The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories

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

  4. offices: those parts of the house given over to household work or storage, such as the kitchen, pantry, scullery, cellars and laundry room.

  5. turning-tables: during the 1850s, an interest in spiritualism and a belief in occult phenomena had become widespread and passionately held by many across Europe and North America. Growing out of mesmerism (see note 10 below), the movement found a first home in Germany, and then in 1848 acquired its first famous case with the Fox sisters and their haunted house in New York. One key feature of early séances was table-turning, in which participants sat around a table with their hands resting on it and waited for the table – supposedly operated by spirits – to move in response to letters of the alphabet being called out. In another sense of the phrase, turning the tables may also form the theme of a story in which a man pursues a ghost.

  6. half-tester: a bed with a partial canopy (a tester being a canopy over a bed, supported by posts or suspended from the ceiling).

  7. Zoological Gardens: opened in 1828 by the Zoological Society of London, and situated at the northern end of Regent’s Park in London, this was the world’s first scientific zoo.

  8. fearing that his bite … madness of hydrophobia: hydrophobia is the aversion to water symptomatic of rabies – the acute viral disease transmitted by the saliva from the bite of an affected animal and causing madness and convulsions; also another name for the disease.

  9. medium: the intermediary at a séance between the human attendants and the spirits; in other words, a clairvoyant, a communicator with spirits. The first recorded use of this word in this sense in the OED was in America in 1851. Bulwer Lytton had become involved with a number of ‘mediums’ in the mid 1850s, with whom he had attempted to contact the spirit of his dead daughter, Emily.

  10. mesmerism or electro-biology: mesmerism – named after its originator, Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), and which he termed ‘animal magnetism’ – involved inducing a hypnotic trance in a human subject, sometimes for therapeutic ends. Electro-biology originates as a term in the late 1840s and early 1850s. It stands both for the study of electrical phenomena in living organisms, and also as a fashionable offshoot of mesmerism, in which a trance was generated by means of an ‘electro-vital force’. In the 1850s, it was practised as an amusement at parties.

  11. Odic: ‘Odic force’, a mysterious and dynamic vital force, od or odyle, believed to inhere in all living bodies, as described by Baron Dr Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Reichenbach (1788–1869), a prominent German chemist.

  12. solar microscope: a device which uses the sun’s rays to project a greatly magnified image of a very small object on to a screen in a darkened room. Displays using a solar microscope were popularized by the late eighteenth-century itinerant lecturer and (self-proclaimed) occultist, freemason and natural philosopher (for natural philosophy, see note 3 to ‘No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man’) Gustavus Katterfelto (d. 1799). Other itinerant lecturers, such as John Warltire (1725/6–1810), made similar presentations to the public.

  13. Liverpool: that he wrote the letter from the port of Liverpool gives away his desire to leave the country, in fact for Melbourne in Australia, as it turns out.

  14. Walworth: a district of London in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames.

  15. rapport: the state of close connection between the mesmerist and the subject, in which the former can act upon the latter. ‘En rapport’, a few lines later, derives from the same source (see also note 10 above).

  16. Paracelsus … Curiosities of Literature: Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) was a Swissborn alchemist, astrologer, physician and metaphysician; he exerted a vital influence on the history of occultism, particularly on the Rosicrucian movement. Curiosities of Literature, published in six volumes between 1791 and 1823, and much revised thereafter, is an entertaining compilation of biographical anecdotes by Isaac Disraeli (1766–1848), father of the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81).

  17. eidolon: a Greek word first used in English by Thomas Carlyle in 1828, meaning an insubstantial image, a phantom, a spectre.

  18. volumes of communications … Bacon … and Plato: Bacon could be the English philosopher and essayist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) or possibly Roger Bacon, English philosopher, popularly misremembered as a necromancer (c.1214 – after 1292); Plato is the Athenian philosopher (c.428/7 – c.348/7). The practice of mediums (see note 9 above) producing posthumous books by famous writers, or posthumous compositions by famous composers, was a feature of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century publishing. None of these works has ever acquired fame in its own right, partly for the reasons that the narrator of the story describes.

