Notes Introduction 1. Dickens, “Christmas Tree,” pp. 292–3. 2. “Vernon Lee” is the pseudonym of Violet Paget. The prolific Blackwood continued to write ghost stories until his death in 1951. 3. Dickens, “Christmas Tree,” p. 293. 4. Although Spicer is not identified as the author of the story in its original publication in All the Year Round, he reprinted it in Volume II of his col- lected works, Bound to Please (1867). 5. Spicer, “An Unpatented Ghost,” p. 523. 6. Molesworth, “The Story of the Rippling Train,” p. 319. 7. With the exception of three excellent early studies: Julia Briggs’s Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), Jack Sulli- van’s Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Black- wood (1978), and Vanessa Dickerson’s Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (1996). 8. Auerbach, “Ghosts of Ghosts,” p. 278. 9. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, p. 1. 10. I use the term “popular” here to distinguish the Christian beliefs this book is interested in and orthodox Christianity supported by the Angli- can Church or various dissenting bodies. 11. Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 16. 12. As Sullivan notes, “While it is true that repressed or displaced sexuality functions as an element in some of these stories . it is not necessarily true that this is the dominant or most arresting element. To reduce the stories to case studies is to rob them of their charm and power” (6). 13. Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares, p. 3. 14. Ibid., p. 38. 15. Ibid., p. 18. 16. Ultimately, Sullivan does suggest a kind of authority behind the seeming chaos of Le Fanu’s universe: “Once Le Fanu’s hellish machine begins grinding, it does so with Hardyesque remorselessness, but also with a strange awareness of purpose which goes beyond the half-consciousness of the Immanent Will. If Hardy’s cosmos is struggling to attain con- sciousness, Le Fanu’s has already attained it, or is at least well along the way. If there is no benevolent or rational purpose behind things, there does seem to be a sinister purpose” (19). 17. Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, p. 4. 172 Notes 18. See Davies 5–6 and 39 for particular examples of “crime-solving” ghosts. Davies’s discussion of the Cock Lane Ghost (81–3) is also illustrative of this type of ghost belief. 19. Smith, The English Ghost Story, p. 3. 20. Ibid., p. 4. 21. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, p. 3. 22. Smith, The English Ghost Story, p. 3. 23. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, p. 61. 24. Clute, “Beyond the Pale,” p. 421. 25. Stevenson, “The Body Snatchers,” p. 303. 26. Crawford, “The Upper Berth,” p. 69. 27. Le Fanu, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances on Aungier Street,” p. 19, italics original. 28. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, p. 6. 29. Ibid., p. 7. 30. Ibid., p. 6. 31. Scott, “The Tapestried Chamber,” p. 7. 32. Scott explicitly connects superstition and Catholicism elsewhere in his fiction. See George W. Boswell’s “Personal Beliefs in Scott’s Novels” and Richard French’s “The Religion of Sir Walter Scott” for discussion of his mixed sentiments regarding Catholicism. For Scott’s support of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, the major political issue of the year in which “The Tapestried Chamber” appeared, see Michael Tomko’s Brit- ish Romanticism and the Catholic Question. 33. Thatcher, An Essay on Demonology, Ghosts and Apparitions, and Popular Superstitions, pp. 1–2. 34. See also Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphatus: Or, A Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (1726) and the tales col- lected in Andrew Joynes’s Medieval Ghost Stories. 35. James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” p. 34. 36. Ibid., p. 43. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., p. 41. 39. Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, p. 5. 40. Ibid., p. 4. 41. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, p. 2. 42. Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, p. 5. 43. Scott, “Novels of Ernest Theodore Hoffmann,” p. 10. “Doctor John- son’s doubts”: Scott goes on to quote Imlac’s opinion of ghosts in Ras- selas: “That the dead are seen no more, said Imlac, I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages, and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom appari- tions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which, per- haps, prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth: those, that never heard of one another, would not have Notes 173 agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence, and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears” (John- son 107). Samuel Johnson, of course, famously took an interest in ghosts and was one of the investigators of “Scratching Fanny” the Cock-Lane Ghost. 44. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century, pp. 163–4. 45. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, p. 184. 46. As McCorristine points out, the collection went to a sixteenth edition within six years (10). Crowe’s tales were largely adapted from German works, as she notes in her introduction: “In this discussion, I shall make free use of my German authorities, Doctors Kerner, Stilling, Werner, Eschenmayer, Ennemoser, Passavent, Schubert, Von Meyer, &c., &c.; and I here make a general acknowledgment to that effect, because it would embarrass my book too much to be constantly giving names and references” (19). 47. Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature, p. 10. 48. “Religion and Science,” p. 192. 49. Bahn, “Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency,” p. 664. 50. Bahn persuasively argues that ghost stories were also influenced by spiritualist depictions of the afterlife, demonstrated through the greater agency ghosts acquire in late-Victorian ghost stories. 51. This depiction of spiritualism is by no means uniform. Some ghost sto- ries, particularly the type Dickens often published in All the Year Round, criticized spiritualism on the basis that its materialism was focused on the wrong causes, looking for external evidence for spirit manifestations rather than rooting them in the disorders of the senses. For example, in the 1864 story “The Ghost of Mr. Senior” the narrator seems to only mildly distance himself from spiritualism, stating, “The facts to which I allude occurred many years since, before table-turning, spirit-rapping, spirit hands, ‘et hoc genus omne,’ were invented” (34). He ends his story, however, with a minute discussion of the way memory and imagi- nation might affect vision, leading to the creation of a specter. See Chap- ter 4 for a more detailed discussion of ways in which ghost stories and spiritualist tenets are aligned. 52. Dickens, The Haunted House, p. 9. 53. MacDonald, “Uncle Cornelius His Story,” p. 131. 54. Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature, p. 17. 55. Edwards, “The Phantom Coach,” p. 13. 56. Molesworth, “Lady Farquahar’s Old Lady,” p. 2. 57. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, p. 9. 58. See Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia, Section XL. “On the Ocular Spectra of Light and Colours,” pp. 605–8 particularly. 59. Ferriar, An Essay toward a Theory of Apparitions, p. 100. 174 Notes 60. Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions, p. 10. 61. As Alderson notes, he first delivered his thoughts on the subject of apparitions in a speech before a literary society in 1810. He claims that Ferriar’s work is based wholly on his own: “In 1813, an eminent and learned physician at Manchester published as new the same theory, sup- ported by ancient history and traditional stories, which, if not equivocal, could not be so well authenticated as those to be found in the following essay” (viii). 62. Alderson, An Essay on Apparitions, p. 28. 63. Newnham, Essay on Superstition, p. 75. 64. Ibid., p. 119. 65. Ollier, Fallacy of Ghosts, Dreams, and Omens, p. 4. 66. Brewster, Natural Magic, p. 20. 67. Ollier, Fallacy of Ghosts, Dreams, and Omens, p. 10. 68. Smajic, Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, p. 18. 69. Edwards, “Was It an Illusion?,” p. 251. 70. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, p. 32, italics original. 71. Dickens, Christmas Carol, p. 59. 72. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, p. 1. 73. Nesbit, “Man-Size in Marble,” p. 123. 74. In fact, Nesbit’s story rejects orthodox religious explanations as well. As Nick Freeman argues, “There is certainly no suggestion of a protecting Providence overseeing the innocent Laura as there was in many earlier Victorian ghost stories. The clergy are conspicuous by their absence, and Jack’s belief that his wife’s sweetness means ‘there must be a God [. .] and a God who was good’ (132) is the sourest of ironies” (462). 75. Hawker published using the pseudonym Lanoe Falconer. Chapter 1 1. James, “M. R. James on Ghost Stories,” p. 413. 2. Ibid, p. 24. 3. “The Judge’s House” is closely based on Le Fanu’s “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street,” for example. For a general dis- cussion of Le Fanu’s influence on Stoker, see Carol A. Senf’s “Three Ghost Stories: ‘The Judge’s House,’ ‘Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House in Aungier Street,’ and ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle.’” Broughton, Le Fanu’s niece on his wife’s side, found her literary endeavors much encouraged by Le Fanu and dedicated Cometh Up as a Flower (1867) to her uncle “as a small token of affectionate regard.” 4.