The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories Read Free

Told After Supper (1891):
     
    There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas—something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.
     
    And not only do the ghosts themselves always walk on Christmas Eve, but live people always sit and talk about them on Christmas Eve. Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood ... For ghost stories to be told on any other evening than the evening of the twenty-fourth of December would be impossible in English society as at present regulated.
     
    A great many of those who provided this seasonal fare were women, both as writers and as editors of magazines. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, of Lady Audley's Secret fame, for example, wrote a number of fine ghost stories—'The Cold Embrace' (1860) and 'Eveline's Visitant' (1867) being her most famous—and from 1866 to 1893 edited Belgravia; Mrs Henry Wood, author of the best-selling East Lynne (1861), owned and edited The Argosy from 1865 to 1887 and wrote several ghost stories that appeared in her Johnny Ludlow series; and Mrs J. H. [Charlotte] Riddell edited the St James's Magazine for a time and produced some excellent ghost stories, the best of which were collected in 1882 as Weird Stories. The reasons why women took to the ghost story so successfully is one of the great unasked critical questions; but one might guess that it was due less to an inherent susceptibility to the supernatural (though doubtless some psycho-cultural thesis could be advanced to explain their achievements) than to the practical—often pressing—need of a certain type of educated woman to earn a living. The monthly magazines required an endless supply of fiction, short and long, and authorship was often the only means some middle-class women had to meet their financial needs. As ghost stories were consistently in demand it was natural that women, who provided so much fiction for the magazines, should provide these too. Charlotte Riddell is an often-quoted example of a not uncommon situation: the woman who had to write constantly to make up the financial deficiencies of her husband. Margaret Oliphant, who wrote long, emotionally charged 'Stories of the Seen and the Unseen', is another. Her diary entry for Christmas night 1887 testifies to the relentless drudgery that went with the regular provision of magazine copy: 'All the things I seem to want are material things. I want money. I want work, work that will pay, enough to keep this house going which there is no-one to provide for but me.'7 Amelia Edwards, Miss Braddon, Mrs Riddell, and Rhoda Broughton were the most prominent women ghost-story writers of the 1860s and 1870s, but there were many others. In the last two decades of the century the list includes Louisa Molesworth, Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget), Rosa Mulholland, Bithia Mary Croker, Edith Nesbit, Louisa Baldwin (Rudyard Kipling's aunt), and Violet Hunt. In the twentieth century women have been equally productive.
     
    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