THE VALANCOURT BOOK OF VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS GHOST STORIES
VOLUME TWO
Edited with an introduction by
ALLEN GROVE
VALANCOURT BOOKS
The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Volume II
First published December 2017
Introduction © 2017 by Allen Grove
This compilation copyright © 2017 by Valancourt Books, LLC
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
Cover by Henry Petrides
INTRODUCTION
Christmas, Ghosts, and the Nineteenth Century
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) opens with a group of men and women sitting “round the fire, sufficiently breathless” as they share strange tales in an old house on Christmas Eve. In W. W. Jacobs’s “Jerry Bundler” (1901), we find half a dozen travelers at an old inn in late December “talking by the light of the fire” as the conversation turns to supernatural tales. At the end of the final story in this collection, the narrator and his friends sit “about the glowing logs” on Christmas day to hear a ghost story. Again and again in the pages of Victorian literature, we find that ghost stories are just as much a part of the holiday as gifts and Father Christmas.
While stories of hauntings, murder, and fear might seem a strange way to celebrate the birth of Christ, the connection isn’t as odd as it might at first appear. For one, storytelling was a sure way to find comradery and entertainment during the darkest time of the year. Also, some ghost stories perfectly fit the spirit of the Christmas season. The most famous of them, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, reveals that a healthy dose of fear can actually transform one into a better person. Through his interactions with the novella’s ghosts, Scrooge learns to value family and friends, and he even discovers the pleasure that comes from spending money on Christmas gifts. The story struck an enduring chord, for the perennial stage productions, audio performances, and movie adaptations make clear that Dickens’s ghosts are as popular today as they were when the tale was first published in 1843. We find the influence of Dickens in this collection of tales as well, and in “A Terrible Retribution; or, Squire Orton’s Ghost,” the story’s supernatural events bring about a transformation in the narrator that leads to a “happy Christmas to all.”
The association between ghosts and Christmas, however, did not begin in Victorian times. December 25th, after all, is most likely not the actual birthdate of Christ, but the date of pagan festivals such as the Roman Saturnalia that celebrate the winter solstice. The solstice marks the moment when darkness begins to give way to light, and the dying world begins to be reborn. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to recognize it as a time when the living and the dead are most likely to encounter each other. Even within British fiction, the associations between ghosts and Christmas predate the Victorians. Horace Walpole published the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, using his private printing press at Strawberry Hill on Christmas Eve in 1764. The novel features several ghosts and supernatural beings, including one that walks out of its painting frame, a phenomenon we find repeated in “The Ghost of the Treasure-Chamber,” one of the stories featured in this collection.
While the origins aren’t Victorian, the popularity of ghost stories certainly peaked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The timing has much to do with shifts in the publishing industry. In the 1790s, Gothic novels were all the rage, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) were two of the most widely read works of the decade. Readers craved fiction with shadowy villains, mysterious screams, secret passageways, and castles and manor houses with haunting inhabitants. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) went through four editions in two years as readers devoured his violent tale of ghosts, demons, and sexual transgressions. While these works featured hauntings, they were also three- and four-volume novels that little resembled the short stories that would find an adoring audience just a few decades later. Access was also an issue, and the typical eighteenth-century reader couldn’t afford novels. So while haunting tales were popular, books were expensive, short stories were not yet a popular genre, and magazines had not yet reached their heyday.
This would all change in the Victorian period as cheaper and faster methods of both printing and paper manufacture were developed. By the mid nineteenth century, numerous weekly and monthly periodicals featured fiction, poetry, essays, local news and gossip, cartoons, and other forms of entertainment. Long before television, radio, movies, and the internet, a family’s evening amusement often involved the sharing of magazine content by lamplight. In the pages of Bentley’s, All the Year Round, Punch, Temple Bar, The Argosy and numerous other periodicals, we find stories and essays crafted to entertain and unite families in the evening hours. Many of these magazines would take advantage of the growing popularity of Christmas by devoting entire editions to Christmas content that included ghost fiction.
Indeed, the rise of magazines and the rise of Christmas went hand-in-hand. In the early 19th century, Christmas was a little-celebrated holiday, one that wasn’t even recognized by many employers. Queen Victoria would play a large role in changing the holiday’s status, in part because her husband Prince Albert brought to England many Christmas practices from his native Germany. Writers such as Washington Irving in the United States and Charles Dickens in England also played an important role in transforming the holiday through their representations of Christmas celebrations similar to the ones we know today. It was during the nineteenth century that Christmas trees, gift giving, holiday decorations, and even the roast turkey became dominant elements of the holiday.
