"The Fortune Teller" by Adele Kindt

"The Fortune Teller" by Adele Kindt

One of the common forms of fortune telling from Victorian England was cartomancy, involving the assignment of emotions or conditions to card values. Cards would be drawn for customers or picked randomly by them. There were various techniques of card distribution, inviting one to question the validity of the technique, yet cartomancy workers were sometimes very wealthy off their craft. The customer in the illustration appears young, and perhaps not as serious as one who's receiving their fortune should appear. The fortune teller is a very old lady with a cat sitting on her lap, head leaned over her arm as the fortune teller's ninety-degree'd elbow supports some cards in front of her face. She's wearing an ominous black hood, reminiscent of a servant in an interpretation of the underworld. The customer, meanwhile, has almost a smile on her face and peers to her side as the extends her hand for a card. She does this in supposed unawareness of the fortune teller either placing or sliding a card to her on the table. For the contemporary reader, this looks like a potentially senile woman using magic to extort time and money from a naive, thrill-seeking girl. The dark visual themes clash well with this perception of the image, and of any form of fortune telling, which is good fuel for writers. This polarity between what fortune telling appears to be and what the questioning individual might find it as is a perfect energy for an author. Characters afflicted by fortune telling can fill roles defined by gullibility or impulse, and choices made can by saw through the lens of, 'why would they have done that without proof behind the fortune telling that brought them to do so?"

Adele Kindt

Wikimedia Commons

Circa 1835

Public Domain

https://www.mimimatthews.com/2016/01/11/19th-century-fortune-telling-from-the-drawing-room-to-the-court-room/

Painting, 900 by 709 pixels

Painting