The Great Divide

The Great Divide

After the recent birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle, I received a number of comments on the irony that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was, in his personal life and non-Holmesian writings, obsessed with spiritualism and fairies. It seems odd to us but in this, he was a man of his times...

Victorian society was zealous in its belief that scientific progress was the answer to all humanity’s ills. At the same time, society was rigidly Christian.

The great Victorian debates between Science and Religion erupted most fiercely when Darwin’s theory of evolution smacked up against the belief that God created the world in six days, finishing on October 23, 4004 BC.

The Victorians scorned supersition and other such nonsense (by which they meant the religions of other cultures). Yet they embraced séances and other communications with the spirit world. I suspect that the close physical intimacy of the séance setting, touching hands while sitting in the dark, had as much to do with repressed sexuality as with any spirit communication.

But, then, the view of women as either virgins or prostitutes was another of the divides.

The great Victorian writer Charles Dickens

famously began his novel A Tale of Two Cities with the immortal line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” He may have been talking about the French Revolution but the man understood humanity...

Somehow we manage to endlessly polarize our world, no matter what times we find ourselves in.

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Photo: Elsie Wright ("Cottingley Fairies", 1917)