by Lisa Kröger
As shadowy fact and spooky fiction fed into each other, the ghost became a popular character in prominent literature of the day by such writers as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, M. R. James, and Sheridan Le Fanu. Even authors who wrote tales of realism and local color—Mary N. Murfree, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman—dabbled in the supernatural. And it was women who took the genre to the political realm, making their ghostly tales much more than just scary stories to tell in the dark.
In the United States, a spiritual firestorm soon swept the nation, and it was two young women who lit the flame. On the eve of April Fool’s Day in 1848, sisters Margaretta “Maggie” and Kate Fox tapped into the growing public interest in spiritual matters quite literally: by “talking” to ghosts via knocks on a wall. They told their parents they could speak to the spirit realm and that the spirits would answer back, rapping once for yes and twice for no. Stunned, the family invited neighbors to see what their daughters could do. It was the beginning of an odyssey that would take the sisters onto the global public stage and, in the process, create what essentially became a new religion: Spiritualism.
Within months, Maggie and Kate were “performing” their conversations with the dead at town halls around the world. People flocked to the events hoping to communicate with loved ones and beloved historical figures. (Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln seemed to have had particularly active afterlives.) The movement spread like wildfire, and people began holding home séances and developing beliefs about the fate of the soul after death. Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one devotee.
Skeptics believed the Fox sisters were perpetuating a long hoax on the world. And the sisters admitted as much in 1888, though later recanted the confession. Genuine or not, their performances created a platform for women to not only speak publicly but also assume previously unattainable leadership roles in both politics and religion. Because séances were usually conducted by women, these events afforded women a unique, unprecedented opportunity to speak freely outside the home. Their communicants from beyond often preached abolitionist and feminist views to audiences. It was a win-win situation: the women were able to speak their political views while blaming it all on the inhabitant of the Great Beyond. In an interesting historical side note, the Spiritualist Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president, with the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
With Spiritualism in the ether and feminism in the air, women who wrote Victorian ghost stories did more than conjure specters—so much more. Elizabeth Gaskell and Violet Paget, whom you’re about to meet, shaped horror fiction into a genre familiar to twenty-first-century readers. Neither fit the mold of a proper Victorian woman. A friend to the author Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell lived one life as a wife and mother and another as a published writer, working closely with such literary luminaries as Charles Dickens (with whom she often argued over style and editing decisions). While Gaskell downplayed her success as a writer, Paget flaunted it—so long as she could maintain her privacy behind her male pen name of Vernon Lee. She was a feminist, a lesbian, a voracious traveler, and once the subject of a painting by the renowned artist John Singer Sargent.
The Victorian ghost story shared some elements with its Gothic predecessor, in particular the setting of the isolated, old manor home, far from civilization. But the Victorian ghost story was decidedly un-Gothic in many ways. Gothic writers reveled in Romance, in the unrealistic over-the-top expression of emotion. By contrast, the Victorian ghost story blurred the lines between spiritualist science and social realism. The specters in these tales returned for one reason: to exchange knowledge with the living. Some ghosts merely wanted their living relatives to find the hidden fortune they’d left behind. Others warned about impending doom. Either way, these visitations were presented as warranting serious study.
The Spiritualist movement started in 1848 with the incredible Fox sisters. The Victorian ghost story took flight around the 1840s, too, with the publication of popular Christmas ghost stories, such as those Charles Dickens was writing. Both infatuations would pass; by the fin de siècle, cynicism had displaced the Victorian ghost story, and Spiritualism faded as prominent mediums were exposed as relying on stagecraft to achieve their otherworldly communications. Yet many of our modern ideas about ghosts, and ghost stories, originated in this era, when the veil between the living and the dead seemed real enough to touch.
Ghosts Are Real
Elizabeth Gaskell
1810–1865
Women in the nineteenth century were expected to be good home-makers, both as wives and mothers. The household was their domain. The men went out to work in the city while their wives stayed at home, overseeing the daily domestic duties.
Elizabeth Gaskell—Mrs. Gaskell to most who knew her—was so successful at managing her home life that she managed an entire second home, without her husband even knowing she owned it.
How did she do it? Mrs. Gaskell wrote ghost stories.
When most people call to mind Victorian writers of ghostly tales, they think immediately of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Elizabeth Gaskell is another who springs to mind; she contributed spectral tales to Dickens’s Household Words magazine and was a literary powerhouse in her own right. She first won Dickens’s praise with Mary Barton (Chapman and Hall, 1848), a novel that examined the social problems in British society, which was a topic that interested Dickens also.
But though Dickens called her his “dear Scheherazade,” the two didn’t always see eye-to-eye when it came to the scribblings of his editorial pen, nor did she shy away from disagreeing with her celebrated colleague’s criticisms. In addition, Gaskell had trouble keeping up with his deadlines and didn’t always understand his edits to her manuscripts. He seemingly became so frustrated with her that in 1855 he wrote in a letter to a friend, “Oh, Mrs. Gaskell, fearful—fearful! If I were Mr. G, Oh Heaven how I would beat her.”
