As we are still in haunting season, this new blog focuses especially on the uncanny.
We have told each other strange and ghostly stories for as long as anyone can count. The first officially recorded ghost story was written down by Pliny the younger, whose uncle died in the eruption at Pompeii in AD79. Pliny the Younger’s tale has all the classics of a ghost story with an abandoned haunted house that no one can live in, a terrifying spectre rattling chains and a murdered man seeking retribution.
It could be argued that the appetite for Gothic tales really took off in the Year without a Summer – 1816 – and the story telling competition at the Villa Diodati where Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Dr John Polidori, Byron’s physician, were staying. The stories devised there brought us Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre.
But in much more modern times the real boom in ghost stories began in Victorian times. The Victorians loved a good spooky tale and were also keen to track down real life experiences. There was a surge of belief in spiritualism and attendance at seances.
The Society for Physical Research began in 1882 and a number of famous ghost hunters emerged – writers such as Charles Dickens not only wrote some of our best known ghost stories, but also went on hunts for spooks himself. Or Catherine Crowe who wrote not only her own ghost stories but also investigated and collected the uncanny for publication in books such as “The Night Side of Nature”
But why were the Victorians so keen to explore the spirit world? Perhaps it had something to do with the mass move away from the countryside to smoky, foggy towns. Perhaps it was the nervousness of young people sent away to service in very large, dark, draughty houses with dark corners and creaking floorboards. There is also a theory that the introduction of new gas lighting to the home might have been a factor. The gas used could be toxic and cause fainting and sometimes hallucinations. Was this responsible for visons of spectres?
From the late Victorian age onwards there was a huge surge in women writing horror and ghost stories. This enabled women to express themselves in a way not usually open to them. They could be free from the stifling constraints of their lives and empowered to write about some very specific issues such as domestic abuse, child abuse, the home as a place of terror and restriction.
Dr Melissa Edmundson author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (2018)states: “Women were integral to the formation of the modern ghost story, a tradition that really came into its own in the 19th century. It’s a genre dominated by women, but we will never truly know how many women published ghost stories because so many wrote under pseudonyms or wrote anonymously. Women also tended to use male narrators, so many stories that were written anonymously and thought to be by men were actually written by women.
“The entire second half of the 19th century into the first half of the 20th century was a remarkable period of productivity when it came to women writing supernatural fiction. Certainly some of the best known women writers of ghost stories came out of the 19th century, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell, Margaret Oliphant, Edith Nesbit and Vernon Lee, to name only a few.”
Acknowledgements:
Art: John Everett Millais: The Somnambulist
Catherine Crowe: The Night-side of Nature
Melissa Edmundson: Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940
Roger Clarke: A Natural History of Ghosts
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/23/ghost-stories-victorians-spookily-good
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/female-ghost-writers-overlooked-history-why-the-birds-daphne-du-maurier-helen-oyeyemi-a8023116.html
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