This innovative history of popular magical mentalities in nineteenth-century England explores the dynamic ways in which the magical imagination helped people to adjust to urban life. Previous studies of modern popular magical practices and supernatural beliefs have largely neglected the urban experience. Karl Bell, however, shows that the magical imagination was a key cultural resource which granted an empowering sense of plebeian agency in the nineteenth-century urban environment. Rather than portraying magical beliefs and practices as a mere enclave of anachronistic 'tradition' and the fantastical as simply an escapist refuge from the real, he reveals magic's adaptive and transformative qualities and the ways in which it helped ordinary people navigate, adapt to and resist aspects of modern urbanization. Drawing on perspectives from cultural anthropology, sociology, folklore and urban studies, this is a major contribution to our understanding of modern popular magic and the lived experience of modernization and urbanization.
John Henry Anderson, the "Wizard of the North," was one of the most successful stage magicians of the nineteeth
century. The article examines who magic shows engaged with the emerging consensus of technological modernity
while simultaneously helping to maintain faith in traditional magical authenticity, helping to complexify notions of
European disenchantment in the nineteenth century.
Arguing for a more historicized approach to hauntological theorizing this article explores the insights to be gained from urban ghost lore. Focussing on nineteenthcentury Portsmouth, it uses ghost lore to penetrate the town's dominant narrative as the home of the Royal Navy. Through examining the ways in which ghosts variously informed a sense of community, tacitly subverting civic narratives whilst also resonating with key features of 'official' memory, this article argues for the existence of interpretative struggles over urban spaces, places, and identities. In doing so it seeks to highlight the potential value to historians of a developing 'spectral turn'.
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