The pair’s contentious relationship began before they even met. Gaskell’s publisher sent him Mary Barton, and he didn’t personally respond (though he did publish his praise). Gaskell took offense at the slight but nonetheless published several stories with Dickens. They continued to argue, especially when he would make changes to her stories without her authorization. He famously angered her when he deleted a reference to the Pickwick Papers (his own work) in her first Cranford story. The two also disagreed over the place of the supernatural in fiction. Despite having written about the most famous Christmas spirits of all time, Dickens thought that ghosts lessened a story’s impact. This disagreement came to a head when Dickens was preparing to publish Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Tale” in the December 1852 issue of Household Words. He pointed to Shakespeare as an example, arguing that ghosts only weakened strong stories, and pushed Gaskell to adopt a rationalist point of view. She refused to give in, and the story—one of her most famous—was published as she originally wrote it.
Dickens’s frustrations must have subsided, though, because the two continued to work together for most of her career.
Spirits of the Times
Gaskell is best known for her realist novels that criticized the social ills of her day. In the 1830s she and her husband and daughters lived in Manchester, England, a hotbed of industry and radical politics and a microcosm of the problems facing the nation. The once-small town was booming thanks to the explosion of industrialization and factory work. Child labor was common, as was unemployment—without a constant need of workers, factories would lay off employees often and without warning. Though the working class was growing in numbers, it remained unable to catch up to the aristocratic upper class in affluence. Gaskell’s desire to help alleviate poverty and call attention to the plight of women in particular led to some of her best-known work and, at one point, the destruction of a few copies of one of her books by her Unitarian minister husband’s church congregation (against his wishes)—includi
ng the aforementioned novel Mary Barton, North and South (1854–55) and Cranford (1851–53), which was adapted for television by the BBC in 2007.
Gaskell explored social issues in her novels, but she used the short story format to delve into more ghostly subjects. These works appeared frequently in Dickens’s periodicals, especially his supernatural-themed Christmas issues. She was fascinated by English folklore, and often her stories take the form of a tale handed down through generations, with a kernel of truth at the center. Her belief in the adage that power corrupts, as well as her fascination with the repression of past abuses in family histories, became recurring themes in her short fiction.
In her best-known tale, “The Old Nurse’s Story,” published in the 1852 Christmas edition of Household Words, a ghost haunts a young orphan girl who has come to a relative’s manor home, which, of course, is sufficiently spooky. Entire rooms are off-limits, and organ music plays at odd hours. (What is it with ghosts who play the organ? We’re waiting for one to pick up the clarinet.) We won’t spoil the ending, but the house is doomed to repeat past abuse, and the little orphan is caught in the deadly haunting. Another shorter work, “The Poor Clare” (Household Words, 1856), boasts all the typical characteristics of a Gothic tale, along with a little dash of The Twilight Zone: a tense mother-daughter relationship, a witch, an abusive husband and father, a haunted house, a Catholic nunnery in a foreign land torn by war and revolt, a curse, and a doppelgänger demon. So many elements in one story could be disastrous in the hands of a less talented writer, but this novella is one of Gaskell’s best, demonstrating her mastery of fiction.
Another cautionary tale of terrible men—this time, a mother warning her daughter not to marry an evil man, as the former unknowingly did—is Gaskell’s “The Grey Woman,” published in the Dickens-owned magazine All the Year Round in 1861. The titular character grows pale and gray after witnessing horrors at her husband’s castle, followed by an escape fraught with close calls. Like the working women Gaskell described in her realistic novels, often those in her supernatural tales find themselves working against, and sometimes defeated by, larger societal forces. Yet even in defeat, their stories and their traces remain with the reader.
Elizabeth Gaskell pioneered a new kind of Gothic writing. In the earliest Gothic novels, particularly those influenced by Ann Radcliffe, plots revolved around the “explained supernatural” (that is, Radcliffe’s heroines thought they were being haunted by ghosts when in fact they were being stalked by predators or gaslighted for their inheritances). By the time women of Gaskell’s era were writing, the crumbling castles and ruined abbeys of Radcliffe’s settings had been replaced by old English manor homes. But while the Gothic settings became more realistic to the contemporary reader, the ghosts in these stories became less so. Hauntings no longer had rational explanations, as Dickens would have preferred. Rather, Gaskell’s ghosts were presented as truly supernatural, which seemed even more eerie contrasted with the realism of her settings.
Gaskell enjoyed literary success in her lifetime. She was well-loved by readers, thanks in large part to her collaboration with Dickens, and her success brought her wealth and a degree of independence not possible for most women of her day. She tired of living in cold, dreary Manchester, in the north of England, and in 1865 bought a house in the southern town of Hampton, more than 200 miles away—and kept her husband in the dark. She knew he was reluctant to leave Manchester, which had been their home for so long, and hoped to convince him that a change in scenery would do them good. While she waited for the right time to break the news, she frequently visited her new home in secret with her daughters.
The Hampshire house was such a well-kept secret, in fact, that Mr. Gaskell learned of its existence only when his wife died of a heart attack there. Elizabeth Gaskell pushed the boundaries of what a woman could do—even in death.
