BleakChesneyWold

                  Enter Mr Podgers and the awful meaning of Doom                                                                               A strange sense of fatalism surrounds Oscar Wilde's short story Lord Arthur Savile's Crime . A dark humour murder tale with a sort of Guy de Monpaussent type twist at the end. Centred round salon hostess Lady Windermere, seemingly infatuated by cheiromancers (palmreaders ) and fortune tellers generally. Amongst her guests is a young aristocrat by the name of Lord Arthur Savile, who is recently engaged. The hired Cheiromancer is Mr Podgers. There are plenty of Wilden type witticims in play, but the old age problem emerges. What happens if a psychic happens to detect some quite unpleasant destiny? Do th...

                             Daniel Dunglas Home-  Gifted Medium or Scoundrel ?                                              First came across  the most famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home when reading Linda Stratmann's  Mina Scarletti  novels. Set in  Brighton during the  early 1870's, the lead character is set on a course to expose mediums, who are generally depicted as being tricksters and preying on the grief of those who were suffering bereavement.  In the novel Mr Scarletti's Ghost  ,Mina reads a pamphlet titled The claims of D.D.Home Refuted Containing a Very Full Account of the Lyon Case and His Disgrace  by Josiah Rand M.D.    I have not found this publication, though Mina could have read quite a widely circulated Illustrated Police News p...

                              Cosmic Horror From 1908                                                                                                             William Hope Hodgson was a master of unreality, and The House on the Borderland is a masterpiece. Rated highly by future authors such as H P Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett. Hodgson' view of the natural world is chaotic and seething with unknown possibilities, most outcomes are hostile to humanity. Disorder prevails. Hodgson is anti-Utopian and anti-pastoral.  Two young men go camping in a desolate part of Ireland, hoping to enjoy the outdoor life and fishing. The natives are not ...

                                            Review of new book by Paul Williams  On the night of 24th November 1898, a prisoner by the name of William John Onion, decided to turn his life around. Onion was seriously ill in his cell, and prayed, offering to give up intoxicating alcohol and make amends for his shocking life. He had a little over 500 hundred convictions, largely related to getting drunk, then turning offensive and often violent. Police officers, Workhouse staff, his first wife, were amongst those Onion had assaulted.  Onion had tried to change his life before. This time he succeeded, becoming teatotal, and pursued his skill as a verse writer which he had been developing throughout the 1890's.  Born near Whitechapel Road, his father died when he was an infant, his mother was severely ill in hospital. Onion and a younger sister spent some time in Selby...

                            1860's Best Seller -'Fear Among the Teacups'  East Lynne, the second novel by Ellen Wood, ( Price), who was usually known as Mrs Henry Wood, was first serialised by Colburn's New Monthly Magazine in 1860. Then published in book form in 1861, going on to sell two and a half million copies, and translated into many languages. Also to become the best selling novel of the 1860's. Quite an achievement for a woman who was writing to earn money after husband went bankrupt. JAMES There were popular stage versions, five films, and a television series of the book in 1982. There was even a comedy - East Lynne on the Western Front (1931), set in 1915, in which soldiers decide to stage their own version.  East Lynne (1861) is regarded an exquisite mid-Victorian sensation novel. Instead of one country pile, there is both East Lynne and West Lynne, each with their own aristocratic family at the...

                                              The Curse of the Other World                                                Born in London in  1831,Amelia B (Blandford) Edwards was a novelist, musician,journalist,poet, travel writer and a leading Egyptologist.  Her first novel was My Brother's Wife A Life -History (1855) though Barbara's History (1864) is probably better known, dealing with the Victorian interest in bigamy. Miss Edwards wrote some quite striking ghost stories, many published in such magazines as Household Words and All The Year Round . Now with the rise of ghost and horror tales narrated on podcasts and Youtube, Amelia B Edwards's short stories are gaining a new audience. The Phantom Coach (1864) and the railway haunting classi...