The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (2 page)

The explosion of periodical publishing from 1860 meant that the rise of the short ghost story was a rapid one. In 1842 the American novelist William Gilmore Simms had prefaced his story ' "Murder Will Out"' with the complaint that: 'We can no longer get a good ghost story, either for love or money. The materialists have it all their own way... That cold-blooded demon called Science has taken the place of all the other demons.' But only forty years later F. Anstey (the humorist Anstey Guthrie) could reflect with tongue-in-cheek regret that the British Ghost—by which he meant the real thing—was 'fast becoming as extinct as the Great Bustard', thanks to the irresistible advance of the 'Magazine Ghost'.8

These two comments frame four decades during which the ghost story proliferated to such an extent that not even the implacable demon of science could snuff out a seemingly insatiable popular taste for these irrational entertainments. Indeed, the ghost story seemed to thrive precisely because it dealt in possibilities that were in fundamental opposition to the explicatory march of science; it was certainly true that 'great as may be the popularity of any clever work that undertakes to explain portents and apparitions on grounds that are called "natural", the vogue of such a work never yet equalled the vogue of a right-down book of ghost-stories'.9

From the late 1840s the parallel craze for spiritualism and mesmerism fed popular credulity, on the one hand, and, on the other, stimulated worthy efforts to prove the objective reality of supernatural phenomena. Whilst fiction echoed the veridical literature in its use of such recurring themes as the haunted house and the warning dream, the ghosts of fiction bore only occasional resemblance to the often aimless visitations recorded in the dreary annals of psychical research.

As the narrator of Dinah Mulock's story 'The Last House in C-Street' (1853) puts it: 'They [Ghosts] come—that is, they are reported to come—so irrelevantly, purposelessly—so ridiculously, in short— that one's common sense as regards this world, one's supernatural sense of the other, are alike revolted.' In contrast to the typically spasmodic and mute appearances of veridical apparitions, the ghosts of Victorian fiction, more like their folkloric counterparts, hardly ever lacked motivation—even though it might sometimes be fuelled by an anarchic and baffling logic: they revealed secrets, avenged wrongs, re-enacted ancient tragedies, in some cases proffered help and comfort to the living, or bore witness to the workings of divine providence. Most disquieting of all, they could pursue blameless living victims with a relentless and unfathomable malignity.

The relationship between veridical phenomena and imagined ghosts was a complex one. Fiction, for example, often posed as fact, and a range of narrative strategies was deployed to reinforce the masquerade. Although Amelia Edwards suggested that 'nothing, perhaps, is more calculated to throw discredit upon a ghost-story than the least pretension to authenticity',10 the notion of 'authenticity' was often used by writers to bridge the worlds of fiction and supposed fact. In an early example, Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' (1845), the way the theme of mesmerism 'in articulo mortis' (echoed fifty years later in E. Nesbit's 'Hurst of Hurstcote') is presented anticipates the kind of spurious factuality used by later writers. Whilst many ghost stories embodied a reaction against fact and empirical logic, writers frequently made use of an appearance of fact to enforce an illusion of authenticity. The technique can be seen in R. S. Hawker's 'The Botathen Ghost' (1867), in which the story is partly told through extracts from the diary of Parson Rudall—the ' "diurnal" which fell by chance into the hands of the present writer'. But the greatest exponent of the factualizing narrative was M. R. James, whose antiquarian stories set in train a vigorous sub-category of English ghost stories that still continues. In James's 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-book' (1895), for instance, the reader is bombarded with factual detail—or rather a subtle blending of actual fact and invention based on James's formidable learning: bibliographical and historical references, Latin quotations (duly translated for the ignorant), architectural and topographical detail—all delivered in a reticent style that heightens the sense of actuality by distancing the narrator from the events he is reporting.

