6
The British and Irish Ghost Story
and Tale of the Supernatural:
1880–1945
Becky DiBiasio
The Roots of the Ghost Story
In the middle of the isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine fell into
my hands; and, among other somewhat redundant matter, I read a story about a young
married couple who move into a furnished house in which there is a curiously shaped table
with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening an intolerable and very specific smell begins
to pervade the house; they stumble over something in the dark; they seem to see a vague form
gliding over the stairs – in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table
causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the
dark, or something of the sort. It was a naïve enough story, but the uncanny feeling it produced
was quite remarkable. (Freud 1955: 244–5)
This anecdote from Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay on “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”), which remains one of the clearest statements about the power of literary
fantasy, illustrates several characteristics of the English ghost story: the story occurs
in a familiar, safe British setting and the narrative gradually develops an atmosphere
of discomfort and tension; a small group of characters are isolated and threatened
by a representative of the dead; they are not directly or necessarily linked to the
object which contains a malignant spirit; and the experience for the characters is
sensory as they smell, touch, and possibly see something that is both alien and
localized. The story lacks a stated rationale for the appearance of the supernatural,
but there is an element of dark humor – presumably they are renting the malignant
spirit as well as the house. The table that houses the spirit is alien, a souvenir of
empire and colonialism, and it haunts the home and therefore the couple just as
the repercussions of empire building haunted the British at the turn of the
century.
Freud does not bother to give us the resolution of the story. For his purpose in
the essay, closure is unimportant; his focus is on the shared moment of dislocation
A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story Edited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm
© 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14537-4
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Becky DiBiasio
and unease experienced by the reader as well as by the characters when the table
comes to life. That focus on the temporary displacement of both reader and characters
is also typical; a rationale for the appearance of a ghost or alien is replaced by tension
through the implication and creeping fear that the world is not what we think
it is.
Freud does stress that there is a difference, primarily aesthetic, between the
literary uncanny and any real-world experience of the uncanny. Readers of fiction
experience the uncanny only if an author creates the proper mood and the setting
is real but the characters or events are supernatural, or if they empathize with the
emotional state of a character. For example, in Walter de la Mare’s supernatural
tale, “Seaton’s Aunt,” which first appeared in the April 1922 issue of The London
Mercury, the narrator slowly comes to the realization that both the guardian and
the shadowy inhabitants of the ancestral home of a schoolfriend are repulsive
vampiric beings and that no one can save Seaton from being slowly destroyed by
them. The narrator cannot even imagine a way to describe to the police or other
adults what he senses. Who would believe him? The story is effective, in part,
because the reader can sympathize with the fear and frustration of a boy who
knows that he will not be believed – he can only observe and be horrified by
what he sees.
Freud creates another link to the British ghost story when he points out that many
languages do not have any words that are equivalent to the German “unheimlich”
(uncanny), but English has several, including: “Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy,
dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive fellow” (Freud
1955: 221). Speakers of English are, in a sense, linguistically predisposed to be
attracted to ghost stories.
In the eighteenth century, “fantasy” was a term used to describe any use of imagination, but became associated particularly with literary tales of the supernatural. The
literary fairy tales of German romanticism such as Johann Ludwig Tieck’s “The Elves”
and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (which is the primary text that Freud analyzes
in his essay) reflect themes of doppelgängers, alienation, madness, and isolation that
were adapted by writers of gothic fiction.
Gothic tales were particularly popular in Britain from 1764 to 1820: stories about
innocent characters who were powerless and at risk of physical, sexual, and mental
violation by patriarchal villains. Medieval castles and abbeys, exotic locales, and the
ruins of religious houses provided the settings. These stories of evil patriarchs and
terrorized but resourceful young heroes and heroines caught the interest of a variety
of readers, many of whom were marginalized by class and/or gender, were literate,
and had to cope with political, social, and economic revolutions in their own
lives.
Celebrated gothic novels include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otronto (1764),
in which the supernatural is an important element of the plot and action, Ann
Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolfo (1794), in which seemingly supernatural elements are
rationalized, Matthew Lewis’s lurid The Monk (1796), which focuses on sexual, moral,
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and religious transgressions, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which contrasts
the ideals of the Enlightenment with those of romanticism. These stories caught the
attention of readers of all classes and reflect subversive reactions to the political
repercussions of the Enlightenment, the rise of the middle class, the geographic
redistribution of population, and an economic redistribution caused by the Industrial
Revolution.
