Introduction
Shades of Meaning: A Haunted Victorians Anthology
Photograph from Hours with the Ghosts, or Witchcraft in the Nineteenth Century by Henry Ridgely Evans, 1891
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. No known copyright.)
In Charles Dickens’s narrative “To Be Read at Dusk,” a frame narrator eavesdrops on and reports the conversation of five couriers who are sharing supernatural stories outside an Alpine inn as the sun sets. None of the couriers talk of ghosts, but this is nonetheless a narrative of haunting. Of what, then, do they speak? “If I knew of what…then I should probably know a great deal more,” one courier ominously declares (Dickens, “Dusk”). This is the provoking promise implicit in all haunting narratives: if we were able to understand the how and why of seemingly paranormal events, then (we assume) we would also understand more about the very nature of existence, especially the parts of it that defy explanation by systems of empirical or religious knowledge. But ghost stories in the Victorian period are structured not just to provoke this desire to know more, but also to thwart it: these narratives leave the reader possessed of more questions than answers.
Tales of ghosts and hauntings are always tales about knowledge, which usually lead to questions about reality: What do we know? How do we know it? And how might this knowledge help us understand what things truly mean for us, now and in the future? This is why hauntings and history always go together. As John Bowen writes, in a ghost story the “past that should be over and done with suddenly erupts within the present and deranges it. […] A ghost is something from the past that is out of its proper time or place and which brings with it a demand, a curse or a plea” (Bowen, “Gothic Motifs”). All hauntings disrupt the supposed separation between the past and the present; all hauntings operate on the principle that the past is never really over, and the present is never fully within anyone’s control, or even comprehension. As Simon Hay explains it, “the ghost is something that comes back, the residue of some traumatic event that has not been dealt with and that therefore returns, the way trauma always does. To be concerned with ghost stories is to be concerned with suffering, with historical catastrophe and the problems of remembering and mourning it. Trauma […] leads to failed narratives, gaps in consciousness, slippages of epistemology. A traumatic history has trouble saying what causes those gaps, failures and slips,” leaving readers to attempt to make narrative sense of the effects of a haunting (Hay 4). According to Hay, because of their origins in a troubled past, ghost stories also tend to revolve around broader social and cultural anxieties about other complex historical structures, such as the law, questions of property and inheritance, status and rank, and Empire (Hay 4-12). The Victorian period (approx. 1837-1901) was an unprecedented time of change, uncertainty, and displacement. Economic, technological, and social “progress” was a double-edged sword in this era, and its costs and benefits landed unevenly among the many communities living in Britain, and under British imperial rule. The British imperial project overseas raised especially pointed and troubling questions about fundamental human value, challenging simplistic beliefs in British “superiority” as the complex consequences and profoundly problematic modes of empire-building became more generally understood. The popular genre of the ghost story was popluar in part because it emerges from and engages with these anxieties. Haunted narratives permit (even insist that) readers attend to pressing existential questions and reconsider what they think they know about themselves, and the world: “Ghost stories are a mode of narrating what has been unnarratable, of speaking such history belatedly, of making narratively accessible historical events that remain in some fundamental sense inaccessible" (Hay 4). In other words, we may learn more about the past through hauntings, we may live in its varied aftermaths, but we cannot change it. "What does this mean for ourselves, and for our futures?" these narratives push readers to ask.
As Dickens’s “To Be Read at Dusk,” and all the Victorian ghost stories collected here, illustrate, telling stories is one way to process and to share with others the paradoxical possibilities evoked by seemingly supernatural events in complex contexts. And it is not just the content of these narratives that haunt us. In haunted Victorian narratives, we tend to find that even the structure of these tales constrain what the reader can know. Character-narrators are our usual guides, and though they recount their own past experiences, how they tell their stories suggests that they still struggle to make sense of these events. Richard in “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street,” Hester in “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Phil in “The Open Door,” the unnamed narrator in “The Skeleton,” and Helen in “Herself” all present their uncanny experiences with varying degrees of hesitation, uncertainty (whether playful or sincere), even sometimes skepticism and defensiveness. Just as ghosts emerge, unbidden, from the murky and traumatic past of the fictional world, so too do these tellers’ stories feature gaps and absences, with layered analeptic flashbacks filling in just enough narrative bits and pieces to show us how little we know about these events and their meanings—leaving us wanting more yet fearing what we may find out. And none of these character-narrators provide unqualified explanations in their conclusions: the final paragraph or the final line of most haunted narratives refuse to give us assurance that lessons were learned, or that some meaning has been found, or that the ghostly presence has been contained. In each narrative, though in different ways, the haunting exceeds the boundaries of the narrative itself. Through the alignment of both form and content, then, ghost stories in the Victorian period dramatize that the boundaries between past and present, self and other, life and death, essence and ephemerality tend to be porous and flexible rather than fixed and knowable.
Shades of Meaning: A Haunted Victorians Anthology is an open-access collection of Victorian ghost stories through which we hope to make these haunting experiences available to more readers far and wide. Each narrative is accompanied by explanatory annotations, an introduction, and an image gallery compiled through research and collaborative interpretation by editorial teams composed of students enrolled in the JMU English course ENG329: Haunted Victorians in the fall of 2024. “Ghost stories,” in this anthology, may in fact be more accurately rendered as something like “narratives of haunting.” As the members of the editorial teams and I have discovered through our work together, many Victorian ghost stories are, in fact, lacking a defined or definable “ghost” presence: consider Braddon’s “Herself,” or Riddell’s “The Open Door.” Even those stories that present readers with a manifested spirit—such as Le Fanu’s “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”—tend to derive their “haunted” effect not just from the existence of an individual ghost but from the epistemological, and thus, ontological doubts raised by the identity and the actions of that ghost. Hauntings happen, with or without a ghost, and it is the readers of haunted narratives, ultimately, who carry the haunting with them. Our collection, Shades of Meaning, hopes to introduce you to a new experience, a new author, a new image, or a new idea that induces you to think twice, and, perhaps, to check over your shoulder the next time you walk down a darkened hallway. The unresolved revenants, ambiguous meanings, and open questions raised by these narratives may just manage to shade our perspectives, productively haunting our experience of the worlds beyond the text.
Dr. Heidi L. Pennington, December 2024
Illustration from Walter Woodbury's Photographic Amusements, 1896
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. No known copyright.)
Editorial Contributors
"An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" (Le Fanu, 1851)
Samantha Armstrong
Isabel Costa
Samantha Johnson
"The Old Nurse's Story" (Gaskell, 1852)
Hannah Atkinson
Olivia Brightwell
Nicolette Fish
Jack Milman
"The Open Door" (Riddell, 1882)
Daria Ausen
Teagan Kolenbrander
Natalie Reitano
Caroline Woods
"The Skeleton" (Tagore, 1892)
Ella Jorgensen
Natalie Lopresti
Caroline McKeown
Lucy Saunders
"Herself" (Braddon, 1894)
Joshua Black
Olivia Gulick
Ellis Lucas
Claire Sullivan
Jordan Whitehead
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