The Story of Clifford House (a Ghost Story by an Anonymous Victorian Woman): A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis

The following story is perhaps most remarkable because we are not sure who wrote it. It was published in the first edition of Mary E. Braddon’s Christmas periodical, The Mistletoe Bough, a fiction magazine which ran successfully for fourteen years, every December, and was liberally graced with ghost stories and tales of the supernatural.

In the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Michael A. Cox notes acknowledges that while there is no evidence as to who may have penned the story, “it is tempting to suppose [that it] was written by Miss Braddon herself.” Indeed, the tale contains a number of elements which were common to Braddon’s socially-conscious, sardonic tales. It’s religious sensibilities, maternal voice, and relatable pathos, however, are reminiscent of Oliphant, and its detailed social realism, slow-burning tension, and insidious ghosts recall Broughton’s style.

Arguments could also be made that its stark juxtaposition of middleclass morality and supernatural savagery point to Edwards, or that its emphasis on financial concerns and real estate harken to Charlotte Riddell.

All we can say for certain is that it was almost certainly a female writer, probably older than thirty, familiar with upper middle-class society (regardless of whether she was born into it), with a knowing knack for describing the joys and annoyances of motherhood and married life, willing to depict Christian theology in a positive light, and open to writing ghost stories with dark, unresolved backstories. 

In any case, I have included this story, in part, as a sort of “tomb of the unknown soldier” to the many brilliant Victorian women who elevated the ghost story from maudlin folklore into literary fiction. While I have my own suspicions as to who the author might have been, we will allow that it any number of talented female writers could have submitted it to Braddon’s inaugural edition of The Mistletoe Bough.  

II.

 The name of the publication, itself, comes from the Victorians’ most popular Christmas horror story – more beloved, even, than A Christmas Carol. “The Legend of the Mistletoe Bough” was an 1828 poem written by T. H. Bayly, based on Samuel Rogers’ 1822 poem “Ginevra,” which was itself inspired by a folkloric rumor that was attached to a number of English manors as early as the 18^th century.

The legend goes that one Christmas – during a vaguely pre-industrial century, seemingly between the Tudor and Georgian eras – a wedding banquet was being held in an established, old country mansion. The bride was young, beautiful, and sprightly – an arch coquette – who was tired of being pestered by the guests, so she arranged to play hide-and-seek with her bridegroom in an effort to get some much-needed alone time.

In a dark, rarely used lumber room, she found a long, coffin-shaped chest – the perfect hiding place. Her lover sought her all day, and soon the guests joined in the search, which became frantic – stretching out for days and weeks before her disappearance was accepted as an unsolved mystery: was she abducted by a suitor, did she flee the marriage, or was she spirited away by fairies?

Half a century later, the room with the chest was being cleaned out when another girlish flirt – “as young, as thoughtless as [the bride]” – opened the lid to discover a skeleton enshrouded in a wedding dress and veil. The lid to the menacing antique had a secret spring-lock which snapped shut behind her, and she had suffocated in the close air.

The macabre story, with its creepy, urban-legend-like elements, became a popular sensation, and once it was set to music, it became “one of the most popular songs ever written … known by heart by many,” and its “solemn chanting [became] a national occurrence at Christmas.”

I describe this little poem in such detail because there are several parallels in “The Story of Clifford House.” Both narratives describe married bliss interrupted by innocent missteps, both depict joyful transitions (a wedding banquet; a move into a beautiful new house) which are soured by calamity, and both involve stately homes which harbor macabre secrets.

Although “The Story of Clifford House” is most certainly not an adaptation of “The Legend of the Mistletoe Bough,” it shares its essentially Victorian ethos: an anxiety surrounding the perils of change, the dangers of hubris, and the cruel specter of disappointed hopes. 

SUMMARY

The unnamed narrator of “The Story of Clifford House,” a happily married young woman named Helen Russell, begins by recalling with dread the period shortly after her marriage when she and her husband George rented a grand London townhouse called Clifford House. Having grown temporarily weary of the beauties of their idyllic country estate, Helen persuades George to take a fashionable town residence for the season. After inspecting several disappointing homes, they are shown Clifford House, an imposing and elegant mansion with spacious rooms, luxurious appointments, and an unusually low rent.

