Table of Contents

PART ONE: CURSE STORIES
1: King Tut and the dead Earl
Opening the Tomb
First Interpretations
2: Precursor Stories I: Thomas Douglas Murray and 22542 (The Unlucky Mummy)
3: Precursor Stories II: Walter Ingram and the Coffin of Nesmin
PART TWO: CONTEXTS
4: Egypt in London I: Immersive-Exotic Spaces
The Egyptian Hall, Belzoni's Tomb and Mummy Pettigrew
The Exotic Panorama and the Theatrical Extravaganza
Bazaars, West End Shopping, and Exotic Consumption
5: Egypt in London II: The Exhibitionary Universe
Egypt at the World's Fairs
The British Museum in the Empire of Shadows
6: The Curse Tale and the Egyptian Gothic
Learning to Curse
Plagues, Scarabs, and the Nuclear Option: The Golden Age of Egyptian Curse Stories
The Museum Gothic
Algernon Blackwood: Egypt Introjected
7: Rider Haggard Among the Mummies
Rider Haggard's Encounters with Egypt
Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Haggard and Major E. Arthur Haggard in Egypt
Rider Haggard's Artefactual Fictions
8: Evil Eyes, Punitive Currents and the Late Victorian Magic Revival
Late Victorian Hermeticism: Blavatsky's Theosophical Society
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Haute Magie and Low Comedy
Magical Thinking and Curse Logic
Closing in: The Evil Eye Looks Back
Afterword

About the Author

Roger Luckhurst has written and broadcast widely on popular culture, specialising in science fiction and the Gothic. He is interested in the odd spaces between science and popular supernatural beliefs. He has previously written a history of how the notion of 'telepathy' emerged in the late Victorian period, and has published editions of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. He is also a regular radio reviewer of terrible science fiction films. He teaches
horror and the occasional respectable novel by Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Reviews

[An] alluring book ... The story of the mummy's curse, unsurprisingly, is far more revealing of attitudes and anxieties prevalent in 19th century Britain than of anything in Ancient Egypt.
*Thomas Jones, London Review of Books*

The Mummy's Curse is a thoughtful and thorough exegesis of an enduring popular myth.
*Irish Times*

A fascinating account ... There are some absolutely laugh-out-loud moments in this consistently insightful and well-written study ... This is the kind of academic volume which impresses you with the ideas found on each page, and at the same time sparks off new ideas in the reader.
*Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman*

Here is a topic with a variety of themes, some farcical, some darkly serious, some complex, and others which are beyond silly. It takes a particular skill to balance such a range of ideas, and Roger Luckhurst possesses this skill.
*John Ray, Times Literary Supplement*