Past Spirits

I wrote this article at the turn of the year, shortly after visiting the exhibition in question. I held it over until today to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, one of England’s greatest writers and most generous spirits.

I loved all of my grandparents, but father’s father was the biggest single influence in my life. He died when I was twenty, almost six years ago now. I still miss him, I miss the things we used talk about and the stories he used to tell, wonderful stories of his time in India both before and during the Second World War, stories of his life at school, stories of his Norfolk boyhood.

It was he who introduced me to the tingly pleasures of the ghost story. It’s the winter nights I remember best, cold outside, warm within, when he read aloud, fire blazing and lights dimmed (candle light was best), the tales of haunting long ago. It was by his fireside that I was introduced to the delights of Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James (really scary!), E. F. Benson and so many others. It was by his fireside that I first heard Charles Dickens’ tales of the supernatural, not just A Christmas Carol, the most famous ghost and morality fable ever written, but others like The Signalman and The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber.

Like me, Dickens was introduced to ghost stories early in life. It was the tales told in childhood that left him with a life-long hankering after ghosts, which just so happens to be the title of a rather charming little exhibition presently being held in the Folio Society Gallery in the British Library!

Scheduled to run until early March, A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural displays the author’s interest through a variety of printed media. I went not long before Christmas, which added to the general cosiness of the whole thing. So far as I am concerned the way it was laid out could not be bettered. It presents, if you like, a study in ambivalence: Dickens’s fascination with the subject, informed by his childhood influences, on the one hand, and the scepticism of a mid-Victorian rationalist, on the other.

It’s a kind of voyage in several stages, beginning with childhood, illustrations from The Arabian Nights along with a copy of The Terrific Register, a kind of penny dreadful that the writer read in his teens with lasting effect, not surprising, given the lurid nature of its content. He later recalled that it used to frighten the wits out of his head!

But he recovered them sufficiently to treat some of the more farcical Victorian obsessions, particularly with spiritualism, with amusing condescension. Apparitions and other manifestations of the supernatural could be reduced to natural causes, so he believed. In Well Authenticated Rappings, a satirical sketch published in 1858 in Household Words, an uncanny voice in the narrator’s head turns out to be no more than a thumping Boxing Day hangover. There is more of spirits than spirit about you, one is tempted to observe.

While he could mock the spiritualists, Dickens entertained his own fashionable notions, including a belief in spontaneous combustion (think of Krook in Bleak House) and, most particularly, in mesmerism. His own efforts here were to cause a slight rift with his wife Catherine, as an 1853 letter shows, after the author’s magnetism with one Augusta de la Rue appeared to her to be a little too animal!

In the end one is simply left with the ghost story as a story, all rational explanations aside. It’s not about the real or even the surreal world; it’s simply about imagination and the power of imagination. Here Dickens did so much to stimulate contemporary interest. His ghosts, it might be said, are comfortably bourgeois, no longer inhabiting Gothic piles but Victorian firesides; his apparitions are ever more fearful for appearing by the side of something as modern as the railway.

Now let me say a word or two in appreciation of John Leech, the man who created the splendid illustrations that make A Christmas Carol even more memorable. There is the manifestation of Marley, the magnificent Odin-like figure of The Ghost of Christmas Present and, the most chilling of all, The Last of the Spirits pointing to Scrooge’s doom. As an aside here I have to say that a lot of the film adaptations of A Christmas Carol hopelessly miss the point, seeing this encounter as the decisive moment. It’s not; it’s only the final part of Scrooge’s gradual redemption.

Andrea Lloyd, the curator of the exhibition, has written of its theme and purpose;

Dickens is already closely aligned with Victorian ghost stories in many people’s minds largely because of the success of A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens touches upon the supernatural in many of his other works, revealing his thoughts about unexplained phenomena, which in turn reflect the evolving scientific theories and beliefs that were prevalent in 19th century England. At this time people were debating the virtues of mesmerism and animal magnetism, getting caught up in the Spiritualism craze that arrived from America, and actively investigating and recording ghostly phenomena. By engaging with this vogue for the supernatural, and by tapping into the Victorian attraction to the macabre, Dickens created some of his finest works.

