2004 and Willburn 2006 provide, undoubtedly, the best overviews of the Victorian supernatural. Although Smith and Haas 1999 is at times overlooked, for readers interested in the state of the field in the 1990s, it usefully supplements the earlier visions. Brandon 1983 is an oft-quoted study with a wider focus, which, alongside Messent 1981, gives a useful cursory view of the field when it really started, in the 1980s. Auerbach 2004, Pearsall 2004 and Luckhurst 2014 provide sound starting points. There is no single overview of the study of the supernatural, as it comprises several movements, definitions and phenomena. This article mainly focuses on secondary critical material, organized in thematic sections that testify to the relevance of the supernatural in the Victorian period, from the emergence of spiritualism as a system of belief and its intrinsic connections with science and technology, to folklore, and finally to the persistence of the supernatural in contemporary imagination through the critical master trope of haunting and spectrality, as well as in “ Neo-Victorianism” as examined in the article in Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature by Jessica Cox. Also, the supernatural maintained close links with the professionalization of science and the establishment of psychology, and the advent of new media such as telegraphy, photography, and cinema, which were at first regarded as occult phenomena. Some of them openly expressed their belief in the supernatural.
James, Rhoda Broughton, Henry James, Richard Marsh, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and Vernon Lee explored the supernatural in its various guises in their works. Authors such as Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, M. In fiction, the fashion for the unknown and the otherworldly coincided with the burgeoneing interest in ghost stories, and it showed connections with sensation fiction, and the Victorian gothic. The rapid secularization of the Victorian period also allowed for the emergence of new systems of beliefs that renegotiated ways of dealing with the spiritual and the material. The supernatural belief was understood as a response to “Victorian crisis of faith” and also as part of a broader cultural discourse about scientific knowledge and modern society. In Victorian times these three interpretations coexisted. However, there are several interpretations of the word ‘supernatural’ which are generally accepted by the critics: preternatural, spiritual or paranormal, and supernatural (the natural and the supernatural inhabit the same ontological space). Etymologically speaking, the term ‘supernatural’ refers to what is superior or above nature. The supernatural was as important as the realm of the natural in Victorian times, as is proven by its relevance in political, cultural and religious history and in the incipient entertainment industry. As a result, the category of the supernatural was a slippery one, but it was commonly held that it encompassed both the otherwordly, the strange and the unseen, and the ordinary and the material. The 19th-century understanding of the supernatural was hotly contested, including by theologians.
It pervaded all forms of art and science, as well as Victorians’ daily lives, and its language and metaphors impregnated Victorian culture. The supernatural was an important aspect of Victorian society.
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