A photograph of the snowy Yorkshire Dales (light cover of snow), 2023 (from All Creatures Great & Small)
Dear friends and readers,
Over the past few years I’ve made a habit of writing Christmas blogs — on movies I’ve seen, Christmas specials of TV series, books or stories read, or as a theme in a long-running TV series (e.g., “Christmas in Poldark“). I suspect I’ve written too many, of which too many were overlong (just type in Christmas in the “search” box to the right side at the bottom). Well, this year I have but one thus far (and may not have another), the ghost stories I read recently in a Politics and Prose online course with a professor of British literature, Victorian specialist, Nicole Miller. I enjoy ghost stories, and myself taught them for about 3 years at George Mason, and know she partly chose the topic as appropriate to Christmas time – she also teaches a much longer-length one at the college where she is (presumably) tenured. The telling of such stories is presented by people today as having been prime entertainment during Christmas in the 19th century, the first era of our present commercialized Christmas increasingly centered on family and friends.
John Millais, “Christmas Story-Telling,” “Christmas Supplement,” London News, 20 December 1862
On our Every-Other-Week online Trollope reading group (hosted by the London Trollope Society), we may be said to have almost suffered through one of Trollope’s rare failures, “The Two Heroines of Plumpington”. I say almost because the story was rescued by the hard work and absorbing information the speaker bout the story, Chris Skilton, brought to and out of the story. He showed how autobiographical it slyly is, and its themes of class, ambition, money. After he finished people in the group immediately began to talk of problems or flaws in the story.
I offered the idea that writing Christmas stories was such a trial for Trollope, such a struggle to pull off, because Christmas stories have since the inception of this custom been associated with or outright ghost stories, and nothing was further from Trollope’s robust and sceptical temperament — than either the prevalent type, unnerving, uncanny, often with a malevolent revenant, come back to haunt indiscriminately whomever is unlucky enough to enter their imaginary; or the type Dickens seems to have been the first to invent, in his The Christmas Carol, where benign presence (or presences) come down from somewhere determined to retrieve the past, and redeem the present of some suffering wronged or wrong-full person. Is not this It’s a Wonderful Life, even if 20th century disbelief seems to demand a being no-one credits for real, an angel who looks anything but? Clarence, we all instantly remember, needed to be promoted — what a mid-century American comic take for the sake of probability.
Henry Travers as Clarence (It’s a Wonderful Life)
Miller’s was a very rich course; we met for 2 and 1/2 hours for three sessions (each staying over an extra half hour) and read some interesting (some of the best) stories by Dickens, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. I’ve written about The Turn of the Screw here (as “the problem of moral panic”), and several of the Edith Wharton’s on this blog, Austen Reveries and the gothic section of my website (see Reading … Winter Solstice, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,,” “Afterward,” “Mr Jones,” as well as Dickens’s “The Signalman: the trauma of technology.”
Before each of the three discussions about the individual authors, Prof Miller held forth on ghost stories themselves, or some aspect of them related to the author we were exploring that session. It seems the form was especially reveled in by British and American authors; and may be said to emerge archetypically from fear of shadows (all sorts) in our homes, accidents and traumas surrounded by an atmosphere of the new large cities, phantoms from newness, unknown “strange” people, eruptions from people’s pasts, the old (haunted houses), the new (scientific discoveries, psychical research), dread of death and the dead (seances). M.R. James (see my blog on recent film adaptations to be found on YouTube) singled out reveling in spectacles theatric, evoking from the mind psychological allurement of dramatic interaction, strong literary high quality (your language must be powerful and precise), frightening and short. The reader must be complicit; the author creative and original. The ghost and Christmas story is bound up with our reaction to winter, the cold, the darkness, change. The story that ends with redemption offers balm to our anxieties over time, non-integration of ourselves (we are left out, left behind), a saving of a desolate soul. This is a view I agree with.
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The book I used to read Dickens’ ghost stories in is Peter Haining’s Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens, Franlin Watts, 1983, with original (Phiz) illustrations. They are too small to make the nightmare impact intended. I read a number of them and was impressed how the pattern we find in Dickens, of a withdrawn man transformed by an experience of the supernatural recurs; similarly, that Dickens was himself sceptical of the reality of ghosts, despite the Christian providential nature of his paradigms. Near the later part of his life he while traveling with Ellen Ternan and her mother was involved in a disastrous train crash, and the trauma of that is translated into “The Signalman.” Scrooge resembles him in life in numerous ways — which has also been pointed out by others.
Alistair Sim as Scrooge on Christmas morning, fairly hysterical with relief as well as cheer
Since so many of us have heard or watched A Christmas Carol, and (I assume read about it), I shall keep this section brief (see my blog on how I cried and cried the last time I watched). The famous opening rivets us. Insistence on how Marley was dead. All is dark, bleak, Scrooge a withered utterly selfish sardonic alone old man. The clock tolls throughout the story: there are many bells. The uncanny and inanimate come alive. The point (as in other stories in this volume) is to reform, transform Scrooge. The air he travels through with the “Ghost of Christmas Past” is filled with phantoms. A Blakean world of the dispossessed. “Christmas Past” is presented as a child-like old man. We see the boy abandoned. We see how little it literally cost Fezziwig to make cheerful scenes for all. Christmas present is the ancient Green Man turned sardonic. A cornucopia of delights. The famous boy and girl, Want and Ignorance — wretched, abject. Then the last fear of death. This phase continues modern desolate scenes — like the lighthouse in the storm. Amber colored. Scrooge cannot face that he is not mourned, that he is erased, his things stolen. Then when Scrooge awakens and it is only the next day and he feels he has time to change, the intense joy.
An illustration from a volume of Dickens’s Christmas stories, 1867: The apparition, more in the mood of “The Signalman”
By contrast, the deeply darkly haunted nature of “The Signalman” and by the end how little explained. This comes right out of Dickens’s own traumatic experience of a vast train crash, where he played the part of a hero, rescuing people at risk of his own life. Prof Miller thought Dickens’s fiction itself as a whole altered after this incident. The man isolated by technology; given no chance to educate himself and live among men due to his class. The earlier stories in the volume are yarns, the later ones sceptical.
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A still of Michelle Dockery as the awestruck governess, maintaining some calm (Sandy Welch, 2009, framed by a story of an unjust imprisonment of an apparently disposable woman)
For Dickens, much of the class time was taken up by “A Christmas Carol,” which is a literary gem, perfect masterpiece and she hardly got to “Signalman,” so she avoided “Turn of the Screw” until near the end — incurring resentment I felt among some of the people in the room who were there to discuss this never-endingly intriguing (ambiguous) novella. I learned that the misogyny has gotten so bad that some people regard the governess as wholly a liar, now living in an asylum (thus degrading her utterly and making the manuscript inexplicable), which explained to me for the first time why Sandy Welch’s 2009 Turn of the Screw is framed by showing us the governess put unfairly into an asylum while the inset flashback story has the children in utter collusion with the evil ghosts (there all right).
Quint and Miss Jessel from the 2009 film
Flora — look at the child’s face
When first published, it was rightly seen as capable of being interpreted as a governess caught between two deeply harmful corrupting spirits and susceptible yet still partly innocent (unknowing fully) children.
For Henry James, though I had many of the stories separately in decent editions with introductions and notes, I bought the recommended copy (sold by Politics and Prose too), Ghost Stories of Henry James, Wordsworth edition, 2001, re-issued 2008, with an introduction by Martin Scofield. The book also includes James’s prefaces to all the stories but The Turn of the Screw, and his musings/introduction to The Turn of the Screw. Scofield is very helpful. An early story, “The Ghostly Rental,” surprised me by unnerving me. I began to have the kind of inward fears of myself that M.R. James can provoke. James has the power of sudden single powerful words to make the reader feel a ghost is suddenly caught on a page. There are moral lessons in “Sir Edmund Orme” (against bad actors), and stories that hint at Bluebeard and Medea paradigms (murderous men, vengeful women). There is a coolness here; he undermines beliefs in family love, is himself almost anti-children — who are seen to be collusive and alienating in stories beyond The Screw. In one story, not a ghostly one, a novella, The Other House, James has a group of people murder a child and get away with it. After that I could not read James for years.
For Henry James, Miller concentrated on “The Friend of the Friends,” where the friend is no friend to two others, and in the story’s end does all she can to keep them apart (out of jealousy) and “The Jolly Corner,” where the corner is a site of telepathic unnerving doubles, signaling death, as well as a portal to an imagined world where James could overcome his revulsion a reality, and invent richly. The conceit of the “The Friend of the Friends” are the two targeted people each had a parent who died and appeared to them at the moment of death. They are obsessed with meeting but somehow something always comes up to prevent the encounter; until at the death of the woman they do meet, and our narrator believes this enables them to meet ever more. In both stories we are in a thicket of dreams and events that are like the forest of fairy tales. I liked the way she talked of “The Jolly Corner” to make it an explanation of James’s obsessive themes of life, living having passed him by, missing out on being another admirable self, life as an adventure because the need for a sense of security makes the narrator withdraw to seeming safety, but leaving his conscience haunted. Alice Staverton in the story, the childhood friend, could stand in for Constance Fenimore Woolson.
