1812–1870
By the 1860s Charles Dickens was the most famous author on Earth. Behind him was a parade of novels, from chaotic early outings such as Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop to more tightly crafted works such as Bleak House and Little Dorrit. During this decade he wrote a series of sketches, collectively titled The Uncommercial Traveller, which appeared in his own weekly periodical, All the Year Round—the successor to Household Words, which he abandoned after a quarrel with its publisher. In one chapter, “Nurse Stories,” Dickens detailed, and no doubt embroidered upon, the ghoulish and macabre tales that his childhood nurse told him, apparently merely to frighten the poor lad.
“Her name was Mercy,” wrote Dickens, “although she had none on me.” Apparently this semi-fictional character was based upon his real nurse, Mary Weller. In his first big success, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in the mid-1830s, Dickens bestowed her first name upon the nurse of the Nupkins family and her surname upon the Cockney valet who plays Sancho to Pickwick’s Quixote. Scholars also consider Weller the inspiration for David Copperfield’s doting nurse, Clara Peggotty.
Dickens credited the nurse with sparking his interest in tales of crime and the supernatural. Mary was only thirteen years old when she came to work for the Dickens family—in 1817, when Charles was five—but apparently she arrived with a trunk full of horrific stories. Dickens particularly remembered the accounts of one of Mary’s characters, the ominously named Captain Murderer, who kills his wives and makes them into meat pies. “If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase),” wrote Dickens, “I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.”
From his earliest days as a writer, Dickens was drawn to ghost stories. Always needing to fill out the month’s or week’s serial installment, he also sprinkled phantoms through his episodic early novels. In Pickwick you can find Gabriel Grubb, an ancestor of Ebenezer Scrooge who also gets his supernatural comeuppance on Christmas Eve; and Nicholas Nickleby includes a farcical ghost story called “Baron Koëldwethout’s Apparition.” In fact Dickens’s best-known work is a ghost story. The hugely influential Christmas Carol in Prose appeared in 1843, to be followed for the next few years by several Christmas volumes such as The Cricket on the Hearth and another supernatural story, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. Ebenezer Scrooge strode out of his story and into the popular imagination alongside Don Quixote, later joined by Tom Sawyer, Captain Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, and eventually characters such as Wonder Woman and James Bond.
While Dickens’s shorter ghost stories did not conjure characters as resonant and enduring as Scrooge, several are fascinating adventures into the supernatural—sometimes frightening, sometimes playful. They reach their pinnacle in the oft-reprinted train story “The Signal Man” and the even better (and less known) “Trial for Murder,” which is eerie, atmospheric, and genuinely suspenseful.
Dickens may have collaborated on this story with his son-in-law, Charles Allston Collins, the younger brother of his friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins. Starting out as a religiously inclined Pre-Raphaelite painter, Collins gradually turned away from the visual arts and more toward writing. His most successful book was The Eye Witness, a collection of humorous essays that Dickens had originally published in his magazine. It appeared in 1860, the year that Collins married Dickens’s favorite daughter, Katey, who was also a painter. (She is remembered as Kate Perugini, her name after her second marriage, following Collins’s death in 1873.)
In 1860 Dickens began assigning a distinct title and theme to each Christmas Extra issue, for which he sought stories from various contributors. The 1865 Christmas issue was entitled Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions and included stories by the Irish novelist Rosa Mulholland, the English children’s-book author Hesba Stretton (pseudonym of Sarah Smith), and others, with titles such as “To Be Taken Immediately” and “Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time.” The sixth of the doctor’s prescriptions, Dickens’s own, was titled “To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt,” but reprints of the story out of its original context soon acquired the title “The Trial for Murder.”
Dickens’s influence on Victorian ghost stories was not limited to his own writing. As editor of two successful periodicals, he not only helped fan public interest in literary ghost stories but nurtured the career of many a young writer, including Amelia Edwards and Elizabeth Gaskell, both of whom you will find in this volume.