Gothic fiction influenced the development of several subgenres of popular
fiction in the nineteenth century, including: the ghost story, the sensation novel,
the uncanny or weird adventure tale, the detective story, and supernatural horror
tales. We are still familiar with the conventions of most of these subgenres, but
sensation fiction is a particularly Victorian staple of inexpensive books and magazines that foregrounds the lack of options for unhappily married women. Lady
Audley’s Secret (1862), by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was one of the earliest and
most notorious sensation novels. The title character, a young wife, becomes an
adulteress and, ultimately, a murderess as well. Even more popular was East Lynne
(1861), by Mrs Henry Wood, which combined a lurid domestic crime with realistic settings and real current events. Sensation novels revealed the rot at the heart
of Victorian middle-class values by focusing on the fragmentation of life for
middle-class women who had no legal rights and very few opportunities to voice
their discontent. Both Wood and Braddon were well-known literary figures in
London who also wrote ghost stories, supernatural tales, and political essays; in
addition they were both editors of influential magazines and published many ghost
stories.
Ghost Stories
The British ghost story tends to reduce or limit setting and action to a domestic,
realistic setting in which the dead return and interact with the living, or a spirit
representative of the past will not stay in the past. Usually, both the returning dead
and representatives of the past are associated with a specific object, an event, a structure, or a person and any attempt to restore order is reliant on the appeasement of the
spirit or ghost. Revenge and a need to be acknowledged are dominant themes. Very
few ghost stories address any aspect of religious belief, relying instead on fear and
terror to activate belief in the power of revenants.
Sir Walter Scott wrote a very early gothic ghost story, “Wandering Willie’s Tale,”
as a chapter in his novel Redgauntlet (1824), and another that has a recognizably
English setting, “The Tapestried Chamber” (1828), but Charles Dickens published
the first British ghost story, distinct from the gothic tale, in which the ghosts are
essential to the theme as well as the plot of the story, in “The Goblins Who Stole
a Sexton,” in The Pickwick Papers (1836–7). This ghost story, told on Christmas
Eve by Mr Wardle, initiated a tradition of ghost stories being associated with
Christmas.
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Mr Wardle’s tale concerns Gabriel Grub, a mean-spirited soul, who sets out to dig
a grave on Christmas Eve. Goblins rise from the gravestones and drag him back down
below the graveyard where they show him the past, the future, and the error of his
ways. It certainly prefigures A Christmas Carol and it is accompanied by illustrations
by “Phiz” (Hablot Knight Browne). Dickens also began to publish several ghost
stories in each of the Christmas numbers of his magazines, Household Words (1850–9)
and All the Year Round (1859–70). These Christmas issues sold several times the circulation of the magazines during the rest of the year.
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu was another early influence on the development of the
ghost story. He was an Irish scholar, the editor and publisher of Dublin Univeristy
Magazine, a sensation novelist, and writer of ghost stories. His best collection of
supernatural stories, In a Glass Darkly (1872), garnered some attention, but he was
better known during his lifetime for his novels and as a publisher. Several of his stories,
macabre and often grotesque, had a great impact on twentieth-century writers, after
M.R. James published a collection of LeFanu’s ghost stories in Madam Crowl’s Ghost
and Other Tales of Mystery (1923). Two of his best-known tales are “The Ghost and
the Bonesetter” (1838) and “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier
Street” (1853).
Le Fanu was also an early minor figure in the literary Irish revival in which
many writers evinced a renewed interest in Irish myths and legends, Arthurian
romances, and fairy tales, which led to popular interest in an idealized, antiindustrial medieval culture. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Lady Wilde, and Lord Dunsany
used Celtic myth, legend, and folklore to create new fantasies of national identity.
Early in the twentieth century these stories combined Irish myths and legends with
modern characters whose experiences with modern manifestations of Celtic heroes
and villains were sometimes whimsical, or melancholy, but more often were mordant,
witty, and ironic. They often ended badly for the modern man or woman, as in
Lord Dunsany’s “Two Bottles of Relish” or Charlotte Riddell’s “Hertford O’Donnell’s
Warning.” Most of these writers, including James Stephens, Douglas Hyde, and
Joseph O’Neill, also experimented with tales that were much darker than fairy tales,
focusing on the individual and alienation, loss, madness, or physical and mental
isolation.
