Bringing Ghost Stories Up-to-Date: Andrew Lang’s Victorian Reconciliation of Science and the Paranormal

ABSTRACT For the late-Victorian folklorist Andrew Lang, credulous interest in the supernatural could coexist with a distinctly modern emphasis on scientific empiricism. He believed that his society, despite its sophistication and refinement, was less different than it claimed from its distant past. This article argues that for Lang stories of ghosts were still relevant even in an age dominated by scientific inquiry and that he justified the use of modern empirical methods to study supernatural phenomena. In advocating for analytical investigation, he yearned to justify the study of ghosts for a doubtful world, to make it relevant and credible to the present age. Still, examining Lang’s article “Ghosts Up to Date” reveals his attitude toward the evidence-based exploration of the paranormal to be ambivalent, as he attempts to reconcile a fin-de-siècle desire for progress with the folklorist’s yearning to maintain a connection to the past.