THE GHOST STORY: A CHRISTMAS TRADITION
If a hearth was blazing on a December night in nineteenth-century England, folks were gathered around it telling spooky tales. A Christmas Carol is the most famous expression of the tradition of sharing scary stories in the dark, which goes back centuries, but in Dickens’s day most writers of the supernatural took a stab or two at a Christmas ghost story. By publishing special Christmas-themed issues of his magazines, Dickens cemented this custom, which may be why his tale of the spirits who visited Ebenezer Scrooge continues to be shared and adapted for modern audiences.
The English yuletide bonfire tradition has not continued in the United States, thanks to the Puritans who snuffed out the fun practice. We say it’s time for a revival—throw in a roasted marshmallow or two for a perfect winter’s night.
Reading List
Not to be missed: Gaskell’s stories are often included in modern horror anthologies, particularly collections that focus on Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, alongside such writers as M. R. James and Wilkie Collins. In 2004, Penguin published a collection of her ghost stories called Gothic Tales that includes some of her best work, including “The Poor Clare” and “The Old Nurse’s Tale.”
Also try: Gaskell’s novella Lois the Witch, which looks at the Salem witch trials, is worth reading. The story is about an orphaned English girl who is sent to live with distant relatives in New England. Her Puritan family, however, doesn’t fully understand the girl’s English ways; the cultural confusion results in Lois, along with a Native American girl, being accused of witchcraft in the midst of the local witch hysteria. It’s both a story about cultural misunderstandings and a warning about believing in cultural superiority.
Related work: While not as well known as Gaskell, Eliza Lynn Linton wrote short fiction in the Christmas ghost story vein. Her “Christmas Eve in Beach House” (Routledge’s Christmas Annual, 1870) is a supernatural drama set against the Cornish coast.
Born Storyteller
Charlotte Riddell
1832–1906
Why do ghosts come back to haunt the living? Maybe the afterlife doesn’t live up to expectations. How great can the great beyond be given how many ghosts spend eternity hanging around abandoned buildings and scaring teenagers who dare to sneak in? Occasionally, ghost stories center on a spirit whose agenda goes beyond haunting a specific place. As Charlotte Riddell’s ghost stories suggest, some come back because they want their murder to be solved.
Charlotte Riddell played with traditional supernatural images in her stories, giving us familiar characters like the devil, the banshee, the poltergeist, and the cursed nun. Often her ghosts return to show the living where bodies are buried (or unburied), or where deeds are hidden, or to provide solutions to cold murder cases. Riddell’s hauntings were usually connected to people through places and personal history, but occasionally she incorporated the phenomenon of precognition, rather than the strictly spectral. Like Elizabeth Gaskell (see this page) she was known for penning social realism novels and was a prolific ghost story writer.
Riddell’s ghost stories marked a phantasmal paradigm shift. In early nineteenth-century stories, a ghost was typically a sort of metaphorical mirror for the protagonist, reflecting what was already haunting the character. Consider, for example, Washington Irving’s ghost of Henry Hudson, who visits Rip Van Winkle in his long sleep in the Catskills, or the spirits that visit Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol to teach him an important lesson. In these stories, supernatural beings are meant to help the living—not the other way around. Riddle’s ghosts, however, have agency. They have lives (or afterlives, as the case may be) that exist beyond the character arc of the story’s protagonist. And they won’t go away with a sprinkle of salt. Instead, they continue to wreak havoc until the living satisfy their demands.
Riddell’s well-known short story “Nut Bush Farm” depicts a ghost who returns to reveal that a murder has occurred. The young man who rents the titular haunted farm initially doesn’t believe in ghosts, but learns the truth the hard
way. He also learns that they’re very persistent, and if you try to stand in a ghost’s way, it keeps going…which leaves you very cold and very scared. The story is primarily a neat little mystery; the narrator solves a murder by observing the ghost near a footbridge and then (after fainting) investigating on his own. In “A Strange Christmas Game,” one of Riddell’s holiday ghost stories, a young man and his sister inherit a haunted house from a wealthy family member whom they know next to nothing about. During the course of the tale, the siblings solve the murder of another relative, who mysteriously disappeared on a long-ago Christmas and has been haunting the home ever since. As one does.
Ghostwriter
In her life, Riddell was just as restless as her ghosts. She forged a career in writing and publishing that many women authors of the time only dreamed of. Her mother said that as a young girl Riddell invented stories before she could even hold a pen in her tiny hands, dictating them to her mother. A friend of Riddell’s mother worried that encouraging the budding writer was akin to teaching her to lie and told her that writing should be avoided at all costs. It’s a good thing Riddell didn’t listen.
Called “a born story-teller” by the literary critic S. M. Ellis, the Irish-born Charlotte Eliza Lawson Cowan wrote more than fifty novels and short stories to support herself and her husband (until his death in 1880). She also did editorial work for the magazine Home and St. James’s Magazine, which she co-owned briefly with its founder, Anna Maria Hall. In the nineteenth century, publishing was dominated by men. Women authors often had trouble breaking into the industry and making any kind of livable wage—especially considering they were often paid less than men for their work. To even the playing field somewhat, some established their own magazines and presses.