He did more than that. As G. K Chesterton once wrote, he did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology. I thought of Dickens; I thought of the ghosts of Christmas past, not long past, my past; I thought of my beloved grandfather, to whose memory this article is dedicated.

Night monsters

I’ve mentioned previously that the essay stands high among my favourite literary genres. Last year I worked my way through George Orwell’s exploration of subjects as varied as Charles Dickens and naughty seaside postcards, an absolute delight in every sense: in subject, in analysis and in the use of the most limpid forms of prose. This is where Orwell’s true genius lay, rather than in the novel; his efforts here are largely second rate. I also discovered the work of Clive James, an Australian author and broadcaster, who writes brilliantly on a range of literary and political figures; cultural and historical icons of one kind or another.

There are lots of other essayists I’ve dipped into, for the sheer pleasure of reading and for tuition on points of style. My collection includes the work of Francis Bacon, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, Michael de Montaigne and Charles Lamb.

It’s Lamb’s Essays of Elia that I’m reading at the moment, a wonderfully whimsical series of dissertations. There is one in particular that induced my own mood of whimsy and introspection - that entitled Witches and other Night Fears. It induced, if you like, a Proustian mood, a remembrance of things past, and that’s without the Madeleine!

In essence it concerns the nature of fear, on the images and ideas that induce fear in childhood. Here is how he describes his own fearful encounter;

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with, good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds -- one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot -- attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen…

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life -- so far as memory serves in things so long ago -- without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel --(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe--not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy -- but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow -- a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true.


But then he grew and attained the age of reason, beyond the power of imagined things. I, too, am beyond their power, beyond the power of the monster under my bed, ready to reach out and pull me to some nether world if I did not get under the duvet quickly enough! Still I have lost something else in losing irrational fears: I have lost a peculiar kind of pleasure.

Pleasure? Yes, pleasure, the pleasure in reading ghost stories in fascination and fear; the tingly pleasure of the senses being alert to every creak and groan made by our old country house; the pleasures brought by the spur of my imagination – put that down, lift it up; I need to know what’s going to happen. I carried this with me even so far as school, reading ghost and horror stories by torch after lights out, stories I then related to the other girls, inducing and sharing in a collective terror. Terror, in this instance, was power!

No longer; it’s all gone, no matter how vivid the story. I think in childhood that each of us relives the passage of civilization, from the night fears of our distant ancestors to a growing belief in the light of reason, a far greater delusion. Perverse or not, I remember with some affection the comfort of irrationality…and the monster under my bed!

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn’d round, walks on.
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Look into the dark

In the course of any life there are remarkable discoveries to be made, sometimes quite by accident. I first became aware of the strange, enigmatic and atmospheric work of Godfried Schalcken, a Dutch genre painter of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, through a short story, a story that I will come to in a moment, though you may have already guessed the title and the author.

Schalcken painted in the precise and exquisitely detailed manner of the Leiden Fijnschilders, literally fine painters. His particular specialty was portraits or intimate scenes by night, the figures illuminated only by candle light. The first thing one notices is images captured by light, faces and figures; the second the dark beyond, impenetrable and slightly threatening.

His paintings are wonderfully atmospheric, but the enigma and strangeness is for me a way of seeing, a psychological frame, if you like, given by a reading of Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter (sic), a gothic horror story written by Sheridan Le Fanu. I came across this in an anthology when I was twelve, a time I was passing through my own peculiar gothic phase, and it gave me a quite delicious sense of terror! I still look into the darkness of Schalcken’s paintings with a slight sense of unease, even after all these years.


