Witches and Witchcraft in Victorian Britain

For years, historians claimed that belief in witchcraft declined after the 1700s. _Witches and Witchcraft in Victorian Britain_ uncovers a world where the old ways never truly died, and a belief in witchcraft perpetuated on a wider scale than had been previously recognised, into the 1800s and beyond. Beneath the era’s polished confidence in science and progress, superstition thrived: in back‑alley fortune‑tellers, rural cunning‑folk, behind the closed curtains of the drawing rooms of the rich, and in courtrooms where accusations of bewitchment, and the retaliation of those who believed themselves bewitched, surfaced with unnerving regularity. Discover how witchcraft persisted, and even flourished, at a time supposedly governed by morality, piety and the progression of science and reason. These are the lives of Victorian witches who were feared, revered, ridiculed and prosecuted by a society wrestling with forces it insisted it had outgrown.