“If a place be fortunate”: Feng shui in the Victorian imagination

The essay explores the presence of feng shui in Victorian debates, focusing on two interrelated issues: its role in the struggle for the control of particular spaces, and its function as a site of encounter between different ways of understanding human interaction with nature. The first section is devoted to a brief overview of how feng shui was presented (and mostly berated) in the British press. However, such negative reaction was not unanimous: the second section looks at texts which show curiosity, or even partial appreciation. The third section considers how, by the end of the century, feng shui had become sufficiently familiar to the reading public to be deployed in debates concerning the use of land in Britain itself. Thus, it emerges that Victorian reactions to feng shui reflected crucial preoccupations of the time, including an increasing awareness of the multifaceted ways in which places can shape life.