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Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920, by Shane McCorristine; pp. x + 275. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, £55.00, £19.99 paper, $95.00, $33.99 paper.
A new and exciting field of Victorian studies has emerged over the course of the past decade: the Victorian supernatural. Of course, Victorianists have had an interest in the ghostly for a long while, as too many canonical writers had penned supernatural tales for the fact to go altogether unnoticed: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy-virtually anybody one can think of has a couple (if not dozens) of ghost stories to his or her name. But it was not until recently that we could count on a steady annual supply of books and articles exploring Victorian supernaturalist culture. What we have discovered is that this culture was not an aberrant offshoot divergent from dominant attitudes; on the contrary, talk of ghosts was as common as talk of weather or the health of the Empire. That talk often turned to the questionable reality of apparitions. Can there ever be enough evidence to decide the matter one way or the other? Who gets to decide the validity, the conclusiveness or inconclusiveness, of evidence? And why, if ghosts are truly among us, are they so skittish, so loath to show up, speak up, and lay the matter to rest? Only ghosts can tell.
Shane McCorristine's Spectres of the Self tells the story of scientific and quasiscientific endeavors in the nineteenth century to prove...