Diary, 1906-1909, 1906-03-14 - 1909-02-06

1 Autograph Manuscript notebook dated 03/14/1906 to 02/06/1909 containing Autograph Letters and diary entries comprising for the most part a journal of Chesson's dreams, interspersed with records of his correspondence and associations, and occasional tallies of progress on his "lexicon" or the "Chesson-Encyclopaedia", totaling his entries alphabetically. The diary records the death of his wife, Nora, on 04/14/1906 [p. 10], after the birth of their third child, Dagmar Chesson, and the subsequent adoption of their son and second child, Dermot, by Graham Spence over the dates 05/28/1906 to 06/26/1906 [pp. 16-19]. Subsequent entries constitute the record of Chesson's tortured dream-life and his obsession with the memory of his wife and the effects of their experiments with the planchette. Chesson devotes several pages to a description of his meeting with the spirit photographer Robert Boursnell and its outcome, and includes an Autograph Letter Signed dated 02/01/1907 from Boursnell to Chesson arranging the meeting [pp. 35-39]; he also describes his communication with the astrologer George Wilde [pp. 93, 95-96]. Also of note are an Autograph Letter Signed dated 04/07/1906 from his sister Julia Chesson regarding a dream of hers which foreshadowed the death of Nora Hopper Chesson [p. 8], an Autograph Note Signed dated 04/12/1906 from Arthur Garnett concerning the [mortal] illness of his father, Richard Garnett [p. 9], an Autograph Letter Signed undated from a psychometrist, Miss H. Davies, responding to Chesson's request for the identity of a "red-haired woman" he had imagined in 1905, whom he believed he would meet [p. 43], and an Autograph Note Signed from T. Werner Laurie enclosing money and expressing his hope that Chesson "will soon get over the [financial] complaint" [p. 91]. Reference to Ann Caroline Spry Chesson, the book-dealer Wilfred Voynich [pp. 28-29], Nora Hopper Chesson's novel "Father Felix's Chronicles", Chesson's commission to "Children's Stories from Shakespeare" to supplement the work of Edith Nesbit Bland (E. Nesbit) [p. 73], Thomas Fisher Unwin, and the completion of his biography of George Cruikshank.