If you don’t know the story it tells of kinship betrayed by avarice, of love frustrated, of heartless bargains; it tells of an unnatural union between life and death. It was originally published in The Purcell Papers, purporting to be manuscripts of the late Rev. Francis Purcell, an Irish priest, who tells of a visit to a Dutch friend;

I had often been struck, while visiting Vandael, by a remarkable picture, in which, though no connoisseur myself, I could not fail to discern some very strong peculiarities, particularly in the distribution of light and shade, as also a certain oddity in the design itself, which interested my curiosity. It represented the interior of what might be a chamber in some antique religious building--the foreground was occupied by a female figure, arrayed in a species of white robe, part of which is arranged so as to form a veil. The dress, however, is not strictly that of any religious order. In its hand the figure bears a lamp, by whose light alone the form and face are illuminated; the features are marked by an arch smile, such as pretty women wear when engaged in successfully practising some roguish trick; in the background, and, excepting where the dim red light of an expiring fire serves to define the form, totally in the shade, stands the figure of a man equipped in the old fashion, with doublet and so forth, in an attitude of alarm, his hand being placed upon the hilt of his sword, which he appears to be in the act of drawing.

'There are some pictures,' said I to my friend, 'which impress one, I know not how, with a conviction that they represent not the mere ideal shapes and combinations which have floated through the imagination of the artist, but scenes, faces, and situations which have actually existed. When I look upon that picture, something assures me that I behold the representation of a reality.'

The Dutchman immediately confirms the impression and begins to unravel the tragic and terrible story of Rose Vanderklaust, the niece and ward of the painter Gerard Douw- another real Dutch master-, to whom Schalken was apprenticed. She was, by the light of the author’s imagination, to be the painter’s first and only love, given away, as it turns out, like a chattel as a matter of profit and loss to a mysterious rival, a certain Mynher Vanderhausen of Rotterdam. But Vanderhausen is not just mysterious; he is something else altogether. If you want to know exactly what, if you want to know what happens to Rose, do read the story for yourself. I certainly don’t want to spoil it for you!

Le Fanu’s prose is superlative. He uses words in the same precise way that the Dutch master uses paint, a style which excites the imagination, a technique which adds to the atmosphere and the general mood of tension. Above all he has the most intimate understanding of the work of the real Schalcken, which has enabled him to weave a life into a macabre legend in a masterly and seamless fashion.

I should say, just in case you set off in pursuit, that the painting referred to in the story does not actually exist; it merely represents a kind of amalgam of Schlacken’s work. However, given the references in the story I am convinced that the central model Le Fanu had in mind, Rose with her arch smile, is that of Girl with a Candle, with the dark threatening to envelop a guarded and uncertain light.

A cry in the night

I acquired an early love of ghost stories, a point I’ve made here before. In mentioning the work of M. R. James a recent contributor reminded me just how much I love them, how much I love his work in particular. Montague Rhodes James, to give him his full name, was actually a specialist in medieval manuscripts and the provost of King’s College, Cambridge and then of Eton. But he is best remembered for his delicious tales of the supernatural.

I say ghost stories but he really crosses boundaries, touching on less spectral, far more tangible forms of horror. His tales touch on discoveries of things best hidden, of secrets that should never be told, of forces uncovered by antiquarians from which they recoil, unable to close that which has been opened; marvellous stories like Count Magnus, A Warning to the Curious, Lost Hearts, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and Whistle and I’ll come to you; even writing the titles brings a tingle of remembrance!

I first came across them in an anthology that father has in his library, one of the books from his own Eton days. I delight in recalling the terrors in reading the stories by torchlight under my duvet after lights out, stopping at every creak and imagined noise! Sir John Betjeman, also a lover of these stories, had a similar early encounter;

In the year 1920 I was a new boy at the Dragon school, Oxford, then called Lynam's, of which the headmaster was C. C. Lynam, known as 'the Skipper'. He dressed and looked like an old Sea Salt, and in his gruff voice would tell us stories by firelight in the boys' room of an evening with all the lights out and his back to the fire. I remember he told the stories as having happened to himself.…they were the best stories I ever heard, and gave me an interest in old churches, and country houses, and Scandinavia that not even the mighty Hans Christian Andersen eclipsed.

Skipper was being wonderfully disingenuous because, as Betjeman later discovered, the stories he was claiming as his own reality were in fact the fictions of James. But I can’t think of a more delightful way of discovering them, adding a verisimilitude that must have amplified one’s sense of terror.