Most British ghost stories have settings that are carefully described, well developed,
realistic and ordinary. This tendency to set stories in familiar, easily imagined settings
that slowly become disturbingly unfamiliar distinguishes the ghost story from the
gothic tale; the narrators of the British ghost story sometimes tell tales based in outposts of imperialism, but the tales are told in decidedly British settings. Many later
writers, born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, including A.E. Coppard
(1878–1957) in witty and comic tales such as “Ahoy, Sailor Boy!” (1933), and “The
Kisstruck Bogie” (1923); Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), who wrote weird tales and
ghost stories such as “The Promise” (1919); and the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth
Bowen (1899–1973), in her collection of ghost stories, The Demon Lover (1945), lived
through World War II and experienced the bitter aftermath of the end of empire.
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Their stories often contrast formerly bucolic English towns or countryside with industrialized or urban settings.
Several colonial and postcolonial writers, such as the Australian Christina Stead in
“The English Gentleman’s Tale – The Gold Bride” (1934), Alice Perrin (an AngloIndian writer) in “Caulfield’s Crime” (1901) and “The Bead Necklace”, Saki (pseudonym of H.H. Munro; Anglo-Burmese in background) in “The Soul of Laploshka”
(1910), and Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand) in “A Suburban Fairy Tale” (1917),
use the supernatural to subversive effects. Others, such as Fiona Macleod (pseudonym
of Scottish writer William Sharp) in “The Sin-Eater,” Kenneth Morris (Welsh) in
“The Secret Mountain,” and Arthur Machen (Welsh) in his collection The House of
Souls (1906), turned to Celtic myth and fantasy in a search for a distinctive national
identity.
Other writers, including Lord Dunsany (Anglo-Irish) in his collection The Sword
of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), and John Buchan (Scottish) in The Moon Endureth:
Tales and Fancies, used the supernatural short story to defend imperialism. Rudyard
Kipling is often thought of as defending the empire in his ghost stories, but close
readings of his ghost stories and supernatural tales, especially, “The Mark of the
Beast,” reveal an ambiguous attitude toward his fellow countrymen and empire
building.
By the final decades of the nineteenth century, ghost stories and weird or uncanny
tales of the supernatural began to reflect the alienation experienced not only by
women, the working class and the poor, but also by British military and merchants
in the colonies. Irish writers, especially those involved in the Irish revival, were particularly prolific and successful in writing such stories. B.M. Croker’s ghost story,
“To Let” (1890), is typical of this type. Bithia Mary Croker was raised in Ireland,
but spent most of her adult life in Burma and India with her husband, a military
officer stationed in a variety of outposts. She published some stories in Englishlanguage Indian journals, but sent most of her ghost stories to editors in England.
Many of her stories focus on women like herself, military wives and daughters who
are sensitive to the resentment and the folklore of the people they are there to govern.
In “To Let,” women left in a local village in India see, hear, and then feel the effects
of the violent death of a British soldier as they attempt to recreate England by following rigid social schedules of visits and outings, but only become more alienated
from their suroundings in the process. The soldier’s ghost haunts one bungalow and
repeatedly acts out the gruesome pantomime of his death. The only way the women
can survive is to retreat – to abandon the bungalow and hide behind the walls and
habits of empire.
World War I became the focus of many British ghost stories. Among the eeriest
is Herbert de Hamel’s “The House of Dust” (1934), in which a German officer in
Belgium loses his mind after a sexual encounter with the ghost of a woman who
was murdered during the war. Many stories written in the aftermath of the war
refer to it indirectly. Virgina Woolf’s 1921 short story “A Haunted House” presents
a narrator who longs for the safety of the past. Arthur Machen’s “The Soldiers’ Rest”
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and “The Bowmen,” from his collection The Angels of Mons (1915), present fantasies
in which the ghosts of medieval British warriors appear to help their modern counterparts in the war. By 1918, however, few writers besides John Buchan glorified
the war; a few who examined the horrors of war and its effects on Britain and the
British include H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Mary O’Malley, and Elizabeth
Bowen.
I.A. Ireland is remembered primarily for A Brief History of Nightmares (1899). His
one ghost story, “Climax for a Ghost Story” (1919), is, like many eighteenth-century
gothic tales, in the form of a fragment. Unlike those gothic fragments, however,
Ireland’s ghost story has a dry, ironic tone that hints at the very real disruption
of life in Britain that continued long after the Armistice:
“How eerie!” said the girl, advancing cautiously, “– And what a heavy door!” She
touched it as she spoke and it suddenly swung to with a click.
“Good Lord!” said the man, “I don’t believe there’s a handle inside. Why, you’ve
locked us both in!”
