“We are encompassed on all sides by wonders, and we can scarcely set our foot upon the ground, without trampling upon some marvellous production that our whole life and all our faculties would not suffice to comprehend.”
—Catherine Crowe, from The Night-Side of Nature
The Industrial Revolution brought progress to Europe in many fields, including mass murder. The Napoleonic Wars killed upwards of four million people, and various wars of independence added hundreds of thousands more. As violent deaths were added to the tolls of disease and hunger, a desire to communicate with the dead and to receive some reassurance that there was a life after death sparked intense interest in ghosts and the persistence of spirits. The nineteenth century was awash in ghosts as a result.
In part, this fascination with ghosts manifested in the sudden rise of séances and the growth of Spiritualism. In addition, spooky regional lore was collected by writers like Catherine Crowe in her hugely influential The Night-Side of Nature (1848). Tales of ghosts and related otherworldly beings filled the pages of the magazines and books that had come about with new printing technologies such as wood engraving (replacing copperplate), lithography, and a range of photomechanical means of reproduction.
As editors working together, we have now produced four volumes of early supernatural fiction; as readers, we’ve been enthralled by such stories our entire lives. You might think that by now we’d have discovered every significant ghost story of the last two centuries. Instead, we are continually delighted to discover new gems that we can’t wait to share. How is it possible that the larders of literary history remain so packed with hidden treasures?
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ghostly stories were as common as any other type of story; they weren’t relegated to either their own periodicals or publishing’s cobwebbed back corners. Pick up any major magazine from, say, 1870, whether it’s an issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine or All the Year Round (founded by Charles Dickens), and it’s virtually certain that you’ll find a haunted tale among the serialized novels and short stories recounting adventures, mysteries, memoirs, and romances. Although some authors wrote only supernatural tales, most wrote stories about whatever interested them, unburdened by any publisher’s or bookseller’s demand that they confine themselves to a single type of story. When authors produced collections of their work, they sometimes gathered the ghost tales into a separate book, but quite often they simply placed them among their other nonsupernatural stories.
Ghost stories were in demand for Christmas publications, a specialized market that not only published work like Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but also ghost stories by other authors in the Christmas issues of his magazines (at first Household Words, then All the Year Round, which was edited by Charles Dickens Jr. after the elder Dickens passed on). However, after Dickens noted in a letter dated March 8, 1855, that he had found “the best Ghost story [sent by a lady for Household Words] that ever was written,” he didn’t hold the piece until the following Christmas, as would have been customary, but instead published “A Ghost Story” (which appears in this book under its revised title “M. Anastasius”) by Dinah Mulock in the March 24 issue of Household Words. Ghost stories, in other words, were popular all the year round (pun intended).
Why have some of these excellent spine-chillers been consigned to history’s mausoleums? Certain stories—like Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost,” included in this book—have been frequently anthologized and adapted to other forms. The ghost stories of M. R. James, F. Marion Crawford, and Algernon Blackwood (the latter two represented herein by “The Screaming Skull” and “The Kit-Bag,” respectively) are still beloved by genre fans. But others have been undeservedly neglected. Perhaps it’s simply that many were published in a disposable (i.e., magazine) form, so that contemporary readers don’t know where to find them. Perhaps it’s because (in the case of authors like Braddon, Wells, and Kipling) other work by the authors has overshadowed or obscured the merits of these stories.
We believe the tales we’ve chosen for this book (and the three volumes that came before it) remain as entertaining now as they were for readers a century or more ago. Although some include words or phrases that need footnotes and some deal with classes of society that have vanished, their emotional cores are still frightening, disturbing, tragic, moving, and even sometimes ecstatic. The best ghost stories are fundamentally about the living, and people haven’t really changed much in 200 years. The mysteries of death are as impenetrable as ever, and a love for tales of supernatural dread and a longing for a glimpse of the afterlife remain part of the human condition.
It is unfortunate that the narrow categories of “genre” may consign certain great and true works of literature to the back shelves. We hope all lovers of fiction will be as drawn to these wonderful works as we were. If, after reading these, you see the world a little differently than you did before, the authors—and we—will have accomplished their purpose!
—Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger