This is a good example of how -- despite my Things-I-Want-To-Read list (and this year I've started writing a more specific one for each month) -- I still find myself heading down byways. They're always interesting byways, mind you. But byways branch, and lead to other byways. There is a danger that you're never on the road to somewhere, but always down a byway.

Anyway, this byway was inspired by another of Audible's Dickens productions. This time it was The Signalman, brilliantly read by Sam Mendes, and enhanced by 3D sound effects. I'd read the story before (the text can be found here), but this treatment really brought it to life.

It's a chilling little tale, which very atmospherically evokes the deep, lonely railway cutting where the signalman carries out his duties, and the dank air of the tunnel that emerges into it. The signalman is haunted by a mysterious ghost. Twice the figure has appeared, and twice its appearance has been followed by a tragedy. Now the figure is back. There has been no incident, but the signalman torments himself trying to foresee what disaster might lie ahead this time -- while having nothing specific enough to report to the authorities.

And sure enough, the story closes with another tragic accident. But this time, the victim is the signalman himself, mown down by a train whose driver unknowingly repeats the words of the ghost. What the signalman saw or didn't see is left ambiguous, but we realize, with a shiver, that "the words the narrator conjured in his own mind as he watched the signalman’s demonstration of the specter’s warning gestures are the very words that the train conductor uttered in trying to warn the signalman of impending danger".

Dickens himself was involved in a rail accident in 1865, the year before he wrote this story. Ten people were killed, and he was involved in helping the injured and dying. Not surprisingly, he found the experience traumatizing.



Dickens had been interested in the paranormal from childhood. According to Emily Dunbar, curator of an exhibition on this aspect of Dickens's life and work, "Although he was really interested in ghosts, I wouldn’t say he really believed in their existence. But he loved the idea of people being scared of ghost stories." Twenty of his books and stories feature ghostly apparitions, but this, she says, was partly a response to public demand. Nevertheless, in 1859, Charles Dickens actively went looking for a place where he might encounter a ghost... In a letter to spiritualist and fellow-writer William Howitt, he asks for suggestions as to "any haunted house whatsoever within the limits of the United Kingdom where nobody can live, eat, drink, stand, lie or sleep without sleep-molestation", and proposed visiting such a place with his friend John Hollingshead. Howitt recommended an inn in Holborn, but it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment...



Of course, this was all very intriguing, so I scurried off to Gutenberg to see what I could turn up. Something called Three Ghost Stories seemed a promising start. The third is The Signalman. The middle story is called The Trial for Murder. Written in 1865, this one is narrated by a banker, who serves as Foreman of the Jury in the murder trial of the title. His peculiarity is that he can see the ghost of the murdered man...

In fact, his initial vision shows him both the murderer and the waxen-faced victim who now pursues him. There are two additional oddities. Firstly, he finds he can convey his supernatural vision to others by means of touch. (His valet, for example, who initially sees no figure in the room he's standing in, suddenly says, "O Lord, yes, sir! A dead man beckoning," when the banker happens to touch him.) And secondly, the man on trial (subsequently convicted) senses there is something hostile about the banker.

So all this creates a nicely eerie atmosphere.

As the trial progresses, the ghost starts to show up in court: "Although the Appearance was not itself perceived by those whom it addressed, its coming close to such persons was invariably attended by some trepidation or disturbance on their part. It seemed to me as if it were prevented, by laws to which I was not amenable, from fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if it could invisibly, dumbly, and darkly overshadow their minds."

When the verdict is pronounced, the ghost disappears: "As I took my place, his eyes rested on me with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great gray veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. As I gave in our verdict, 'Guilty,' the veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty."

Philip Allingham maintains that this story was a collaborative endeavour, involving Dickens and his son-in-law, Charles Allston Collins (brother of Wilkie Collins), who also wrote another of the stories in the compilation it appeared in (entitled Dr Marigold's Prescriptions).



The first component of Three Ghost Stories was a bit bewildering. It's called The Haunted House, and consists of a framing story called The Mortals in the House, and another story called The Ghost in Master B's Room.

A bit of internet-burrowing revealed that these extracts were part of a story series published in the weekly All the Year Round in 1859. It was the "Extra Christmas Number", to be precise, which contained "the amount of TWO ORDINARY NUMBERS", and cost 4d. That's four old pence, or -- for those who grew up only with decimal currency, rather than those mind-stretching pounds, shillings, and pence -- a third of a shilling, which means you could buy 60 of these publications for a pound...).

The compilation is described as being "conducted by Charles Dickens" (as, indeed, was the later Dr Marigold collection). In the guise of the narrator, John, Dickens wrote the opening and closing sections, plus one of the substantive chapters; other noted contributors are Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell.

The full text is available here.



Call me snobby (or at least still capable of calling up some remnants of byway-resistance), but I focused on the contributions by Dickens, Collins, and Gaskell, rather than those by Hesba Stretton, George Augustus Sala, and Adelaide Anne Procter (this last is entirely in verse...).

