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Home » Adopt a Piece of History » Letters to James Mansfield Requesting his Services as a Medium, 1860s-1880s. 30 items.

Letters to James Mansfield Requesting his Services as a Medium, 1860s-1880s. 30 items.

Manuscripts

$2100

Handwritten letters requesting James Mansfield’s services as a medium may best illuminate his professional work. Letters from husbands attempting to contact their deceased spouses, sisters carrying on correspondence between the living and the dead, and many others provide vivid testimony to the grief that fueled Mansfield’s enterprise. Few of these evidential letters survive despite Mansfield’s claim that he wrote well over 100,000 over the course of his career as a writing medium. A number of them are addressed to Mary Mansfield, as her husband frequently traveled to maintain his business.

About this Collection: The James V. Mansfield Papers

The William L. Clements Library had the unprecedented opportunity to acquire a large portion of the papers of James V. Mansfield (1817-1899), his wife Mary Hopkinson Mansfield (b. ca. 1827), and their children John Worthington Mansfield (1849-1933) and Mary Gertrude Mansfield (1854-1922). James Mansfield was born in 1817 in Massachusetts and worked as an itinerant penmanship teacher and a dry goods merchant in Boston before establishing himself as a spiritualist medium in 1857. James Mansfield’s services included delivering séances in person or acting as a writing medium. You were able to send to Mansfield a letter to a deceased family member or friend, and he would channel the departed, who would then respond to the unopened letter. Mansfield would return the reply and the original letter for a fee. For this service he gained the moniker “spirit postmaster,” and is now recognized as one of the founders of the American spiritualist movement, alongside Charles Foster and Henry Slade.