Fairies in Nineteenth-century Art and Literature (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-century Literature & Culture)
by Nicola Bown
Cambridge University Press, £40, ISBN 0521793157

Victorians were fascinated by fairies. Ariel, Puck, Oberon and Titania were the subject of countless paintings. But Victorian fairies were not the twee little beings that we see nowadays on greetings cards and “Flower Fairies” books. These were something altogether more sinister.
Victorian painters such as Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald painted Bosch-like fantasies of grotesque creatures engaged in bizarre activities which verge on the surreal. But why were the Victorians so interested in these strange, mythical beings? Nicola Bown argues that it was an expression of nostalgia for a vanished rural past – “the industrial revolution killed the fairies”. From the onset of Darwinism to the notorious case of the Cottingley Fairies, belief in fairies gradually declined. Bown explores various artistic and literary manifestations of this decaying belief. I was particularly intrigued by her discussion of Darwinism in relation to Dadd’s “The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke” – a painting which most of us only know via the Queen song of that title.
It is a shame that Bown does not reproduce more of the paintings, though presumably this would have made the cost of the book prohibitive. It is best read alongside the lavishly illustrated catalogue of the Royal Academy’s 1997 “Victorian Fairy Painting” exhibition.
The book offers a fascinating insight into the Victorian psyche. But were the Victorians so different from us? Was nineteenth-century belief in fairies so very different from modern beliefs in crop circles, alien abduction and supernatural spoon-bending? Maybe we can’t really count ourselves superior.

Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations
by John Diamond
Vintage, £7.99, ISBN 0099428334

Because the medium through which most people knew John Diamond was his Times column, in which he could pick and choose the facts around which he built his witty and sometimes scathing opinions, it’s easy to forget that first he was a journalist. The surprise in Snake Oil, his unfinished “uncomplimentary look at the world of alternative medicine” is the extent to which he knew the subject (he also had an excellent researcher).
It’s not just that once he made public his cancer diagnosis thousands of people wrote to him recommending he try this and that cure. He’d already spent years researching articles on the subject for a wide variety of publications. Certainly, the years he spent in treatment for his cancer gave him a thorough understanding of how the medical establishment and the human body work, if he didn’t already have those.
The unfinished book is polemical, well-reasoned, and entertaining (“Look,” he writes, “at any advert for those cosmetics which claim to rid the body of ‘toxins’ and you’ll understand what the popular understanding of the function of the kidneys is.”). But it is unfinished – and hard to tell how he’d have been able to weave
together the disparate strands of his discussion. To fill out the rest of the book, the editor (brotherin-law Dominic Lawson) selected a representative sampling of Diamond’s popular journalism. Many are from his Times column; others are from publications such as the Jewish Chronicle, and the Spectator, and cover the range, from the physics “experiments” conducted by his baby daughter to Nostradamus’ prophesies. All in all, worth reading, though in the rush to publication it’s a great shame they didn’t include an index. Also sadly missing is any sample of his online postings, which were some of his best writing.

Inventing the Victorians
by Matthew Sweet
Faber and Faber, £16.99, ISBN 0571206581

Opium, sex crime and serial killers aren’t usually the first things that spring to mind when anyone mentions Victorian values. But Matthew Sweet’s book argues that the Victorians may not have been as straight-laced as we’d like to think.
Sweet takes a skeptical look at our ideas about the Victorians, and reveals the truth behind the myths. Victorians did not drape piano legs in chintz to save their modesty, nor were Victorian ladies advised to “lie back and think of England”.
Even their restrictive rules of etiquette make sense once you know the reasons behind them. Victorian readers enjoyed reading about the exploits of serial killers, and best-selling sensational novels of the time featured bigamous, murderous heroines who would not be out of place in a modern thriller. Victorians invented the mass-production of pornography and enjoyed freak shows, whose star performers earned a fortune even by modern standards. Sweet aims to rescue the Victorians from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” Unlike many academic books, this is immensely readable and vastly entertaining. Even his most controversial statements are backed up by an impressive amount of facts, and I can’t fault his extensive research.
This fascinating and thought-provoking book is well worth reading. Who would have thought the Victorians had so much fun? As Sweet comments, “If Queen Victoria wasn’t amused, then she was in a very small minority.”

Final Seance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle
by Massimo Polidoro
Prometheus Books, £21.99, ISBN 1573928968

In 1932 Ernst and Carrington wrote Houdini and Conan Doyle, a fascinating account of the relationship between Houdini, the famous magician and investigator of psychic fraud, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an educated medical doctor famed for his Sherlock Holmes books, but also a renowned proponent of Spiritualism. In Final Séance Massimo Polidoro becomes our tour guide, embellishing and updating Ernst and Carrington’s subject matter with extensive research. Beginning with the mutual interest in the Davenports in 1920, possibly their first meeting, then giving us a florid whirlwind chronological tour of investigations.
These investigations, and especially the subsequent comments by Doyle, are related with a waggish smile from Polidoro. Despite this there is utmost respect for their obsessional hunt for truth. Massimo’s mammoth tour of mediums investigated by the two central figures takes us through Eva C., Nino Pecoraro, Ada Besinnet, Margery Crandon, and George Valiantine with many more gracing these fascinating pages. Correspondence between Houdini and Doyle provides an intriguing insight into a friendship that has as its battleground one of the most interesting periods in the history of psychical research.
Frequently we see Doyle attempting to gloss over Houdini’s reputation, somewhat of a hindrance, in an effort to have him sit in on séances. Conversely, we are given eyewitness accounts of Houdini’s replications of mediumistic phenomena and his attempts to convince Doyle not to turn to a paranormal explanation so facilely. The “Final Séance” that the book title refers to occurs in Atlantic City where, even now, fortune-tellers and parlour-room psychics ply their trade. It is this simple séance that holds the key to the friendship’s demise, and one can almost feel the frustration with which Houdini tries to deny his own apparent psychic ability that Doyle so readily insists he has. Polidoro’s tour of this unique duo with their common Spiritualism interest forging a friendship that moulded psychical history books, provides us with delightfully written snapshots – perfect for showing the guests at your next circle!

