The Fancy on Witches in the Nineteenth Century Viewing from

The Lancashire Witches

Kumiko Tanabe

(Osaka University of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Japan)

Abstract: William Harrison Ainsworth is a historical novelist, whose novel The Lancashire Witches was serialized in the Sunday Times newspaper in 1848. This serialization was based on the story about the witches who are said to have lived on Pendle Hill in Lancashire and were executed in 1612. It was published as a novel called The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest in 1829. Ainsworth had been gathering information about Pendle Hill from between 1846 and 1847, and wrote his novel based on a public document called The Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613) published by Thomas Potts as a clerk of this trial. The subject of the Lancashire Witches was suggested to Ainsworth by James Crossley as the president of Chetham Society, which published the books on the history of north-east England. The Lancashire Witches displays a lot of Lancashire dialect spoken by folks and the landscape and architecture on Pendle Hill with antiquarian knowledge, which reveals the fashion of antiquarianism and the influence of Chetham Society. Ainsworth’s style including fancy or fantasy into history to recreate it became the model for modern fantasy and historical fiction.

Key words: fancy, reality and disbelief in witches, W. H. Ainsworth, the nineteenth century, Lancashire, Burne
Jones, Pre-Raphaelites