Rewriting the Empire of the Imagination: The Post-Imperial Gothic Fiction of Peter Carey and A.S. Byatt

She suggests the narrow line between magic and science that mesmerized the Victorians. Victorians dabbled in occult practices, such as telepathy, séances and mesmerism, even while they struggled to accept Darwinian science and its earthly ramifications. They also practised spiritualism while the Empire magically spread itself around the globe. Victorian anthropologist Andrew Lang’s explanation of the relationship between empire and the occult casts light on the period’s wedding of science and pseudo-science: ‘‘As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem to hope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far from us’’. Lang implies that as the British reached the limits of exploration, after they had weighed, mapped, and claimed as their own more than their share of the globe, the only frontier left to explore and map was the invisible world.