The Circus of Ghosts

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In the mid eighteen-forties, the somewhat lurid newspaper reporting of a scandalous society murder in London ¿ with links, however tenuous, to both the dubious practice of Mesmerism and the eminently respectable young Queen Victoria ¿ forced the main protagonist, a lady mesmerist cleared of the murder by a jury but nevertheless irrevocably tainted by the reporting of the events, to leave London with the rather odd group of people she called her family, for America. It is known that with them, for reasons of the heart, travelled Inspector Arthur Rivers, one of the first British detectives, from the newly-formed police division based in Scotland Yard, off Whitehall. The Fox Sisters, who began the cult of table-tapping and claimed to talk to the dead, were a nineteenth-century American phenomenon, fanned by the American press. It is thought that opium always hovered, the alcoholism and the scandals came later.