Below is a great and quick summary by Dr. Roger Luckhurst, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of London regarding Victorian attitudes toward anomalous experiences that were commonplace during Victorian England. A future entry on this blog will also cover parallel trends in America at the time.
The 19th century is routinely thought about as the era of secularisation, a period when the disciplines and institutions of modern science were founded and cultural authority shifted from traditional authority of religion to explanation through the scientific exposition of natural laws. The sociologist Max Weber spoke about this process as the disenchantment of the world.
The emblematic figure in this narrative is Charles Darwin, the anxious amateur biologist who held off publishing his theory of evolution by natural selection for years for fear of the religious and social disturbance it might produce. Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) did indeed result in a crisis of faith for many in the 1860s, before his ideas became embedded in British intellectual life in the last decades of the century.
While we might still accept the broad brush strokes of this story, the Victorian period is also of course a period of deep and sustained religious revival. There was an evangelical revival in the Christian church but also a host of dissenting, heterodox and millenarian cults. It was a golden age of belief in supernatural forces and energies, ghost stories, weird transmissions and spooky phenomena. For a long time historians ignored these beliefs as embarrassing errors or eccentricities, signs of the perturbations produced by the speed of cultural change.
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