Research Catalog
Hellish Nell : last of Britain's witches / Malcolm Gaskill.
- Title
- Hellish Nell : last of Britain's witches / Malcolm Gaskill.
- Author
- Gaskill, Malcolm
- Publication
- London : Fourth Estate, 2001.
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1 Item
| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | BF1581 .G37 2001 | Off-site |
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Details
- Description
- xiv, 402 p. : ill.; 22 cm.
- Summary
- "Private seances, at which spirits are said to return from the dead, were once more of a public affair. In darkened back-rooms, cellars and halls across early twentieth-century Britain, thousands of people went to 'the spooks' hoping to see mediums manifest ghostly forms. For many, working-class Scot Helen Duncan - nicknamed 'Hellish Nell' as a child - was the best there had ever been. But fame turned to infamy early in 1944 when she was tried at the Old Bailey under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, and sentenced to nine months in prison." "It was one of the most sensational episodes in wartime Britain. Why did the trial occur just weeks before the Normany landings? Why was Helen Duncan gaoled for summoning spirits when mediums were usually fined as petty frauds? And what actually happened at the seances to impress so many respectable people, more than forty of whom testified as defence witnesses at her trial? Was she in fact a conjurer, a mystic, a con-artist or even a spy? To Spiritualists, Helen Duncan was a martyr. To the state, she became a security risk. Her life story is a broth of wartime anxieties, legal deviousness, science and pseudo-science, conspiracy, politics and sheer entertainment. But she was also the focus for one of the oldest and most difficult questions of all: what happens when we die? It was the question of the age for a generation which had lived through the slaughter and sorrow of two world wars."--Jacket
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- Biographies.
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Processing Action (note)
- committed to retain
- ISBN
- 1841151092
- OCLC
- 47148625
- SCSB-12786034
- Owning Institutions
- Harvard Library