The Ghost in the Garden Room (review)

Abstract

Ghost in the Garden Room. By Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Fran Baker. {Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Volume 86, Number 1 (Spring, 2004).] (Manchester: John Rylands University Library of Manchester. 2005. Pp. cxxiv, 84. 2005.) One of the most interesting and influential innovations in Victorian publishing was Charles Dickens's numbers, carefuUy planned special editions of Dickens's weekly journals that appeared every Christmas from 1850 1867 and reached an audience of over quarter of a million eager readers. Dickens loved the whole idea of storyteUing - a setting conducive the telling of tales, storyteUers with a tale (often from their own lives) tell, and a captive group of listeners gathered around a Christmas fire, snowed up in an inn, or bobbing about in a lifeboat awaiting rescue. He invited other writers contribute and tried give them free rein within guidelines intended make the number coherent and the theme explicit, not an easy task and one that eventually defeated him. intention of the numbers was always, as Dickens said of his earlier Christmas books (A Christmas Carol being the most famous), to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land. Elizabeth GaskeU's The Ghost in the Garden Room was written for the 1859 number, The Haunted House,the intention of which was debunk the kind of spiritualism (rappings, mediums, seances, etc.) that Dickens deplored because many Victorians mistook it for genuine religious experience. Dickens intended the stories show that the inhabitants of the house were haunted by ghosts of their own making - their former selves or former experiences - thereby bringing about a deeper understanding of life and human relations. As Fran Baker points out, Elizabeth GaskeU's ghost story was weU suited this framework: a prodigal son, believed be dead, returns his parents' home in a manner more threatening than any ghostly visitation. In order make the story fit the framework, Dickens gave the story a lawyer who had heard it from the judge who had presided over the case against the son and was stEl haunted by the memory of the faithful, suffering mother. Like most journalism, Dickens's Christmas numbers disappeared into obscurity long before the twentieth century, but in recent years literary scholars have been unearthing them and looking at them through a twenty-first century lens. Fran Baker's edition is one of a number of studies that consider the stories or poems from the point of view of the contributing writer in order shed light on Dickens's editorial methods and the difficulties of collaborative authorship. …