1 H. Rider Haggard, She, New York: Signet Classic, 1994, p. 175. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

2 See Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. According to Couliano, magic is “the means of control over the individual and the masses based on a deep knowledge of personal and collective erotic impulses” (p. xviii). In other words, the magician knows his audience’s desires and uses them to his advantage, becoming as Craig Williamson says “one who fears and manipulates others”. See Williamson, A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddles and Songs, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Haggard’s She uses her mesmeric sexuality to manipulate her audience. I also label her a “scientist”, because she has bio-engineered a race of servants.

3 See Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London: Routledge, 1979. Yates argues that Elizabethan magicians wanted to use white magic to create a British Empire.

4 See Patrick Brantlinger, “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914”, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988, p. 240.

5 ibid., p. 227.

6 ibid., p. 230.

7 Peter Carey, Jack Maggs, New York: Vintage, 1997. p. 67. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

8 See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Dickens: A Life, New York: OUP, 1979, p.4. Anthony Hassall recognizes the strong parallels between Carey’s novel and Great Expectations and the shift of interest from Pip to “Magwitch and Dickens himself ” (128). Yet he fails to drawout the implications of these parallels and others between Dickens and the character of Jack Maggs, as well as Dickens’s use of mesmerism in his own “healing” practice. See Hassall, “A Tale of Two Countries: Jack Maggs and Peter Carey’s Fiction”, Australian Literary Studies, 8, 2 (1997), 128-35.

9 Emery Neff, Carlyle and Mill: An Introduction to Victorian Thought, New York: Columbia UP, 1926, p. 48.

10 Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975, p.4.

11 ibid., p.7.

12 See Rule of Darkness, p.241. This mesmeric act is much like Dickens’s use of mesmerism in the case of Madame de la Rue. Dickens mesmerized her to “exorcise” a “phantom” that caused her physical pain, Dickens and Mesmerism, pp.86-94. Yet mesmerism was not just thought of as a healing art; it was also a passage into an unknown world. As David de Giustino notes: “[t]o treat an audience to a demonstration of thought transference... was like conducting them on a tour of an unknown land. Mesmerism was the forcible opening of undiscovered territory, the inscrutable frontier”, De Giustino, Conquest of the Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought, London: Croom Helm, 1975, p.48.

13 Dickens and Mesmerism, p. 112.

14 Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “Angels and Insects: Two Novellas”, A.S. Byatt, New York: Twayne, 1996, p.107.

15 Ann Braude, “ ‘My Soul’s Thraldom and Its Deliverance’ ”, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, second edn., Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989, pp.4-5.

16 ibid., “Introduction” and p. 16.

17 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, p. 6.

18 Radical Spirits, pp. 2 and 6. Braude also indicates that spiritualists were also involved in radical social movements, including the abolition of slavery, marriage and labour reform, religious freedom and vegetarianism (p. 3).

19 A.S. Byatt, “The Conjugial Angel,” Angels and Insects, New York: Vintage, 1994, p. 201. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

20 Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 1926; repr. New York: Arno, 1975.

21 Pauline Melville, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, New York: Bloomsbury, 1997, p. 2.

Rewriting the Empire of the Imagination: The Post-Imperial Gothic Fiction of Peter Carey and A.S. Byatt

Abstract