“Not both of us. Only one of us,” said the girl, and before his eyes she passed straight
through the door, and vanished. (Sandner 2001: 734)
Ireland’s story, brief as it is, exhibits the conventions Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert
use to define the traditional English ghost story in the introduction to their definitive
collection, The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories:
each story should reveal to the reader a spectacle of the returning dead, or their agents,
and their actions; there must be a dramatic interaction between the living and the dead,
more often than not with the intention of frightening or unsettling the reader; the story
must exhibit clear literary quality . . . ; there must be a definable Englishness about the
story . . . English characters and institutions, and qualities (both stylistic and thematic)
representative of the English ghost-story tradition as a whole; and finally . . . the story
must be relatively short. (Cox and Gilbert 1986: xvi)
And Ireland’s story has a narrative detachment that is also typical of the British
ghost story.
Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936), a highly respected medievalist and provost
of King’s College, Cambridge, and, later, Eton, re-established general interest in the
British ghost story: first, by editing and re-publishing the ghost stories of the Irish
writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; then by writing a number of excellent ghost stories,
including a vampire tale, “Count Magnus,” a horror story of a witch’s monstrous
haunting in “The Ash-tree,” and a mingling of eerie Celtic legends in “Casting the
Runes.” He published Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), and three other collections
of his own ghost stories, most of which begin in common daily activities into which
the unfamiliar, ghastly, or seemingly alien events and creatures creep slowly. His
stories are set in a familiar world of universities and the English countryside; the
narrator’s voice is dry, ironic, and occasionally amused, as the narrators attempt to
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find a way not only to describe, but to accept the eruption of the supernatural in their
daily activities. One narrator’s detachment serves to foreground the structure of the
twentieth-century British ghost story, in “A School Story,” as he recites a kind of
catechism of ghost story conventions:
“Let’s see. I wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was
the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each
of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, ‘I’ve
seen it,’ and died.”
“Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?”
“I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the passage at night,
opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on all fours with his eye
hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me think –.” ( James 1992: 98)
Some of those “characters, institutions and qualities” frequently include: a first-person
narrator who expresses doubt or disbelief about the tale he or she hears or tells; a
self-reflexive or ironic narrator; or a framing device of a small group of like-minded
people who tell ghost stories to pass the time. For instance, in F. Marion Crawford’s
“The Upper Berth” (1886), the frame narrator is a bored club member who has had
too many cigars, drunk too much wine, and heard too many stories, when one of his
companions claims to have seen a ghost:
A chorus of exclamations greeted Brisbane’s remarkable statement. Everybody called for
cigars, and Stubbs, the butler, suddenly appeared from the depths of nowhere with a
fresh bottle of dry champagne. The situation was saved; Brisbane was going to tell a
story. (Cox and Gilbert 1986: 70)
The previous sentence could have been the signal for the comedy of a P.G. Wodehouse story; instead, the irony is deliberate. The story that follows is developed
slowly, building to a frightening climax, yet the club members and the reader are
left in doubt by Brisbane’s dry conclusion, “That is how I saw a ghost – if it was a
ghost. It was dead, anyhow.” His statement pulls us out of the ghost story and back
into the smoke-filled clubroom, but his hesitation in defining the thing that he saw
serves to stress the dread of the unknown and the indefinable. It also highlights the
randomness of the haunting – there is no clear link between the revenant and the
narrator.
Weird Tales
The weird tale is also an offshoot of the gothic that stresses encounters between
humans and the alien, ancient, or mythic. The writers use elaborate and lapidary
phrasing in an assault on the senses of characters and readers alike. H.P. Lovecraft,
the American writer of weird tales and horror stories, defines this form of fiction, and
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provides an example of the language and phrasing of the stories, in a long essay
“Supernatural Horror in Literature”:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted
form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint,
expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of
those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and
the daemons of unplumbed space. (Lovecraft 1973: 15)
Lovecraft goes on to claim that it is more important for a weird tale to create
an atmosphere of dread, a sensory recognition and contact with the unknown than
to have a fully realized plot (1973: 16). The weird tale developed in tandem with
the art and fiction of the decadents and the symbolists, displaying a fascination
with death, horror, and the grotesque. The plots of these stories often revolve
around the chaos that erupts from an ancient site or artifact when humans tamper
with the past. M.R. James’s vampire tale “Count Magnus” and the description of
the appearance of an ancient and evil spirit in “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to
You, My Lad” are examples of stories that revitalized the supernatural short
story.
