A genre of supernatural fiction was among the more improbable products of the Age of Enlightenment, but produced a string of bestsellers. E. J. Clery's original and historically sensitive account charts the troubled entry of the supernatural into fiction, and examines the reasons for its growing popularity in the late eighteenth century.

Beginning with the notorious case of the Cock Lane ghost, a performing poltergeist who became a major attraction in the London of 1762, and with Garrick's spell-binding performance as the ghost-seeing Hamlet, it moves on to look at the Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis and others, in unexpected new lights. The central insight emerging from the rich resources of Clery's research concerns the connection between fictions of the supernatural and the growth of consumerism. Not only are ghost stories successful commodities in the rapidly commercialising book market, they are also considered here as reflections on the disruptive effects of this socio-economic transformation.

In providing a newly detailed context for the rise of supernatural fiction, Clery's work will change our view of its dramatic role - as much commercial as creative - in the movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism.