Dr Melissa Dickson is an ECR-funded researcher at St Anne’s College Oxford. Her publications include Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, co-authored with Ameila Bonea, Sally Shuttleworth and Jennifer Wallis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), ‘Jane Eyre’s ‘Arabian Tales’: Reading and Remembering the Arabian Nights’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:2 (2013) and ‘Charles Wheatstone’s Enchanted Lyre and the Spectacle of Sound’ in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789-1851, ed. by Ellen Lockhart and James Q. Davies (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

This wonderful book shows how firmly the Arabian Nights was embedded in the British cultural psyche during the nineteenth century. From childhood reading through to stage performances and the narratives of archaeology and industrial modernity, this astute study tracks the ways in which the Arabian Nights wove its own forms of entrancement. Dickson’s subtle text calls for a recalibration of our understandings of ‘Orientalism’ in the nineteenth century.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1. ‘For a time their world made mine’: Childhood Encounters with the Arabian Nights2. Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights3. The Magical Metropolis4. Magic and Machines at the Great Exhibition5. Epilogue: A New Arabian NightsBibliographyIndex

Dr Melissa Dickson is an ECR-funded researcher at St Anne’s College Oxford. Her publications include Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, co-authored with Ameila Bonea, Sally Shuttleworth and Jennifer Wallis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), ‘Jane Eyre’s ‘Arabian Tales’: Reading and Remembering the Arabian Nights’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:2 (2013) and ‘Charles Wheatstone’s Enchanted Lyre and the Spectacle of Sound’ in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789-1851, ed. by Ellen Lockhart and James Q. Davies (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

This wonderful book shows how firmly the Arabian Nights was embedded in the British cultural psyche during the nineteenth century. From childhood reading through to stage performances and the narratives of archaeology and industrial modernity, this astute study tracks the ways in which the Arabian Nights wove its own forms of entrancement. Dickson’s subtle text calls for a recalibration of our understandings of ‘Orientalism’ in the nineteenth century.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1. ‘For a time their world made mine’: Childhood Encounters with the Arabian Nights2. Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights3. The Magical Metropolis4. Magic and Machines at the Great Exhibition5. Epilogue: A New Arabian NightsBibliographyIndex