Ghostly coaches shuttling the mildewed cadavers of its ill-fated occupants; a young orphan being lured to a frosty death by a pale, little girl with a mangled shoulder; a man spends the night in a room with a fatal past; a restless ne'er-do-well recognizes his fiancee with her throat cut in a twilit vision; a beautiful woman is sold by her uncle to a corpse living beneath a church...

 

These are the images that haunted their authors' brains and found their way into the Golden Age of the British ghost story... As industrial Britain steamed away from its feudal-agrarian past, a sense of self-deceit and insecurity - a lingering of violent potential and national shame - pervaded the collective unconscious of the world's preeminent empire. This psychological malaise manifested itself in the English ghost story, which saw its golden era in the Victorian Age. The unsettling works of Dickens, Gaskell, Blackwood, Hardy, Nesbit, Conan Doyle, M. R. James, Braddon, Broughton, O'Donnell, Edwards, Oliphant, Wells, and Le Fanu grace this brief homage to that unique literary era of elegance, mystique, and horror.

​

TALES INCLUDED in this ANNOTATED EDITION:

​

Braddon: The Cold Embrace

Broughton: Nothing But the Truth; Behold, It Was a Dream

Conan Doyle: The Brown Hand

Dickens: The Signal-Man; To Be Read at Dusk; A Christmas Tree

Edwards: The Phantom Coach

Gaskell: The Old Nurse's Story

Hardy: The Superstitious Man's Story

M. R. James: Lost Hearts

Le Fanu : Schalken the Painter; Disturbances in Aungier St

Nesbit: Man-Size in Marble; Mystery of the Semi-Detached

O'Donnell: The Top Attic

Oliphant: The Open Door

Wells: The Red Room

​

​