Grant Allen, who wrote non-fiction essays on prehistoric barrow mounds and other
British archaeological sites, also wrote weird tales; one of his best was based on his
own research. “Pallinghurst Barrow” is a spare story in which the narrator goes to a
country house party where only he and a lonely young girl can feel the terror and see
the rites and celebrations of the spirits of the barrows.
Vernon Lee’s (pseudonym of Violet Paget) “Dionea,” in which a young girl
is an avatar of a goddess who wrecks havoc in a Greek fishing village, and
Arthur Machen’s great tale of terror, “The Great God Pan,” show the horror
that is unleashed by the tampering of a well-meaning man with forces that are
not just old, but malign. The exotic, the deviant, and the perverse were associated with the return of the ancient past and themes often dealt with the impact
of a god interacting with humans, or a human encountering a doppelgänger or
nemesis.
Algernon Blackwood, a prolific writer of weird tales, was also an active participant in the spiritualist movement and lectured on radio and, much later, on television about ghost sightings and paranormal events. “The Willows” is an effective
tale about two Englishmen who camp in Eastern Europe. Their arrogance and sense
of entitlement are destroyed by their encounter with alien beings who have invaded
the area. Some of Blackwood’s best weird tales are collected in The Listener (1907)
and Pan’s Garden (1913). Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walter de
la Mare, H. Rider Haggard, James Stephens, H.G. Wells, Barry Pain, and Violet
Hunt also wrote weird tales that were published in several magazines, especially
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The Yellow Book in the 1890s, The Strand and The Pall Mall Gazette, and the American magazines The New Yorker, the Saturday Review, and Weird Tales through to the
1940s.
“The New Mother” (1888) by Lucy Clifford is a very early example of the weird
tale. A young mother is left with an infant and two children, Turkey and Blue Eyes,
who explore the local woods and the nearby town. They meet a gypsy girl who
encourages them to misbehave and as they become more independent and more
uncontrollable, their mother warns them that if they do not behave she will leave
them with a new mother. One day the mother takes the infant and leaves the house;
she is replaced by a monstrous “mother,” with eyes that flash and whirl and a tail
that clacks against the floor. The children’s bid for independence brings horrible
consequences.
These tales are marked by realistic settings in a modern world and characters who
are linked to an ancient or alien supernatural being or artifact and are altered or
destroyed by it. A hallmark of the weird tale is the atmosphere – uncanny, strange,
or horrible. Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Lot 249” has a familiar university setting in
which two students are destroyed by a mummy they have purchased. Their loss of
control and destruction is gradual and becomes more horrific as time passes. Quests
such as theirs often end in the emotional, physical, or mental destruction of the
seekers.
Many weird tales are set in ancient times or on other planets and reflect popular
interest and discoveries in archaeology, biology, physics, astronomy, and new technology. Certainly, the writings of Darwin, and pseudoscientific theories, such as those
contained in Max Nordau’s Degeneration and Richard Kraftt-Ebbing’s Psychopathia
Sexualis, provided grist for stories of strange rituals and behaviors such as Charlotte
Mews’s “White Night,” in which three travelers witness a ritual and appalling human
sacrifice. Two of the travelers are horrified by the events, but one is exhilarated and
titillated.
The popularity of supernatural tales coincided with the invention and popularity
of photography and photographs were often published in the same magazines.
People associated photography with death and with war. Photographers were often
called upon to create memorial photographs of the dead in their coffins. In 1854
and 1855, photographs of the Crimean War appeared in the newspapers and
magazines. Due to the amount of equipment necessary for the photographers and
to the long exposure time necessary for clear photos, the only subjects were the
dead left on the battlefields and formal portraits of officers who could pay for their
photos. Some photographs of the horrible conditions in which ordinary soldiers
lived were published and led to a public outcry against the military. Later, after
military censors reviewed all commercial photographs during World War I, periodicals such as the Illustrated London News dedicated several pages in each issue to
portrait photos of officers killed in World War I. Photographs provided permanent
images and encouraged people to seek contact with the spirits of the dead. The
activities of the American and British Societies for Psychical Research, supported
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by respected social scientists such as William James, also added unintentionally
to the popularity of both ghost stories and weird tales, while the development of
museums raised general public awareness of, and interest in, the distant past. A
growing interest in spiritualism, mesmerism, and psychical research that began
just after the Crimean War and peaked in the years just before and following
World War I, gave credibility to the search for life after death that cut across the
boundaries of social class.
