The Shock of Vril

Abstract

It took over a century for the old regime to crumble. Strains on the social fabric haunted the Victorian mind. The only solution was to reconcile the irreconcilable by papering over the cracks. Such was the Victorian masquerade we call hypocrisy, but which was essential for the framework of social norms to remain stable. The nineteenth century was a period where opposites might be reconciled without any sense of contradiction. On the one hand, the period was notable for its material, technological and scientific sense of progress, whilst on the other, it was a period filled with forebodings of moral decay and physical disaster. The Victorians lived their lives as much in the material here-and-now as in an hallucinatory elsewhere exemplified by their obsession with the spirit realms of drugs, fairies and ectoplasm.