Review: Spirits of an Industrial Age July 6, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
There are few pleasures greater in the second decade of the twenty-first century than picking up a self-published volume and finding that it is actually a good read. (For younger readers this simply did not happen thirty years ago). Enter from the left stage Spirits of an Industrial Age: Ghost Impersonation, Spring-heeled Jack and Victorian Society by Jacob Middleton. The title is self explanatory. Let’s forget the creaky corridors of the squirearchy’s halls and the wind-swept heaths and come into the new suburbs of the rapidly growing British cities and look for spooks by gaslight.
Jacob and Beach sniff at the same lamp-posts and there are several themes, subjects and even ghost cases that both have covered. Indeed, on the morning of writing this notice Beach had the dubious pleasure of writing to a review and asking them to change a publication because his argument was so close to some of the pages here that there was the risk of a ‘misunderstanding’. Thanks, Jacob, thanks a lot… Beach hopes to return the favour one day soon.
There are the usual suspects, of course, the Hammersmith Ghost and Spring Heeled Jack (SHJ is as mysterious as ever to this blogger). But there is also lots on a little studied but vital part of the urban ghost story (in which the Hammersmith Ghost and SHJ are caught up): the false ghost, the man (and of course they are almost always men) who dress up as ghosts or who just walk around naked in the middle of the night terrifying neighbours. Beach was surprised to see that the ghost riot was missing: or rather it is mentioned in sources but never examined in its own right. There are some welcomes paragraphs on Jack the Ripper that was the ghost that the modern age was really waiting for: the nightmare that London (though not those poor women) deserved.
The history writing is good. Let’s go down the normal tick-list. i) Fluid English; ii) More primary sources than secondary sources; and iii) No Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Marcuse, Postmodernism, Structuralism or any of those other put-a-pistol-in-my-mouth words. Tick, tick, and tick: the book does not feel as it was written in an airless university library or to satisfy a doctoral adviser. If Jacob ever reads this Beach would love to get in touch.
Strange History is always on the look out for good ghost books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