While the connections between ghosts and Christmas might make some sense, the actual popularity of haunting tales during the Victorian era is rather odd. After all, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment never really ended, and faith in science and reason only continued to grow during the nineteenth century. Within the pages of this anthology we find mention of electric lights, rapid transportation by train, and the telegraph. The Victorian era is also marked by the appearance of the first automobiles and the publication of Charles Darwin’s important theories of evolution. More and more of the world around us was being explained by science, and even religious faith seemed to be under attack by scientific progress.
The stories collected here often reflect this rational and empirical world through their narrators. While we sometimes encounter Poe-like madmen such as the narrator of Coulson Kernahan’s “Haunted,” many are quite the opposite. The speaker in “Number Two, Melrose Square” is a translator who values “hard practical work” and describes herself as a “plain matter-of-fact woman of the nineteenth century.” More often the rational, level-headed characters are men, for medical advancements of the nineteenth century were often unkind to women. Hysteria and other neurological disorders were largely considered female problems. Drawing on these stereotypes of female nervousness and sensitivity, ghost fiction is filled with women whose weak minds make them susceptible to ghosts. In “The Ghost of the Treasure-Chamber,” the narrator is “naturally of a very nervous and excitable temperament.” Many of these s
tories forecast the most famous ghost story centered on female nervousness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).
Ghostly Images
In “The Ghost Chamber,” we encounter another type of popular haunting in Victorian literature: portraits. While there is obviously nothing supernatural about a painting, it captures a time that no longer exists. A portrait can function much like a ghost, a long-dead visage staring stony-eyed into a shadowy room in a castle or manor house. We find such hauntings in Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Christmas Eve in Beach House,” James Grant’s “The Veiled Picture,” and Emily Arnold’s “The Ghost of the Treasure-Chamber.”
A new nineteenth-century technology—the photograph—can play a similar role to a painted portrait as it captures a moment that ceases to exist in the living world the instant the camera’s shutter closes. Moreover, the limitations of early photography with its long shutter times often transformed its subject into a ghostly image. When the shutter is open for seconds or even minutes, anything in motion will appear as nothing more than a ghostly shadow, if it appears at all. Louis Daguerre’s 1839 photo of Boulevard du Temple transformed a busy Paris street into an eerie scene depopulated of everyone but a man standing still to get his shoes shined. Numerous street scenes of the 19th century reveal ghostly, transparent shadows of people who failed to stay still long enough to make a full impression on the photographic plate.
These ghostly images certainly made their Victorian viewers think of ghosts, and they also led to numerous efforts to pass off these ghostly images as actual ghosts. Spirit photography became popular in the 1860s as William Mumler in Boston gained a reputation as both a medium and photographer who could capture photos of his clients with the ghostly images of dead loved ones standing behind them. Mumler was just one of many spirit photographers in England and America in the second half of the 19th century, and the time was marked with a widespread interest in the invisible forces in our world that escape our senses. We see evidence of this in “The Ghost of the Treasure-Chamber,” a story that features Mr. Delaware, a “clairvoyant and mesmerist” who puts the narrator into a trance in which she receives a vision central to the story’s mystery. Belief was not universal. The narrator of “The Steel Mirror: A Christmas Dream” notes that he is not a believer in “spirit-rapping,” a popular method of communicating with the dead by Victorian spiritualists.
In our contemporary world in which cameras are cheap and ubiquitous, we tend to think of a photo as something that captures a snapshot of reality. The limitations of Victorian photography, however, meant that photographs weren’t necessarily thought to capture the world as it is, but to transform it or even capture alternate realities. James Grant’s “The Veiled Portrait” begins with the narrator discussing the “Unseen World” and the idea that the “darkness is full of light.” This was a widely held idea, and many Victorian ghost hunters believed that cameras would be able to capture invisible energies that elude human perceptions. In 1891, Michael Solovoy wrote in the Journal for the Society for Psychical Research that “it seems to be a generally accepted fact that rays of light which the human eye cannot see can be photographed, and that images invisible to the human eye can affect the sensitized plate.” This belief remains with us in the twenty-first century, and cameras were frequently used in the popular television show Ghost Hunters to document paranormal activity.
Whether or not a camera has ever actually captured the image of a ghost is debatable, but there’s no denying that film can, in fact, capture rays of light that are invisible to the human eye. The hypothesis of Victorian ghost hunters was proven true in 1895 when Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen placed his hand between a Crooke’s tube and a fluorescent screen to see the world’s first X-ray. An X-ray is clearly not a ghost, but to the Victorian imagination it might as well have been. Periodicals were quick to publish haunting images of skeletal hands stripped of their flesh with metal rings and bracelets floating hauntingly around the bones. The language surrounding these images in the sensationalized periodicals of the 1890s was not of medicine and science, but of ghosts and the graveyard. Much like the winter solstice is a time when the living and dead can mingle, the X-ray image revealed the deathlike skeleton lurking beneath the surface of its living subject.
