The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories
Page 46
wee little
weel well
whammled thumped
wha what
whaten what kind of
wheen number, quantity
whaur where
whiles sometimes
whilk which
wi’ with
won went
wrang wrong
wrastlin’ wrestling
wud wild, mad
wund wind
wursted worsted
ye you
yett gate
Biographical and Explanatory Notes
Regarding the page references used below for a short story’s first publication in book form, very often it was the practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to begin numbering from the title page of the story. Here, page references start with the first page of the story’s text. References within the notes to the Oxford English Dictionary are abbreviated ‘OED’.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
The Old Nurse’s Story
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–65) was a novelist and writer of short stories. Her novels are: Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and the unfinished Wives and Daughters (1866). She included Charles Dickens, John Ruskin and Florence Nightingale among her friends, and is the author of a brilliant biography of another good friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Gaskell was a committed Unitarian (indeed her husband was a Unitarian minister). She began writing fiction as a means of distracting herself from her grief for a dead son.
‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ was first published in Charles Dickens’s weekly periodical Household Words, in the ‘Extra Christmas Number’ (price threepence), ‘A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire’ (18 December 1852), pp. 11–20. Other stories in the same volume, by other authors, included ‘The Poor Relative’s Story’, ‘The Child’s Story’ and ‘The Host’s Story’. It was reprinted in Lizzie Leigh; and Other Tales (‘by the Author of “Mary Barton,” “Ruth,” &c.’), ‘Cheap Edition’ (London: Chapman and Hall, 1855), pp. 69–84. The latter is the copy-text for the version printed here. For explanations of any dialect words in this story (set near the border of England and Scotland), please see the Glossary of Scots Words.
1. Westmoreland: a former county in the north-west of England, in the area of the Lake District. In 1974, Westmoreland was merged with the neighbouring country of Cumberland to form Cumbria.
2. Northumberland: a county in the north-east of England, on the border with Scotland.
3. Westmoreland Fells: the high land and mountains of the Lake District.
4. Newcastle: Newcastle-upon-Tyne was the county town of Northumberland and the area’s largest city.
5. andirons and dogs: andirons – generally used in pairs and also called ‘dogs’ or ‘firedogs’ – are horizontal iron bars used for holding logs in an open fireplace. Each andiron is supported on short legs and has an upright guard at one end (the end facing the room), often elaborately ornamented.
6. beaver … stomacher: though a beaver is a kind of hat, in this context ‘beaver’ most likely means felted cloth; a ‘stomacher’ is a waistcoat, or a decorative covering for the chest.
7. flesh is grass: a reference to several biblical texts: ‘The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field’ (Isaiah 40: 6); ‘For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away’ (I Peter 1: 24).
8. Crosthwaite Church: the parish church of Keswick, in Westmore-land, the nurse’s home county. (The current organ was made in 1837.)
9. perished: frozen, near to death, with cold.
10. Doncaster Races: one of the oldest racecourses in England, dating back to the sixteenth century, is located about one hundred miles to the south of Northumberland at Doncaster, south Yorkshire.
11. with the army in America: possibly an indication that this part of the story is set during the American War of Independence (1775–83) but more likely a reference to the war fought between Britain and America from 1812 to 1815.
FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN
What Was It?
Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–62) was a poet, short-story writer, playwright, critic, Bohemian and wastrel. Born in County Limerick, Ireland, he was the son of a lawyer. He moved to London in 1849, where he rapidly dissipated his inheritance, and so in the early 1850s went to make his fortune in New York. He earned an unstable living as an all-purpose writer, spinning out articles, essays and stories for the periodicals, sometimes flush, and sometimes on the run from creditors. He was brilliant, witty and incorrigible. His greatest successes are his tales of the uncanny, particularly ‘What Was It?’, ‘The Wondersmith’ and ‘The Diamond Lens’ – the two last appearing in the Atlantic Monthly. ‘The Diamond Lens’ tells the story of a strange, human-like creature revealed by a microscope to be living in a drop of water. With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, he enlisted in the New York National Guard; in 1862, he joined the staff of General Lander as a lieutenant. At the Battle of Bloomery Gap, he was wounded in the shoulder, dying of tetanus six weeks later.
