The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories Read Free Page A

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