William Chapman

Confessions of a Medium William Chapman

Published anonymously in 1882, Confessions of a Medium is the thinly-disguised factual account of the partnership between two important mediums of the 1870s and early 1880s: the Englishman William Chapman, and the American Alfred H. Firman. Written by Chapman in the wake of Firman's abandonment of Chapman on the Continent, and Firman's subsequent "self-exposure" tour of English provincial towns, Confessions of a Medium is unique in the Spiritualist canon: an indubitably factual account of mediumistic work that gives its readers insight not only into the practices of fraudulent mediums, but also into the business of Spiritualism in nineteenth-century England, and into the milieu - the people, places and ideas - within which mediums practiced their profession.