In the mid-1890s the London based Society for Psychical Research dispatched researchers to the Scottish Highlands and Islands to investigate an extraordinary power of prophecy said to be peculiar to the residents of these remote regions. Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, and given in English as ‘second sight’, the phenomenon was most commonly associated with the vision of future events: the death of neighbour, the arrival of strangers into the community, the success or failure of a fishing trip and so forth. The SPR were not the first to take an interest in this pre-visionary faculty, rather they joined a legion of scientists, travel writers, antiquarians, poets and artists who had made enquires into the topic from the end of the seventeenth century. This thesis examines the remarkably prominent position enjoyed by Scottish second sight in the Victorian popular imagination. In seeking to appreciate why a strange visionary ability was able to make claims upon the attention of the whole nation where other folk motifs were consigned to the realms of specialist interest only, this project charts its migration through a series of nineteenth-century cultural sites: mesmerism and phrenology, modern spiritualism and anthropology, romance literature and folklorism, and finally psychical research and Celtic mysticism. Binding these individual case studies together is a cast of shared actors - Walter Scott, Catherine Crowe, William Howitt, Marie Corelli, Andrew Lang and Ada Goodrich Freer - and a focus on their common investigative and creative cultures. My interest is with how the power of second sight, once defined as a supernatural occurrence tied to the geographically distant and mysterious Scottish Highlands, comes to be transformed by the close of the nineteenth century, into a supra-normal facet of the psyche, potentially accessible and exploitable by all.

This thesis examines the belief that ideologies about blindness which have their provenance in religious, mythical and symbolic belief are 'infused into our literature and art' to become 'an important part of the way we perceive ourselves and others'. Depictions of the enduring power and influence ot symbolic belief is examined in fictional and autobiographical writings from 1600-1995. The history of theories of causation of disease in general is discussed in the first chapter. This is tollowed in the second chapter by an examination of the myths, meanings, symbols and ideologies which have become attached to blindness from pre-Christian times to the present day. The third chapter is devoted to an assessment of the influential meanings given to his own blindness by the poet John Milton and to an appraisal oi the responses, in the following century and a half, both by his adherents, notably Marveli, Dryden and the Romantic Poets, and his detractors, not least among whom was Samuel Johnson. The tollowing two chapters are given to an examination of the influence of ideology on depictions of blindness in Nineteenth and twentieth Century literature. Special attention is given to portrayals of blindness in recent works for children, in view of the belief and recommendation that writings about and for handicapped children should be realistic and tree from stereotype. Both chapters are underpinned by brief surveys of the then current social situation of the blind and of the state of medical knowledge at the time. Finally, fictional representations of blindness are compared with a number of experiental accounts taken from autobiographies of blind people written between 1870-1990.

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