Murder, Magic, Madness : The Victorian Trials of Dove and the Wizard

"This is a straightforward piece of well-researched and exciting microhistory.

The story is a tragic one, and told with a skill that genuinely seizes and holds the attention, and makes the sections of historical analysis easily digestible by any readership.

There is a cast of colourful and unpleasant characters, who are very well drawn and in whom interest is sustained from start to finish...In sum, it combines some of the best skills of the storyteller and the analytical historian" - Professor Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol, Owen.

Davies has a formidable track-record as a historian of popular magic and cunning folk in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England, and he uses his expertise in this area to weave into the story of Dove's downfall the world of fortune tellers, popular physicians, and popular occult practitioners...The mental and cultural world of a northern Methodist family is reconstructed deftly and interestingly, and the Leeds of the period is admirably evoked" - Professor James Sharpe, University of York.

In 1856 William Dove, the son of a respected Methodist merchant, was tried for poisoning his wife.Believing the prediction of Henry Harrison, the 'Leeds Wizard', that he would remarry a more attractive and richer woman, he made a pact with the devil and murdered his wife.

Was he mad? Or was he one of the foulest murderers in the annals of crime?

The trials of Dove and the wizard sensationally exposed a world of popular magic that had remained largely hidden from middle-class Victorian eyes.