Comments on: Charles Dickens, Hypnosis and Mesmerism

By: Adam Eason

Adam Eason — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:21:54 +0000

In reply to priyanka. Thank you Priyanka, I am off to google it this very minute :-) best wishes, A.

By: priyanka

priyanka — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:19:48 +0000

do read Jack Maggs, if you haven’t already, the novel is supposed to be a retelling of Great Expectations, with Charles Dickens-like character experimenting with hypnotism for gaining psychological insight.

By: Adam Eason

Adam Eason — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:28:23 +0000

In reply to Marty Drury.

Marty, great contribution, as usual.

Dickens was, by all accounts, very full on in regards to the way he lived his life. He did not tend to do things by halves from what I gather and his involvement with mesmerism was no different. I could have written much more in this entry… I also love his novels.

And I am delighted you are progressing so wonderfully with your training and chosen path, good for you! 🙂

Best wishes, A.

By: Marty Drury

Marty Drury — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:16:56 +0000

Thinking about it, you might have thought it about Dickens. Dickens, after all, obsessed over the new and the novel or at the very least the “developments” of his age. The Old Curiosity Shop has characters taking a walk backwards from the industrial revolution scenery to the scenery that revolution was rapidly eating up. The railways feature in a lot of his works etc. Dickens was clearly a keen observer of people, science, new developments and…well…goodness knows what they might have called it back then but you’d be hard pressed to be interested in people but shun psychology.

I love Dickens’s books. Drury Lane features in one of the books and I enjoyed being posh for a moment at university one time and putting my hand up to say: “erm…yeah, that Drury Lane he mentions there…named after my ancestor.”

Mind you, it did not help that the Penguin version of The Old Curiosity Shop has a footnote next to the mention of Drury Lane and…if you look at the back of the book, it says something along the lines of: “a notorious haunt for thieves, vagabonds, murderers and prostitutes”. And I say to that simply: my family was involved. What do you expect? 🙂

Great blog posts as ever, Adam.

Just wanted to take this opportunity to say a little thank you. Reading your insights really helped me whilst I was studying for my psychotherapy course. Last weekend, I passed that course and gained NLP Practitioner certificate and the Foundation Certificate in Contemporary Psychotherapy. Which I am beyond happy about. Long journey still ahead but your remarkable skill with what you do was one of the things that inspired my journey in the first place and I am really grateful for the knowledge you give out for free on his blog.