author

Thomas Alfred Spalding

b. 1850

A Victorian barrister and man of letters, he wrote on everything from Shakespeare and demonology to naval history and public institutions. His books have the curious range of a writer equally at home in scholarship, biography, and lively historical subjects.

1 Audiobook

Elizabethan Demonology An Essay in Illustration of the Belief in the Existence of Devils, and the Powers Possessed By Them, as It Was Generally Held during the Period of the Reformation, and the Times Immediately Succeeding; with Special Reference to Shakspere and His Works

Elizabethan Demonology An Essay in Illustration of the Belief in the Existence of Devils, and the Powers Possessed By Them, as It Was Generally Held during the Period of the Reformation, and the Times Immediately Succeeding; with Special Reference to Shakspere and His Works

by Thomas Alfred Spalding

About the author

Born in 1850, Thomas Alfred Spalding was an English barrister-at-law who also built a substantial career as an author. A brief legal notice records that he studied at University College London, was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1874, and later served as private secretary to the chairman of the London School Board.

Spalding wrote across an unusually wide field. He is best known today for Elizabethan Demonology, a study of beliefs about devils and the supernatural in the age of Shakespeare, but his work also included biography, naval history, fiction, and writing on public life. Catalog and library records connect his name with titles such as A Life of Richard Badiley, Vice-Admiral of the Fleet and The Work of the London School Board.

That mix of legal training, historical curiosity, and literary interest gives his writing a distinctive character. Whether he was exploring old superstitions or recounting lives from the past, he approached his subjects with the habits of a careful researcher and the range of a prolific late-19th-century author.