The Persistent Business of Superstition
An editorial from 1877 examines why, despite the march of progress and the printing press, humanity remained obsessed with palmistry, spiritualism, and bad omens.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It is a circumstance of curious import, and one which may attract the attention of a future Grote or Hume, that in the very year in which we are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the introduction of the printing press, courts of justice should be busy trying persons for extorting money from her Majesty's subjects by 'palmistry and other subtle devices.' So slow is the progress of our race. After four centuries of existence, the press has been unable to liberate the human mind from some of its most degrading superstitions. The belief in witchcraft has hardly disappeared from some remote country villages, while in great and enlightened cities it has been replaced for thousands of men and women by the astonishing creed known as 'spiritualism.' There seems to be small hope that human credulity is likely to die a natural death before the light of knowledge and reason.
“There seems to be small hope that human credulity is likely to die a natural death before the light of knowledge and reason.”
While this 1877 editorial laments the persistence of spiritualism and palmistry in the face of Victorian scientific advancement, it captures the perennial human struggle to find certainty in an unpredictable world. Today's 'digital fortune telling' and algorithmic prediction markets mirror the exact anxieties of the 19th-century public seeking order in chaos.
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