ABSTRACT
Thomas Carlyle speaks most prophetically to the defining feature of the late twentieth century. If the eighteenth century was enlightened, reasoning and increasingly sure of itself, the first half at least of the nineteenth was opinionated, impetuous and unsure. In the fantasies, there is the pleasure to be had from 'the sheer experience of entering the domain which George MacDonald's imagination has created'. Mrs Margaret Oliphant conveys a sense of reality most consistently when she writes about the supernatural in stories whose didactic purpose is fundamentally theological. Evil is a metaphysical object of fact for Mrs Oliphant, with the worship of science its wickedest contemporary expression. This is the conviction at the heart of her toughest and most intricately visionary story, 'The Land of Darkness', in which the narrator travels through three nightmare cities which are like three successive infernal circles derived from Dante Alighieri's Inferno.
