Were people of Victorian Britain superstitious? Like with myths and stuff?
They certainly believed in ghosts and spirits. Then as now, there were many people who made their living claiming to communicate with the dead. The pseudoscience of phrenology, analyzing the character by examining the shape of the skull, was also quite popular. Of course it’s hard to say just how many people believed in those things, but it seems to have been a lot. A Victorian invented the vampire genre, but I doubt that anyone actually believed they were real. There were many old beliefs about fairies, elves, and sprites, and some actually did believe those, famously including Arthur Conan Doyle. Since Victorians were a bit obsessed with sex but didn’t actually have much scientific study of it, there were a number of superstitions recipes for things like contraception and the prevention of syphilis, which was a major cause of death. There were many absurd beliefs, which seem to have been almost universally accepted, about the horrendous effects of masturbation. Parents actually feare