Several stories written after 1914 focused on the emotions and mental states of
those who had survived the random, chaotic pointlessness of the horrific experiences
of the young men who became fodder for the battlegrounds of the Crimea and the
trenches of France, orchestrated by a misguided military aristocracy. By 1918, everyone was haunted by those who had died in the trenches or had survived physically
but not mentally or emotionally. Weird tales stress that we are not in control, no
matter how fast our locomotives and steamboats, how bright our gaslights, or how
much we manufacture.
Magazines, Women, and War
By 1840, a literate population, cheaper paper and printing processes, and an efficient
and inexpensive postal system led to a proliferation of quarterly, weekly and monthly
journals, magazines, and newspapers that provided short fiction in large amounts.
Everyone read magazines that combined serialized novels and showcased short stories,
essays, debates on science, politics, and theology, As shown above, even Freud read
British magazines. The ghost story was a staple of the magazines, particularly in the
Christmas numbers from the 1840s through the 1890s.
The Strand Magazine (1890–1950) was founded by George Newnes and edited
by H. Greenough Smith from 1891 to 1930. Taking advantage of a new, inexpensive three-color printing process, the magazine also contained illustrations that
attracted advertisers as well as readers. The additional income from advertisers
allowed Smith to pay higher prices than competitors could for fiction from popular
authors. Arthur Conan Doyle, a friend of both Smith and Newnes, was one of the
star writers for the magazine, which published all of his Sherlock Holmes stories
and several of his ghost stories and supernatural fiction. Many of his stories were
illustrated by Sidney Paget, whose drawings became identified with Doyle’s stories.
The Strand also regularly published ghost stories and supernatural tales such as
“An Inexperienced Ghost” (1902) by H.G. Wells and “The Toll-House” (1907) by
W.W. Jacobs.
The magazines catered to broad general audiences and they needed a steady weekly,
fortnightly, or monthly supply of short stories. The London Journal (1845–1912) was
a weekly that catered to a working-class audience with gothic tales, ghost stories,
sensation fiction, historical and sentimental romances, and horror. Argosy was a
monthly magazine with two illustrations in each issue. It was edited by Mrs Henry
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Wood and published her own ghost stories as well as stories by Rhoda Broughton,
M.E. Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, and Amelia B. Edwards.
Braddon and Edwards also published often in Dickens’s All the Year Round. Several
magazines were edited by women who wrote ghost stories and supernatural tales and
who purchased large numbers of ghost stories. Mary Elizabeth Braddon edited Temple
Bar and, in addition to stories by Rhoda Broughton, published Arthur Conan Doyle’s
“The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ ” in 1883, and E. Nesbit’s “John Charington’s Wedding”
in 1891.
Pall Mall Magazine (1893–1914) competed with the Strand for both ghost stories
and weird tales. Pall Mall published Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher”
in the 1884 Christmas number, M.R. James’s chilling tale of the revenge of murdered
children, “Lost Hearts,” in 1895, and Algernon Blackwood’s “A Case of Eavesdropping” in the Christmas number, 1900, and “The Kit-bag” in the Christmas number,
1908.
While we tend to think of Victorian fiction as emphasizing social realism, women
writers were able to explore controversial and taboo topics and themes through fantasy
in magazines, particularly through ghost stories. Charlotte Riddell, M.E. Braddon,
E. Nesbit, Virginia Woolf, Vernon Lee, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen,
and Edith Wharton all took advantage of the subversive properties of fantasy to
explore themes of physical and psychological alienation as well as national and temporal isolation.
At the same time, the works of Freud and Jung were influential in legitimizing or
establishing dream states, doppelgängers, doubles, vampires, case studies of conflicted
sexual identity, and the unconscious, as thematic material. Many of the women writers
mentioned above also wrote children’s literature, romances, social realist fiction, and
were journalists and editors. This psychological focus carried over into the early twentieth century, in the wake of World War I, in the stories of Charlotte Mew, May
Sinclair, Florence Marryat, and E. Nesbit.
