Spooky Spotlight: The Best Victorian Ghost Stories

(Excerpted from The Essential Victorian Ghost Stories) The Victorian Age was an epoch of severe social and industrial transition for the countries of Europe and their colonial objectives. The United Kingdom – the country whose literary stockpiles are the primary focus of this collection – is perhaps best remembered during this stage of human events (so much so that it has born their monarch’s name) for ushering in the industrial revolution, for its jingoistic and often bloody foreign policies, and for its stringent observance of moral, sexual, and gender-related self-regulation. Perhaps it is because of this unshakable exterior of personal restriction and national hubris that the generations succeeding the Victorians have been most enraptured with the diseased, fungal underbelly of their glorious society. Jack the Ripper’s gruesome spree in the red light districts of East London, the moral miscarriage of children being exploited for cheap and replaceable labor in Dickensian mill towns and mine shafts, and the slew of sexual infamies haunting the upper echelons of British society, like the Cleveland Street scandal, are the events which most stringently retain the public interest and grace the screens of Hollywood and household televisions with lurid embellishments and milquetoast understatements alike.

Indeed, even in literature, it has been the Victorian sense of the Gothic – rather than its mawkish morality novels which dominated in the 19^th century – which  has given the era its longest-lasting legacy: Sherlock Holmes’ fog-obscured stakeouts, Jane Eyre’s nocturnal terrors, Scrooge’s spectral visitors, Dr. Jekyll’s sinister secret, Dracula’s seductive power, Carmilla’s dark eroticism, and Heathcliffe’s diabolical parentage represent a larger portion of our collective twenty-first century imagination than do the bourgeois sentimentality in which the era sought its legacy. Today Stoker and Conan Doyle are far more revered than Arnold or Tennyson, and The Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper are astronomically more well-known than General Gordon or Dr. Livingston. I don’t necessarily say that this should be so, but we must admit that – warranted or not – this is certainly the case. In our collective unconscious the Victorian era is a whitewashed tomb: its well-manicured exterior cloaks a vault of noxious corpses, whose bloating secrets are straining against a yielding membrane of avoidant self-delusion. Although it was a time of great progress, it was also a time of great injustice – to borrow its greatest author’s observation: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” While industrialization fueled improvements in science and technology, the popular appetite for factory-made products – made cheaply and quickly – incentivized poor labor conditions, uprooted long-established rural communities, and accidentally led to the proliferation of theft, fencing, drug addiction, prostitution, smuggling, human trafficking, de facto slavery, and suicide. The hidden cost of these cheaper, inventive innovations would prove to be to the Empire’s moral credit.   

FROM GEORGIANS TO VICTORIANS; FROM HOFFMANN TO IRVING:

THE EARLY HISTORY OF SHORT SUPERNATURAL FICTION

The Victorian Era saw an explosion in innovation not only for engineering, medicine, and armaments, but also in Gothic literature – a genre which was barely seventy years old, having been ushered into the mainstream in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s medievalist novel, The Castle of Otranto. The supernatural fiction of the Georgian Era (ca. 1715 – 1835) was largely limited to similarly dense, melodramatic book-length works about bleeding statues, animated suits of armor, lustful monks, and menaced virgins in nightgowns running through owl-infested graveyards (the kind of schlocky horror that would fuel the delightfully over-the-top B horror movies of the 1960s). Despite their theatrical self-indulgence, these novels – by the likes of Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, Clara Reeve, and William Godwin – still have artistic value and are worth reading, but they were always large reads (often released as multi-volume publications) that were meant to occupy a reader over the course of a week or two rather than providing the pithy, hour’s entertainment we expect from a good ghost story. On a smaller scale there were hundreds of lurid, Gothic poems (cf. Bürger, Schiller, Goethe, Blake, Robinson, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, etc.), many of which are excellent, but the advent of the short, anthologizable ghost story (especially those of genuine literary merit) was still years away.