The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness
by J Allan Hobson
MIT Press, £19.50, ISBN 0262082934

The title of this book is a reference to the chemical mechanisms of the brain that cause dreaming. As someone who has read other books about the brain and sleep this one was of particular interest to me. The author’s aim is to investigate states of consciousness with reference to his threedimensional state space model known as AIM. Briefly, the dimensions of this model are: “Activation” (energy levels in the brain), “Information Source” (input/output status of the brain), and “Modulation” (modulatory status of the brain). As a layperson I’m not in a position to decide how good or useful this model is, but at least it’s not too difficult to understand.
There are six chapters in the book, the subjects of which effectively split it into two parts. The first three chapters look at states of consciousness: normal ones such as waking and sleeping, and abnormal ones caused by dysfunctions like temporal lobe seizures. The last three chapters look at drugs (both prescribed and “recreational”) and the implications for treatment. From reading this book I gained a greater knowledge of how conscious states are reflections of, and affected by, the chemical goings on in the brain. However, I did find myself becoming overloaded with information at times. There’s no doubt that this book is worth reading by anybody wanting to understand more about the brain, and especially dreaming, but it does take quite a lot of mental effort in places to keep up with.
I think the reader is best served by using the book as a source of knowledge and should be wary of buying too much into the author’s conclusions. Many popular science books put forward new ideas and the problem is that lay readers are often not the best people to evaluate them.

The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead
by Heather Pringle
4th Estate, £15.99, ISBN 1841151114

Among the theatrical attractions of 1830s Britain was “mummy unrolling”. Audiences of up to 2000 people paid to see entrepreneurs unwrap Egyptian mummies on stage. Heather Pringle’s book is the 21st century equivalent, investigating myths and the truth about mummies.
It’s not just Egypt. Pringle found mummies in Russia, China, Peru, Chile and Scandinavia, and interviewed the dedicated (and sometimes eccentric) people who study them. She met many mummy experts, including one of the men who embalmed Stalin, and a forensic scientist who specialises in investigating the “incorruptibility” of saints’ bodies.
Interest in mummies has not always been purely scientific. A 12th-century mistranslation of an ancient manuscript implied that powdered mummy was a powerful medicine for a range of illnesses. So tombs were raided and mummies ground into powder. Until less than a century ago, the powder was also used as a pigment for oil paint. Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones was horrified to discover what he had been using, and promptly gave the tube of paint a decent burial in his garden. Early mummy collectors were a strange bunch. Victorian racist George Gliddon obsessively measured the size of mummies’ brain cavities in a forlorn attempt to “prove” white “superiority”. Edwardian Egyptologist Grafton Elliott Smith collected mummified penises. Why? Today’s experts are more respectable, but no less interesting. They complain that their studies are underfunded. Maybe this will change now that Pringle has given them such good publicity.

The Encyclopedia of Magic and Witchcraft: An Historical Exploration into the World of the Magician
by Susan Greenwood
Little Brown, £17.95, ISBN 0754805816

This is a beautiful book, well-presented, with high quality paper, print and illustrations. The title is a bit misleading: it is not an encyclopaedia in the usual sense, where one can look up a certain subject. Instead, it is a collection of short chapters treating a wide variety of topics concerning magic and witchcraft from ancient times to today, across many civilisations. The author tries to define and describe magic, shamanism, occultism, and their relations with society and religion, and provides a lot of interesting information along the way. Since the scope is so wide not all subjects will appeal to all readers, but that goes for any encyclopaedia.
Some chapters are less informative, and the illustrations can even be irritating because many have but little relevance to the subject. As a reader of an encyclopaedia one does not draw much information about the Greco-Roman or the Celtic period from reproductions from paintings by 18th to 20th century European artists, unless one accepts that this book is more intended as entertainment.
Another uneasy feeling came to me as a skeptic when I started to realize that the author is writing in defence of magic and really believes in it; and often the limit between objective data and the personal beliefs of the author is not well-defined. Some topics are treated too narrowly or are one sided, such as the small chapter called “Science and Magic”. The scientific view is represented only by one philosopher and two anthropologists.
The personal view of Greenwood on this subject sounds peculiar: “Magic is similar to science. It also offers an explanation of the world although it uses the medium of spiritual connection that cannot be measured in a laboratory.
The cause effect relation in spiritual Magic and science are different ways of thinking. All humans can exercise two ways of thinking: logical analytical and analogical or magical . . . both can be examined and understood through a scientific world view.”
This kind of threw me off, but then there followed some very good texts on famous witches and witchhunts, although with many illustrations that certainly have aesthetic value but provide no information on the subject.
When discussing astrology, the author laments that the link unifying the individual with the cosmos has been lost, and also states that the elixir of immortality was invented in China in the 4th century BC. Again it gave me a von Däniken feeling and it made me wonder how much all the other information can be trusted.
Do I recommend this book? I don’t know – it depends what you are looking for. It certainly is entertaining, and nice to have on the coffee table, not least for the illustrations. Some parts are very good and others are less so, but all are pleasant to the eye. Perhaps I should not have taken the title too literally.