Women writers were, certainly, influential in expanding the themes of the ghost
story from stories of gothic dread to stories that focused on the psychology of characters caught up in or by the past through isolation and alienation. One of E. Nesbit’s
most effective ghost stories, “Man-Size in Marble” (Grim Tales, 1893), is in the gothic
tradition but makes the malign and random acts of the ghosts, who inhabit marble
tomb effigies of medieval knights, and the desperation and hopelessness of the narrator
who survives their visitation, the central focus of the tale:
Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe
it. Nowadays a “rational explanation” is required before belief is possible. Let me then,
at once, offer the “rational explanation” which finds most favour among those who have
heard the tale of my life’s tragedy. It is held that we were “under a delusion,” Laura and
I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can judge, when he, too, has heard my story,
how far this is an “explanation” and in what sense it is “rational.” There were three who
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took part in this: Laura and I and another man. The other man still lives, and can speak
to the truth of the least credible part of my story. (Cox and Gilbert 1986: 125)
Edith Wharton, though an American by birth, wrote a number of ghost stories
before and after World War I that chart the alienation of women by the ghosts of
a world and way of life that ended in the trenches of France. “Afterward” (1909),
“Kerfol” (1916), and “Pomegranate Seed” (1928), point to the increasing isolation
of the women left behind. That loss of a generation of young men and the attendant
despair of the women left behind, coupled with the fragmentation of Europe and
permanent changes in the class system, could be charted through her ghost
stories.
The magazine market changed after the war and so did readers’ interests. The real
world had done far more than fiction could to illustrate for readers a shattered world.
Edith Wharton blamed the invention of the wireless and the cinema for the lack of
interest in short-story fantasy fiction, but Kipling’s “Wireless,” Barry Pain’s “The
Case of Vincent Pyrwhit,” and M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” cleverly adapted
new technology to their ghost stories.
Between the wars, the short ghost story and the weird tale began to give
way to supernatural horror or adventure tales of aliens and lost worlds. The
heyday of quarterly or monthly illustrated magazines full of short fiction that
appealed to a general public was over; monthly or weekly publications full of
weird tales and pulp sensational fiction were targeted to narrow, specific markets.
W.H. Smith and others began to publish texts in pocket size to appeal to the
riders on commuter trains. The readers of supernatural fiction, especially of the
weird tale and science fiction stories, could buy collections of short stories for
pennies.
The war years 1939–45 provided, sans the printed page, the quite real horrors of
the unimaginable that exceeded all fictional horrors. War brought about a breakdown
of cultural identities and barriers; we became the monsters and the ghosts. The war
changed maps and countries literally, too. Science fiction began to absorb the conventions of the supernatural tale, while the uncanny or weird gave way to pure horror.
The technology of mass destruction had a lasting impact on the supernatural tale,
while the ghost story began to incorporate elements of spiritualism, naturalism, and
the psychological portrait in short stories by writers as disparate as H.G. Wells,
A. Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, and
R.L. Stevenson.
Conclusion
While ghost stories and supernatural tales after World War I often dealt with the
loss of a way of life as well as personal losses, the ghost story during World War II
frequently refers back to the first war as a source of ghosts and horror. Elizabeth
The British and Irish Ghost Story: 1880–1945
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Bowen’s ghost stories are good examples of this. Bowen (1899–1973) was an AngloIrish writer who combined an ability to succinctly describe rural life and settings with
an acute understanding of the psychology of characters who, in the midst of familiar,
daily activities and locales, must deal with the unexpected.
She wrote several novels, including In the Heat of the Day, but her short stories
set during and immediately after the blitz in London may be the apex of her
work. “Mysterious Kôr” presents London, itself, as a ghost. In “Pink May,” a
woman in wartime blames the failure of her marriage on a ghost in a furnished
house, but she is haunting her own life. “The Demon Lover” is one of Bowen’s
best-known short stories; in it, a married woman goes to retrieve some things
from her blitzed London home. Once there, she finds and rereads a letter from an
old lover who was lost in World War I, gathers her personal items, enters a taxi,
and disappears into the horrors of both wars, with her dead lover at the wheel of
the cab.
The power of the story depends in part on the lack of rationale and in part on
the chaos of the Blitz and the woman’s horrified recognition of the revenant of her
youth. “The Demon Lover” takes an old plot element of the nineteenth-century
ghost story – a corpse claiming his bride – familiar in stories such as E. Nesbit’s
“John Charrington’s Wedding,” retains the brevity and economy of the traditional
ghost story, adds a third-person narrator and only as much detail as is necessary
for the reader to follow the character through the rubble of her home into pure
horror.
Bowen wrote many other ghost stories, ranging from an early tale, “The Shadowy
Third,” in which a malevolent ghost haunts the home of her husband and his new
wife, to “Hand in Glove,” an often anthologized story from the 1950s, in which a dry
narrator adds an ironic twist to the story of two sisters who inherit a trunk from India
that harbors a deadly gift. “Hand in Glove” also refers back to an earlier tale, Henry
James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.”
