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The Dead Man’s Message

by Florence Marryat

edited by Greta Depledge

First published in 1894, The Dead Man’s Message was inspired by Florence Marryat’s very strong spiritual beliefs. On the surface, a curious little gothic tale, Marryat delivers a story which engages with humane questions over how people live their lives and contextualises this within a plot which grapples with much wider scientific debates.

Professor Aldwyn wakes from a nap to discover that he is actually dead. During life he was a rational man of science, but he has now entered the spirit world and is forced to account for his actions on earth. In this novella Florence Marryat presents the reader with a sometimes playful, but ultimately engaging, challenge to the wider scientific community and its skepticism of the spiritual other.

This new edition, edited by Dr Greta Depledge, features an introduction, contextual notes and the following appendices:

  • Science versus Spiritualism – the debate
  • Spirit photography
  • Extracts from Florence Marryat’s There is No Death

Dr Greta Depledge is a lecturer at the Faculty of Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck College and an associate lecturer for the Open University. She specialises in the interface between medicine and literature in the nineteenth century and is co-editor of The Female Body in Medicine and Literature for Liverpool University Press (2010). She also works on Florence Marryat and nineteenth and twentieth-century crime fiction.

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