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The Lancashire Witches is the only one of William Harrison Ainsworth's forty novels that has remained continuously in print since its first publication. [1] It was serialised in the Sunday Times newspaper in 1848; a book edition appeared the following year, published by Henry Colburn .
The Late Lancashire Witches belongs to a subgenre of English Renaissance drama that exploited public interest in the scandalous subject of witchcraft. The most famous of these plays is Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1603–6), though Middleton's The Witch (c. 1609–16) and The Witch of Edmonton (1621) by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, are other notable examples.
An illustration of Ann Redferne and Chattox, two of the Pendle witches, from Ainsworth's novel The Lancashire Witches. The Pendle witch trials of 1612 associated Lancashire with witchcraft in the popular imagination: this was particularly so in the nineteenth century after William Ainsworth's celebrated historical novel The Lancashire Witches (1848).
Potts was employed as a clerk of the peace for the East Riding of Yorkshire in about 1610–11, and was an associate clerk on the northern assize circuit in the summer of 1612, when the Lancashire witch trials took place. [5] Although he had sufficient legal training to be able to advise Justices of the Peace, he had not received a university ...
Pendle Hill from the northwest. On the right is the eastern edge of Longridge Fell, which is separated from Pendle Hill by the Ribble valley.. The accused witches lived in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, a county which, at the end of the 16th century, was regarded by the authorities as a wild and lawless region: an area "fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the ...
“Witches are interested in mythology," she does note. "And the devil is a really interesting mythological figure. Certainly, plenty of witches like to talk about it or think about it, especially ...
Wigglesworth was in attendance at a number of meetings that year but is not recorded as having had much to say. His famous poem "Day of Doom" published some 30 years prior has only one brief mention of the word "witch." [9] Unlike the Mathers, witchcraft does not appear to have been a subject of great interest to him.
Scott's book has also been credited with provoking the long line of Victorian novels on necromantic themes that includes Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches and Bram Stoker's Dracula. [ 20 ] Though the book was a rapid seller, its reception by the critics was mixed, some praising its sceptical attitude to the supernatural and some ...