Abstract
In the course of the nineteenth century the increasing importance of science changed the role that ‘mystery’ played in the collective imagination. Even before Queen Victoria’s reign Thomas Carlyle had reassessed common religious and popular beliefs in a chapter of Sartor Resartus (1833–34) entitled ‘Natural Supernaturalism’. While acknowledging the value of science, Carlyle questioned its mechanical view of the universe, refusing to renounce either faith or ‘mystery’, and relocating the supernatural in the inner dimension of the human being:
Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we have now named Madness, and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: What is Madness, what are Nerves? Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysteriousterrific, altogether infernal boiling up of the Nether Chaotic Deep …1
Victorians were attracted both to the aberrant side and to the ‘superhuman’ powers of the mind. While the ancient abyss of hell seemed to close its doors, previously unfathomed inner abysses opened up their depths in a world whose coordinates of time and space were being traced with increasing exactitude.
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Notes
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, eds Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 199.
See Patrizia Guamieri. Introduzione a James (Roma and Bari: Laterza. 1985), p. 40.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Milton R. Stern (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 91.
Villiers De I’Isle-Adam, L’Ève future, Édition établie par Nadien Satiat (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), p. 240.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 29.
Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895), pp. 13–4.
See Beryl Gray, ‘Afterword’, in George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, ed. Beryl Gray (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 69.
Charles Dickens, ‘The Trial for Murder’, in The Complete Ghost Stories, ed. Peter Haining (New York and Toronto: Franklin Watts, 1983), p. 292.
See James Esdaile, From Mesmerism in India, in Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: an Anthology, ed. Laura Otis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 410–14.
William Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. Anthea Trodd (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 19.
William Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel: a Mystery of Modern Venice (New York: Dover, 1982), pp. 107–8.
Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: the Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 4.
Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 246–7.
See The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, ed. Alan Ryan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).
A.C. Doyle, The Parasite (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), p. 3.
A.C. Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (London: Pavilion Books, 1996), p. 3.
Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’, in In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 83.
Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, in Victorian Ghost Stories: an Oxford Anthology, eds Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xviii.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, in The Mystery Book, ed. H. Douglas Thomson (London: Odhams Press, 1934), p. 917.
Marie Roberts, Gothic Immortals: the Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 193.
A.C. Doyle, Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 205–6, online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DoyLamp.html (visited 10.10.06).
Hesketh and Katherine Prichard, ‘The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith’, in The Experiences of Flaxman Low, ed. Jack Adrian (Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 2003), p. 1.
Algernon Blackwood, ‘A Psychical Invasion’, in The Complete John Silence Stories, ed. S.T. Joshi (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), p. 1.
W.H. Hodgson, ‘The Searcher of the End House’, in Carnacki: the Ghost Finder (Doulestown, Penn.: Wildside Press, 2000), p. 136.
Sax Rohmer, ‘Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room’, in The Dream-Detective. Being some account of the methods of Moris Klaw (London: Jarrolds, 1920), p. 21.
See Gerry Vassilatos, Lost Science (Kempton, IL.: Adventures Unlimited, 1999).
H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Dover, 1973), p. 97.
L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, ‘The Horror of Studley Grange’ (‘Stories from the Diary of a Doctor’, VII), The Strand Magazine, 7 (January–June 1894), p. 8.
See Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Crime and Empire: the Colony in Nineteenth-century Fictions of Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
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© 2007 Maurizio Ascari
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Ascari, M. (2007). Pseudo-Sciences and the Occult. In: A Counter-History of Crime Fiction. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234536_5
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