The notion that witchcraft faded away with the onset of the scientific revolution is entirely mistaken. This text stands in the grand tradition of writing and witchcraft and suggests that magic was alive and well in 19th-century Scotland, as contemporary newspaper reports confirm. Carefully researched, alive with stories drawn from Sir Walter Scott's own and contemporaries' experience, and ranging in subject matter, from ghosts and fairies to witches and astrologers, the "Letters" inform, enliven and entertain as they try to wed 19th-century scepticism with evidence which contradicts it.