Grant Allen’s “Wolverden Tower” (1896) was quick to incorporate this new scientific advancement. While “The Veiled Portrait” of 1874 references the “Unseen World,” Allen’s story, published shortly after the discovery of X-rays, presents imagery that Röntgen’s rays clearly inspired. When Maisie enters the vault of the dead, she finds that “her face and hand and dress became momentarily self-luminous; but through them, as they glowed, she could descry within every bone and joint of her living skeleton.” Later in the story, she observes others whose bodies became “self-luminous” so that for each “the dim outline of a skeleton loomed briefly visible.” In descriptions such as these, we find a possible explanation for the continued popularity of supernatural tales at a time when superstitions were rapidly yielding to scientific reason and progress. The reality was that the scientific and technological advancements of the age created as much fear and wonder as they dispelled, and science ironically worked to confirm the existence of ghosts rather than debunk it.
Ghost stories are meant to surprise and scare us, but at the same time their conventions bring a certain level of pleasure in their familiarity. The stories here don’t disappoint on this front. We find vacant old houses whose rents are surprisingly cheap (warning: there’s a reason!) We discover secret rooms and hidden staircases. We find sinners whose crimes come back to haunt them. We find haunted rooms, haunted objects, and haunted minds. Many of the stories here are by little known or anonymous authors, but in their pages we find echoes of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Charles Dickens, M.R. James, Mary Shelley, and many other popular and influential writers of dark and disturbing tales.
The stories in this collection vary widely. We find ghosts that are malicious and ghosts that are benevolent. Some stories unquestioningly feature supernatural beings, while the hauntings in others are traced to natural causes or the chimera of a disturbed mind. Whatever the nature of the ghosts, the stories in this anthology give us a glimpse into a Victorian world that we often look back on with nostalgia. That world, however, hasn’t entirely left us. As the days grow cold and short, shut off the television, phone, and computer. Turn off the lights, but light a few candles to help dispel the darkness (except in the shadowy corners of the room). Stoke the fire, and gather family and friends around. Embrace the living, enjoy the holiday season, but recognize that the dead aren’t that far away. Now, it’s time to read …
Allen Grove
Alfred University
September 2017
Allen Grove (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Chair and Professor of English at Alfred University where he teaches courses such as Tales of Terror, Gothic Fiction, Literature and Science, and the Romantic Movement. His research and teaching often explore the interplay between sexuality, science, and genre in gothic fiction. He has previously introduced several editions for Valancourt Books, and he has also written introductions for Barnes & Noble Books and Race Point Publishing for works including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Lost World.
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
The stories in this volume are reprinted verbatim from their original periodical appearances, with the exception of a very small number of obvious typographical errors that have been silently corrected. The use of single quotation marks in “White Satin” has been changed to double to match the other stories.
The sources for the stories are as follows:
“A Real Country Ghost Story” first appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany in January 1846.
“The Ghost of the Treasure-Chamber” first appeared in Time in December 1886.
“Number Two, Melrose Square” first appeared in All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens, on D
ecember 6 and 13, 1879.
“The Weird Violin” first appeared in The Argosy in December 1893.
“Walsham Grange: A Real Ghost Story” first appeared in the Illustrated London News Christmas Number in 1885.
“Haunted!” first appeared in Time in November 1885.
“The Steel Mirror: A Christmas Dream” first appeared in Routledge’s Christmas Annual for 1867.
“White Satin” first appeared in the London Society Christmas Number in 1875.
“Nicodemus” first appeared in the Belgravia Annual in 1867.
“Wolverden Tower” first appeared in the Illustrated London News Christmas Number in 1896.
“Christmas Eve in Beach House” first appeared in Routledge’s Christmas Annual in 1870.
“The Necromancer, or, Ghost versus Gramarye” first appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany in January 1842.
“The Veiled Portrait” first appeared in the London Society Christmas Number in 1874.
“The Ghost Chamber” first appeared in Ainsworth’s Magazine in January 1853.
“A Terrible Retribution; or, Squire Orton’s Ghost” first appeared in the Bow Bells Supplement on December 6, 1871.
Albert Smith
A REAL COUNTRY GHOST STORY
Albert Smith (1816-1860) was one of the most popular writers of his day and well known as a humorist for his contributions to the magazine Punch. His wit and humor are on display in the opening pages of this story, which begins in a light-hearted vein before turning its focus to the uncanny happenings of one particularly tragic Christmas. Smith’s story first appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany in January 1846.
The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories Page 1
