February 21st 2017:- I didn’t reach my target 1,000 words today, but I was dealing with a very delicate moment in the story, and I thought it better that I worked on it in order to find the right balance than to skim past it for the sake of my word target …. and while doing that, it occurred to me that I needed to know just what Londoners living in 1851 knew about the subconscious mind. They certainly had ideas about the soul, and about the ability of the dead to communicate with the living, and there was mesmerism going on and similar oddities. I haven’t yet discovered what the general educated public thought the mind was capable of, but I suppose if you imagine that spirits can communicate through special members of the living then it almost suggests that they thought there were areas of the brain or the mind that we were not in control of. But I’ve got some research to do now and have just got hold of Catherine Crowe’s book ‘The Night Side of Nature’ written in 1848 about ghosts and how they should be taken seriously… and this is the beginning of the great spiritualism obsession that so many intelligent people let themselves believe it. It can’t have been as a reaction to all the death around them, because that was the normal state of affairs before 1851. It’s been the normal state of affairs right up until relatively recently. So something else brought on this fever in them… some other longing.
