Tag: Spiritualism

Digital Clairvoyance: Lessons Learned by Text Mining the “Dr Slade Number” from 1876

Digitizing the Victorians, Other

The American medium Henry Slade was a nineteenth-century sensation. At the height of his career in the early 1870s he was considered one of the most extraordinary psychics of his generation. His main performance featured a type of supernormal communication where written messages, said to be from spirits existing beyond the veil, appeared on supposedly blank slates. It was a hugely popular act, and Slade toured all over North America and Europe demonstrating his incredible mediumship to broad and eager

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The Curious Case of Mr. and Mrs. Holmes

Other

Sherlock Holmes is not often associated with the supernatural, having “confined [his] investigations to this world” when Dr. Mortimer presented Sherlock with his most overtly supernatural case, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Sherlock was logical, factual, and believed that human nature and the natural world, not the paranormal, could explain anything unexplainable. Despite this, Sherlock’s origins have closer ties to the supernatural than it might first appear. Sherlock’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a known spiritualist and a dedicated

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“Is there anybody there?” :Examining Victorian Responses to Spiritualism and the Occult

Book Reviews

The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth Century Spiritualism and the Occult, by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds.), Surrey: Ashgate, 2012, v + 436 pages, illustrated, £85 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6912-8 The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as a Sacred Text, by Noel Montague-Etienne Rarignac, London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012, v +234 pages, illustrated, $40 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7864-6499-9 Reviewed by Dr Clare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores University) C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk As the dust jacket of the Ashgate Companion notes,

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