Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism

by Aviva Briefel

Ghosts and Things argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, s ances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to specialized technologies invented to register the presence of spirits. In its supernatural object lessons, Victorian spiritualism was not just a mystical...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1501780263
• ISBN13: 9781501780264
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.