This began to change with the turn of the 19th century, with two foreign authors – both bored lawyers who felt socially adrift in their respective societies – leading the charge: one a German and one an American. Writing during the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussian jurist E. T. A. Hoffmann stunned the public with his dark, proto-Freudian fairy tales and ghost stories (e.g., “The Sandman,” “Nutcracker and the Mouse-King,” “Vampirism,” “The Entail”). Hoffmann’s creepy stories were short enough to be anthologized, which meant that he could afford to be more ambiguous with his storytelling: while Gothic novelists usually felt obligated to explain away every horrifying detail, Hoffmann’s tales typically ended without clear explanations, encouraging the reader to come to their own conclusions about what they just read. Meanwhile – just three years before Hoffmann’s death – a restless Manhattan attorney and professional tourist, Washington Irving, began including ghostly “sketches” in his internationally successful Geoffrey Crayon collections (e.g., “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The Spectre Bridegroom,” “Tom Walker and the Devil,” “The Adventure of the German Student”). Irving – like Henry James and F. Marion Crawford after him – spent decades of his life living abroad in Europe, mostly in England, where he united his American ingenuity with British literary traditions, creating subversive ghost stories which defied tropes, surprised readers, reveled in at-times taunting ambiguity, and were sometimes as short as three pages. In 1827 in 1828, Irving’s Scottish mentor, Sir Walter Scott, was inspired by his protégé’s haunting, 1824 anthology, Tales of a Traveller[1] to pen a handful of supernatural episodes including “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” “The Tapestried Chamber,” and “Wandering Willie’s Tale.” These works are among the earliest and most influential short ghost stories in British literature, and are still widely anthologized (especially the chilling “Tapestried Chamber”). And yet, the genre had still not seen its dawning day in England.

It soon came with the help of one surprising invention: the steam engine. With steam power came the advent of river cutters and locomotives, and with these (and the subsequent suburbanization of the new capitalist aristocracy) came the invention of the suburban work commute. Commuters and train-travelers needed entertainment to make the time go by, but the time went by much too quickly to read Mr. Dickens’ latest novel in bulk. Periodicals rapidly capitalized on this need by printing serialization of novels (which also led to the invention of the tantalizing cliff-hanger) and short stories which could be digested during the train ride from Richmond to the London.

Almost as soon as the short story arrived in the laps of middle-classed men across the European world, the horror story arrived with it. Irving’s ghostly sketches had inspired his countrymen Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became dominant voices in American literature, and whose macabre tales stoked a transatlantic appetite for the fantastical. Dickens himself was a fawning devotee of Irving and an ardent admirer of Hoffmann, adapting many of their themes and motifs in his own supernatural stories[2]. By the 1840s, Dickens, Le Fanu, Collins, and others were regularly printing short, open-ended, Gothic stories in the style of Dark Romanticism so favored by the Americans and Germans.

As industry and capitalism accelerated the rampant social change (for good and for ill), displacing farming families from the parishes where they had abided for generations into the newly minted suburbs, there was a universal sense of disconnection and loss which resonated with the supernatural tale’s nostalgic ethos and its concerns with fate, family, destiny, inheritance, and guilt. In the United Kingdom, where emotion was reserved for the imperial battlefields and sexuality denied in the obviously fetishized British ideal of womanhood, ghost stories provided an outlet whereby the unspeakable could be spoken, the unbelievable believed, and the unredeemable redeemed. Ghost stories subverted societal conventions by the very nature of their supernatural unconventionality: villains who would, in the real world, be celebrated (e.g. Scrooge) – and heroes – who would, in the real world, be condemned (e.g. Hester Prynne) – are given their just desserts through otherworldly intervention.