  19. telegraph wires: the means of communication; the electric telegraph was an invention of the late eighteenth century, but its application on a practical level, with lines across London and on the Great Western Railway, dates from the 1840s. In the late 1850s, attempts were in progress to lay the first transatlantic telegraph wire; these were finally realized in 1866.

  20. pentacle: a five-pointed star or pentagram used as a magical symbol; the double pentacle referred to three paragraphs later would have consisted of a smaller pentagram superimposed upon a larger pentagram, possibly enclosed within a circle and again used for magical purposes.

  21. vellum: a kind of parchment originally made from the skin of calves.

  22. anathema: a curse or denunciation.

  MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON

  The Cold Embrace

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was born in Soho, London, the daughter of a solicitor father and journalist mother. Her parents’ marriage collapsed due to her father’s infidelity. After a spell as an actress, Braddon began a career as a writer of hack fiction, turning out stories of crime and infamy for the ‘penny dreadfuls’. However, a more lasting form of literary success came with the serialization of Lady Audley’s Secret (1861), a key work in the formation of the then new genre of ‘the novel of sensation’. A year later, she published Aurora Floyd (1862), like its predecessor a novel of bigamy and scheming heroines. Braddon went on to become a prolific novelist, playwright and short-story writer.

  The text of ‘The Cold Embrace’ derives from its initial appearance in book form, in Braddon’s first collection of short stories, Ralph the Bailiff and Other Tales (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1862), pp. 69–78. The story was first published in the periodical Welcome Guest on 29 Sepember 1860. In the book version, Braddon’s name does not appear on the title page, but she is identified as ‘The Author of Lady Audley’s Secret, Aurora Floyd, etc. etc. etc.’. Among a number of stories, the volume also includes the famous ghost story ‘Eveline’s Visitant’ and the supernatural tale ‘How I Heard My Own Will Read’.

  1. Raphaels, Titians, Guidos, in a gallery at Florence: sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Italian painters: Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520); Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, 1485–1576); Guido possibly referring to a number of painters, but most likely the baroque painter Guido Reni (1575 – 1642). All three have paintings on display at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

  2. Brunswick: or, in German, Braunschweig, a region and town in Lower Saxony, Germany; here the River Oker connects to the Aller and Weser rivers. A German setting for such Gothic tales as this one was traditional.

  3. meerschaum-pipe: see note 11 to ‘What Was It?’.

  4. diligence: a public stage-coach.

  5. Aix-la-Chapelle: now more commonly named Aachen, the west-ernmost city of Germany, close to the border with Belgium and the Netherlands. Traditionally, British people used the French name for the town.

  6. coupé: a four-wheeled carriage that accommodates two passengers inside and has a seat outside for the driver.

  7. Antwerp … Rubenses … Quentin Matsys: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the Flemish painter, was resident in Antwerp for much of his life. The city is the place to find many of his greatest paintings, including those held at the Rubenshuis. Quent
in Matsys (also spelled Massys, Messys or Metsys, 1466–1530) was an earlier Flemish painter and the founder of the ‘Antwerp school’. There are a number of candidates for the ‘great picture’ by Matsys at Antwerp, including Jesus Chasing the Merchants from the Temple or the St John Altarpiece, both on show at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Royal Museum of Fine Arts).

  8. Newfoundland: a very large, generally black dog.

  9. Carnival: a yearly celebration in February before the advent of Lent (see also note 11 below).

  10. domino: a loose, hooded cloak worn with an eye mask as a costume at masquerades.

  11. Débardeuse: a young woman dressed as a débardeur, a docker or stevedore, employed to unload produce from ships (French); the débardeuse was a typical character at the Paris Carnival (see note 9 above), immortalized by the French caricaturist Paul Gavarni (1801/4–66), who specialized in illustrating the Carnival.

  12. salle: a hall, or room (French).

  13. polka: a polka is a lively dance tune, originating in what is now the Czech Republic, and invented in commemoration of the Polish Uprising of 1830–31.

