Victorian Ghost Stories Research Articles

Railing through reality: Trains and mobility in Victorian ghost stories

This paper explores the multifaceted cultural history of ghost trains in Victorian fiction by situating three little-known ghost stories in the publishing and social history of the second half of the nineteenth century. The figure of the ghost train offers a route into the entangled history of publishing and railways by contextualising the anxieties presented in railway ghost stories with the real-world experiences of passengers. Taking ideas of mobility as a focal point, this paper brings together discussions of virtual travel and the supernatural to demonstrate some of the impact railways had on reading and writing about train travel. More so than tales of other haunted transport technologies, it is the ghost train's unnatural capacity for movement that disturbs both passengers and readers. By both enhancing and warping reality, railways are ripe source material for Victorian ghost stories to entertain and demand questions of spatio-temporal experience from their reading passengers.

Untimely Women: Transgressive Histories in the Victorian Ghost Story

Abstract: This paper examines the creation of a feminine, untimely relationship to history in two late Victorian ghost stories, Vernon Lee's "Oke of Okehurst" (1886) and E. Nesbit's "Man-Size in Marble" (1887). Nineteenth-century ghost stories, I argue, perform a radical mode of historical thinking and narration, one that rebukes conventional linear time and empiricist historicism. As ambassadors from the past, these literary ghosts confirm the doctrine of historical continuity while simultaneously undercutting it through their subversion of the orthodox frame narrative. Lee's and Nesbit's female protagonists exploit the anachronistic potential of ghostliness, shattering their husbands' deterministic mode of nationalist historical reasoning. In this way, this paper refigures the genre as more than an antiquated diversion from the realist fiction of the period, revealing the ghost story's serious intervention in conventional historical imaginaries.

“Meddling with Sorcery”: Hypnotism, the Occult and the Return of Forsaken Women in the 1890s Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith

Lettice Galbraith’s ghost stories are largely excluded from histories of the Victorian supernatural. Despite writing within a genre popular in the 1890s, little is known of her biography, her literary circle or her influences. Like other 1890s writers, Galbraith capitalised on public fascination with the tropes of crime narratives – the foggy London streets, the sensational newspaper snippets, violence and suppressed scandal – as well as the fascination with hypnotism and the occult revival. In the stories “In the Séance Room” and “The Missing Model” (1893) the wronged woman, abandoned, mistreated and objectified, returns as a terrifying spirit, who manifests in disturbing form to shame professional men. The séance room and the art gallery admit the excluded woman who silently petitions for her lost story to be told: the ghostly women have “magnetic” stares, subverting power relations in contemporary discourses of hypnotism. In “The Blue Room” (1897) women’s attempts to summon a demon have dangerous consequences and are seen as “meddling with sorcery”. Borrowing from the crime narrative with its mysteries, clues, detection and fake identities, Galbraith refashions the Victorian ghost story to hold men accountable for their deception and violence and addresses fears about black magic and hypnotism.

Ghostly Objects and the Horrors of Ghastly Ancestors in the Ghost Stories of Louisa Baldwin

ABSTRACT This article examines the late Victorian ghost stories of Louisa Baldwin. Looking at several stories from her 1895 collection The Shadow on the Blind, we argue that, although her work is a part of the ongoing tradition of women’s ghost stories in the nineteenth century, they differ from most by the weight of emphasis given to family, ancestry, and the importance of material, inherited objects. We argue that Louisa cannot be separated out from her family, who included sisters married to Edward Poynter, and Edward Burne-Jones; her nephew Rudyard Kipling, and her son Prime Minister (to be) Stanley Baldwin. There is a material weight of family evident in her work that haunts her characters through ancestry and heritage. The ghost stories discussed here display a sense of fatality; of destiny, of inescapability, and finally of a dwindling and the dying out of the ancestral line. Tracing some sort of autobiographical criticism of over-bearing families, this article explores both real, and spectral “ghastly ancestors”.