‘What Was It?’ was first printed in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 18 (March 1859), pp. 504–9. The copy-text used here is from The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien (Boston, MA: Osgood and Co., 1881), pp. 390–407.
1. balusters: a baluster is a pillar, one of several supporting a parapet (hence balustrade) or, as in this instance, the handrail of a staircase. Balusters are candlestick shaped, slender at the top and base and swelling in the middle; indeed, the word is believed to derive from the Italian balustra, ‘pomegranate flower’, because of the resemblance, in shape, to the half-open flower.
2. Bleecker Street: a street some way downtown from 26th Street, running from east to west in Manhattan, two blocks below the southern end of Washington Square, and crossing lower Broadway; its eastern edge ran to the Bowery, a down-at-heel district of pawnshops and dosshouses. Moving uptown to 26th Street would have meant ascending the social scale.
3. between Seventh and Eighth Avenues: that is, on the west side of Manhattan.
4. Weehawken heights: across the Hudson River, on the Jersey shore, directly opposite Manhattan.
5. Mrs Crowe’s ‘Night Side of Nature’: Catherine Ann Crowe (1790–1872) was a British novelist and writer on the supernatural; her The Night Side of Nature: Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848) was a popular and influential work of non-fiction. Her idea of correspondences between the natural and supernatural realms inspired the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), though he would also have found the idea in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (see note 6 to ‘Green Tea’), among others. She suffered from a brief (and public) spell of insanity in 1854, and spent some months in Hanwell Asylum, near London.
6. opium: both a common and much-used drug, and a badge of entry for nineteenth-century Bohemians; Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816), supposedly written under the influence of an opium-induced dream, were vital in allying the drug with the idea of the unfettered imagination.
7. Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ … Caliban: William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1611?) features two non-human characters: Ariel is a dainty spirit, androgynous, ethereal, beautiful and playful; by contrast Caliban, the product of sex between a witch and a demon, is a more comic figure – earthy, gross, sulky and lascivious. Ariel is also able to render himself invisible at will.
8. Like the Guebers … faces to the east: also known as Kebbers, Ghebres or Guebres, these are Zoroastrians or Parsees, members of a religious sect popularly thought of as fire-worshippers. Zoroastrians pray facing the east in the morning and the west in the evening, following the progress of the sun.
9. port: bearing.
10. rana arborea: a species of tree frog – one
not normally found so far north as New York.
11. meerschaums: pipes with bowls made of the white, clay-like material known as meerschaum (from the German, ‘sea foam’, owing to its frothy appearance).
12. Haroun: presumably Haroun Al-Rashid (763–809), the Abbasid caliph, and a ruler noted for the artistic brilliance that flourished during his reign. His court and fictionalized adventures feature in a number of stories of The Arabian Nights.
13. afreets … from the copper vessel: in Muslim myth, an afreet (also spelled afrit or ifrit) is a powerful demon or jinn. Afreets flourished in Romantic verse, appearing in poems by Robert Southey (Thalaba, 1802) and Lord Byron (The Giaour, 1813); in her Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë describes Heathcliff as ‘a Ghoul – an Afreet’. The reference to an afreet emerging from a copper vessel is clearly a reference to ‘The Fisherman and the Ifrit’ from The Arabian Nights, where the fisherman releases a spirit from a jar. In his footnote to his translation of the story, Sir Richard Burton writes: ‘Not “A-frit,” pronounced Aye-frit, as our poets have it. This variety of the Jinn, who, as will be shown, are divided into two races like mankind, is generally, but not always, a malignant being, hostile and injurious to mankind (Koran, xxvii. 39).’ The word ‘jinn’ – from the Arabic word janna, meaning to hide – implies, among other things, invisibility and concealment. The passage brings together opium dreams (visions arising from the effects of a drug associated with the East), Romantic Orientalism, The Arabian Nights, the idea of invisibility, and the demonic.
