INTRODUCTION

The Victorians invented many things—the penny post and the telegraph, the sensation novel and detective fiction, bicycles and petrol and antimacassar oil—but they did not invent the ghost story. Yet we associate the ghost story with the Victorians, in part doubtless because of Charles Dickens’s efforts to craft the form when serving as editor of Household Words and All the Year Round, and his ability to recognize its appeal for readers during the Christmas holiday—another Victorian achievement, not invented but perfected in the nineteenth century. Writing nearly a quarter-century after the close of the Victorian era, M. R. James proposed a formula that indicates what made Dickens and his contemporaries so successful:

Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are . . . the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo. Let us . . . be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage . . . Then, for the setting. The detective story cannot be too much up-do-date: the telephone, the aeroplane, the newest slang, are all in place there.

Although James advised that the author might “leave a loophole for a natural explanation” (as we see in some of the stories in this volume), he preferred to keep it “so narrow as not to be quite practicable.”

This recipe, particularly the concern with atmosphere, helps to explain what many Victorian writers seem to have understood intuitively. The paraphernalia of everyday life pervade any number of Victorian ghost stories, and if to their first readers they offered the pleasure of the mundane slowly and almost imperceptibly inching into the eerie, to modern readers they offer the additional pleasure of a densely and vividly imagined material world whose comforts and accoutrements are fascinatingly different from ours and yet invitingly homey.

The same considerations help to account for the continuing attraction of the Sherlock Holmes stories: what makes them so compelling has to do not only with Holmes’s talent for creating a biographical sketch out of seemingly insignificant trifles, but also with the kinds of trifles he relies on—such as hats and gloves and walking sticks. Even when something drab, like mud, provides the telling clue, it turns out to be the mud near the Wigmore Street Post Office, a localized detail that invites us to place ourselves in the topography of Victorian London.

The ghost story, like the detective story, creates its effects by asking us to imagine a world stocked with desks and paintings and all the furnishings of a world that is sufficiently far removed from living memory as to provide a reliable occasion for nostalgia, yet not so far removed as to seem unenticing. And in both genres, what attracts the reader is not only the profusion of material objects but also their tactile qualities: just as the glove becomes meaningful because of its frayed edge and indentations, the ghost story’s plush sofas and ancient, creaking chests figure not just as items in the background but as palpable objects with a sensory allure.

If these tales owe some of their enduring appeal to the opportunity to imagine, in fine-grained detail, the comforts of Victorian life, those sensations gain additional force in the Christmas ghost story, with its elaborate descriptions of the food and drink, games, and bedclothes that so many of these stories rejoice in offering for the reader’s delectation. We might think of them as a particular kind of sensation tale, one that occasionally recalls the sensation novels of the 1860s and ’70s by introducing a backstory featuring matters like adultery and illegitimacy, but that more typically invites the reader to experience the contrast between the Victorian home’s cheery interior and the piercing cold of the snow and ice outside. In his essay “Gaslight, Fog, Jack the Ripper,” Joachim Kalka points to this contrast as the defining feature of the period, remarking that, “For us, the primary quality distinguishing the nineteenth century . . . is a great, cozy sense of security brought out all the more vividly by the evocation of the uncanny.” The Christmas ghost story compacts all of these features and heightens their effect by eliminating the boundary that insulates the cozy domestic interior from the bitter cold: instead of scaring up an external threat and imagining the home as the safe harbor, it terrorizes the inhabitants with spectral beings who wander between those two spheres.

Not every story in the following pages exemplifies these features—this year’s anthology showcases the diversity of Victorian ghost fiction by including examples of the comic and even satirical modes, as well as the suspenseful variety—but many of them combine drama and fantasy in a way that uses visual and meteorological effects to appeal to the reader’s senses and to heighten the reader’s pleasure. “The Ghost of the Cross-Roads” opens on a lavishly described Christmas feast (with “the whole Pie family” running the gamut from “plebeian Apple to rich Mrs. Mince”) and then immediately presents us with a violent ice-storm, before introducing a wayfarer who has just barely survived the storm and the dreadful adventure that makes up the gist of the tale. “19, Great Hanover Street” and “Walnut-Tree House” give us richly described premises that come under threat in precisely the way that James recommends. Similarly, “Old Simons’ Ghost!” is a wonderful tale of a miser who comes back to reclaim his property, on Christmas Eve, from the long-suffering clerk who tries to take possession of it. On the other hand, some of the stories imagine hauntings that take place entirely out of doors (“The Haunted Tree,” “Haunted Ashchurch,” “The Nameless Village”) or hauntings that target specific individuals (“A Dead Man’s Face”).

Other stories use the form more playfully, such as “The Ghost’s ‘Double’,” which starts conventionally enough, with a bachelor reclining by the fireside in a room whose décor is conducive to “suicidal depression,” only to find himself haunted by two competing ghosts with apparently incompatible agendas. “The Barber’s Ghost” and “The Wicked Editor’s Christmas Dream” take the comedy even further—the would-be victim of the barber’s ghost proves to a pragmatic sort who turns “the late discovery to his own advantage,” and the wicked editor is compelled to undergo a dismal literary tour seemingly based on Scrooge’s experiences, with the significant difference that he is given no reason to reform.

It is perhaps salient that most of the comic ghost stories date from the end of the century, when the familiarity of the genre in its traditional form, carrying the accumulated weight of many decades, may have prompted writers to seek out new directions. “Sir Hugo’s Prayer,” for instance, seems to owe some of its inspiration to Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost,” another tale in which the phantoms, all too aware of the demands that literary convention would exact from them, choose to rebel instead of following the script.

Taken together, these stories present Victorian ghosts in a wide variety of incarnations, from the grotesque to the pathetic to the irreverent, and they return for the holiday season to entertain modern readers just as they did more than a century ago.

 

Simon Stern

October 2018

 

Simon Stern received his Ph.D. in English literature from Berkeley and his J.D. from Yale and is an associate professor at the University of Toronto, where he is a member of the Faculty of Law and the Department of English.