Professor Christine Ferguson

Towards the Centenary of The Land of Mist: Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism, and Scandal in 1920s Britain

Presented by: Portsmouth BookFest

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0	ONLINE: Zoom - online event
P	Tuesday 2nd July, 2024
N	7:00pm

Event information

First serialized in the Strand between 1925-26, Arthur Conan Doyle described The Land of Mist as his “big psychic novel” which would, he hoped, prompt wide-spread conversion to the modern spiritualist cause he had been publicly championing since 1916. My talk examines how the novel developed from and responded to various controversies in the early nineteenth-twenties British occult scene, including the Cottingley Fairy fiasco, the tabloid crusade against Thelemic sex magician Aleister Crowley, and Harry Houdini’s public attack on the authenticity of Jean Doyle’s mediumship. We will see how Doyle enlisted the capable male adventurer characters from Doyle’s popular Professor Challenger series to promote a sane, seemingly scientific, and scandal-free brand of Christian spiritualism in line with his increasingly conservative and enduringly nationalistic outlook, one often at odds with the cosmopolitan modernity that The Land of Mist depicts.