14. Brockden Brown’s novel … Bulwer’s ‘Zanoni’: born in Philadelphia, Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was the author of Wieland (1798) and other Gothic novels. In this novel, the stranger Carwin ventriloquizes voices in a wood that are heard by Wieland, who mistakes them for the voices of God; deceived by Carwin, Wieland obeys the voices and kills his own family. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) was one of the most popular authors of the nineteenth century (see the biographical note on him in ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’). His Zanoni: A Rosicrucian Tale (1842) is an occultist novel set in the period of the French Revolution; in that novel, the Dweller of the Threshold is a spirit of malice, a dark presence that exists on the boundary between the physical and spiritual realms. The term ‘dweller of the threshold’ was incorporated in later occultist and mystical texts by contemporary writers on the subject, such as Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune.
15. a story like Hoffman: a reference to the tales of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822), the brilliant German music critic and writer of uncanny and fantastic fictions.
16. ghouls: another Orientalist term (see note 13 above), a ‘ghoul’ (from the Arabic ghūl) is, according to Muslim folklore, an evil spirit that preys on corpses and robs graves.
17. Goudon’s ‘History of Monsters’: I have been unable to trace this work, and infer that it is very likely a fictitious text and a hoax on the reader.
18. ‘spirit-circles’: a reference to the practice of a séance, and to the contemporary vogue for spiritualism, a religious movement concerned with contacting the spirits of the dead. Spiritualism was then particularly strong in the USA, where it had originated in the 1840s.
19. chloroform: discovered in the early 1830s, a transparent liquid that could induce unconsciousness; formerly used as an anaesthetic in surgical operations.
20. Gustave Doré, or Callot, or Tony Johannot: all illustrators and artists: Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was a Frenchman known for his illustrations of the works of Byron (in 1853), of Dante’s Inferno (1857) and the Bible (1866); Jacques Callot (1592? – 1635) was an engraver from the Duchy of Lorraine best known for a grotesque and violent series of prints called Les Misères de la guerre (‘The Miseries of War’); Antoine (Tony) Johannot (1760–1838) was an artist born in Germany, but who lived most of his life in France and who became one of the most celebrated illustrators of the age.
21. Un Voyage où il vous plaira: ‘A Journey to Wherever You Please’ (French); a work by the poet Alfred de Musset (1810–57) and P.-J. Stahl (the pseudonym of Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1814–86), published in 1843 and illustrated by Johannot (see note 20 above), with sixty-three macabre vignettes.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer Lytton (or Bulwer-Lytton, and formerly Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, 1803–73) was a British aristocrat, first a reforming politician, later an advocate of conservatism, for two years the Secretary for the Colonies, and one of the bestselling novelists of the nineteenth century. His work ranged from a ‘fashionable novel’ such as Pelham (1828) to crime fiction like Eugene Aram (1832), from the historical epic The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) to the early science fiction of The Coming Race (1871). He also wrote volumes of poetry, plays and short stories. Conceited, shy, egotistical, thin-skinned, obsessive, Bulwer Lytton led one of the most public lives of the nineteenth century, his failed marriage a matter of common scandal, and yet he flourished best in privacy. He was deeply interested in occult phenomena, and was something of an adept in its lore. He wrote a number of key works in this field, most notably the Rosicrucian novel Zanoni (1842 – see note 14 to ‘What Was It?’) set in part during the French Revolution, the novel A Strange Story (1862), commissioned by Charles Dickens for his magazine All the Year Round, and the story included here, ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’, a classic mid-Victorian ghost story and an initiator of the Victorian ‘haunted house’ genre.