Ghost Speed: The Strange Matter of Phantom Vehicles

This essay examines an important subgenre of the Victorian ghost story: narratives of phantom vehicles. Wilkie Collins's “The Last Stage Coachman” (1843), Charles Dickens's “The Story of the Bagman's Uncle” (1837), and Amelia Edwards's “The Phantom Coach” (1864), among others, feature vehicles from the past that return to haunt the living. I argue that that by using ghosts to express nostalgia for more human(e) modes of transportation, Victorian writers explore what it means to feel profound attachments to material things that are no longer accessible. The longing for lost objects results in a grotesque materiality that blurs the line between persons and objects. This is an unusual strain of commodity fetishism, an objectification of persons and animation of things provoked by a desire for a time in which these categories were distinct. In the first two sections, I focus on mid-Victorian writings that explore the process through which transportation nostalgia triggers uncanny exchanges of the human and the thing, thus exposing nostalgia itself as a dehumanizing and even violent process. In the final part, I discuss Rudyard Kipling's “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1885) as a narrative that revives this spectral tradition within the context of imperial nostalgia and racial labor.

British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness, by Victoria Margree

Reviewed by: British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness by Victoria Margree Clare A. Simmons (bio) British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness, by Victoria Margree; pp. ix + 203. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $89.99, $59.99 paper, $44.99 ebook. British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness makes a strong case for the woman-authored short supernatural tale as a genre that crosses historical periods, paying serious attention to a form through which women of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could participate in the literary marketplace. Many of the supernatural stories discussed in Victoria Margree's study were the work of long-lived writers who could recall a time when British women's legal identities were in many respects erased at their marriage. For example, when Henrietta Dorothy Everett was born in 1851, only the wealthiest women who found themselves in unhappy marriages had a chance of divorce, while husbands would take control of all but a fraction of the money women brought into the relationship; women could not vote, either, even in local elections. Everett lived long enough to write about the traumas of the First World War in her ghost stories and to see the first female Member elected to Parliament, but she [End Page 576] died in 1923, five years before women's voting was placed on equal footing with men's. In subtitling her study "Our Own Ghostliness," Margree draws attention to the ghosts of memories of women's experiences living in the shadow of a male-dominated society. Even more significantly, she argues that supernatural stories by women disrupt common notions of literary periodization, so that "literary histories premised on a radical break between modernism and Victorianism need to be significantly complicated" (3). Even Victorian ghost stories, she suggests, show literary devices associated with modernism, such as "narrative irresolution, ambiguity, and polysemy that proceeds from the character of ghosts as beings that can only be perceived indistinctly and intermittently" (4). The chapters that follow are arranged roughly chronologically but also thematically. Included are discussions of both true ghost stories that depict the return of the dead and other forms of supernatural experience, such as charms, spirit possession, and primal memories of paganism. Discussions of short works by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Edith Nesbit show that in the ghost story, death does not terminate preoccupations with money and family. Like much fiction of the time, colonialism and empire also cast a shadow over many of the works analyzed; the figure of the unsuspecting family member returning from the colonies, for example, occurs in a number of tales, while the Anglo-Indian Alice Perrin's stories form the subject of the fourth chapter. Perrin's stories, Margree suggests, "employ a specifically Anglo-Indian form of supernaturalism" in their representation of the Anglo wife in India (113). In "The Tiger Charm" (1901), for example, readers can believe (if they wish) that an Indian amulet presented to a sympathetic man by an oppressed wife causes the tiger to kill the abusive husband instead of the man with the charm. "An Eastern Echo" (1901) features what has been termed a crisis apparition, where a wife now in Britain connects with what a former acquaintance was experiencing in India at the time of his death. Particularly relevant to this book's arguments about periodization are stories influenced by the First World War, sometimes from the point of view of women, and sometimes reflecting the experiences of combatants. This does raise the question of the extent to which women's writing differs from that of men. If women can write effectively frightening tales about the war as traumatizing both women and men, that complicates the notion that women's writing is somehow distinct from that of their male counterparts. Margree partially acknowledges the similarity when she explores stories that show the influence of the master of the supernatural tale, Montague Rhodes James, such as Eleanor Scott's, which use James's trope of the unfortunate antiquarian scholar. Even the excellent and insightful analysis of Nesbit's "fascination with female death...

