Confessions medium de chapman william (3 resultados)

Condición: New. Print on Demand.

Condición: Very good plus. First Edition. 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. 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. 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.…

First edition. 16 pages of preliminaries, then 232 pages plus 32-page catalogue dated October 1881. The book is reasonably firmly bound in the publisher's brown cloth covered boards, lettered and decorated in gilt, white and dark brown, the cloth is heavily marked, rubbed and damp stained, with a mottled appearance, the cloth becoming powdery, the extremities are bumped, with small tears to the cloth. The text block is slightly foxed, marked and age toned, with slight cracking at points and minor damage to some page edges, it has been neatly annotated in pencil throughout, mainly giving names to people whose identities have been disguised or omitted. A scandalous Victorian tell-all exposé by the rejected partner in crime of Alfred-Henri Firman, the American medium and spirt-photographer, detailing the supposed supernatural phenomena and the manner in which they were contrived, written in a sensational, highly entertaining fashion. This, an externally unprepossessing but internally tolerable copy of the first edition.…