Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Charles MacKay's study of mass folly appears here in an 1852 London edition, bound as two volumes. It follows the way whole communities fix on a single idea and chase it together, whether the idea is money, religion or fear. The preface sums it up: people "think in herds" and "go mad in herds," and they recover their senses slowly, one by one.

The first volume opens with financial manias: John Law's Mississippi Scheme in France, the South-Sea Bubble in England and the Dutch craze for tulips. It then moves to alchemists, fortune-tellers, almanac prophecies and the magnetisers, and closes with an odd chapter on how politics and religion shaped the fashion of hair and beards. The second volume takes in the Crusades, the witch mania, slow poisoners, haunted houses, duels and ordeals, and the trade in relics.

MacKay writes as a popular historian of his day, with period engravings, caricatures and a steady supply of anecdotes. Readers still pick it up for its early accounts of speculation and of how rumour spreads.