That devil's trick —— Hypnotism and the Victorian popular imagination

----- 魔鬼的诡计：催眠和维多利亚大众的想象

ISBN: 9780719074837 出版年：2015 页码：256 Hughes, William Manchester University Press

This book is the first study of nineteenth-century hypnotism based primarily on the popular - rather than medical - appreciation of the subject. Drawing on the reports of mesmerists, hypnotists, quack doctors and serious physicians printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the Victorian fin de siecle, the book provides an insight into how continental mesmerism was first understood in Britain, how a number of distinctively British varieties of mesmerism developed, and how these were continually debated in medical, moral and legal terms. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors - Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle among them - whose fiction was informed by the imagery of mesmerism.