The essays in Strange Science examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society. To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. Strange Science takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, cultural studies, the history of the body, and the history of science.

Acculturating refers to the interchange of patterns of behaviour, perceptions and ideas between groups of individuals who have different cultural backgrounds. This book, which is the result of collaboration between specialists from different disciplines from around the world, allows the comparison of systems of dependency, mediation skills, empathy and social understanding and cultural attitudes towards people who experience the stages of aging.

This work adopts a fresh approach by relating the vogue in the 1860s for sensation fiction to a specific phase of a crisis of faith in the bourgeois ideology of self-help. The demise of sensation fiction after a mere decade is then associated with a returned sense in the 1870s of the durability of the status quo, and the temporary revival of a moralism, which had seemed in a terminal condition in the 1860s.