  14. gendarmes: soldiers employed on police duties (French).

  AMELIA B. EDWARDS

  The North Mail

  Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831–92) was a novelist, poet, children’s author, writer of short stories, translator from the French, an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage and a well-respected expert on Egyptology. She was also a travel writer, producing the bestselling A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1876) after a voyage along the river. Although she had written and published short stories from her teenage years, her first published book was the novel My Brother’s Wife (1855). She often wrote stories for Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, especially for the Christmas editions. In addition to ‘The North Mail’, her other most celebrated piece of ghost fiction is Monsieur Maurice (1873), a ‘novelette’.

  ‘The North Mail’ first appeared in Miss Carew (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1865), vol. 2, pp. 197–230. That is the copy-text used here. The tale is often anthologized under the title ‘The Phantom Coach’. For explanations of the occasional Scots words used within this story, please see the Glossary of Scots Words.

  1. the grouse season: this traditionally lasts from 12 August (known as the ‘Glorious Twelfth’) to 10 December.

  2. Dwolding: this appears to be a fictitious place name; however, there is a village named Wyke in west Yorkshire, south of Bradford, mentioned three lines later. The servant’s accent and a later use of a Gaelic word by his master might suggest that the story is supposed to take place still further north.

  3. now’t: nothing (northern English).

  4. flitches: sides of bacon.

  5. speculum: in this instance, a glass or metallic mirror used as part of a reflecting telescope.

  6. optician: formerly, someone who studied optics.

  7. galvanic battery: an apparatus employed since the very beginning of the nineteenth century for the production of galvanic electricity (electricity from a chemical source), and often used for medical purposes. The name derives from the discoverer of the process, Luigi Galvani (1737–98). Galvani had famously investigated electrical processes in the body, using static electricity to stimulate (hence galvanize) dead frogs’ legs. His nephew Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834) animated human corpses in the same way.

  8. Louis von Beethoven: the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). This French version of Beethoven’s name was common in nineteenth-century France, and therefore, to a lesser extent, in Britain. The passage possibly alludes to the nineteenth-century pseudo-science of phrenology: that is, the belief originating in the writings of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) and Johann Caspar Spurzheim (1776–1832) that the character and mental powers of a person have specific locations in the brain, the bones of the skull adapting to accommodate these areas. The popular version of this belief therefore involved the reading of character through attention to a person’s physiognomy and bumps on the head. Beethoven was a favourite subject for such enquiries.

  9. Watts to Mesmer … the Magi and Mystics of the East: Henry Watts (1815–84) was a notable Victorian chemist; his A Dictionary of Chemistry and the Allied Branches of Other Sciences had begun to be published in 1863. However, given that the action of the tale is set twenty years earlier (the story being published in 1865), this identification is untenable. In that case, it might be that Watts is a slip for James Watt (1736 – 1819), the pioneer of the steam engine, and member of the Lunar Society, the Birmingham-based club for natural philosophers (for natural philosophy, see note 3 to ‘No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man’). For Mesmer and Reichenbach, see notes 10 and 11 to ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’; for Swedenborg, see note 6 to ‘Green Tea’; for Plato, see note 18 to ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’. The other names in the list are: Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac (1715–80), French philosopher particularly interested in sensation, and the origin and development of consciousness and language; René Descartes (1596–1650), French mathematician and philosopher concerned with scepticism; George Berkeley (1685–1753), Irish philosopher and bishop, whose idealist philosophy (partly prompted by the desire to counter the scepticism of Descartes and English philosopher John Locke) suggested that human beings can only know sensations and perceptions, and that therefore the world might be thought only to exist in the perceiving subject; Aristotle (384–322 BC), Greek philosopher. The Magi refers vaguely to the philosophers of the ancient Near East; the ‘Mystics of the East’ may refer to Indian or Chinese, Buddhist, Hindu or Taoist philosophers. The roll-call of great thinkers signals a move from science to pseudo-science, from electricity to philosophy, from the present to the past. All the thinkers mentioned are concerned with (and provide various answers to) questions concerning the nature of life, reality and consciousness. The first-named authors are particularly pertinent in relationship to ghosts, in so far as they all seem to have been fascinated by the vital principle of life. However, such specific interests become somewhat blurred as the names go on to become merely a list.

