The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories

by The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories- From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (retail) (epub)

  NOTES

  1. Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 203.

  2. From a letter to Frederick A. Duneka, editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, in Philip Horne (ed.), Henry James: A Life in Letters (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 437.

  3. Henry James, Preface to The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace and Other Tales, vol. 17 of the New York Edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1909), p. xvii.

  4. M. R. James, from the Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, ed. V. H. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. v.

  5. Robert Louis Stevenson, from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol. 7 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 155.

  6. In an article, ‘Ghosts – Treat Them Gently!’, printed in the Evening News (17 April 1931), M. R. James writes: ‘The recrudescence of ghost stories in recent years is notable: it corresponds, of course, with the vogue of the detective tale.’

  7. Quoted in Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 145.

  8. Quoted in Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1971), p. 314.

  9. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), p. 101.

  10. Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 110.

  11. Scarborough, The Supernatural, p. 106.

  12. Henry James, Preface to The Altar of the Dead, p. xx.

  13. Scarborough, The Supernatural, p. 81.

  14. M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), p. viii.

  15. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 42.

  16. Henry James, Preface to The Altar of the Dead, p. xvi.

  Further Reading

  In the 1970s and 1980s, it was customary to preface any consideration of the ghost story by remarking on the fact that very little critical attention had been paid to the genre. No one need make such a lament now. There now follows a select list of books that can deepen your understanding of the ghost story, and of the tales in this book.

  Bibliographical Studies

  Bleiler, Everett F., The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983).

  Wilson, Neil, Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction, with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell (Boston Spa and London: the British Library, 2000).

  Books and Essays on Ghost Stories and the Supernatural by Contemporary Practitioners

  Dickens, Charles, ‘On Ghosts’ (1848), reprinted as ‘Dickens on Ghosts: An Uncollected Article’, The Dickensian, vol. 59, no. 339 (1963), pp. 5–14.

  ____ ‘Review: The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers by Catherine Crowe’, The Examiner (26 February 1848), reprinted in ‘The Amusements of the People’ and Other Papers: Reports, Essays and Reviews 1834–51, vol. 2 of The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, ed. Michael Slater (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), pp. 80–91.

  ___ ‘Rather a Strong Dose’, All the Year Round (4 April 1863), pp. 133–6.

  James, Henry, Preface to The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace and Other Tales, vol. 17 of the New York Edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1909), pp. v – xxix.

  James, M. R., Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, ed. V. H. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), pp. v – xiii.

  ____ ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’, The Touchstone, vol. 2 (30 November 1929), pp. 46–7.

  ___ ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’, The Bookman (December 1929), pp. 169–172.

  Lamb, Charles, ‘Witches, and Other Night-Fears’, Essays of Elia (1823)(London: Everyman’s Library, 1962), pp. 76–82.

  Lang, Andrew, ‘The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 17 (1885), pp. 623–32.

  ___ ‘Ghosts Up to Date’, Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. 155 (1894), pp. 47–58.

  Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: B. Abramson, 1945).

  Scott, Sir Walter, ‘On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and particularly on the Works of Ernest William Hoffmann’, Foreign Quarterly Review, vol. 1 (1827), pp. 312–15, 325–6.

  ___ Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq. (London: John Murray, 1830).

  Shelley, Mary, ‘On Ghosts’, The London Magazine, vol. 9 (1824), pp. 253–4.

  Literary Criticism on the Ghost Story

  Botting, Fred, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1995).

  Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘The Second Ghost Book’, After-Thought: Pieces About Writing (London: Longman, 1962), pp. 101–104.

  Bown, Nicola, Burdett, Carolyn, and Thurschwell, Pamela (eds.), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  Briggs, Julia, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber & Faber, 1977).

  ____ The Ghost Story’ in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 122–131.

  Dickerson, Virginia, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia, OH, and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996).

  Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  Penzoldt, Peter, The English Short Story of the Supernatural (London: Peter Nevill, 1952).