Although pleased by the house’s beauty, Helen is disturbed by an odd chill in the dressing-room adjoining the principal bedroom, while the nervous house-agent’s clerk behaves strangely and seems reluctant to linger upstairs. George jokes that there must be “a screw loose somewhere” to explain the suspiciously cheap price.

Despite these misgivings, the Russells move into Clifford House with their two young children and servants. Helen delights in her beautiful dressing-room, particularly its immense mirror, and feels grateful for her fortunate life. Yet, on the first evening, something strange occurs. While admiring herself in the mirror, dressed in George’s favorite bronze-brown silk gown, she notices George suddenly recoil in fright as if struck by something unseen. Though he dismisses it awkwardly—claiming he merely bumped himself—Helen suspects he is concealing the truth.

Later that same night, Helen experiences her first unmistakable terror. Entering her brightly lit dressing-room, she glimpses reflected in the mirror the figure of a strange woman: “a tall woman, strongly built, and broad-shouldered,” with “light hair hanging in a disordered manner” and “a white, hard, masculine face” fixed upon the doorway with “keen glittering” eyes. In the next instant, the figure vanishes. Though shaken, Helen tries to dismiss the experience as imagination caused by fatigue.

In daylight, Clifford House appears perfectly cheerful and harmless, and several peaceful weeks pass. Helen befriends a neighbour, the widowed Mrs Carmichael, who reacts oddly when Helen warmly praises the house. The mystery deepens one night when Helen visits the nursery and finds the children’s nurse, Mary, sitting upright in bed, terrified and near collapse.

Crying, “Oh, mistress, I am dying!” Mary falls senseless. When a doctor arrives, the servants reluctantly confess that Mary had feared seeing “the ghost,” and that several servants—including the butler and cook—have already glimpsed a spectral woman with “fair hair all over her shoulders.” Though George angrily mocks their fears, Helen privately realizes the apparition matches the figure she herself saw.

Mary later explains that she heard footsteps and struggling outside the nursery, followed by a woman’s face peering in at the children with “wicked gleaming eyes” and yellow hair. Too frightened to continue in service, Mary departs for recovery. A replacement nurse, Mrs Hamley, proves calm and practical. When Helen nervously alludes to the house’s reputation, Mrs Hamley matter-of-factly admits she believes in spirits and has heard troubling stories about Clifford House, though she avoids elaborating.

Time passes quietly, and Helen’s health begins to suffer under the strain of London society. One oppressive summer evening, while George attends a dinner party without her, Helen remains alone in the darkened house. Half asleep in the drawing-room, she hears distant voices, quarrelling, doors slamming, and hurried footsteps overhead. Believing the servants are behaving irresponsibly and may wake the children, she hurries upstairs.

On the staircase, she suddenly encounters two women rushing past her in silence. One resembles the nurse fleeing in terror; behind her comes the dreadful apparition herself: the tall woman with “coarse, disordered, yellow hair,” “steel-blue eyes,” and an expression of inhuman malice. The figures vanish soundlessly into the shadows. Frozen with horror, Helen is eventually found trembling by Mrs Hamley and the cook. She finally confesses the truth to George, insisting, “We must leave the house, George. I should die here very soon.”

George reluctantly agrees that they should eventually leave, though he stubbornly attributes the disturbances to trickery or malicious interference. Yet the servants soon threaten mutiny after hearing “talked and shrieked and run and raced” throughout the house during the night. Only Mrs Hamley remains composed, encouraging them not to fear “wandering, poor, lonely souls.”

Though the manifestations cease for weeks, George himself deteriorates. Once cheerful and vigorous, he grows nervous, sleepless, and irritable, though he denies illness. Helen notices how thin and haggard he has become. Eventually she persuades him they should abandon London and return to the country.