  10. usquebaugh: a word (pronounced ‘us-quee-bar’) derived from the Scottish and Irish Gaelic term (uisge/uisce beatha) for ‘water of life’ or ‘whisky’.

  11. recal: by the 1860s an old-fashioned but nonetheless correct spelling for ‘recall’.

  CHARLES DICKENS

  No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man

  Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–70) was, of course, one of the greatest and most successful Victorian novelists. He uses elements of the supernatural in a number of his novels and stories, most particularly in the inset narratives included in The Pickwick Papers (April 1836 – November 1837) and in the Christmas books A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Haunted Man (1848). In addition he wrote a handful of short ghost stories other than ‘No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man’, notably ‘To Be Read at Dusk’ (1852) and ‘To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt’ (1865).

  The copy-text of ‘The Signal-man’ is from its first publication in his own weekly journal All the Year Round, vol. 16, no. 400, pp. 20–25, in the Christmas edition of 1866. Although his once very popular magazine was by then already launched on its lingering decline, such Christmas editions were hugely successful, on occasion selling up to 300,000 copies. The story is printed in double columns. In the contents list and throughout the story, ‘signalman’ is so spelled, whereas in the heading it is hyphenated, ‘signal-man’; the inconsistency has been retained in this edition. Under the general title ‘Mugby Junction’, the story is one of eight in that edition, of which four are by Dickens and one (the last) by Amelia B. Edwards. All the stories use Mugby Junction and the railway as a narrative focus.

  1. The Signal-man: a man employed to signal to trains whether the line is clear; a word coined, and an occupation established, in this context, in the late 1830s and early 1840s (the OED gives the earliest usage as 1840).

  2. recal: see note 11 to ‘The North Mail’.

&
nbsp; 3. natural philosophy: like the old-fashioned spelling of ‘recal’ (see note 2 above), in the 1860s a slightly outmoded term, meaning the study of the natural sciences, or what was by then already more commonly named physics.

  4. perspective-glass: a telescope; in another context, this could be a device that uses mirrors to produce a distorted visual effect.

  SHERIDAN LE FANU

  Green Tea

  Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) was born in Dublin, a privileged member of the Anglo-Irish elite, and spent the greater part of his writing life in that city, where he made his name as a bestselling novelist, short-story writer, journalist and newspaper proprietor and editor. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and though he qualified as a barrister, he never practised the law. He began writing ghost stories in the 1840s, and over the next thirty years established himself as one of the greatest practitioners of the genre. Most of the best of his ghost stories were collected in two books: Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851) and In a Glass Darkly (see below). After his death, a number of uncollected stories appeared in The Purcell Papers, edited by the poet Alfred Perceval Graves (1880), The Watcher and Other Weird Stories (1894) and, most significantly, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, edited by M. R. James (1923). James’s championing of Le Fanu led to a revival of interest in the author; he also remained a significant figure to Irish writers, notably W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen. In addition to his short stories, he wrote a number of novels, including a trio of mid-Victorian sensation masterpieces, blending realism and the supernatural: The House by the Churchyard (1861–3), Wylder’s Hand (1864) and Uncle Silas (1864).

  The copy-text of ‘Green Tea’ derives from In a Glass Darkly (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1872), vol. 1, pp. 3–95. This book, a classic of supernatural fiction, consists of three volumes, comprising five tales in total: ‘Green Tea’, ‘The Familiar’ and ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ (vol. 1); ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ (vols. 2 and 3); and ‘Carmilla’ (vol. 3). ‘Green Tea’ first appeared in Dickens’s All the Year Round (23 October – 13 November 1869), Le Fanu benefiting from Dickens’s interest in the genre both as writer and editor.