  Scarborough, Dorothy, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917).

  Sullivan, Jack, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978).

  Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew (ed.), Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

  Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

  Woolf, Virginia, ‘Henry James’s Ghost Stories’, The Times Literary Supplement (22 December 1921), reprinted in Granite and Rainbow (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 65–72.

  Literary Theory and the Figure of ‘the Ghost’

  Buse, Peter, and Stott, Andrew (eds.), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (London: Macmillan, 1999).

  Davis, Colin, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

  Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

  Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970), trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).

  Some Histories of Ghosts

  Davies, Owen, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

  ___ (ed.), Ghosts: A Social History (collection of primary material relating to ghosts), 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).

  Handley, Sasha, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007).

  Maxwell-Stuart, P. G., Ghosts: A History of Phantoms, Ghouls & Other Spirits of the Dead (Stroud: Tempus, 2006).

  Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).

  Studies in the History of Spiritualism

  Brandon, Ruth, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983).

  Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

&nbs
p; Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989).

  Winter, Alison, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  Some Useful Biographical Works

  Calder, Jenni, RLS: A Life Story (biography of Robert Louis Stevenson) (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980).

  Carrington, Charles, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1955).

  Cott, Jonathan, Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Knopf, 1991).

  Cox, Michael, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

  Glasser, Leah Blatt, In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

  Hedrick, Joan D., Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  James, Anthony, W. W. Jacobs: A Biography (Knebworth: Able Publishing, 1999).

  James, M. R., Eton and King’s (London: Williams & Norgate, 1926).

  Jay, Elisabeth, Mrs Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols. (London: Gollancz, 1953).

  Kipling, Rudyard, Something of Myself (London: Macmillan, 1937).

  Lewis, R. W. B., Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

  McCormack, W. J., Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

  Mitchell, Leslie George, Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (London: Hambledon and London, 2003).

  Morris, Roy, Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  Oliphant, Margaret, The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  Pfaff, Richard William, Montague Rhodes James (London: Scolar Press, 1980).

  Rees, Joan, Amelia Edwards: Traveller, Novelist and Egyptologist (London: Rubicon Press, 1998).

  Stineman, Esther Lanigan, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

  Uglow, Jenny, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 1993).

  Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1934).

  Wolff, Robert, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979).

  Woole, Francis, Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1944).

  A Note on the Texts

  In choosing the texts for this anthology, I worked on the principle that a story should be good in itself: that is, well written, sophisticated and (if possible) frightening. This means that I felt it best not to shy away from some obvious choices. In my view, some very good anthologies of ghost stories are weakened by a desire to pick surprising, neglected or substandard stories by the best writers in the genre, or second-rank stories by largely forgotten writers. As a result, the editors produce anthologies for people who collect such anthologies and who already own the classic tales. While this book intends to provide something for such readers, it aims more at the person who will buy only one such book for private reading or for study, and for those who want one volume that brings together the very best examples of the genre. For this reason, many familiar undisputed classics have been included, especially with a sense of what will work in private reading and in the seminar room. The aim of the anthology is therefore primarily just to gather the finest ghost stories of the period 1848–1914.

  The decision to include American, English, Scottish and Irish works was intended for reasons of variety, to demonstrate how interdependent these various local traditions were, and to get away from the narrowly nationalist (and nostalgic) practice of labelling all ghost stories of this period as ‘English’. The only constraints on inclusion in the volume were those of length and copyright. The first meant the omission of such wonderful writers as Vernon Lee and Rhoda Broughton; the second accounts for the absence of Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, Arthur Machen, Robert Hitchens, Oliver Onions and E. F. Benson. I am in no doubt that in this instance, as presumably in others, the extension of copyright in the UK to seventy years is depriving certain great writers of readers, and damaging their literary reputations.

