Decoding the Bubble: Popular Magic, Financial Deception, and Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia

Alison Daniell ()
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Alison Daniell: University of Southampton

Chapter Chapter 6 in The Bubble Act, 2023, pp 111-129 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Readings of Eliza Haywood’s South Sea Bubble narrative, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent of Utopia, have traditionally interpreted the wizard Lucitario (thought by some to be James Craggs) as a powerful magical figure. However, the early part of the long eighteenth century witnessed a profound change in understandings of the supernatural, including reframing those who claimed to practise magic as, essentially, confidence tricksters. This essay provides a re-reading of Haywood’s text to shed fresh light on contemporary views of the Bubble and its aftermath, bringing it into line with contemporary understandings of magic and depicting those at the heart of the South Sea debacle as little more than con men.

Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-3-031-31894-8_6

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-31894-8_6

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