In The Magical Imagination Karl Bell demonstrates that nineteenth-century English society was not only defined by industry and reason but also shaped by a preindustrial mind-set that turned to the supernatural to confront “the experience of modernization” (267). Comparing three urban contexts—Manchester, Norwich, and Portsmouth—Bell shows private and communal functions of the “popular or plebeian magical imagination” manifested through specific activities such as fortune-telling, spell-casting, ghost-hunting, legend-sharing, and memory-mapping (3). Bell also examines how people of higher social strata engaged with supernatural beliefs, and he reveals that historians have minimized the role of the “magical imagination” in general because they were beguiled by the emergence of modernity, “enacting a colonization of the past by the concept of modernization” (262).

Bell's thesis of adapting supernatural beliefs for a changing world builds on Bronislaw Malinowski's functionalist approach in anthropology that emphasizes how supernatural beliefs give power to the powerless (9). Bell joins the opposition against sociologist Max Weber and historian Keith Thomas because of Weber and Thomas's contention that the modern world was a disenchanted world where “rational bureaucratic systems” replaced supernatural beliefs and practices (13–14). Wary of cultural critics who would colonize the past ideologically, Bell critiques claims for a female contingent of magical practitioners defying a paternalistic male modernity. The magical imagination was enlisted by female fortune-tellers “to make ends meet,” and they chiefly used their magical vocation “to manipulate other females” not as a “form of assertive proto-feminism” (185). Unhealthy living conditions, unsafe neighborhoods, and unstable job markets all contributed to people seeking magical remedies, whether through folk medicine, charms against burglary, or spells to help career advancement (72–74, 128).

Bell does not insist that there were no changes in supernatural belief amid changing social, economic, and technological innovations; rather, he argues for a “qualitative rather than quantitative decline in magic” in which the role of magic professionals diminished, while “the amateur, the dilettante, or simply the spiteful neighbour” carried on magical practices, including retributive spells (114–115). Chemists and pharmacists served customers who bought material such as “red gum resin,” popularly known as “‘dragon's blood,’” to be burned as a charm to ensnare someone with desire or to punish an enemy with misfortune (113). In observing changes from rural to urban folk beliefs, Bell points out that ghosts were almost exclusively anthropomorphic in the city while animal phantoms were common in the country (247). Bell also clarifies changes over time for supernatural beliefs within the city, such as how omens connected with strangely shaped cinders altered from “open wood fires to coal-burning fires” (think, for example, of the soot in the grate presaging the arrival of a stranger in Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight”) and hanging horseshoes within a home as specific charms against witchcraft (and, in fact, horseshoes had been used against the fairies as well) in the 1820s and 1830s had shifted in general to vague totems of good fortune by the 1890s (82).

Bell examines urban ghost tales as markers of communal memory across space and time that rendered “the city both as it was and as it had been” (244). In Norwich a “phantom horseman had its origins in the local memories of Robert Kett's rebellion in the city in 1549 whilst the ghost's demise was linked to urban redevelopment in the 1790s, the horseman disappearing once Bishops Gate Tower was demolished in 1791” (245). Spanning four centuries of change in Norwich, this legend persisted beyond “the loss of past buildings through urban development,” and the tale of the ghost through memory-mapping also recreated in the minds of those sharing the legend Bishops Gate Tower and “Hassett's Manor House, from where the ghost was said to originate” (245). Thus, the magical imagination shapes urban identity.

Much of Bell's book disentangles pervasive periodic assumptions about the nineteenth century from the extant historical evidence. Akin to claims for the perpetual vanishing of fairies, ghosts, and witches in the past, Bell points out there was “an ineluctable modernity that was forever on the verge of arriving” despite the insistence by many journalists and historians of the nineteenth century and critics of the twentieth and twenty-first that the modern age had dispelled the phantoms of the past (155). Instead of the overthrow of the magical imagination, Bell underscores that educated Victorians provided a new frame for the old ideas via the various psychical and paranormal groups among whose members were literary and scientific professionals. Likewise, while elites redefined ghosts as spiritualist phenomena, astrologers and fortune-tellers addressed new forms of socioeconomic fears.

Written with clarity and wit, this book elicits many questions literary critics, historians, and folklorists will wish to ask. What were other ways that the magical imagination affected daily life? Beyond the content of local legends, are specific tale-types and motifs represented in Manchester, Norwich, and Portsmouth, respectively? What of other English cities? How did the English magical imagination compare with the Irish and Scottish magical imaginations—and beyond? Bell's precision is limited occasionally by vocabulary that varies by discipline, such as his use of the term urban legend, which (folklorically defined) rarely has supernatural content and is more often international in its dissemination and scope rather than regional in focus as Bell implies when he refers to how “urban legends” in Manchester had few “long-established communities within which to root themselves” (258).

Bell explores “antinomian” studies emphasizing “paradoxical tension” within nineteenth-century English cultural contexts of skepticism where a cynical modernity competes with traditional magic (18). The Victorians' ironic and metaphorical treatment of magic rendered magic mundane or mere entertainment in magic shows, penny-dreadfuls, and satirical broadsides. Criminals manipulated supernatural beliefs, such as smugglers who exploited supernatural credulity to evade detection (69). Bell concludes that studies that claim the use of supernatural beliefs as irrevocably polluted and diluted by irony do not recognize the meaningful resonance of the magical imagination. The book is not fully persuasive that the deeper matrix of magical belief outweighs the ironical frames, but The Magical Imagination is an important reassessment of cultural history that explores the democratization, transformation, and persistence of magical beliefs.