Abstract
This chapter takes the reader through the period 1830 to 1913 with reference to its historical, political and social context (such as spiritualism) and the various forms of its expression from poetry to painting, architecture to literature and theatre to waxwork displays. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament, the Puginesque churches in provincial cities across the British Isles, the high gothic mansions of wealthy aristocrats and nouveau riche capitalists and the later high Victorian government buildings of India and Australia upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, and new garden cemeteries and spiritualism, mesmerism and theology granted the Victorians a glimpse of an afterlife that defied material changes, Gothic literature filled the vacant spaces between our life and the life beyond and the world of the mind and the world of industrialisation with a dread that spread to America, France, Germany and even Russia.
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Bloom, C. (2021). Introduction: The Black Shadow of Doom. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_1
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