9/1/2023 0 Comments Ouija boards and seance table![]() 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 séances feature conversations he and his brother had with Elizabeth Siddal, whose presence punctuates the three recorded years. We have co-edited this meticulous record of 20 séances that William attended between 18, published for the first time this year as a volume titled Pre-Raphaelites in the Spirit World – The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti. Pursuing William Rossetti’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 Rossetti (labelled “Séance Diary”) is kept. The most regular participant was his brother, William Michael Rossetti. Many of these took place in his home in Chelsea, attended by friends and acquaintances. The pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, started holding spiritualist séances after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1862. The fashion for spiritualist séances was fuelled by those who longed for communication with lost loved ones or friends. All communication with the spirits was done through letters of the alphabet, similar to ouija boards. Séances began to take place in the parlours and dining rooms of France, Germany, Italy and Britain. Soon “table-rapping” swept the American continent, 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. Death and disease are no strangers to the streets of Britain.
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