![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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