ATYPICAL VICTORIAN GHOST STORIES:

EARLY, DARK HORROR AND THE VISIONARIES WHO WROTE IT

This book contains a selection of stories that do not necessarily match the average Victorian ghost story: many of these are darker – more ambiguous, cynical, and savage – than the typical Victorian ghost tale. They are, in fact, quite atypical and, as a result, much more haunting than the more popular sentimental, moralistic fare that graced Christmas and Hallow-mass periodicals of the mid to late nineteenth century. “Schalken the Painter” details the rapacious demon buying the soul of a young woman from her uncle. “The Signal-Man” was written after Charles Dickens was nearly killed in a train crash that took dozens of lives and left him shaken by PTSD until his death – five years to the very day of the disaster. The gruesome, otherworldly horrors of “The Upper Berth,” “The Phantom Coach,” “Lost Hearts,” and “The Body Snatcher” all presage the gruesome, neo-Gothic weird fiction which followed World War One, with their hapless protagonists and savage antagonists – hardly A Christmas Carol. “Man-Sized in Marble,” “John Charrington's Wedding,” and the “Mystery of the Semi-Detached” – all by Edith Nesbit – are cynical and haunting stories of happy women ravished by unwarranted horrors. H. “The Red Room” is a morose study in the shapeless psychology of terror, and “Some Strange Disturbances” is a clear precursor to more popular but perhaps less nuanced stories by H.P. Lovecraft (“The Rats in the Walls”) and Bram Stoker (“The Judge’s House” – also printed here). “The Open Door” and “The Old Nurse’s Story” are both grim, Gothic narratives where one child is lured to death by the ghost of another, while “Nothing But the Truth” and “Behold, it was a Dream!” – Rhoda Broughton at her best – are uncommonly sophisticated in their sense of psychological realism and existential terror.

   Typical practitioners of the Victorian ghost story were often ineffectual writers whose sappy moral parables and cliché-riddled, agonizingly predictable plots have faded forever into history – and rightfully so. It has long been a literary truism that the hardest story to write is a good ghost story, and the Gothic drudgery that so often plagued Victorian magazines illustrated this with droves of ridiculous stories apt to cause the modern reader to audibly groan. But there were also many genuine masters of the craft. Le Fanu was in the first rank, a writer whose grasp of irony, visceral horror, and philosophical tact allowed him to craft the century’s best supernatural tales, ripe with nuance and genuine horror – both psychological and physical. His niece, Broughton, inherited his taste for the macabre and was fostered by the era’s most famous writer of English ghost stories, Charles Dickens. Nearly all popular authors of the era contributed to the genre, which the British public adored and British publishers craved. Dickens, Doyle, Wells, Kipling, Hardy, Wilde, Stevenson, and Henry James – all of whom are more remembered for their literary fiction, adventure, dramas, science fiction, or detective fiction – continue to be admired by for their excellent ghost stories and weird fiction.

THE PROMINENCE OF SUBVERSIVE, FEMALE VOICES

IN THE VICTORIAN GOTHIC

While men like James and Le Fanu unquestionably excelled at their crafts, the ghost story was notably a largely female craft, and many of the genre’s most gifted masters were in fact mistresses: Oliphant, Wood, Braddon, Broughton, Gaskell, Molesworth, Riddell, Edwards, and Nesbit positively dominated the literature. Critic E.F. Bleiler counts Riddell, Broughton, and Edwards as the only Victorians to threaten Le Fanu’s supremacy, and while I would count about half-a dozen others in that group, I certainly agree with his high opinion of their particular literary prowess. The best stories from these ingenious women convey a high level of emotional and psychological depth, often grounded in real-life anxieties that fail to resound quite so noticeably in the works of their male counterparts.

   Ghost stories are subversive by nature, allowing hidden realities to manifest in the face of public denial and avoidance, and women readily swarmed to the genre as a means of expressing unpopular anxieties about class, gender, sex, patriarchy, nationalism, religion, philosophy, society, war, crime, suicide, morality, and family life. Women often wrote to support their families, or themselves, and female supernatural fiction is redolent with themes of social anxiety, financial insecurity, abuse of power by authority figures, and a mistrust of the sacred cows of Victorian society.