Contemporary settings, or at least settings with only a slight haze of distance, also gave the Victorian ghost story a sense of solidity lacking in its literary predecessors. The Gothic tale of terror—whose improbable fantasies continued well into the nineteenth century through the work of such authors as G. W. M. Reynolds and J. F. Smith—had revelled in pseudo-historical settings; the Victorian ghost story turned to the prosaic detail of modernity to establish a credible context for supernatural violation. M. R. James, an avid reader of magazine ghost stories as a boy in the 1870s, concluded that:

“On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator."

Everyday detail abounds in the Victorian ghost story: details of decor and dress, food and drink, furniture and transport, landscape and architecture, as well as the realities of social and sexual relationships. Despite the pace of change, there were still plenty of apparently settled social structures: marriage, the law, landed and aristocratic society, the Church, the universities, the colonial experience. Any one of these could provide an ordered microcosm into which the supernatural could intrude.

Though Sir Walter Scott wrote two of the earliest fictional ghost stories worthy of the name—'Wandering Willie's Tale' (from Red-gauntlet, 1824) and 'The Tapestried Chamber' (1829)—the ghost story's potential was first revealed by the Irish writer J. S. Le Fanu, who was to dominate Victorian supernatural fiction. M. R. James—the equivalent figure in the twentieth century and who, with S. M. Ellis, was responsible for Le Fanu's rehabilitation after a long period of neglect—placed him 'absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories ... nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly'.12 Le Fanu's power and originality are clearly displayed in one of his early stories, 'Schalken the Painter' (1839), which develops the startling theme of supernatural abduction (and, by implication, rape). 'Schalken' is a rare instance of a successful ghost story with a historical setting (seventeenth-century Holland). Le Fanu's 'An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street', reprinted here, is no less successful, though in a different way. It is perhaps the best of all Victorian haunted-house stories—far more subtle in its effects than Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's much-vaunted 'The Haunted and the Haunters', published in Blackwood's Magazine in August 1859, six years after Le Fanu's story first appeared in the Dublin University Magazine. Le Fanu's sureness of touch and keen eye for the disquieting detail are apparent throughout, as in this passage:

It was two o'clock, and the streets were as silent as a churchyard—the sounds were, therefore, perfectly distinct. There was a slow, heavy tread, characterized by the emphasis and deliberation of age, descending by the narrow staircase from above; and, what made the sound more singular, it was plain that the feet which produced it were perfectly bare, measuring the descent with something between a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear.

Le Fanu also wrote tales and novels of mystery (most famously, Uncle Silas, 1864), and elements of the mystery story frequently invade his overtly supernatural fiction (and vice versa). These two forms of sensational literature shared several common qualities, and it was not uncommon for elements of the mystery story and tale of detection— the sowing of clues, criminous motivation, final explication—to be combined with a supernatural denouement—as in Wilkie Collins's 'Mrs Zant and the Ghost' (1885) or M. R. James's 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas' (1904), in which the unravelling of clues in true Holmesian style leads the curious

Mr Somerton to the hidden treasure and its terrifying guardian. Such fusion produced another sub-genre, the story of psychic detection, with sleuths such as E. and H. Heron's Flaxman Low, Algernon Blackwood's John Silence, and W. Hope Hodgson's Carnacki pitting their wits against a variety of supernatural opponents. The close relationship between the ghost story and tales of mystery and detection is emphasized by the satisfying fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective of them all, also wrote supernatural stories (we reprint one of his earliest, and best, 'The Captain of the "Pole-star"', 1883).

Le Fanu's first book, the extremely rare Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, with four illustrations by Dickens's illustrator 'Phiz' (Hablot Knight Browne), appeared in 1851. Though now recognized as a landmark collection, it had far less impact on popular taste for the supernatural than two celebrated volumes by Mrs. Catherine Crowe: The Night-side of Nature (1848) and Ghosts and Family Legends (1859 for 1858), which presented highly embellished versions of what were claimed to be veridical experiences. But the resulting hybrid has not worn well, and Mrs Crowe's writings, despite their considerable contemporary popularity, had negligible influence on the way supernatural fiction developed over the course of the century. In terms of influence, and in the quality of his best work, Le Fanu stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries. One reason for this is that he hardly ever strayed beyond the boundaries of supernatural and mystery fiction: he was a supreme specialist. He appeared to recognize his limitations, but at the same time there was clearly a deep inner compulsion to write the kind of fiction that could accommodate the themes that engaged him so obsessively—the implacability of evil, the demoniacal potential of sexual desire, and, above all, the consequences of guilt. The stark conviction of Captain Barton in 'The Watcher' (1851) is surely Le Fanu's own, and stands as a motto to the darker aspects of the Victorian ghost story:

