Introduction to Haunting Imperial (Non)Sense: What Cannot Be Captured in the Victorian Ghost Story

A Haunted Victorians Anthology Project

ENG329: Haunted Victorians, James Madison University, fall 2025

One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors surpassing 
Material Place—
* * *
Far safer, through an Abbey—gallop—
The Stones a’chase—
Than moonless—One’s A’self encounter—
In lonesome place—

* * *

Excerpts of “One need not be a chamber—” by Emily Dickinson

 Cultural Contexts of the Victorian Period

            Despite their buttoned-up reputation, the Victorians were really a rather self-aware and angsty set—and this holds true for all of the several generations that lived during the long period that bears the name of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). The extent of the social, economic, and technological changes that took place throughout these decades can explain much of the moral and cultural anxiety that is so detectable in the literature of the era. As the editors of Broadview’s “The Victorian Era” write, “During Victoria’s reign, Britain was the richest nation and the most powerful empire on the globe, with unchallenged military supremacy until the latter decades of the century and an imperial reach that covered one-quarter of the earth’s surface by 1897. As the world’s first industrialized country, Britain experienced both the benefits and the horrors or enormous growth throughout the nineteenth century” (“The Victorian Era” XLI). Hunger, poor housing conditions, political disenfranchisement, and devastating diseases were common experiences among the working classes throughout the century. These realities were widely acknowledged, and their causes publicly debated, even as those Victorians in or aspiring to join the growing middle classes—or to maintain their genteel status positions—also loudly trumpeted Britain’s national greatness at home and abroad. The Victorians were not blind to the seeming contradictions that made up their composite, multifaceted collective identity in their “modernizing” age and nation. Indeed, “there was never a single ‘Victorian mindset’ or ‘Victorian value system’ but rather a range of them [that] shifted throughout the century” (“The Victorian Era” XLI).

            Contradictions, however, need not be merely confounding: they can also be generative. And for the Victorians that was indeed the case, as their art and literature demonstrate. Haunted both by their shared and troubled national pasts, and by their simultaneous wishes and fears for the future, ghost stories and haunted narratives were one of the most popular, widespread, and conventionally recognizable literary forms for Victorian writers and readers. One might even say the Victorians haunted themselves. And such a haunting by the self—as the excerpts of Emily Dickinson’s poem above suggest—may be the most horrifying type of haunting one can experience. From the possibly prophetic reflection in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Herself” to the shifting attire and imperial affiliation of Rabindranath Tagore’s unnamed narrator in “The Hungry Stones,” variations on haunting of and by the self are everywhere in the Victorian ghost story as a genre.

            The narratives chosen to make up this collection demonstrate many types of self-haunting and uncanny encounters, but all share an obsession with the ways in which imperial values and actions—both past and present—affect and reflect upon the haunted selves of the protagonists. Sensory disruptions are a common feature of these types of haunting, as in the auditory hauntings in Bithia Mary Croker’s “To Let,” or the visual disturbances experienced by the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s “At the End of the Passage.” The senses are the means through which humans interact with other humans and with the world outside the self. So what happens to our understanding of the world when we experience sensory stimuli that we cannot explain? And such failures of the senses to make “sense” of the world are particularly appropriate as content for a Victorian haunting, given the increasing association between scientific empiricism—the assumption that knowledge can only be gained through observable and measurable phenomenon—and imperial claims to “mastery” over people and places far afield from the United Kingdom. In this way, imperial (non)sense and its varied manifestations emerge in these selected narratives as personally, socially, nationally, and globally significant—if ambiguously meaning—happenings. When the way one “knows” the world no longer makes sense, we are asked to rethink what is and is not true, and how we come to such conclusions in the first place.