„Praca widma w epoce mechanicznej reprodukcji”. China Miéville: koncepcje „haute weird” i „abcanny”

The aim of the paper is presentation and discussion of China Miéville’s theoretic approach to the issue of horror’s subgenres, including classical Victorian ghost story and Lovecraftian weird fiction. “The abcanny” — in a way a subversive, theoretical category, that Miéville coins in his critical writings — is crucial for both his own speculations and the problems considered here. As it is decisively opposite to Freudian “uncanny” and Kristevian “abject”, it constitutes a relatively new approach to the question of distinction among the aforementioned horror literary genres. The Victorian ghost story, as Miéville sees it, is deeply rooted in the experience of the uncanny, and so it presupposes the “return of the repressed” from the individual or collective/cultural unconsciousness. Hence ghost stories are — just for example — susceptible to hauntological interpretations. Weird fiction — on the contrary — implies the experience of something radically new, something so far non-existent and therefore unacceptable and dreadful. If a classical ghost story can be perceived as an expression of the nineteenth–century fear of the irrationality returning from the past preceding the revolution of the Enlightenment, haute weird narrative embodies modernistic anxiety of the upcoming future, its uncertain nature, cognitive and moral relativism, and — what is most important here — the dubious status of man facing a boundless chasm of time and space.

Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

<i>Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel</i>. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James, by Zo� Lehmann Imfeld and Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain, by J. Jeffrey Franklin

The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James, by Zo� Lehmann Imfeld and Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain, by J. Jeffrey Franklin

The Role of Light and Vision in Two Victorian Ghost Stories

ABSTRACTThis article demonstrates how two selected Victorian ghost stories address the problem of the unreliability and subjectivity of perception through the characters' experiences with the supernatural or the inexplicable. I focus on how Victorian ghost stories—particularly Margaret Oliphant's “The Open Door” and Sheridan Le Fanu's “The Account of Some Disturbances in Aungier Street”—induce hesitation both in characters and in the reader. This “moment of hesitation” is not only central to Todorov's definition of the fantastic but also highly relevant to the anxieties about vision and knowledge that existed in Victorian society. I argue that the stories use the theories and assumptions about vision that were current in the Victorian age to subvert the idea that sight is an objective conduit to the truth, and thus the stories both utilize a source of fear that was already present in Victorian society and offer a relevant social commentary.

Ghostly Hands

This edition critically analyzes “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” by Henry James. It is put in context with three other Victorian ghost stories that use the similar trope of ghostly hands. The theme of these ghostly hands is used to explore Victorian era issues concerning class, property exchange, and the roles of women.

“Winter Stories — Ghost Stories... Round the Christmas Fire”: Victorian Ghost Stories and the Christmas Market

Using the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” in the 1852 Christmas number of Dickens’s Household Words as a case study, this paper examines how the publication of Victorian ghost stories in Christmas numbers redefines the ghost story, transforming it from a modern text participating in contemporary debates on spiritualism into a social text participating in the broader cultural project of reaffirming the nation’s (religious) traditions in the face of (secular) modernity. While the themes of Christmas ghost stories explicitly address social issues and secular, middle-class cultural values, the morals and social traditions promoted by Christmas fiction cannot exist outside of the era’s contemporary conversations about the place of religion in a modern, industrial society. The ghosts and goblins of Dickens’s Christmas fiction address and attempt to correct the social ills of modern society through a secularised application of Christian values and behaviours.

Misstated Identity in Gaskell's 'The Old Nurse's Story'

ELIZABETH GASKELL’s ‘The Old Nurse's Story’, already well-known to aficionados of the ghost story, is likely to become the primary work by which Gaskell is known to a much wider audience thanks to its inclusion in recent editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, as well as in various collections of Gothic and ghost story literature, such as the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. It has not yet been remarked, however, that there is an error of identity in this important story. This error involves matters of lineage and generational relationship, for it mis-states the relationship between Grace Furnivall and the ‘present Lord Furnivall’, a notable mistake given this story's close concern with matters of class and family heritage. The story's present Lord Furnivall (the one who sends Rosamund and her nurse to live in Furnivall Manor) is a grandson of the old Lord Furnivall (he of the ghostly organ playing). We are told that the old Lord had a son who ‘was with the army in America’ (18) and it is this son who is also identified as ‘the present Lord Furnivall's father’. This clearly makes the present Lord Furnivall the grandson of the old Lord Furnivall, yet the Nurse identifies Grace as ‘a great-aunt of my lord's’ (12). It is inescapable that ‘my lord's’ here refers to the present Lord Furnivall, since it is his disposition of Rosamund that the Nurse is discussing when she makes the above reference to Grace Furnivall. This identification unintentionally inserts an additional (non-existent) generation between the present Lord Furnivall and Grace, who as the sister of the present Lord's father would simply be the present Lord's aunt, not his great-aunt. Gaskell herself affirms this when, at the end of the story's fourth paragraph, she writes of the present Lord Furnivall's plan to send Rosamund to live at Furnivall Manor that ‘my lord had thought that it would suit Miss Rosamond very well for a few years, and that her being there might perhaps amuse his old aunt’ (12).

