Ghostly coaches shuttle the mildewed cadavers of its ill-fated occupants; a young orphan is lured to a frosty death by a pale, little girl with a mangled shoulder; a nerve-wracked man spends the night in a room with a fatal past; a restless playboy has a shocking vision of his girlfriend ravished in her boudoir, with her throat cut; a beautiful woman is sold by her uncle to a wealthy corpse living beneath a church...

 

These are the images that haunted their authors' brains during the Victorian Era... 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 classic ghost story, which saw its golden era in the Victorian Age.

 

The unsettling works of Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, W. W. Jacobs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Nesbit, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Marion Crawford, Henry James, M. R. James, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rhoda Broughton, Amelia B. Edwards, and Margaret Oliphant grace this brief homage to that unique literary era of elegance, mystique, and horror.

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TALES INCLUDED in this ANNOTATED EDITION:

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Anonymous: The Story of Clifford House

Braddon: The Cold Embrace

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

Crawford: The Upper Berth

Doyle: The Captain of the Pole-Star; The Brown Hand

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

Edwards: The Phantom Coach

Gaskell: The Old Nurse's Story

Jacobs: Jerry Bundler

Henry James: Owen Wingrave

M. R. James: Lost Hearts

Le Fanu : Schalken the Painter; Squire Toby's Will;

Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

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

John Charrington's Wedding

Oliphant: The Open Door

Stevenson: The Body Snatcher

Stoker: The Judge's House

Wells: The Red Room; The Inexperienced Ghost

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