Special Collections
Book of the Month, July 2008
The Complete Fortune Teller, or, True Book of Fate
Margaret Foresight
London: T. Tegg, 1810
H.P.L. [Foresight] RBC
The True Fortune Teller, or, Universal Book of Fate
Glasgow: [c. 1840]
H.P.L. [True] RBC
The Library recently acquired these two works for the Harry Price Library, to add to the considerable holdings of pamphlet material held in the collection. Popular publications dealing with various aspects of fortune telling had long been published in considerable quantities – as indeed they are still. Survivals of such publications, often bought from pedlars, are less common. These two examples have no binding but both have rather good illustrations, one of which is hand coloured.
Publications purporting to divine the course of fate were often linked with individual seers or, in this case prophetesses, Margaret Foresight in one and Mother Bridget in the other. There also seems to be a common stock of material drawn upon by such publications, or endemic plagiarism, as the exact same phrases appear in the section on fingernails in both of these pamphlets. In both pamphlets there is also a genuflection towards a rational and even scientific tendency in the reader’s approach to the material, perhaps intended to flatter the reader.
In The Complete Fortune Teller, the author is given as Margaret Foresight, Professor of the Occult Sciences, Tooley-Street, Southwark and the ‘book’ described as the ‘Result of nearly Seventy Years incessant Labour and Experience’ and indeed scholarship, if the title page is to be believed. Much of the pamphlet concerns astrology, but it ends with a series of items on methods of deducing people’s character and fortune from, for example, fingernails, moles on the body, complexion, palmistry and the size and shape of heads.
The True Fortune Teller has a patronising introduction describing ‘the life of the person who left the following little work for the benefit and instruction of the world’, ‘Mrs Bridget, vulgarly called Mother Bridget’ who was ‘exceedingly fond’ ‘of a pipe of tobacco’. Having distanced themselves from the supposed source of the book, the writer then describes the influence of the stars on people’s lives, and ends with ‘Judgments deduced from the [finger] nails. The cover of the pamphlet (see illustration) has a ‘Tree of Fate’ with numbered leaves – and the reader is invited to make a random choice of these leaves, the chosen number is then interpreted by a numbered list of prophecies on the following page, e.g. ’34 A ramble by moonlight’. The pamphlet ends with a message To The Reader: ‘The foregoing pages are published principally to show the superstitions which engrossed the mind of the population of Scotland during a past age, and which are happily disappearing before the progress of an enlightened civilization. It is hoped, therefore, that the reader will not attach the slightest importance to the solutions of the dreams as rendered above, as dreams are generally the result of a disordered stomach, or an excited imagination.’
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