The copy-text of ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ derives from its publication in A Strange Story; and The Haunted and the Haunters (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1865), pp. 345–65. According to the title page, this offers a ‘New Edition Revised’ of the text. This version opens with the following bracketed paragraphs:
This tale first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, August 1859. A portion of it as then published is now suppressed, because encroaching too much on the main plot of the ‘Strange Story.’ As it stands, however, it may be considered the preliminary outline of that more elaborate attempt to construct an interest akin to that which our forefathers felt in tales of witchcraft and ghostland, out of ideas and beliefs which have crept into fashion in the society of our own day. There has, perhaps, been no age in which certain phenomena have engendered throughout a wider circle a more credulous superstition. But, on the other hand, there has certainly been no age in which persons of critical and inquisitive intellect – seeking to divest what is genuine in these apparent vagaries of Nature from the cheats of venal impostors and the exaggeration of puzzled witnesses – have more soberly endeavoured to render such exceptional thaumaturgia [wonder-workers, workers of miracles] of philosophical use, in enlarging our conjectural knowledge of the complex laws of being – sometimes through physiological, sometimes through metaphysical research. Without discredit, however, to the many able and distinguished speculators on so vague a subject, it must be observed that their explanations as yet have been rather ingenious than satisfactory. Indeed, the first requisites for conclusive theory are at present wanting. The facts are not sufficiently generalized, and the evidences of them have not been sufficiently tested.
It is just when elements of the marvellous are thus struggling between superstition and philosophy, that they fall by right to the domain of Art – the art of poet or tale-teller. They furnish the constructor of imaginative fiction with materials for mysterious terror of a character not exhausted by his predecessors, and not foreign to the notions that float on the surface of his own time; while they allow him to wander freely over that range of conjecture which is favourable to his purposes, precisely because science itself has not yet disenchanted that debateable realm of its haunted shadows and goblin lights.
What Bulwer Lytton describes as the ‘portion … now suppressed’ refers to the longer version of the tale, not highly regarded, in which the magician who initiated the haunting turns out to be st
ill alive, and engaged in occult plots. As Bulwer Lytton mentions at the outset, the story had first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, in vol. 86 (August 1859), pp. 224–45. The previous month’s edition of Blackwood’s had featured George Eliot’s classic Gothic tale of telepathy (though that word was first coined in the 1880s) ‘The Lifted Veil’. Before its publication in an anthology purely of Bulwer Lytton’s work, the story was collected in vol. 10 of the twelve-volume Tales from ‘Blackwood’, First Series (Edinburgh: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1858–61; vol. 10 being published in 1860).
1. north side of Oxford Street … dull but respectable thoroughfare: Oxford Street was then, as it is now, the main shopping street of London, running from east to west, from the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road, to Marble Arch and the start of Hyde Park. The streets north of Oxford Street could range from the rather smart district between Regent Street and Portland Place in the east to Baker Street in the west, to the vaguer social realms in the vicinity of Marble Arch and Edgware Road, and the decidedly seedy locale of the northern end of Soho, centred around Charlotte Street and Fitzroy Square.
2. East Indies … Company: the East Indies, as opposed to the West Indies, meant Hindustan and the islands of the Indian Ocean, as far as the Malay Archipelago. The East India Company began, in 1600, as a joint-stock company engaged in trade with India. However, by the nineteenth century they had become the effective rulers of the whole sub-continent. In 1858, the year before Bulwer Lytton wrote this story, following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Company had been officially displaced as rulers of India by the British government. (The Government of India Act, 1858, established direct rule from London.) The owner of the house returns to England, therefore, at the moment when the Company loses power in India.
3. Macaulay’s Essays: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Essays Critical and Historical (1834) is a book famed both for the clarity of its style and the vapid dogmatism of its arguments. The English historian Lord Acton (1834–1902) remarked of them that they were ‘a key to half the prejudices of our age’.