THE ESSENTIAL NAMES: FROM THE RIGHTFULLY FAMILIAR

 TO THE REGRETTABLY FORGOTTEN

Having read dozens upon dozens of anthologized supernatural tales from this era, I have selected these few to represent the exemplar (rather than the standard) of Victorian ghost fiction. Another fifty or sixty pieces could easily have joined them, but as we are limited by space, I will simply direct the reader who wants an even broader sample of excellent Victorian fiction to read The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, Richard Dalby’s Mammoth Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Roger Luckhurst’s Late Victorian Gothic Tales, and – especially – Michael Cox’s two anthologies, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories and The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, all of which will send you down the appropriate rabbit holes towards the forgotten masters (e.g., Amelia B. Edwards, Mrs. Oliphant, Mary E. Braddon, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Vernon Lee, and Violet Hunt – each deserves their own anthology). I would also aggressively recommend reading the complete writings of the following authors: J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Rhoda Broughton, M. R. James, W. W. Jacobs, and Edith Nesbit – their visionary horrors are pure genius, and are the absolute best of the best in this genre. Any supernatural story from Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, or Oscar Wilde is required reading – even the bad ones (of which there are, obviously, not too terribly many). 

While they are not included in this volume, I would specifically, and earnestly urge you to read the works of Mrs Henry Wood (“Reality or Delusion?”), Charlotte Riddell (“A Terrible Vengeance,” “Nut Bush Farm”), Mary Louisa Molesworth (“The Story of a Rippling Train”), Wilkie Collins (“A Terribly Strange Bed,” “The Haunted Hotel,” “ Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman”),  Barry Pain (“The Four-Fingered Hand”), and Bernard Capes (“An Eddy on the Floor,” “The Thing in the Forest”).

       The Victorian Age, was also largely defined by the transatlantic exchange of culture between Europe and the Americas (specifically between Britain and the United States) to such a degree that American historians have coopted the term “Victorian America” to describe the adoption of the Victorian cultural, economic, and moral ethos by certain segments of American society (viz., the “American gentry” of the Industrial Northeast and Deep South) who “shared many common influences [with the British Commonwealth] which were reinforced by the expansion of printed communication during the 1830s” [3]. Many of post-war America’s intelligentsia followed Washington Irving’s earlier example by becoming expatriates in Europe, where they blended American sensibilities with European literary traditions – including the English ghost story. Like their Commonwealth contemporaries, Yankee ghost story writers frequently contributed masterworks to the genre which shaped English literary tastes and standards just as surely as the Irish Le Fanu, Scotch Stevenson, Welsh Broughton, or Anglo-Indian Kipling.

   Among these cosmopolitan Americans were New Yorkers Henry James (who made England, France, and Italy his home, becoming a British citizen in 1915) and F. Marion Crawford (who resided in England, Germany, India, and Italy – where he died, was buried, and has a major street named after him). Both were expert practitioners of the English-style supernatural tale, and one from each has been included in this anthology to represent the transatlantic literary tradition. Other Americans known for writing excellent ghost stories in the Victorian tradition include masters Willa Cather, Ralph Adams Cram, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Nathaniel and Julian Hawthorne, Lafcadio Hearn, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton, alongside less studied practitioners Gertrude Atherton, Emma Frances Dawson, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Ellen Glasgow, W. C. Morrow, Francis Stevens, and Harriet Prescott Spofford.

A BRIEF, HISTORICAL TIMELINE

OF THE ERAS OF VICTORIAN GOTHIC FICTION

The Victorian Era spans Queen Victoria’s reign of 1837 to 1901. The very best stories from this period tended to land in four clusters: 1852 – 1868, 1868 – 1878, and two strong trends of innovative productivity throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, respectively, and by the end of Victoria’s reign, the genre had picked up a headwind which would cause it to surge in creativity through both world wars. Our survey ranges from 1839 – two years into Victoria’s reign (Le Fanu’s early masterpiece, “Schalken the Painter) – to 1902 – a year after her death (Wells’ trope deconstructing “The Inexperienced Ghost”).

   High-quality supernatural tales were rare in the early Victorian era, and although Dickens and Le Fanu produced some powerful works prior to the 1850s (the notably Poe-esque “A Madman’s Manuscript” and “Schalken the Painter” being standouts), the 1852 publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s wintry masterpiece, “The Old Nurse’s Story,” is often considered the watershed moment of the Victorian ghost story, setting off a vogue of Gothic tales which had previously been considered old-fashioned. The ‘50s through the late ‘60s were dominated by Elizabeth Gaskell, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Catherine Crowe, Wilkie Collins, and Amelia B. Edwards, whose stories were typically far more tragic and grim than their predecessors’ sentimental tales.

