Middle-Class Magic

Abstract

Victorian culture has been interpreted as the product of an internal rebellion against Anglican culture and the major values traditionally associated with it. In his exploration of Victorian intellectual life, historian Frank M. Turner describes how Roman Catholicism, romantic subjectivism, naturalism and materialism forced a recasting of culture, aiding in the destruction of Anglican culture, and leading to the creative culture of the Victorian period.¹ Turner refers to this process as ‘cultural apostasy’. This new culture was characterized by naturalism, religious experiment and subjective aesthetic response.² It is in this climate of cultural change and out of the spirit of cultural rebellion that Victorian occultism emerged. But it was not alone. Many other developments and currents of thought flourished in this environment and subsequently had a hand in shaping the nature and development of late nineteenth-century magic.