Before they can leave, however, disaster strikes. One evening, after an agitated conversation about the haunting, George suddenly hears sounds overhead. Grabbing a loaded revolver, he slips into the hall while Helen follows anxiously. They hear violent footsteps, struggling, sobbing, and furious quarrelling echoing impossibly throughout the house. Then the sounds rush toward them. George bounds upstairs “like a tiger,” revolver in hand.

Moments later Helen witnesses a horrifying scene. George staggers backward while firing two shots. Through drifting smoke she sees “the streaming yellow hair and steel-blue eyes” of the ghostly woman, apparently dragging another struggling figure behind her. Then comes “the dreadful cry of a man in mortal terror” as George crashes backward down the stairs, gravely injured.

For weeks he lies near death with a shattered limb and severe fever. Helen herself nearly collapses under the strain. At last, when autumn arrives, George recovers enough for them to return to their peaceful Hertfordshire home, declaring, “I shall never get better in this house.”

Only afterward does their physician explain Clifford House’s dreadful history. Decades earlier, the house had belonged to two half-sisters of vicious character. The elder was tall, fierce, and masculine, with coarse fair hair and blazing blue eyes; the younger was dark-haired, deceitful, and vain. Rivalry over an admirer turned their bitterness deadly. When the younger sister announced her impending marriage, the elder attacked her in a jealous fury. The women struggled through the house until the elder overtook her sister on the staircase and strangled her to death. Arrested soon after, the murderess killed herself in prison by poison.

George finally confesses the truth: from the very first night he, too, had been haunted by terrifying sights and sounds but concealed them to protect Helen. During the final encounter, he saw “the devilish murderess face” descending toward him, dragging the writhing form of her victim. The horror had been so unbearable, he says, that “if there had been a flaming furnace beside me I think I should have leaped into it to escape that awful sight.”

Years later, the Russells still visit London, but never again take a town house, nor willingly speak of the terrible days spent at Clifford House.

ANALYSIS

The real horror of Clifford House is the way in which it undermines the false hopes of security which middleclass diligence was supposed to afford those families who were fortunate enough to be socially mobile. George and Helen are not nobility and don’t appear to come from the landed aristocracy: he was an officer in the British Army but seems to have retired from the service before his prime (he is still young and energetic – not quite in middle age) suggesting that he was not a career officer, unlike the second sons of noble families who dedicated their lives to becoming generals or admirals. Instead, it would appear that George is likely a member of the country gentry (hence the beloved-if-modest country seat which they abandoned for town life) who has leveraged lucky investments in futures and real estate into a profitable income.

Like typical members of the Victorian nouveau riche, they are plagued with weaselly real estate agents, gossipy neighbors, sketchy investments, marital strains, servant drama, tedious social obligations, and the ubiquitous cycle of keeping up with the Jonses. And yet, they have done well for themselves by following the conventional program of for aspirational aristocrats: they married young, had beautiful and healthy children, participated enthusiastically in London society, remained faithful to the Church of England (having regular times of prayer at home even beyond simply attending Sunday services), invested in the British economy, and took a house in Town even though they had a perfectly good home in the country in order to network with the other family heads.

So many of these choices are designed to demonstrate a willingness to “play along nicely” with the society gatekeepers of Britain’s upper echelons. Life could be pleasant and comfortable without running the West

London rat race, but by rubbing shoulders with their peers, they demonstrate fealty to their social betters, in hopes of currying favor and rising up the ranks of society.

II.

Compare this to the life choices of Clifford House’s original tenant: a “bad man, led a bad wild life, and died in a fit brought on by drunkenness” whose fortune was made through “ill-gotten” means (possibly through the slave trade or through dishonest business practices, both of which merited this Victorian euphemism), and whose sexual libertinism left him with two feuding, illegitimate daughters who have inherited his selfish, spiteful personality. These women and their father have done everything the “wrong” way, yet have also ended up in the same spot as George and Ellen, living in the luxurious Clifford House and rubbing shoulders with the upper set.

