A quirky history that offers a new way of understanding the myth of the mummy's curse. Roger Luckhurst provides a startling path through the cultural history of Victorian England and its colonial possessions.

• PART ONE: CURSE STORIES


• 1: King Tut and the dead Earl


• Opening the Tomb


• First Interpretations


• 2: Precursor Stories I: Thomas Douglas Murray and 22542 (The Unlucky Mummy)


• 3: Precursor Stories II: Walter Ingram and the Coffin of Nesmin


• PART TWO: CONTEXTS


• 4: Egypt in London I: Immersive-Exotic Spaces


• The Egyptian Hall, Belzoni's Tomb and Mummy Pettigrew


• The Exotic Panorama and the Theatrical Extravaganza


• Bazaars, West End Shopping, and Exotic Consumption


• 5: Egypt in London II: The Exhibitionary Universe


• Egypt at the World's Fairs


• The British Museum in the Empire of Shadows


• 6: The Curse Tale and the Egyptian Gothic


• Learning to Curse


• Plagues, Scarabs, and the Nuclear Option: The Golden Age of Egyptian Curse Stories


• The Museum Gothic


• Algernon Blackwood: Egypt Introjected


• 7: Rider Haggard Among the Mummies


• Rider Haggard's Encounters with Egypt


• Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Haggard and Major E. Arthur Haggard in Egypt


• Rider Haggard's Artefactual Fictions


• 8: Evil Eyes, Punitive Currents and the Late Victorian Magic Revival


• Late Victorian Hermeticism: Blavatsky's Theosophical Society


• The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Haute Magie and Low Comedy


• Magical Thinking and Curse Logic


• Closing in: The Evil Eye Looks Back


• Afterword

Roger Luckhurst has written and broadcast widely on popular culture, specialising in science fiction and the Gothic. He is interested in the odd spaces between science and popular supernatural beliefs. He has previously written a history of how the notion of 'telepathy' emerged in the late Victorian period, and has published editions of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. He is also a regular radio reviewer of terrible science fiction films. He teaches horror and the occasional respectable novel by Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London.