   The late 60s through the 70s saw the rise in subversive, female authors, whose works were often informed by the rising influence of Spiritualism. Led by Rhoda Broughton and Mary E. Braddon, their tales frequently involved vengeful ghosts, supernatural premonitions, and jilted lovers. In the five years before his 1873 death, Le Fanu also published a slew of excellent ghost stories, leaving the decade haunted by his influence and that of his niece, Broughton. The 1880s were once again dominated by female-written tales of heartbreak and anxiety (viz., Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, Rosa Mulholland, and Mary Louisa Molesworth) as well as haunting contributions by prominent male authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. The 1890s was a decade of profound innovation in supernatural fiction, which exploded in popularity, especially in popular magazines like The Strand, The Saturday Evening Post, Pearsons, The Pall Mall Gazette, The St. James Gazette, and The Idler, which served as laboratories for cutting edge fiction by the likes of Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, W. W. Jacobs, Jerome K. Jerome, Bernard Capes, Barry Pain, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, M. R. James, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, Stevenson, and Doyle. By the turn of the century, as the Victorian Era transitioned into the Edwardian, the leading names in speculative fiction were Wells, Nesbit, Jacobs, Oliver Onions, William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, Saki, Walter de la Mare, the Benson brothers (E.F., R.H., & A.C.), and – above all – M. R. James. 

HOW WE SELECTED THESE “ESSENTIAL VICTORIAN GHOST STORIES”

(AND WHERE TO FIND THE ONES WE LEFT OUT)

Finally, a brief word on how this anthology’s stories have been selected. We have titled it The Essential Victorian Ghost Stories, but I won’t for a moment pretend that these are the only ones worth reading or the very best of them all. Some truly excellent tales have been left out because the authors’ have already been represented several times over (e.g., Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and “The Familiar” or Nesbit’s “The Shadow” or “From the Dead”), and some of the selections might invite debate (e.g., why Dickens’ “To Be Read at Dusk” but not his “Trial for Murder,” or why Braddon’s “The Cold Embrace” instead of “At Crighton Abbey”?). Some brilliant authors have not been represented at all (e.g., Riddell – whose exclusion may admittedly be scandalous – Molesworth, Pain, Capes, and Mulholland) along with some literary giants whose supernatural works were tremendously popular during the Victorian Age (e.g., Collins, Bulwer-Lytton, Kipling).

     There may also be controversies specific to particular stories being incorporated here due to their provenance or contents (e.g., I have included two stories by American authors – Henry James and F. Marion Crawford – who wrote in the Victorian tradition; and I have included two stories – Le Fanu’s “Disturbances in Aungier Street” and Stoker’s refashioned version, “The Judge’s House” – which share a core narrative). And yet, I consider each of these tales essential to those who would understand the genre of the Victorian ghost story: each has been printed either an uncommonly skillful example of the type – regardless of its lack of fame or influence (e.g., “Mystery of the Semi-Detached”, “Story of Clifford House,” “Behold, it was a Dream!”) or precisely because of its fame and influence (e.g., “The Phantom Coach,” “The Judge’s House,” “The Signal-Man”) as well as its literary prowess.

     These stories, then, are either considered “essential” because they were seminal to the development of the ghost story genre during the 19^th century, or because they represent an uncommon achievement of the form which exceeded conventional standards of the time. Care has also been taken to include examples of the genre’s most significant tropes: haunted rooms, haunted houses, haunted ruins; cursed families, cursed lovers, cursed premonitions; maritime hauntings, colonial hauntings, Irish hauntings; child ghosts, vengeful ghosts, and Christmas ghosts. There are hauntings with psychoanalytical, feminist, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, Jungian, historicist, and structuralist themes and undertones, and there are hauntings which tell the compelling stories of the working classes, single women, and orphaned children, as well as religious, racial, and sexual minorities.

