Charles Dickens

This essay charts and evaluates the contribution of Charles Dickens to the development of the Victorian ghost story. It examines how Dickens’ stylistic inventiveness extends the generic possibilities of the ghost story, whose status is gradually elevated from that of a minor interlude embedded within the novel to a distinctive and powerful form of the short story.  The chapter also traces how his Christmas books, which exploit the well-established association between winter fireside tales and the spectral, are fundamental in transforming the narrative scope and prominence of the ghost story, and leave a lasting cultural legacy. Dickens helped bring the ghostly into the Victorian home, but he represents a problematic case within the ghost story tradition. His treatment of the supernatural is poised uncertainly between credulity and scepticism, and his spectres variously provoke comedy, social critique or brooding introspection. His ghost stories revolve around haunting, memory and nostalgia, community and isolation, money and social conscience, but the allegorical function of ghosts is never settled for Dickens. This chapter will show that, in a period fascinated and daunted by the invisible and unseen, the ghost represents for Dickens a figure of doubtful and privileged perception, allowing us fleeting, enigmatic glimpses of the excluded or forgotten within Victorian culture.