Ghost Stories at Christmas

  • Tara Moore
Chapter
Part of the Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters book series (19CMLL)

Abstract

In terms of genre, ghostly tales at Christmas knew no bounds. Christmas ghosts flitted into novels, poems, periodical short stories, and even collections of nonfiction history. An 1873 Belgravia ghost story opens with one entrepreneurial character, Tom Chester, and his plan to commodify a haunted house: “Rejoice with me … Yes, rejoice with me; I have discovered a new sensation.”1 Editors of magazines had been counting on this very sensation to support Christmas sales for some twenty years by the time Belgravia printed Maurice Davies’s story, but the print tradition goes back even further and into other genres. Tom has discovered a haunted house, and he plans to investigate the ghost with the intention of renting the space out for séances, since “[s]pirits are decidedly looking up just now.”2 Haunting spirits and manor-house ghosts had been “looking up” since the 1820s when annuals relied on ghosts, but a new spate of magazines and journals of the 1850s turned to the oral tradition of Christmas ghost stories as publishers sought to fill special Christmas numbers. Creators of the different genres of Christmas print material sought to harness the ghost story and channel its cultural appeal into new and profitable formats.

Keywords

Oral Tradition Domestic Space Lonely Existence Country House Cultural Appeal 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 5.
    Richard Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a London Institution, 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1997), 156.Google Scholar
  2. 9.
    Margaret Beetham, “Toward a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (London: Macmillan, 1990), 23.Google Scholar
  3. 11.
    Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1994), 27.Google Scholar
  4. 12.
    Richard M. Kelley, Douglas Jerrold (New York: Twayne, 1973), 79.Google Scholar
  5. 24.
    Simon Houfe, John Leech and the Victorian Scene (Woodbridge: Baron, 1984), 54.Google Scholar
  6. 29.
    Anthony Trollope, “Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage,” in The Complete Short Stories, vol. 1 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1979), 65–96.Google Scholar
  7. 4.
    E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction1762–1899 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995), 2–5.Google Scholar
  8. 6.
    Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. History, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America. 1983). 957.Google Scholar
  9. 12.
    E.F. Bleiler, Introduction to Five Victorian Ghost Novels (New York: Dover, 1971), v.Google Scholar
  10. 14.
    Srdjan Smajic, “The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story,” ELH 70:4 (Winter 2003), http://lion.chadwyck.com.
  11. 15.
    Amice Lee, Laurels and Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt (London: Oxford UP, 1955), 224.Google Scholar
  12. 16.
    Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15:1 (Autumn 1988): 38–42; Haining, Introduction to Charles Dickens’ Christmas Ghost Stories, 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 17.
    Albert Smith, “A Winter’s Night with My Old Books; Chiefly Concerning Ghosts and Prodigies,” Bentley’s Miscellany 25 (January 1849): 91.Google Scholar
  14. 23.
    John Sheehan, “A Ghostly Night at Ballyslaughter,” Temple Bar 31 (January 1871): 227–36.Google Scholar
  15. 26.
    Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1996), 40. A decade before the Christmas number Dickens was so well-read on the topic of spiritualism that he was able to write an informed critique of Crowe’s famous The Night Side of Nature: or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (1847). Dickens spent Christmas 1847 reading this, her more famous work in preparation for his review “Ghost and Ghost-Seers” in The Examiner.Google Scholar
  16. Peter Haining, Charles Dickens’ Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens (New York: St. Martin, 1993), 248.Google Scholar
  17. 28.
    Charles Dickens, “The Mortals in the House,” in The Haunted House (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), 4.Google Scholar
  18. 29.
    Charles Dickens, “The Ghost in Master B.’s Room” in The Haunted House (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), 81. The debate between Dickens and Howitt continued in print beyond the Christmas number, and it is clear that Howitt wanted to link the penning of ghosts with the preoccupation with spiritualism. Howitt names Dickens as a contemporary author who “has played with spiritualism as a cat with a mouse; it has a wonderful fascination for him. All his literary life through he has been introducing the marvelous and the ghostly into his novels, and has of late years, in his periodicals, been alternately attacking spiritualism, and giving you most accredited instances of it.” Dickens would review this volume in All the Year Round.Google Scholar
  19. William Howitt, The History of the Supernatural in All Ages and Nations, and in All Churches, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863), 413.Google Scholar
  20. For a fuller investigation of Dickens’s and Howitt’s debate see Louise Henson, “‘In the Natural Course of Physical Things’: Ghost and Science in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round,” in Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. Louise Henson (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 113–123.Google Scholar
  21. 35.
    Solvieg C. Robinson, “Editing Belgravia: M.E. Braddon’s Defense of ‘Light Literature,” Victorian Periodicals Review 28:2 (Summer 1995): 110.Google Scholar
  22. 36.
    Barbara Onslow, “Sensationalizing Science: Braddon’s Marketing of Science in Belgravia” Victorian Periodicals Review, 35:2 (Summer 2002): 162.Google Scholar
  23. 37.
    Ada Buisson, “The Ghost’s Summons,” Belgravia 4 (January 1868): 358–63.Google Scholar
  24. 39.
    Jennifer Uglow, Introduction to Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers, ed. Richard Dalby (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1988), xi.Google Scholar
  25. 40.
    Charles Dickens, A House to Let (London: Hesperus Classics, 2004), 7–8.Google Scholar
  26. 41.
    Charles Ollier, “The Haunted Manor-house of Paddington, a Tale for November,” Bentley’s Miscellany, 10 (1841): 524.Google Scholar
  27. 44.
    Patricia Thomas Srebrnick, “Mrs. Riddell and the Reviewers: A Case Study in Victorian Popular Fiction,” Women’s Studies 23:1 (1994): 70, 71–72, 74–75.Google Scholar
  28. 50.
    Christopher J. Castaneda, Invisible Fuel: Manufactured and Natural Gas in America, 1800–2000 (New York: Twayne, 1999), 9.Google Scholar
  29. 53.
    John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies (Sunnyside: George Allen, 1883), 1:91–92.Google Scholar
  30. 54.
    Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (New York: Cambridge UP, 2001), 182, 196.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Tara Moore 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Tara Moore

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations