The Magical Imagination
Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914

Innovative history of the popular magical imagination and ordinary people's experience of urbanization in nineteenth-century England.

Karl Bell (Author)

9781107002005, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 February 2012

308 pages
23.4 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.63 kg

'Karl Bell's The Magical Imagination offers further insights into what has become a vibrant field of enquiry, exploring the flourishing of magic in three British cities during the long nineteenth century. … The Magical Imagination offers multiple approaches that researchers in diverse fields will find useful.' Justin Sausman, British Society for Literature and Science (www.bsls.ac.uk)

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.

Introduction: the magical imagination
1. Constructing the magical imagination
2. Transformation of the magical imagination
3. Magic, modernity, and the middle classes
4. Urban orientation: the gendering of magical mentalities
5. Urban communal formation and protest
6. Magical memory mapping
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1]