That according to the Paris Review dickens was not immune to the crazies that captivated the Victorian society. During a lifetime, he considered himself a skilled practitioner of something known as mesmerism, which purported to cure patients by putting them into trances and then manipulating magnetic fluid in their body. But the ghosts and goblins and other supernatural phenomena that populated his writing perhaps reflect a keen awareness of what his readers wanted to see rather than his personal convictions