Dickens's scene-setter (The Mortals in the House) is absolutely hilarious. Our narrator (John, you will recall) is looking for a place in the country where he can rest and recuperate, and is made aware of a house that is reputed to be haunted. He staggers off the train pretty tired, having been incommoded by the man opposite, who not only has "several legs too many, and all of them too long", but also has the disconcerting habit of writing down spiritual messages. The spirits he communes with, sadly, speak in cliches, and apparently can't spell: "'A bird in the hand,' said the gentleman, reading his last entry with great solemnity, 'is worth two in the Bosh.' 'Truly I am of the same opinion', said I; 'but shouldn't it be Bush?' 'It came to me, Bosh,' returned the gentleman."

So John goes wearily off to take a look at the outside of the house, which has a neglected and melancholy aspect: "I find the early morning to be my most ghostly time. Any house would be more or less haunted, to me in the early morning." The landlord of the village inn insists he wouldn't sleep in it; Ikey, the inn servant, claims he has seen a hooded woman with an owl (or least the owl). But John has lived in two haunted houses before, and not suffered unduly, so he is not deterred.

He gets the keys, and does a tour of the inside. It's a film-maker's dream: "transcendently dismal... doleful... damp... the gloomy victim of that indescribable decay which settles on all the work of man's hands whenever it's not turned to man's account." But he goes ahead and rents it, and arrives with his sister and their servants in mid-October. It's not long before the servants start to "see things", and by 10 pm, one of them had needed the application of as much vinegar "as would pickle a handsome salmon".

Things don't improve: "As to our nightly life, the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us, and there is no such contagion under the sky. Hooded woman? According to the accounts, we were in a perfect Convent of hooded women. Noises? ... You can fill any house with noises, if you will, until you have a noise for every nerve in your nervous system... The women (their noses in a chronic state of excoriation from smelling-salts) were always primed and loaded for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair-triggers."

The sister then has an idea. Let's get rid of the servants, she says (apart from Bottles, the stable-man, who is deaf, and therefore incapable of taking fright at other people's stories); let's invite a few friends for a three-month house-party, and shift for ourselves. So they do. The guests assemble, draw lots for the bedrooms, share out the household duties, and resolve to keep any ghostly visitations to themselves until Twelfth Night. The friends are all very practical, and sort out any noisy things that might be misinterpreted as ghosts. "The engagement among us was faithfully kept, and nobody revealed anything. All we knew was, if anyone's room were haunted, no one looked the worse for it."



This is vintage Dickens, observant and funny. But after that, the ghost stories themselves are a teentsy bit of a let-down. In fact, the characters created by Dickens, Collins, and Gaskell (host John, old sailor Nat Beaver, and solicitor Mr Undery, respectively) all sidestep any actual ghosts. The first is haunted by the ghost of his own childhood; the second by the memory of something terrible that happened to him; and the third by the recollection of a horrible tale of filial ingratitude that has been passed on to him by a judge.

Dickens's story (The Ghost in Master B's Room) is perhaps the most poignant. Indeed, Peter Ackroyd, in an introduction to the 2002 edition, writes: "The melancholy within [this story] consorts very well with the resignation of The Mortals in the House. Both of them are suffused with the novelist's essential unhappiness towards the end of his life, when he discovered that his childhood agonies had never really left him. As a document of self-revelation, The Haunted House is of the utmost significance for anyone interested in exploring the genius of Charles Dickens."

In the story, we see John remembering his carefree days at school, at the age of eight or nine. He plays at "seraglios" with the one little boy and eight little girls in his class (Ackroyd again: "[It] is all in the worst possible taste, and smacks of mid-Victorian sentimentality at its most insidious, but it is curious and instructive nonetheless"). Into the middle of this colourful and imaginative fun, however, comes the announcement of his father's death, a tragedy compounded by the debts he had left behind. Our narrator was "sent to a great, cold, bare school of big boys; where everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough; where everybody, large and small, was cruel". He is therefore haunted by "the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief".

This story definitely reflects something of Dickens's own life: "His origins were middle class, if of a newfound and precarious respectability... His father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was well paid, but his extravagance and ineptitude often brought the family to financial embarrassment or disaster... In 1824 the family reached bottom. Charles, the eldest son, had been withdrawn from school and was now set to manual work in a factory, and his father went to prison for debt. These shocks deeply affected Charles. Though abhorring this brief descent into the working class, he began to gain that sympathetic knowledge of its life and privations that informed his writings. Also, the images of the prison and of the lost, oppressed, or bewildered child recur in many novels."



The epilogue (The Ghost in the Corner Room) tells of the romance that has flowered between one of the guests and the narrator's sister. Effectively, they are haunting each other.

The closing lines ram home the point of the book: "In a word, we lived our term out, most happily, and were never for a moment haunted by anything more disagreeable than our own imaginations and remembrances." After the huge frisson of The Signalman, and the little spine-tingle of The Trial for Murder, you can't help but feel a tiny bit cheated...

Nevertheless, this whole convoluted byway has rekindled my interest in all these writers, so there will, for sure, be more to come.