Rare first edition of this lightly fictionalized, anonymously published confessional narrative by Chapman, the English mesmerist and former partner of American materializing medium Alfred-Henri Firman, one of the defendants in a widely publicized French spirit photography trial in 1875.
Very good plus.
Price: $375.00
"Nothing is impossible. Just shut your eyes and chatter away; say you are controlled by some great personage - Martin Luther, Judas Iscariot, John Wesley, anybody."
Alfred Firman, depicted here as the charismatic and reprehensible fraud "Thomson," was not only a medium but a second-generation medium: son of that Louise Firman mentioned as "Mrs. Firman the medium" in Conan Doyle's History of Spiritualism and eulogized upon her death in 1879 as "one of the most powerful mediums of this age." Mother and son rose from humble New Jersey origins to the elite Spiritualist circles of England and France in the early 1870s, holding private seances in connection with psychical investigators, interrupted by A. Firman's arrest in the matter of Edouard Buguet's fraudulent spirit photographs, for which, despite the supportive testimony of his loyal patron the Comte de Bullet, Firman served six months in a French prison. By the time the action of CONFESSIONS commences, Firman had returned to London and acquired the perfidious Chapman to give public lectures while the spirits manifested. Chapman, who represents himself as an earnest true believer who very slowly came to recognize his complicity with a charlatan, turned on his mentor only when abandoned by him: Firman/Thomson went alone to Russia in 1880, leaving his partner behind with nothing to do with his time but write a book. Following its publication, the Spiritualist papers readily identified and vilified its author, who names many names not his own, and upon his return to England Firman was reduced to giving "self-exposure" shows, bringing out his finest spirits for a few laughs. A vital if untrustworthy document of Victorian social history.
Read more: Marc Demarest, "Confessions of a Medium: The Author, Outed," eh.blogspot.com.
London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, [1882]. 7'' x 4.25''. Original red and and black decorative cloth with gilt-lettered spine. With 5 black and white illustrations. 232 pages. Light edgewear and bumping, spine sunned. Some soil to boards and spine, soil to lower margins of pages 20-21.
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