“There does exist beyond this a spiritual world—a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us—a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure—I know ... that there is a God—a dreadful God—and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most mysterious and stupendous—by agencies the most inexplicable and terrible.”

Few Victorian writers of ghost stories wrote with this degree of personal conviction. The majority of stories were written in direct response to popular taste: but the best are none the worse for this, and for those who like a tale well told there are pleasures aplenty to be savoured.

As the century drew to a close the ghost story proved to be remarkably resistant to mainstream literary influences. In the wider sphere of supernatural fantasy, the Decadence produced a strain of lyrical, atavistic horror in the work of Arthur Machen; but Machen's stories belong to a different tradition from the ghost story proper, and apart from a handful of examples—such as Vincent O'Sullivan's 'The Business of Madame Jahn', Ella d'Arcy's 'The Villa Lucienne', or the highly wrought tales of Vernon Lee—there is no discernible fin de siecle mood in the stories that continued to be turned out for popular consumption. Nor was the taste for spooks of the old-fashioned kind confined to Britain. A literary tradition independent of, but clearly part of, the British root-stock flourished in New England. The chief figure was Henry James (represented here by an early story, 'The Romance of Certain Old Clothes', 1868), who produced ghost stories, increasingly oblique in style, throughout his career; his friend and admirer Edith Wharton wrote a well-crafted body of ghost stories in the traditional style, whilst Mary E. Wilkins, whose 'The Shadows on the Wall' is reprinted here, fused traditional elements with strong local colour.

If its central characteristics remained immune to change, the ghost story did keep pace with the times through progressive modernization of settings and language. In Barry Pain's 'The Case of Vincent Pyrwhit' (1901), a message from beyond the grave is communicated via the telephone; elsewhere the motor car and other features of modern life are used to vivify stock situations. The magazines remained the chief purveyors of supernatural thrills to a mass public. In the 1860s and 1870s, the work of artists like J. A. Pasquier had occasionally been used to accompany magazine ghost stories; by the 1890s popular monthlies such as the Pall Mall Magazine (a particularly rich source of ghost stories), the Windsor Magazine, and The Strand had become profusely illustrated, an adjunct of doubtful use to a form so dependent upon the individual imagination. The secondary market for collections of ghost stories in book form was equally buoyant—as our Select Conspectus indicates (see p. 493). Ghost stories were being written by mainstream literary figures, such as Kipling and H. G. Wells; by specialists like Algernon Blackwood; and by large numbers of professional writers who combined writing ghost stories with other forms of fiction—E. F. Benson, W. W. Jacobs, Barry Pain, Robert Barr, amongst many others.

The real change in the traditional ghost story came with the upheaval of the First World War, making 1914 an appropriately symbolic termination-point for the Victorian ghost story. The stories written during the first decade of the new century, despite hints of growing uncertainties, remain undeniably fruit from the Victorian tree. In their tone, style, and thematic simplicity, Algernon Blackwood's story 'The Kit-bag' and Perceval Landon's 'Thurnley Abbey' (both 1908) could have been written fifty years earlier; and yet the sense of physical horror—intense in 'Thurnley Abbey'—strikes a new note and signals the end of the true Victorian style. After the Deluge of 1914 the ghost story withered for a time in the face of greater nightmares; but it was quickly to revive, and indeed achieved a second great flowering, with new themes, new modes of expression, and new images of supernatural violation. But that is itself another story.