Long before the Ouija board the Victorians loved a seance

William Rossetti’s seance diary records in meticulous detail every moment from 20 sessions, and every famous participant is also noted down, reports Barrie Bullen

Rossetti’s ‘Beata Beatrix’ depicts the moment his wife Elizabeth Siddal died beside the Thames (Universal History Archive/UIG/Shutterstock)

Death and disease are no strangers to the streets of Britain. 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.

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. In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens recorded fever deaths in the slums of London. But the most prominent flesh-and-bone victim was Queen Victoria’s own husband, Prince Albert. He was diagnosed with typhoid and died in December 1861.

Meanwhile, a bizarre form of comfort was at hand. 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. “Table-rapping” swept across the American continent and modern spiritualism was born; and in the early 1850s it crossed the Atlantic. Seances began to take place in the parlours and dining rooms of France, Germany, Italy and Britain. All communication with the spirits was done through letters of the alphabet, similar to ouija boards.