friends and relatives. Many of the seances feature conversations he and his brother had with Elizabeth Siddal, whose presence punctuates the three recorded years. William Michael Rossetti’s seance diaries were published for the first time in 2021 (Public domain) We have co-edited this meticulous record of 20 seances that William attended between 18, published for the first time this year as a volume titled Pre-Raphaelites in the Spirit World – The Seance Diary of William Michael Rossetti. Pursuing William’s stray memories led me and my colleagues, Rosalind White and Lenore Beaky, to the special collection of the library of the University of British Columbia where a small notebook by William (labelled “Seance Diary”) is kept. The most regular participant was his brother, William Michael Rossetti. Many of these took place at his home in Chelsea, attended by friends and acquaintances. The pre-Raphaelite poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, started holding spiritualist seances after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1862. The fashion for spiritualist seances was fuelled by those who longed for communication with long-lost loved ones or friends. All communication with the spirits was done through letters of the alphabet, similar to ouija boards. Seances began to take place in the parlours and dining rooms of France, Germany, Italy and Britain. “Table-rapping” swept across the American continent and modern spiritualism was born and in the early 1850s it crossed the Atlantic. In 1848 in Rochester, New York, two sisters claimed to have received messages from the spirit of a long-dead inhabitant of their house, and their conversation with him fired the imagination of America. Meanwhile, a bizarre form of comfort was at hand. He was diagnosed with typhoid and died in December 1861. But the most prominent flesh-and-bone victim was Queen Victoria’s own husband, Prince Albert. In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens recorded fever deaths in the slums of London. Wave after wave of typhoid also swept over the population where cause, diagnosis and cure were all equally uncertain – and social class provided no protection. By the late 19th century, tens of thousands of people had contracted fatal infections, such as cholera, smallpox and scarlatina, beginning with the first cholera epidemic of 1832, when detailed records first started being kept. Rossetti’s ‘Beata Beatrix’ depicts the moment his wife Elizabeth Siddal died beside the Thames (Universal History Archive/UIG/Shutterstock)ĭeath and disease are no strangers to the streets of Britain. ![]()
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