The Uncanny Mother in Vernon Lee's "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady"

In her seminal study of the fantastic Rosemary Jackson observes that the genre traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ?absent'(4). It is precisely this revelatory power of the fantastic that has led, in recent years, to its recognition as an essential interpretive tool in critical reconsiderations of the Victorian canon.1 Victorian ghost stories, often the vehicle for meditations on the absence and exclusion of women and other marginalized subjects from main stream culture, reveal the shadowy areas around the edges of the realistic and scientific discourse that dominated the age. That Freud had early on intuited this dimension of the fantastic story is evident from his use of E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sandman to explicate his thoughts regarding the origins of certain unsettling phenomena (repetition, coincidence, doubling) in The Uncanny. Like The Sandman, Prince and the Snake Lady2 explores uncon scious fears in early childhood, focusing on the fantastic visions that are called into existence when the child projects his fears onto the real world of social experience. But the unruly symbolism that com mingles male and female, East and West, past and present in Prince Alberic could never have provided Freud with a neat set of nar rative paradigms that would all fall 'naturally' into place behind his explanation of the constitution of the subject. According to Freud, fear of castration is the key to understanding the fantastic events in The Sandman and his characteristically compelling reading gives this thesis an aura of inevitability. Prince Alberic, in contrast, resists

The Victorian supernatural

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Foreward Gillian Beer Part I. Supernatural Science: 1. Spiritualism, science and the supernatural in mid-Victorian Britain Richard Noakes 2. Investigations and fictions: Charles Dickens and ghosts Louise Henson Part II. Invisible Women: 3. Spectral politics: the Victorian ghost story and the domestic servant Eve M. Lynch 4. George Eliot's prophecies: coercive second sight and everyday thought reading Pamela Thurschwell Part III. Raising the Dead: 5. Browning, the dramatic monologue and the resuscitation of the dead Adam Roberts 6. Baron Corvo and the key to the underworld Colin Cruise Part IV. Envisioning the Unseen: 7. What is the stuff that dreams are made of? Nicola Bown 8. Holman Hunt, William Dyce and the image of Christ Michaela Giebelhausen Part V. Imperial Occult: 9. Knowledge, belief and the supernatural at the imperial margin Roger Luckhurst 10. Romance, reincarnation and Rider Haggard Carolyn Burdett Part VI. Haunted modernism: 11. The origins of modernism in the haunted properties of literature Geoffrey Gilbert 12. Afterword Steven Connor Bibliography Index.

The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story

Despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century and their pervasiveness in the literary periodicals of the time, it appears we are today as unlikely to see new scholarship on the subject as we are to see an actual ghost.' This curious and persistent lack of scholarly interest, according to Julia Briggs, may in part be attributed to the elusive character of ghost fiction itself, a genre widely infamous for being once vast, amorphous, and notoriously difficult to define.2 That the generic boundaries of ghost fiction, as Briggs finds, inevitably collapse upon closer scrutiny is, however, something that may equally be said about any literary genre-the nineteenth-century realist novel arguably even more vast and amorphous than the ghost story, even more difficult to grasp as a unified textual body-nor has the increasingly prevalent argument for the fluidity of generic markers and arbitrariness of generic classification sufficed to discredit terminally the usefulness of genre theory, which has over the past couple of decades demonstrated its compatibility with the methods and practices of historically and culturally focused literary criticism.' It seems that a more daunting and discouraging obstacle for negotiating the ghost story's relation to nineteenth-century literature and culture has been the conspicuous omnipresence of the specter in Western literature. As Dorothy Scarborough remarked as early as 1917, the literary ghost is absolutely indestructible. ... He appears as unapologetically at home in twentieth-century fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology, medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion.'4 Since ghosts evidently belong everywhere in literatureand consequently, one might say, nowhere in particular-the ghost story appears better adapted to the climate of formalist or psychoanalytic, rather than historicist, readings. In fact, the genre as such seems to validate precisely the type of criticism that downplays the signifi-

Dead hands: fictions of agency, Renaissance to modern

List of illustrations Preface Introduction: essentialism, agency and the exemplary hand 1. Divine complicity: God's handy worke and the anatomist's touch 2. Effectless use: dismembering and forgetting in Titus Andronicus 3. That curious engine: action at a distance in The Duchess of Malfi 4. The beast with five fingers: gothic labor relations in Victorian ghost stories 5. Involuntary confession: Pudd'nhead Wilson and law-enforcement mythology Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index.