I’m older now; the childish fears have gone, the seduction of fear has gone, though the memory remains. I could never forget Count Magnus; never forget the terrible pursuit through time and distance of poor scholarly Mister Wraxall, who disturbed those who never should have been disturbed;

People still remember last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strange gentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next morning but one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the jury that viewed the body fainted, seven of 'em did, and none of 'em wouldn't speak to what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God; and how the people as kep' the 'ouse moved out that same week, and went away from that part. But they do not, I think, know that any glimmer of light has ever been thrown, or could be thrown, on the mystery. It so happened that last year the little house came into my hands as part of a legacy. It had stood empty since 1863, and there seemed no prospect of letting it; so I had it pulled down, and the papers of which I have given you an abstract were found in a forgotten cupboard under the window in the best bedroom.

Nikolai Gogol and Tales of the Supernatural

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Gogol, one of Russia’s greatest writers. Most people will know him from his novel, Dead Souls, or plays like The Government Inspector, or stories like The Overcoat and The Nose. But he also wrote some superb supernatural tales, drawing on his Ukrainian background and tradition; tales of demons and witches. My collection includes St, John’s Eve, The Night Before Christmas, The Terrible Vengeance and Viy.

Sadly Gogol died aged only 42, having fallen into a deep mood of depression, exaggerated by malign and reactionary Christian influences, causing him to destroy many of his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls. His death was urged on by a hunger-strike, undertaken to foil the Devil, who he thought was taking him over. Even in death he continued to surprise and shock. In 1931, when his body was exhumed for reburial, he was found lying face-down, leading to rumours that he had been buried alive

Sodomy, the Bishop and the Ghost

You’ve heard, I expect, of the mother-in-law from hell? Now you are about to encounter one for real!

My story, a true one, takes us back to seventeenth century Ireland and England. In December of 1640 John Atherton, Bishop of Lismore, was convicted and sentenced to death for, to use the legal commentary of the day, “the crime not to be named.” Well, I shall name it: Bishop Atherton was a bugger, and I mean that in the literal sense of the term!

Atherton was English and a Protestant. He had come to Ireland because the official Church of Ireland, also Protestant, had plenty of opportunities for advancement in a country where the Reformation had the most superficial roots, and had been appointed to the bishopric in 1636. Now at the peak of his career Atherton’s ascent was about to be followed by an equally rapid descent.

In his hometown of Minehead in Somerset something odd was happening. People were saying that Atherton’s mother-in-law, Susan Leakey, was spreading stories about the new Bishop of Lismore. The only problem was she had been dead for well over a year...

Reports of her revelations reached William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who appointed three magistrates to investigate in February 1637. All of the witnesses interviewed said that they had indeed seen the ghost of Susan Leakey, including Elizabeth Leakey, her daughter-in-law, wife of Alexander, her son. Elizabeth reported that while Susan was on her deathbed in November 1634 she threatened to return into the world of the living. “What, will you be a devil?” she asked. “No, but I will come in the devil’s likeness.”

Return she did, accompanied by all sorts of weird happenings. The Leakey’s nephew, a teenage boy, died, saying that he was being strangled by his grandmother. An apparition was seen, making its way towards Elizabeth’s house, finally appearing in her bedroom. There she told her daughter-in-law to go to Ireland with a message for Joan Atherton, the wife of the bishop. The magistrates asked what the message was but Elizabeth refused to answer, saying she would tell only the King himself and even then only if he commanded.

The magistrates refused to accept these stories, believing the whole thing to be fraudulent. Laud himself concluded that it was probably based on some attempt to extort money from Atherton. But matters were about to get ever more serious.

In Ireland Atherton was making enemies. In the summer of 1640, under circumstances that are not entirely clear, his steward submitted a petition to the parliament in Dublin, accusing Atherton of sodomy, a capital crime. This seemed to tie in with the appearance of the apparition in England, the tale that Elizabeth would only repeat if commanded to do so by the king in person.

