Land of Mist and Other Spiritualist Writings

Christine Ferguson is Professor of English Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Stirling, where her research focuses on the entwined histories of the literary gothic and the British occult revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is author of Open Secrets: The Popular Fiction of Britain’s Occult Revival (2025), Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing 1848-1930 (2012) and Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (2006). Her previous editions include, with Andrew Radford, The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 (2018), and, as solo editor, a volume on Spiritualism, Health, Race, and Human Variation for Routledge’s Spiritualism 1840-1930 facsimile edition series (2014).

This is an important moment in the history of the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle. Christine Ferguson’s landmark edition of The Land of Mist finally allows us to understand this much-misunderstood novel for what it really is: Conan Doyle’s most personal novel, the one in which his deeply-held Spiritualist views get their fullest fictional exploration. Far from being, as is often thought, an anomaly or an outlier in his work, Ferguson reclaims The Land of Mist as perhaps the key book for understanding the later Conan Doyle. For the first time, we get to read The Land of Mist in the context in which it belongs, surrounded by Conan Doyle’s other Spiritualist writings. Ferguson’s meticulously edited, brilliantly annotated edition of The Land of Mist changes the way we look at Conan Doyle’s later life and work.

• General Editor’s PrefaceAcknowledgementsDedicationChronology of the Life of Arthur Conan DoyleThe Land of Mist: IntroductionThe Land of MistChapter I. In Which Our Special Commissioners Make a StartChapter 2. Which Describes an Evening in Strange CompanyChapter 3. In Which Professor Challenger Gives His OpinionChapter 4. Which Describes Some Strange Doings in HammersmithChapter 5. Where Our Commissioners Have a Remarkable ExperienceChapter 6. In Which the Reader is Shown the Habits of a Notorious CriminalChapter 7. In Which the Notorious Criminal Gets What the British Law Considers to be his DesertsChapter 8. In Which Three Investigators Come Across a Dark SoulChapter 9. Which Introduces Some Very Physical PhenomenaChapter 10. De ProfundisChapter 11. Where Silas Linden Comes Into His OwnChapter 12. There are Heights and There are DepthsChapter 13. In Which Professor Challenger Goes Forth to BattleChapter 14. In Which Professor Challenger Meets a Strange ColleagueChapter 15. In Which Traps are Laid for a Great QuarryChapter 16. In Which Challenger Has the Experience of his LifetimeChapter 17. Where the Mists Clear AwayLand of Mist NotesAn Essay on the TextOther Spiritualist Writings: AppendicesI. ‘A New Revelation: Spiritualism and Religion’ (1916)II. ‘The Vital Message: A Plea for the Reform of Christianity’ (1917)III. ‘Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event’ (1920)IV. ‘The Darker Side’ (c. 1924–25)V. Letter from Elsie Wright to Geoffrey Crawley (1983)ApparatusA Note on IllustrationsExplanatory Notes