“I have no story to tell!”: Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black

Intertexts, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2000 Ihave no story to tell!”: Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Blacli D o n n a C o x U n i v e r s i t y o f H u l l Preface This paper considers Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black, atext that, despite its adaption by Stephen Mallatrat into along-running theatri¬ cal production for the West End, has received little critical attention in terms of literary analysis. It makes use of psychoanalytical and post¬ structuralist theory to comment upon the location of the writing subject andtheproductionofnarrativeinrelationtoamaternalpresenceoperating as aschematic absence in Hill’s text. Just as the fictional mother haunts the textual production of Hill’s main character, Victorian ghost story motifs and textual references haunt the storyline of her novel so that amechanics of intertextuality may be seen to operate within its literal dimension. Its own narrative mechanism also offers ahaunting from within, as stories witlnnstoryareunravelledsothat,justasthenarrative“I”ishauntedbyits terrible tale, the story itself is revealed within another layer of narrative. Thispresentsuswithacomplexinterleavingofnarrationreminiscentofthe convolutednarrativestructureofEmilyBronte’sWutheringHei^/hts,ex¬ cept that in this parodic tale, “the wind did not moan through the case¬ ment” (Hill95).2 TheintertextualreferencescontainedinthetextualbodyofTheWoman in Black function by means of an implied extra-textual presence, which is actually amechanics of operative absence in the textual structure. The storyline is haunted by these other texts, which pre-exist it and rely upon thereader’srecollectionofpasttextualencountersthatmaybecalledupby the interpretative act. This scenario of reading echoes the replay of past eventstowhichKippsissubjectedinhisownpsychicalarena.Whentheaf¬ fairs of Mrs. Drablow are first related to him, he notes that “[t]he business beginning to sound like something from aVictorian novel ...” (28). He later describes Eel Marsh House as “like the house of poor Miss Havisham”(61).Theactivationofsuchcommentsreliesuponthereader’s recognition of the motifs, characters and conventions of Victorian texts. Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) is an absent presence in the text due to the inference carried in its title. Kipps may be said to occupy the place of the detective in astructure which is dependent for the success of its revelatory movement upon the depiction of tantalizing suspense. What is hidden provides the page-turning impetus to reveal, while its horror is w a s 7 4 Cox—“I have no story to tell! 7 5 directly dependent upon remaining concealed. To stave ofFhis terror of the unknown, Kipps reads the poetry of John Clare and Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (93-4, 107) as if wishing to displace himself from his “present” situation by being absorbed into texts tied to other spaces and places. It is perhaps ironic that Clare’s poem “I Am” contains the lines, Ilong for scenes, where man hath never trod Aplace where woman never smiled or wept. (Ricks 169) Another character who reads himself to sleep due to the effects of an unsettling haunting is Professor Parkins in the M. R. James short story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” Events of the day cause him to “get out abook” while being contained within the pages of one (James 83). The Professor, formerly possessed of acertainty that ghosts are “not real,” is haunted by anotliing which comes in answer to awhistle. The name of this short story will be recognized as the title of Hill’s chapter, “WhistleandI’llCometoYou”inwhichSpiderthedogcomestohisname in adirect performative result of tlie auditory signifier. It is interesting that anotherdimensionisaddedtotliisintertextualscenariobyJames’simplied reference to the Robert Burns’s poem, “Oh, Whisde, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” This tertiary' haunting of text within text within text is analogous to the mechanics of the story with which we are presented, in which Jennet’s story is contained within Kipps’s narration of the ghost storywhichisrecollectivelyplacedwithinhisprimarynarrationwithwhich the text opens. This results in abreakage of the narrative “I” which becomes dislocated in its very localized existence, tied as it is to the con¬ ventions of textual representation. “I” becomes “not-I” in this intrusion of sign systems one into the other. Kippswriteshisghoststoryagainstthestereotypedconventionsofthe Victorian ghost story. His tale will not tell of “dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tappingatcasements,ofbowlingsandshriekings,groaningsandscuttlings...