IT IS NOT that difficult to describe. It is an unsettling feeling, one that might even approach the state of fear. Sceptics will smirk, but they, too, deep down, will experience the tightness in the throat, the pricking sensation of cold sweat and, oh yes, the unmistakable feeling of the very hairs rising upright from the chill scalp, as if to stand rigid like so many soldiers awaiting inspection.
Halloween night will do it to us all, even the most openly brave. Or, that is to say, those who had fondly assumed their courage above question.
Tonight is a night for storytellers and for hearts thudding that bit louder. No television can compete with the human voice, recounting, or reading aloud, a tale wrought with the woes and revenge of spirits intent on being remembered.
The ghost story comes in a multitude of shapes and forms, many rooted in folk tales and legend. Hell and eternal damnation are irresistible themes, regardless of one's religious inclinations. The early American master Washington Irving, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,from The Sketch Book(1820), wrote of a hapless schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, who, ill-advisedly besotted, pursues a woman. The comedy soon yields to horror as he in turn is pursued by a headless horseman.
Another phantom horseman features in Theodor Storm's extraordinary classic The Rider on the White Horse(1888), a narrative well known by most German schoolchildren. And of course the Brothers Grimm can always be relied upon to put a spectral shimmer on their dark fairy tales.
But when it comes to shaping a body of stories that brought the genre on from the Gothic form, as perfected by writers such as Horace Walpole or Mary Shelley, to the domestic ghost story, the Victorians virtually set up camp. Walpole's The Castle of Otranto(1764), which was initially presented as a translation of an Italian manuscript dating from 1529, was in keeping with the notion of Gothic as medieval. Shelley's Frankenstein(1818), told in epistolary form, is in keeping with the notion of terror.
Some years earlier, Charles Maturin, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, had published The Fatal Revengein 1807, while his Melmoth the Wanderer(1820), drawing on the Goethe's variation of the Faustian theme of bargains with the Devil, is probably the last finest example of a narrative using just about every device of horror and depravity. But the Victorians had a different approach and dispensed with the fantastic, which would not make a comeback until late in the 19th century, when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula(1897), influenced by fellow Dubliner Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, one of the stories in the outstanding collection In A Glass Darkly(1872). Carmilla, in turn, was inspired by central European themes of vampires and the undead.
The Victorians were fascinated by ghosts and frightened, but that fear also had an element of the morality that defined the age. At no other time in man’s history, had change been quite so rapid. Industrialisation and transport had transformed a previously rural world overnight. The feudal and the agrarian had been obliterated by rampaging urbanisation.
Many a country lass was abandoned by lovers who set off to the cities, never to return. Admittedly, Victorian morality was oppressive and largely hypocritical, as Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy made clear in fiction, but it also imposed a sense of guilt that most Victorians never lost. The new progress and, in some cases, prosperity left many fearful about the past that had been so quickly disregarded. It is on this point of guilt that the Victorian ghost story fed.
THE FANTASTIC ANDthe macabre gave way to the spirits of murdered babies and wronged girls. Gone were the images of monsters racing across the Arctic wastes. Foreign locations were no longer needed. Instead the stories became domestic, and took take place in that back bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall, or in the local churchyard. The Victorian ghost story was domestic, and as for the ghosts, most families had one. Most of all, the Victorians were fascinated by death and the choreography of mourning. The ghost for the Victorians was very much a type of social realism precisely because it was so rooted in daily life.
There was also, of course, the spread of literacy. Fiction flourished in Victorian England. If one could not afford to buy books – and the library services was nothing as accessible or as well developed as now – people could buy newspapers and journals. Dickens was not the only writer busy penning his novels in deliberately pitched weekly instalments. Stories were also serialised. The middle classes liked to read and, while they were clearly educated, this did not mean that they were expecting anything from some fiction other than to be entertained and, more importantly, gripped. It was also a time of polemic and sermons.
The reader not only enjoyed a good story, they also felt that with the reading experience should be an element of self-improving enlightenment. Hence the popularity – and inevitability – of the polemical in literature, be it George Eliot or Dickens. Few could spin a story as engagingly as Dickens. Equally, few would make a politically charged point as directly.
It is ironic to note on this day of ghosts and ghostly yarns that Halloween was not the traditional night for ghost stories, at least not for the Victorians, who enjoyed their ghost stories at Christmas, when telling dark tales around the fire was as much part of the yuletide celebrations as the food and mulled wine.
"A sad tale's best for winter: I have one. Of sprites and goblins," wrote Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale. Dickens took that line, spoken by Mamillius, seriously and the Christmas ghost story was well represented in the various periodicals, such as All The Year Round,he edited. He also contributed his own, such as To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt (1865) and The Signal Man. It is no coincidence that his well-loved A Christmas Carol(1843), in which selfish old Scrooge receives a visit from his dead business partner, Marley, heralds a series of visions of the past, the present and the future, including the death he could be facing unless he adopts a kindlier attitude to life.
As Christmas became more commercial it lost contact with the supernatural, and Halloween was there waiting for the ghosts, as were eager, if nervous, readers. Whatever about the seasonal aspect, ghost stories were greatly in demand and writers including Mrs Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson were ready to oblige.
There were also specialists such as Le Fanu, MR James and Algernon Blackwood. Walter Scott was one of the first to write a ghost story as opposed to a gothic tale. The Tapestried Chamber(1829) places the story in a confined space as distinct from the wilds. But it was Le Fanu whose subtle use of space and nuance bypassed the grotesque of the gothic and initiated the domestic ghost story, in An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (1853), and with it introduced the haunted house as a defining stage setting.
Wilkie Collins, a great rival of Dickens, made good use of the plaintive victim of a crime of passion in Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman(1875). "Yes: I saw it. With my own eyes I saw it. A pillar of white mist . . . moving beside me at the edge of the road . . . When I stopped, the white mist stopped." Alongside morality and guilt, there was also an interest in actual evil.
Near the close of the Victorian era, Stevenson published The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), it seemed to personify the contradictions of the epoch, as, in many ways, did Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray(1890). Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1848) could be seen as a ghost story in which many of the themes preoccupying the Victorians preoccupy the fiction they read. For all the terror and the ambivalent satisfaction in being frightened, the Victorian ghost story ultimately elevated fear and dread into regret and lamentation.
There was a lesson to be learned beyond the entertainment. Repentance is heard beyond the shrieks. But the idea of the ghost, the ability to defy mortal death, beguiles. Purgatory(2010), by the Argentine writer Tomas Eloy Martinez, begins, "Simon Cardoso had been dead thirty years when his wife, Emilia Dupuy, spotted him at lunchtime in the lounge bar in Trudy Tuesday." Low-key, practical and incontestable, Le Fanu and his Victorian colleagues would have approved.
10 ghoulish greats
Horace Walpole
The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Charles Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein (1818)
Washington Irvine
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820)
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights (1848)
Sheridan Le Fanu
Strange Disturbances in Aungier St (1853)
Wilkie Collins
Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman (1875)
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Bram Stoker
Dracula (1897)
Theodor Storm
The Rider on the White Horse (1888)