Advancement, then, the author suggests, is less about virtue and merit and more about luck and motivation. The haunting represents the way in which determined, upwardly mobile, middle-class families were disturbed by the corruption they found in the high society to which the aspired: once they “made it,” they found that many of their new neighbors were conniving, vicious, and unethical, and that their wealth was frequently acquired through degrading or shameful means.

Like the blissful honeymooners in Edith Nesbit’s later story “Man-Size in Marble” (or her reckless lovers in “The Semi-Detached,” both printed here) George and Ellen find themselves haunted by the disappointment of dearly held hopes: of not being able to “have it all,” of “making it” yet at the cost of their souls, of rising to the level of their social betters while forfeiting their health, happiness, and virtue.

III.

Indeed, it is important to note that the two ghosts and the two spouses serve as Doppelgängers to one another: the dead couple presaging the possible fate of the living one. The emphasis on the elder sister’s androgynous masculinity is likely to strike modern readers as homophobic or transphobic, but the average Victorian reader would be unlikely to think about her sexual orientation; instead, they would see her as a forceful, jealous, domineering person whose disordered femineity (as they would view it: viz., she is violent, greedy, uncaring, and possessive) is the side effect of her father’s disordered masculinity (viz., he lacks self-control, paternal compassion, and social engagement).

As such, her brutal treatment of her younger, slighter, brunette sister stands both in comparison and in contrast to George’s mixed treatment of his younger, slighter, brunette wife, whose resemblance to the murdered sibling appears to agitate the killer’s ghost. On the positive side, he is not abusive or jealous, and he is obviously indulgent to and smitten with his little “Maid Marian.” However, from the outset, George is dismissive, domineering, and sometimes cold, and his personality gradually changes during his residence in Clifford House: he grows terser, more dismissive, and even deceitful, and he greedily and intemperately begins to seek out risky speculations.

On Ellen’s end, she also seems to have something in common with the younger sister who “repaid” her sibling’s “tyranni[cal]” treatment by indulging in her pride with “crafty selfishness.” Neither spouse is remotely as insidious as their counterpart, but each shares their essential vices: Ellen and the brunette are vapid and vain, and George and the blonde are contemptuous and controlling. While he never appears to threaten Ellen with violence, a structuralist reading of the story would seem to indicate that – had George not fought back against the ghost, and had the couple stayed at Clifford House – Ellen may have been in just as much peril from her husband as from the spirits.

IV.

One nagging clue that favors this interpretation is that the seemingly in-the-know, supernaturally savvy nursemaid assures them repeatedly that ghosts pose no danger to living people who fear God and do their duty. She is never proven entirely wrong and the author elevates her as the voice of reason. What – or who – then, is the peril of Clifford House, if not the increasingly disengaged George, an anxious war veteran who keeps a pistol and sabre, is already chronically dismissive of his wife at the very beginning of the story, has begun making reckless financial choices, and whose mental health is deteriorating so badly that his male, Victorian doctor goes to his wife behind his back to voice his concerns?

The haunting of Clifford House seems to warn George and Ellen away from pouring themselves into the selfish lifestyles of the socially-conscious nouveau riche by illustrating the risks which material decadence can pose to moral character. As with the “Legend of the Mistletoe Bough,” they learn that even fine, old houses and fine, old families, and fine, old chests can hide skeletons, and that all that glitters is not gold. Indeed, both stories focus on the dangers of deception within marriage: the bride in the legend preens her vanity by sexually teasing her groom by hiding from him on the wedding day, just as George barricades his self-pride by hiding his anxieties from his wife, and both are driven towards perils as a result of their self-imposed isolation.

Fortunately, unlike the bride in the legend (or the equally doomed honeymooners in “Man-Size in Marble”), George isn’t too late to return to his wife with his real feelings. Shaken out of their thirst to keep up with the Joneses, instead of finding a better house, they return to their manageable country house and focus on their marriage and parenting instead, leaving the ghosts of Clifford House to continue their unending cycle of desire, disappointment, rage, and revenge.           

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated edition of the very best, essential Victorian ghost stories HERE!