Victoriana: Science and Séance

The Victorian era is celebrated as birth of the modern world. Whilst scientific advances, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, revealed the secrets of the natural world, technological innovation reached heights people thought should be captured by events like the Great Exhibition.

At the same time, though, Britain was also fascinated by the supernatural, from spiritualism and séances to gothic fiction and sensationalist serialisations. Even Queen Victoria would attend a physics lecture one evening and the next an opera filled with “lovely ghosts.”

Discover how science, religion, fanaticism and the supernatural co-existed and what this meant for morality, beliefs and culture in Victorian society.