  Details of the copy-text for each story collected here are given in the Biographical and Explanatory Notes. There would be strong arguments for choosing the first magazine publication as the basis for the copy-texts, as this presents the stories in their original form. Magazine publication was also the medium by which such stories reached their widest audience, as well as being more lucrative for authors. The more ephemeral periodical form was the more vital. Initially, publishing short stories in volume form meant a little prestige, and a little more money, but not much more. Traditionally, it was supposed (and is still now believed) that volumes of short stories sell poorly. However, as the nineteenth century reached its close, this situation subtly changed. This was in part a response to a shift towards the sense that the short story was a particularly vigorous and significant form, one closely allied to the breathlessness, the speed and the fragmentation of modern life. Artistic ambition and a greater sense of the professionalism of the artist led to a wish to see stories collected together in volume form. The collection offered distinction, bolstered an author’s reputation, suggested the permanency of literary regard (in opposition to the short story’s supposed embracing of the ephemeral), provided an opportunity for revision and, most importantly, allowed for a coherent and attractively readable printed form. For all these reasons, volume publication began, despite economic considerations, to vie with magazine and periodical publication, and it is from their first publication in book form that the copy-texts of the stories in this collection nearly always derive. While, in some instances, as with Bulwer Lytton’s ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, the book version of a story is certainly the more authoritative one, this policy chiefly reflects the difficulty of obtaining some of the periodical versions of the stories and the fact that a number of these are too fragile to copy. Despite this, the order of the stories follows the chronology of their first publication.

  The copy-texts have been reproduced largely in the form in which they originally appeared. A few basic aspects of house style, mostly typographic, have been applied and American spellings (where these differ from British spellings of the period) have been anglicized. Obvious printer’s errors have been emended; otherwise spelling and punctuation have not been altered and, in most cases, any inconsistencies and oddities have been retained. Sometimes the grammar may appear to be slightly awkward as a result, but this is a feature of the original texts. Any footnotes (marked with an asterisk in this edition) are also part of the original texts.

  ELIZABETH GASKELL

  The Old Nurse’s Story

  You know, my dears, that your mother was an orphan, and an only child; and I dare say you have heard that your grandfather was a clergyman up in Westmoreland, where I come from.1 I was just a girl in the village school, when, one day, your grandmother came in to ask the mistress if there was any scholar there who would do for a nurse-maid; and mighty proud I was, I can tell ye, when the mistress called me up, and spoke to my being a good girl at my needle, and a steady honest girl, and one whose parents were very respectable, though they might be poor. I thought I should like nothing better than to serve the pretty young lady, who was blushing as deep as I was, as she spoke of the coming baby, and what I should have to do with it. However, I see you don’t care so much for this part of my story, as for what you think is to come, so I’ll tell you at once. I was engaged and settled at the parsonage before Miss Rosamond (that was the baby, who is now
your mother) was born. To be sure, I had little enough to do with her when she came, for she was never out of her mother’s arms, and slept by her all night long; and proud enough was I sometimes when missis trusted her to me. There never was such a baby before or since, though you’ve all of you been fine enough in your turns; but for sweet, winning ways, you’ve none of you come up to your mother. She took after her mother, who was a real lady born; a Miss Furnivall, a grand-daughter of Lord Furnivall’s, in Northumberland.2 I believe she had neither brother nor sister, and had been brought up in my lord’s family till she had married your grandfather, who was just a curate, son to a shopkeeper in Carlisle – but a clever, fine gentleman as ever was – and one who was a right-down hard worker in his parish, which was very wide, and scattered all abroad over the Westmoreland Fells.3 When your mother, little Miss Rosamond, was about four or five years old, both her parents died in a fortnight – one after the other. Ah! that was a sad time. My pretty young mistress and me was looking for another baby, when my master came home from one of his long rides, wet, and tired, and took the fever he died of; and then she never held up her head again, but just lived to see her dead baby, and have it laid on her breast before she sighed away her life. My mistress had asked me, on her death-bed, never to leave Miss Rosamond; but if she had never spoken a word, I would have gone with the little child to the end of the world.