Jodhi May as the governess is the victim, if herself neurotic, of Colin Firth, the exploitative master, in Nick Dear’s rendition
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From the edition I was reading, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Scribner, 1973, illustrations Laslo Kubinyi
The third and last, the Edith Wharton session seemed to satisfy everyone — equal time given to about 6 stories. Prof Miller saw Wharton as pulling together the theorist, personal experience, a cultivation of art, with a real feel for the uncanny. Her ghost stories are mostly post WW1 (though they can be set back in early modern and 18th century times) and are a reaction to that calamity as well as her study of Freud exploration of the irrational inner life. Dickens is writing Victorian and Wharton 20th century ghost stories, with James bridging the two eras. Yet the characteristics of each are not predictable by era: in James the ghosts erupt from within people, are their terrifying other selves. I should not omit sceptical humor in Dickens (especially from Scrooge), and how quietly good M.R. James is at this
In one filmed story of M.R. James, a character needs binoculars in order to see the ghostly castle
Wharton’s stories are of severe female oppression/ imprisonment, of people haunted by dead people, some of whom remove a beloved from us. In “Kerfol” (see the above illustration) an early modern woman is kept alone as in a cage and each time she finds a companion in a dog, the dog is slaughtered; “Mr Jones” reveals a similar story that occurred 2 centuries ago, with a vampire controlling two women in the mansion in the present day, seemingly idyllic. These stories are filled with places women must flee from. “Pomegranate Seed” differs in being aligned with the myth of Persephone, only now Persephone is a dead wife who writes letters to her husband now married to our heroine, letters which deprive him of life’s blood, he himself goes grey, feebler, and eventually, like the husband in “Afterward” disappears. I remember how when I first read them, they made me feel dread I would lose Jim similarly. Well I’ve lost him, but not to a ghost. Like James, some of these stories are intended to baffle us, with the ghost visible only to the seer. “Fullness of Life” an early, and “All Souls” a late story both concentrate sheerly on the inner life of the protagonist, so there is little left of the Victorian gothic furniture, not even revenants for sure. Gentle souls, hounded, abandoned in a sinister silence — “Afterward” has the heroine for the rest of her life in that still house in the library room with some “horror” she feels is there forever after. This is like the person who sees these accusatory eyes after he has done some morally reprehensible (if not criminal) deed.
From “Afterward:” this is before the woman has lost her husband but has premonitions, glimpses a ghost from the old house’s parapet
As with Dickens and James, but more so (more stories) Wharton’s ghost stories have been filmed marvelously well, in her case by the BBC in the 1980s in a series called Shades of Darkness, produced (naturally) for Christmas. “Bewitched” becomes a vampire-witch story as Eileen Atkins as the grim central heroine (reminding me of the close of Ethan Frome) demands the men in the room drive a stake through the heart of a dead woman said to be appearing to and harassing her worn husband.
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I’m probably not doing justice to the three classes or the stories: nowadays my notes are scarcely readable: my hands cannot hold a pencil tight enough and write the Pitman forms precisely accurately enough to read back all that I am trying to get down — my hands are the ghosts of what they have been. Still I hope I have said enough that is understandable that might lead my reader to read some of these stories and see the movies for yourself.
It’s not true that such matter must be short; the very best I know of are novellas, and if I had the courage, I’d do a course in these five: Margaret Oliphant’s Beleaguered City, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Susan Hill’s Woman in Black, and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly. All but one (Beleaguered City) have been filmed, all but one by a woman,and two of these (Hill House and Woman in Black) have produced the two most frightening the memorable (as in leaving me with nightmare images I am afraid my mind will call up — Hill House, Robert Wise, 1960; and Woman in Black, 1993 BBC). I’d be grateful to any reader of this blog who can cite further novella-long brilliant ghost stories.
Pauline Moran as the terrifying “woman in black,” a woman deprived of her child, who goes about snatching other children — I actually still fear seeing this image at the other end of a room late at night
We have seemed to move away from Winter Solstice or Christmas. So we return to our respectable or seasonal acceptable topic briefly. So why are so many a typical Christmas story also a ghost story? Because as the year closes in, we want to retrieve time, look for redemption for ourselves, but also remember the past with all its pain and loss and seek a way to express this most deeply. We do not look for moral lessons, and pace Trollope, are not longing for stories of charity and forgiveness as such, but only as the latter theme (forgiveness) works itself into what has been so harmful for us across our lives. For the rest of the year the delving into the atavistic parts of the human psyche, condition, experience, Kafka-like (see Jack Sullivan’s little book on ghost stories as “elegant nightmares”) is what ghost stories do.
After all this I cannot say “Merry Christmas!” but I can wish for us all, after the nervous laughter has done its distancing work from the experience of the ghost story (how we ended Miller’s class), hope for us all that the experience of retrieval and redemption Dickens dreamed up and Frank Capra re-caught again will be the one we know.
Now I ask my readers to forgive me: I am very sad this year; the death of my beloved female cat, Clarycat, has made this year, this Christmas, one where I am feeling the years’ losses and wish I could be haunted by her out of her loyal love for me.
Clarycat missing us, photographed close-up during one summer time away for Jim and I
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 