Publisher's Synopsis
The book gives us a look at the 1840s attitudes and beliefs regarding all things supernatural in the form of a discussion between four young adults. From a book review published in The Spectator (London), August 14, 1841: "the dialogues of Astrophel and Evelyn, two youths, one a student of divinity, the other an M. D. and practical philosopher, who, accompanied by a pair of gentle girls, beguile a few hours of summer moonlight on the banks of the sylvan Wye, by holding discourse on the nature of apparitions, dreams, transmigration, &c. The embryo divine, under the inspiration of a night passed with the velvet lawn of Tintern for his couch, brings forward his narratives and facts to establish the certainty of ghostly influences; while the M. D. remorselessly, though not always conclusively, explains them away by simple references to natural laws. [
