Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith Victorian Britain

Franklin investigates a broad spectrum of experiences through a series of representative case studies that together trace the development of unorthodox religious and spiritual discourses. The ideas and events discussed by Franklin through these case studies were considered outside the domain of orthodox religion yet still religious or spiritual rather than atheistic or materialistic. Among the works—obscure and canonical—he analyzes are Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s and ; , by William Knighton; Anthony Trollope’s ; Anna Leonowens’s by Matthew Arnold and Bram Stoker’s