Haunted Britain - (Cultural History of Modern War) by Kyle Falcon (Paperback)

About the Book

Haunted Britain offers a new emotional and cultural history of the Great War as told through the spiritualist and psychical research movements between 1914 and 1939.

Book Synopsis

The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war's trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotesque figures. Modernist writers released memoirs condemning the war as a profane and disenchanting experience. Yet British and Dominion soldiers and their families also read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances, and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, they had premonitions and attributed their survival to angelic, psychic, or spiritual forces. For many, the war was an enchanting experience that offered proof of another world and the transcendental properties of the mind. Between 1914 and 1939, an array of ghosts lived in the minds of British subjects as they navigated the shocking toll that death in modern war exerted in their communities.

From the Back Cover

In the aftermath of the Great War, Britons read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances, and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, soldiers had premonitions and attributed their survival to angelic, psychic or spiritual forces. Many of these individuals believed their experiences were based upon scientific facts. Haunted Britain narrates compelling and previously undocumented abnormal experiences to challenge popular myths about the Great War.
Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, renowned British scientists, politicians and authors endorsed spiritualism, the belief in the survival of the human personality after death and the possibility of communication between the living and dead. Others took seriously the possibility of telepathy, a term first coined by the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s. During the outbreak of the Great War, a greater segment of the British population used the language and practices of these movements to understand the slaughter of their children, brothers, husbands and friends under the furnace of industrial warfare. This book explores their ghostly encounters to offer a new emotional history of the Great War that contrasts sharply with the legacy of the war - and modernity itself - as a disenchanting experience. The ghosts that haunted Britain between 1914 and 1939 were uplifting and positive, and claimed to be delivering a new revelation that could unite science and religion, end human and intellectual conflict, and redeem the war's bloodshed.

Review Quotes

'This is a rich academic study... it shows an impressive skill in locating individual case studies to explore in both printed and archival materials in ways that can illuminate larger historical trajectories.'
Prof. Roger Luckhurst

About the Author

Kyle Falcon is a historian specialising in the British Empire during the First World War. He is based in Ontario, Canada.