Cursed Britain: Dr Thomas Waters (1862)
Witches, spells, black magic and shape-shifting combine in unsettling ways in this Halloween episode of Travels Through Time.
The year 1862 in Britain was characterised by innovation and dynamism. In London a pioneering engineering project brought commuters the world’s first underground railway. Hot air balloons were soaring to the top of the troposphere, informing scientists engaged in a new fad for weather “forecasting”. In the Midlands a new football club, Notts County, were formed – later to become the oldest of all the association football clubs in the world.
Yet, as Dr Thomas Waters explains in this episode of Travels Through Time, running in tandem with this modernity was an older, persistent belief in supernatural forces.
It was more than a century since Parliament had repealed the laws against witchcraft but, rather than being eradicated by the Enlightenment, folklore remained an active and potent force in everyday life.
As the first underground trains steamed out of their stations, women were still being accused of being witches.
Other people were driven to violence by a belief that they were bewitched. And right across the country, wise women or “cunning folk” were still making a living, peddling do-it-yourself magic from door to door.
In this episode, Thomas Waters takes us on a tour through 1862 to see examples of all of this: from the isolated Scottish islands, to the heart of Imperial London.
In doing so he provides a striking and memorable portrait of a lesser-known side to the Victorian world.
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Click here to order Thomas Waters’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show Notes
Scene One: Spring, 1862. On the tiny Scottish Western Isle of Gigha. James Smith watches as Catherine McGougan “shapeshifts”
Scene Two: 13th April 1862, 31 Charles Street, Westminster. 74-year-old Mary King is attacked by her grandson.
Scene Three: A little terrace house in Ancoats, Manchester, 1862. A fortune-teller named Alice is doing a consultation for a client, waxing lyrical about mystical things
Memento: A little cross of the Rowan Tree tied together with red thread
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People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dr Thomas Waters
Editorial: Paul Lay / Artemis Irvine
Production: Maria Nolan / John Hillman
Cursed Britain A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times was published in August by Yale University Press.
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