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  • The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914 by Karl Bell
  • Edward Bever
The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914. By Karl Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. vii plus 300 pp.).

The Magical Imagination starts very strong. The introduction contains an outstanding discussion of the current literature on magic and modernity. The first chapter [End Page 207] well introduces the three cities that form the core of the study—Manchester, Norwich, and Portsmouth—and shows the way that the inheritance of magical practices and practitioners fit into the larger popular culture, in particular how they were supported by popular religion and folktales, and consequently did not simply survive, but developed within and adapted to, the nineteenth century urban milieu.

Toward the end of Chapter 1, though, the book’s limitations begin to show. It argues that magical beliefs and practices were not simply illusory or escapist, but instead constituted a form of agency, but it undercuts this laudable assertion by conceptualizing the “magical imagination” as “an extended realm of explanation, a means of wish-fulfillment, a sense of short-term control, and a compulsion to endure” (77). Unfortunately, all of these are simply recondite ways of saying “illusory” or “escapist” except the last, and even that involves only directly influencing oneself. The book tries to have its cake and eat it too, to recognize magic as conferring agency without granting it any real power.

This problem recurs in Chapter 2, which focuses on the changes in the magical imagination. While its discussion of the commercialization of magic is quite strong, demonstrating the complex and ever-changing relationship between “belief, the suspension of disbelief, and skepticism” in both the presentations and audiences of stage shows and popular literature, the chapter’s discussion of the modernization of magic argues that the change from belief that ghosts exist in external reality to the conviction that they are illusory “merely displace[ed] them into the mind” (108, 87). While the chapter goes on to make the interesting point that this internalization of ghosts contributed to the unsettling idea that the mind includes an unconscious dimension that creates a gap between perception and reality, to argue that the process was “merely” a displacement seems inadequate. The shift from presumed external reality to presumed illusion had radical consequences for how such perceptions (and the perceivers) are understood and reacted to, just as there’s a radical difference between a sense of agency and actual agency.

The last section of Chapter 2, the “Democratization of Magic,” makes the important point that printed magic books enabled more people to perform magic themselves, but it over-reaches by claiming 1) that this more than compensated for the decline of specialized practitioners, leading to a more extensive magical activity rather than less by the end of the century, and 2) that this democratization “made magic mundane … so diluted as to appear ordinary,” which led to a “qualitative … decline” in belief (110, 115). The problem with 1) is that while generally demurring to make explicit quantitative assessments, here the author does so obliquely, citing a single late-century commentator’s assertion that there were “‘many millions more’” believers in magic in his day than ever before, and concluding that other “historians’ focus on the gradual decline” of professional practitioners has led them to “underestimate the significance of the amateur” (108, 114-15). The problem with 2) is similar: having claimed that the work will avoid “arrogantly claiming direct insight into intimate thoughts,” it infers here from the growth of do-it-yourself magic publishing and the inclusion of some magical practices with more mundane activities in some books that magic came to “appear ordinary” to people and so their belief was “diluted” (8, 115). Both of these cases are representative of similar problems elsewhere in the book, and of a [End Page 208] broader tendency to sometimes base strong conclusions on complex trains of logic rather than substantial evidence.

Chapter 3 returns to better form with insightful analyses of magic’s contribution to the definition of the modern middle-class self; the role of schools, newspapers, and folkloric studies in disseminating...

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