Empire and Empiricism in the Ghost Story of the Late Victorian Period

            The late 19th century is often called the “golden age” of ghost stories in English, and it is not a coincidence that the British Empire was constantly expanding, in complex and often violent ways, at this moment in time (124). Simon Hay writes that “colonial and imperial history is a crucial, though one among many, determinant of the spectrality of modernity” (197). When it comes to “modern ghost stories” in particular, Hay specifies that they are “concerned with historical trauma:” “the ghost is something that returns from the past, something that irrupts into the present, disrupting both the present’s presumed separateness from the past, as well as its stable inheritance from that past” (127). He continues this line of thought, noting that "in a certain sense the experience of empire was always a ghostly repetition of Europe’s bloody transition into modernity, as though Britain kept going out to re-experience, and to re-visit on others, that trauma [of social change] over and over again” (228). Indeed, Hay demonstrates that “the ghost story becomes a key genre for narrating the process by which the further reaches of the British Empire become incorporated into [the British ideas and processes of] modernity” (228).

            Jen Cadwallader attends to some of the cultural and philosophical trends that characterized the complicated, contested Victorian notion of “modernity” at the heart of much imperialist rhetoric. As she writes, “scientific and theological authorities” in this period “were increasingly classifying and codifying human experience. While the traditional argument regarding the Victorian period is that the rise of the sciences,” and their empirical, observation-based methods for gaining knowledge, “resulted in the decline of faith,” she instead argues that “the ghost story highlights the way faith adapted to and evolved in the scientific climate in the nineteenth century” (6). Not only does faith not fade in the face of an ever-more-systematized Victorian belief that knowledge could only be achieved through that which can be seen, measured, and reproduced—a perspective growing out of Enlightenment empiricism—but faith itself, as a hierarchical system seeking truth, is also challenged by the dynamics of meaning in the Victorian ghost story. According to Cadwallader, “in nineteenth-century theological and psychological terms, ghost-seeing was equated with a failing, either moral or mental, thus both epistemological positions” – the religious and the empirically scientific – “precluded the individual’s ability to interpret and draw conclusions from [their] experience” of the supernatural encounter (6). Cadwallader goes on to show how “ghost story writers” more often than not resisted both totalizing systems of “truth”—religion and science—to instead “grant greater agency to the individual in determining [their] experience’s intrinsic worth,” even if that individual ultimately cannot resolve or make a coherent meaning from it (6-7).

Four Perspectives on Haunting Imperial (Non)Sense

            The four literary works selected for this anthology of ghost stories—or, better yet, of haunted narratives—share a common decade: each was published in the 1890s. This was a time of transition "at home" in the U.K. and of expansion abroad, as this introduction, and each of the story-specific introduction essays, note. While readers will see some common themes and values expressed across all four narratives, it may be helpful to review the editorial teams’ annotations and introductions to their texts in order also to see some of the distinct ways in which each narrative both participates in and questions the dominant imperial and empirical belief systems of the late-Victorian period. In uncanny, eerie, and indeed haunting ways, each of these stories asks readers to think about how knowledge, and truth, can be experienced by the individual and also shared in a world that often defies the ability of our senses, and our systems, to explain and make meaning of life—and death. And while these narratives offer few answers to the existential questions they raise, we hope that they call up the spirit of curiosity in our readers, and that this spirit of earnest interest may linger to haunt our own explorations of the world(s) around us.

by Dr. Heidi L. Pennington, December 2025

Works Cited

Black, Joseph, et al. "The Victorian Era." In: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 5: The Victorian Era. 2nd ed., edited by Joseph Black et al., Broadview Press, 2012.

Cadwallader, Jen. Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

 Hay, Simon. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. Palgrave Macmillan, London. 2011.

Student Editorial Teams

"At the End of the Passage" (Kipling, 1890) ~ Editorial Team: Trevor Costa, Chloe Holloway, Alexis Locke

"To Let" (Croker, 1893) ~ Editorial Team: Brooke Armeni, Maddie Baldwin, Riley Bransford, Liv Searle 

"Herself" (Braddon, 1894) ~ Editorial Team: Delaney DeVack, Doria Guadagnoli, Mary Katherine Kirkwood, Sadie McClain, Amelia Ruzzi

"The Hungry Stones" (Tagore, 1895) ~ Editorial Team: Tabitha Gruen, Laney Hein, Talon Nicosia, Olivia O’Shields, Emma Strzepek