SD1793. Mary Russell Mitford to Anna Maria Goldsmid

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 369 (in part).

[Swallowfield]

Decr 14th 1854

How past all goodness good you are to me dearest Miss Goldsmid!– … Also I have turned over Judge Edmonds’s odious work called Spirituality [sic, for Spiritualism]– Do you know it? No description can realise the frightful manner in which every religious feeling—every feeling of the sacredness of death—every consideration for the affections of the living is cast aside in that book. One of their mediums called Daniel Webster before her Circle on the 27th of Octr he having died on the 24th—& he is represented as dark & suffering because he had during life disbelieved this new faith. They say that the American madhouses are running over with the victims of these Impostors. Mr May tells me it has sent one of his patients to an Asylum– Sir Edward Lytton passes much of his time in conversing with his dead daughter & Mrs Browning believes in these horrors. …

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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