Co-sponsored by the Salmagundi Club Library Committee, Merchant’s House Museum, Victorian Society of New York. 

Meet Q.K. Philander Doesticks, P.B.. (real name: Mortimer Thomson), a reporter for The New-York Tribune, who in 1857 investigated the fortune tellers of the Lower East Side, and eventually wrote a book about them titled The Witches of New York. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. This talk, in celebration of the release of Marie Carter’s book, Mortimer & the Witches: A Nineteenth-Century History of Fortune Telling from Fordham University Press, leads us into the world of Doesticks who hobnobbed with literary luminaries of his time including Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, the wildly-popular columnist Fanny Fern, and biographer James Parton. It will also examine some of the stories of those supposedly “evil” fortune tellers who showed up in the press in surprising ways.

About the Speaker:

Marie Carter is an New York City-based writer and tour guide who hails from Scotland. She is a tour guide with Boroughs of the Dead, an NYC walking tour company that specializes in macabre, strange, and ghostly histories. Her most recent book, Mortimer and the Witches, will be published by Fordham University Press in March 2024. She is also the author of The Trapeze Diaries and Holly’s Hurricane, a historical novel set in the future. See at www.mariewritesandedits.com for more information.