Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A.E. Waite, and the ecstasies of popular fiction

Ferguson, C. (2016) Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A.E. Waite, and the ecstasies of popular fiction. Journal of Victorian Culture, 21(1), pp. 40-55. (doi: 10.1080/13555502.2015.1123170)

Abstract

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Ferguson, Dr Christine
• Authors: Ferguson, C.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Journal Name: Journal of Victorian Culture
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis (Routledge)
• ISSN: 1355-5502
• ISSN (Online): 1750-0133
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2015 Taylor and Francis
• First Published: First published in Journal of Victorian Culture 21(1):40-55
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.