     I would never suggest that a reader who enjoys this collection should be content with it simply because I consider these stories “essential”: there are many other “essential” ghost stories which I did not have the room to print. To help with this conundrum, I have included an annotated bibliography at the end of this book with recommended anthologies for the genre’s principal authors along with select stories that I would suggest reading. Even these lists, however, are not exhaustive: if you enjoy 19^th century supernatural fiction, hunt down these anthologies and try reading them cover to cover in search of the hidden gems that I was not able to include here.  

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In their seminal anthology, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert observed that – unlike the sleepwalking ghosts in eyewitness accounts, who are usually seen repeating the same set of behaviors, without any apparent objective or hope of influencing the mortal world – the phantoms “of Victorian fiction … hardly ever lacked motivation … they revealed secrets, avenged wrongs, reenacted ancient tragedies, in some cases proffered help and comfort to the living, or bore witness to the workings of divine providence. Most disquieting of all, they could pursue blameless living victims with a relentless and unfathomable malignity.” Ghost stories were particularly useful to an age of transition where the feudal past still existed in the landscape and memories of the industrial present.

It was an era where progress was surging and unstoppable but the popular feeling was that despite the improvements of steam, rails, medicine, industry, telegraphs, abolition, globalism, couture, manufacturing, reforms, science, and the Pax Britannia itself – in spite of all their supposed advancement – the violence and injustice of pre-modern Britain was still lingering, warm in their blood, steaming from the very ground and poisoning the air around them like a threatening miasma. They were not so far removed from days of torture, rape, regicides, and massacres – a silent understanding which would be excited into public horror and shame when the Ripper flourished in London’s gin-soaked red-light district or when the inexcusable conditions of the Andover workhouse were exposed. Ghost stories offered an entertaining medium to address the inexpugnable stains of previous generations by acknowledging the omnipresence of the past and its lingering power over the present: “In personal terms, ghosts were obvious, though still potent, images of the lost past – past sins, past promises, past attachments, past regrets – and could be used to confront, and exorcise, the demons of guilt and fear” (Cox & Gilbert viii).

And the ghosts of the Victorians’ past have continued to voyage beyond their contemporary confines to haunt the moral insecurities of the twenty-first century: our own social problems, spiritual ennui, existential fears, and unresolved traumas.

   The Gothic tale has proven one of the most memorable and endurable from the canon of Victorian literature. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, A Christmas Carol, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Picture of Dorian Gray have far exceeded the works of contemporary favorites – even the likes of Thackery, Trollope, and Kipling – in enduring popularity. They feed a realization in our own society that the promised perfection of modern civilization is, for some, a wishful delusion and, for others, a deceitful pretense: regardless of how we manage or restrict our passions and impulses, human nature is bound to bubble up under the lid, and the more we avoid our deficiencies, the darker the story will become. It is only in confrontation, confession, and reparation that ghosts can finally be exorcised.

Though, it must be admitted, not every ghost is willing to accept these offerings when destiny demands a sacrifice. The following stories illustrate a wide range of outcomes for their haunted characters. Some are able to atone for the past with acts of humility or compassion; some refuse to acknowledge reality, and are accordingly destroyed by the phantoms they have imprisoned in their souls; and some are hapless victims of an inscrutable Fate, impossible to satisfy or understand.

[1] Best remembered for its bundle of artfully ambiguous ghost stories in the “Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” section, and for the Satanic Puritan in “The Devil and Tom Walker” and the ghost pirates in “Golden Dreams”

[2] For example, compare “The Goblins who Stole a Sexton” to both Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow,” or “Baron Koeldwethout’s Apparition” to his “The Spectre Bridegroom,” and compare A Christmas Carol to Hoffmann’s The Golden Flowerpot and “Nutcracker and the Mouse-King,” or Great Expectations to his “The Empty House”

[3] Howe, Daniel Walker. “American Victorianism as a Culture.” American Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 5, 1975, pp. 507–32.

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