Other stories about the bishop started to come out; that he was a rapist, a fornicator and an adulterer. He was also accused of incest, sleeping with his wife’s sister, which turned out to be true. Report of this made its way to the Long Parliament in England, where Thomas Wentworth, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, the man who had appointed Atherton, was himself under attack. In the summer of 1641 a pamphlet was published, detailing Atherton’s sexual excesses. The author, rejecting the scepticism of the investigation of 1637, said that Mother Leakey had commanded Elizabeth to tell Atherton to repent or be hanged.

Mother Leakey was set to become one of the ghostly legends of Somerset. Atherton was hanged, either the victim of a political frame-up or supernatural malice. You decide!

Crowley and the Runes

Oh, the discoveries I’m making about Aleister Crowley, a prefect monster of egoism. His writing is at best indifferent and his poetry, well, what can I say? It’s utterly dreadful! But what a marvelous self-promoter, an object for so many writers in every way better than himself. I came across him a year or so ago as the central figure in W. S. Maugham’s novel The Magician. But the author of the biography I am reading suggests that I may have encountered him even earlier than that.

I read the wonderful ghost stories of M. R. James when I was away at school, including one called Casting the Runes. Now, Crowley was up at Cambridge while James was Dean of King’s College. There is no evidence that the two men ever met but it is possible that James came to know Crowley, after he went down, by the colour of his subsequent reputation. Casting the Runes, published in 1911 in More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, features an unpleasant Crowley-like figure by the name of Karswell, who lives in a disused Warwickshire Abbey, leading him to be known as the ‘Abbot of Lufford.’ This was no holy man; oh no;

Nobody knew what he did with himself: his servants were a horrible set of people; he invented a new religion for himself, and practiced no one could tell what appalling rites; he was very easily offended, and never forgave anybody; he had a dreadful face….he never did a kind action, and whatever influence he did exert was mischievous.

So, yes, it is possible. I must say, in winging through the life of ‘the Beast’ I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard. :-))

My Favourite Ghost Stories

My parents have a huge collection of books. I would not be pretentious enough to say that they have a library as such, though one whole room in our house in London is lined from top to bottom with volumes on so many subjects, both fiction to non-fiction. I have my own books, both in my bedroom at home, and in my rooms at university. But a lot of my explorations and my discoveries were made in the hours I spent in that haven, amongst the treasures the two of them had gathered in the course of their lives.

I have one of Father’s books in front of me now, one he bought when he was sent away to school at the age of twelve. It’s simply called Ghost Stories, edited by John Hampden and published in paperback by Everyman in 1963, a reprint of an edition first published in 1939.

I’m looking at the contents page now, reminding myself of some of the great stories, which used to send me under the blankets when I was ten years old! There they are: Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe; The Signalman by Charles Dickens; All Hallows by Walter de la Mare; The Watcher by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Beast with Five Fingers by W. F. Harvey and many more. But there are three in particular that really terrified me. I have read heaps of ghost and horror stories since but I would still include these I discovered over ten years ago now as the best ever. They are Count Magnus by M. R. James; Mrs Lunt by Sir Hugh Walpole and The Tomb of Sarah by F. G. Loring.

It’s difficult to know how to describe Count Magnus. Like much of M. R James’ work in this area it crosses the boundaries between genres; between horror and haunting. It’s a warning of a kind; over the limits of curiosity, of the dangers of getting to close to the evils of the past.

Mrs Lunt is about a ghost, oh yes, but one with a substantial and growing presence: that of a murdered wife determined on revenge and of a husband, wrapped ever more closely in terror, and unable to fight it off.

The Tomb of Sarah was my fist encounter with vampires, well before I had heard of Bram Stoker and Dracula. Sara still terrifies me far more than the caped count! Here I am now at the page with the inscription on her tomb:

SARAH

1630

For the sake of the dead and the welfare of the
Living, let this sepulchre remain untouched
And its occupant undisturbed until
The Coming of Christ.
In the name of the Father, the Son
And the Holy Ghost.

Amen to that!