Karl Bell

Breaking Modernity's Spell – Magic and Modern History

(2007). Breaking Modernitys Spell – Magic and Modern History. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 115-122.

Civic Spirits? Ghost Lore and Civic Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Portsmouth

ABSTRACT Arguing for a more historicized approach to hauntological theorizing, this article explores the insights to be gained from urban ghost lores. Focusing on nineteenth-century Portsmouth, it uses ghost lore to penetrate the towns dominant narrative as the home of the Royal Navy. Through examining the ways in which ghosts variously informed a sense of community, tacitly subverting civic narratives whilst also resonating with key features of ‘official’ memory, this article argues for the existence of interpretative struggles over urban spaces, places and identities. In doing so, it seeks to highlight the potential value to historians of a developing ‘spectral turn’.

‘The Humbugg of the World at an End’: the apocalyptic imagination and the uses of collective fantasy in Norfolk in 1844

This article will explore the origins of this prophecy in Norfolk, rooting it in a nexus of cultural influences. It will examine popular reactions to the prophecy and how people spoke with, and through, apocalyptic imagery, offering an insight into popular mentalities, imagination and perceptions of contemporary circumstances. It will also consider clergymen’s responses to this millenarian outburst, revealing a multifaceted position. This will necessarily involve some comparison of the similarities and differences between popular and ecclesiastical interpretations and uses of the prophecy. Apocalyptic fantasies will be shown to have variously performed radical or conservative functions. On the one hand, they could offer a condemnation of social inequalities and a dramatic envisaging of social levelling. On the other, these fantasies could become a harking back to a pre-industrial utopia. Whether radical or conservative, apocalyptic fantasies offered an (instinctive) critique of modernization. As W. B. Harrison declared in 1842, ‘We live in an age when the whole civilized world appears to be on the eve of some great and important change’ and there is ‘so much wrong with society . . . that it [is] impossible to conceive how it could be changed except by divine intervention’. This article will argue that, for some people, apocalyptic fantasies allowed condemnation of modernity’s disruptive effects in Norfolk while ultimately acting as a coping mechanism which enabled adaptation to its socio-cultural consequences.

The Witch: a history of fear, from ancient times to the present

The Witch probes the particular nature of the early modern European witch hunts by viewing them from the innovative perspective of deep time and cross-cultural comparisons. The book divides into th...

'They are without Christ and without hope’:heathenism, popular religion, and supernatural belief in Portsmouth’s Maritime Community, c.1851–1901

Bell uses religion and supernatural beliefs to examine urban-maritime anxieties and identities in Victorian Portsmouth. The chapter starts by considering how ecclesiastic commentators shaped representations of Portsmouth as an immoral site of heathenism. It then examines the empowering functions of seafarers and port-dwellers’ popular religious and supernatural beliefs, including their adaptation of orthodox religion. Finally, as the Royal Navy modernised and older ‘superstitions’ became more muted, it argues that elements of popular religious beliefs and their critical representations continued in debates about spiritualism in late nineteenth-century Portsmouth. By working with a broader concept of popular religion, Bell argues that historians can gain insight into important distinctions and connections between how Britain’s premier naval town was perceived from ‘above’, and how its inhabitants experienced life from within.