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know, like they were obsessed” (GFL, 16). It is as if Spenser was talking about himself and some of the other characters from his story as they all give way, or even become addicted, to some irrational obsessive mania, be it filming a book, seeking sexual adventures, fighting an abstract conspiracy or tracing the identity of their new internal voice. The connection between the literary and the occult is made clear during the séance Audrey attends and where, with the feeble help of Miss Norman, an irritable, businesslike parody of a spiritualist who is ironically described as a “clairvoyant and spiritual counselor […] well-known in the mediumistic circles for her pragmatic approach to the spirit world, which she tended to address as if she were a customer in Harrods” (GFL, 38), she passes out and starts uttering the words of Amy Dorrit, in spite of the fact that she has never read Dickens’s novel. Later she even has fits during which she “becomes” Little Dorrit, and “she would kneel on the floor, and pray for her father and for herself, pray to God that they would reap their just reward and that it would not be taken from them” (GFL, 113). It is only after his own experience of being rejected, misunderstood and abandoned that Tim begins to appreciate, if not envy, Audrey’s quest, feeling he also “needed guidance, and he would take it from wherever it came” (GFL, 143). The recourse to “institutional” esotericism is depicted as the desperate escapist act of those at odds with the pressures of stressful and alienating city life, rather than a serious means of its comprehension. The occult and the mystical therefore play a twofold role in the novel: while Spenser’s epiphanies when he comes to see himself as part of London’s supra-temporal spiritual continuum enable him to better understand the city and his own position in it, Amy’s psychotic possession has a devastating effect upon her as she grows more and more insecure and paranoid about her own identity. In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem the motif of the occult is introduced through the character of a Jewish-German scholar, Solomon Weil, an expert in the Cabbala and owner of a large library of esoteric texts. Ironically enough, Ackroyd makes this fictional character befriend another German thinker living in London whose materialistic worldview is much more remote from Weil’s spiritualism, Karl Marx. The two elderly men get on surprisingly well and they meet at Weil’s place in order to exchange ideas on various matters of Judaic traditions and cabbalistic teachings. Although Weil correctly assumes that Marx’s sudden interest rather disguises his attempt “to atone for his vindictive assaults upon his own old faith” (DLLG, 64), he finds this atheist revolutionary a pleasant and erudite companion for conversation. In his late search for his once
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