Several of Bowen’s ghost stories evoke horror, but she shares with M.R. James a
concern with the acceptance of ghosts as simply another hazard of British life – one
more thing to deal with in the course of a day. Bowen is so detailed in creating the
ordinary, familiar landscape and activities of daily life in London and in the Irish and
English countryside, that the reader, as well as the characters, is often astonished by
the disruption caused by ghostly encounters.
Margery Lawrence (1889–1969) is much less well known today than Elizabeth
Bowen, but she excels at conveying to the reader a postmodern sense that we, as well
as her characters, may be unwelcome in a world in which so much is hidden that we
are never fully aware of an alien threat until it is made manifest. Her fiction is representative of the shift from the traditional ghost story and the weird tale to postmodern horror and science fiction. Lawrence, like May Sinclair, became interested in
the occult and attended séances and activities of the Society for Psychical Research
during World War I and later published several supernatural stories in which artifacts
of the past overpower people in the present. Her fiction shows the influences of
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Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen as well as, rather improbably, H. Rider Haggard and
Bulwer-Lytton.
One of her most successful supernatural tales, “Robin’s Rath” (1926), begins with
a frame, tone, and atmosphere much like Crawford’s “The Upper Berth,” as club
members tell after-dinner stories and, again as in Crawford’s story, the narrator is
something of a cynic. The protagonist, a spoiled, social-climbing American heiress,
has purchased a country house as part of her campaign to marry an English aristocrat,
and is guilty of hubris. The narrator describes her as “Not the daughter of a hundred
earls, but of one immensely wealthy pork-packer who could deny her nothing, even
to the purchase of Ghyll Hall” (Dalby 1995: 369). The purchase includes a stand of
old-growth forest that blocks the American’s path to the local golf course. When she
decides to cut through it to make a road, the locals try to dissuade her, but are unsuccessful. For her presumption, she is seduced by Robin, the green man of the forest;
her punishment is that instead of being impregnated by the avatar of the Green Man
she has been emptied and returned to New York, where “an anxious father goes from
specialist to specialist with a lovely dark-eyed girl, once bright, alert, vivacious, now
blank and dull, half-witted almost, with the springs of her vivid womanhood dried
up and dead within her” (386). The narrator lacks sympathy for the girl and the story
provides a brief and pithy comment on the arrogance of colonials and the green world’s
response.
Lawrence wrote several stories and novels in which young women are put in danger,
not by their own actions, but by a husband’s or father’s fascination with artifacts of
colonialism. “The Mask of Sacrifice” (1936) is one of her shortest and best supernatural
tales in which a young bride is repulsed by an ancient sacrificial mask that her husband
refuses to part with. Finally, his thoughts and actions are completely dictated by the
mask until he accidentally destroys it. Throughout the story, Lawrence focuses on
oppositions in gender, marriage, friendship and in sensitivity to the supernatural –
experience and recognition of the uncanny and respect for the power of intuition are
the keys to survival. That hesitation between the possible and impossible, or the
imaginable and the unimaginable, has remained a key element of postmodern ghost
and supernatural tales as well.
References and Further Reading
Cox, M. and Gilbert R.A. (eds) (1984). The Penguin
Book of Horror Stories. New York: Penguin
Putnam.
Cox, M. and Gilbert R.A. (eds) (1986). The Oxford
Book of English Ghost Stories. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Cox, M. and Gilbert R.A. (eds) (1992). Victorian
Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Dalby, R. (ed.) (1995). The Mammoth Book of
Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories. New York:
Carroll and Graf.
Dalby, R. (ed.) (1998). Twelve Gothic Tales. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Dalby, R. (ed.) (2006). The World’s Greatest Ghost
Stories. New York: Constable and Robinson.
Freud, S. (1955). “The Uncanny,” in J. Strachey
(ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete
The British and Irish Ghost Story: 1880–1945
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII.
London: Hogarth Press (original work published
1919).
James, M.R. (1992). Collected Ghost Stories. Ware:
Wordsworth Editions.
Lovecraft, H.P. (1973). Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover.
95
Sandner, D. and Weisman, J. (eds) (2001).
The Treasury of the Fantastic: Romanticism to
Early Twentieth Century Literature. Berkeley:
Frog.
Williams, Susan A.(ed.) (1992). The Lifted Veil: The
Book of Fantastic Literature by Women. New York:
Carroll and Graf.