What Thomas Waters shows most convincingly throughout Cursed Britain is that belief in witchcraft has never gone away. Waters orients his analysis toward the victims of witches rather than witches themselves—an approach that allows for a sensitive discussion that lends insight into the genuine fear people feel towards black magic. The book is structured mostly chronologically, beginning in 1800 and finishing in 2015, and tracks the multifaceted strains of witchcraft in Britain, covering witch attacks strikingly similar to those of the seventeenth century to new ideas sparked by mesmerism, electricity, and the influx of world religions.

In chapter 1, Waters establishes that witchcraft is still a very real presence in the modern West, believed in by “sophisticated folks with university degrees” (2) as much as everyone else. The main analysis begins in chapter 2, where Waters argues that, despite the prosecution of witchcraft's having long been outlawed, between 1800 and 1830 belief was still strong across the social spectrum. Indeed, witchcraft fears may have been indulged by establishment figures keen to shore up faith in traditional institutions after the French Revolution. Between 1830 and 1860—the focus of chapter 3—this broad tolerance for witchcraft fears was reversed. Prompted by mounting concern over popular unrest and an influx of Irish refugees, both newspapers and magistrates agreed that witchcraft was a dangerous “superstition requiring urgent eradication” (72). Waters argues that the rise of the police across Britain helped to stamp out attacks on witches, and contradicts Owen Davies's summation that witchcraft was rapidly diminishing; rather, widespread belief continued, and because of this new lack of judicial redress, demand for cunning folk grew. The “us and them” dichotomy between the “well-to-do” and “ordinary” people (39) is perhaps too starkly drawn in this chapter. As Waters points out, newspapers undoubtedly emphasized the distinction, but I find it hard to believe it was so clear in reality given the strong magical thinking of the middle and upper classes elaborated in chapter 6. Though upper-class belief apparently ebbed in the 1850s, in a whistle-stop tour of new movements Waters shows that it was again on the rise through spiritualism, evil magnetism, Christian Science, hermeticism, the Golden Dawn, and neo-paganism in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 4, spanning 1860 to 1900, combines folklorists’ collections and newspaper reports to piece together regional beliefs. Waters contends that witchcraft remained common throughout Britain, and that while folklorists only came across stories of witches who were long dead, this was due to people's reticence at sharing stories of those still living. The fear of retribution from maligned witches was strong, as was a fundamental wariness of the well-heeled men and women asking common people to share their tales. Using newspaper reports, Waters also considers the gender of Victorian witches, 87 percent of whom were female. Interestingly, two thirds were also married: higher than the national average of three fifths. Waters suggests that age was a greater determiner of who was suspected than marital status (the average age of female witches was fifty-five), and that this was due to an established cultural stereotype of witches as old women. It would be interesting to see what trends, if any, were attached to the 13 percent of men accused of witchcraft, and indeed whether newspapers were playing on this stereotype in the cases they chose to report.

Though counter-curses are referred to throughout, chapter 5 focusses specifically on the “unwitchers” of Victorian Britain: cunning folk, Roma women, and fortune-tellers. Most interestingly, Waters focuses on unwitchers as performing a form of mental health care. He argues that, in a situation where one truly believes themselves bewitched, unwitchers helped their clients by validating their fears and giving them a sense of control: something akin to faith-based cognitive behavioral therapy. Chapter 7 shows that this psychological crutch was recognized by some contemporaries, especially those living in Britain's colonies. Opening with the case study of Dr. Stanley George Browne, a medical missionary who lived in the Belgian-ruled Congo for twenty-five years, Waters explores British colonizers who came to think there was “something in” native witchcraft beliefs. This included Australian ranchers who employed Aboriginal medicine women and white rulers in the Caribbean living in fear of obeah magic. The thrust of the argument is that, even as Britain (and in India, the East India Company) tried to stamp out witch killings through legislation, many settlers themselves began to believe in and fear witches.

Witchcraft looked like it might finally die out in the 1950s. Like Davies, in chapter 8 Waters sees the drop in unexplained disasters and deaths as a major reason for witchcraft's decline in the early twentieth century, but adds that the decrease in oral storytelling and fundamental faith in Protestantism also played a part. Ultimately, the policing of cunning folk as fraudsters made witchcraft untenable: without unwitchers to perpetuate belief, witches themselves began to fade. Waters also reasons that, after the Second World War, people just had other things to worry about: children in the 1950s were not taught about ghosts and witches, and genuine fear of them receded from the public consciousness. Not for long: by the 1970s witchcraft was on the rise again, in part driven by Gardnerian Wicca and its offshoots and in part from the influx of magic beliefs from around the world.

Ending in 2015, Waters rounds off Cursed Britain with a discussion of the sinister witchcraft of our own time: the role of Pentecostal churches in driving up belief in—and murder of—child witches; psychic attacks and demonic possessions; and the unscrupulous embezzling of fraudulent healers. Waters also acknowledges the benefits people still feel from spiritual healers and Muslim raqis, showing that even the most heinous crimes against suspected witches come from a place of intense belief and fear.

Witchcraft is faith-based, and as such is to an extent irrational: what Waters effectively shows throughout Cursed Britain is that education and rational argument alone have never eradicated witchcraft, nor are ever likely to. Witchcraft is both stubborn and flexible: it changes according to the knowledge and fears of society, and belief spikes at times of increased uncertainty. Waters ends by arguing that only legislation and the policing of the “most unscrupulous supernatural healers” (265) might dampen belief, as it did in the 1950s. In the face of pandemics, climate change, and increased political polarity, I wonder whether that will be enough.