The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories Read Free Page B

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