the complete ghost stories of charles dickens

Living in an age rife with supernatural speculation, he steadily developed the mind of a skeptic. Whether those wits became jaded over time, or the “power of his common sense” gradually sharpened, Dickens would prove much harder to scare in adulthood.

As a schoolboy, he avidly devoured each installment of the horror magazine The Terrific Register, despite how he said the tales made him “unspeakably miserable, and frightened my very wits out of of my head.” And his love–hate relationship with ghost stories continued throughout adolescence. But, she never spared me one word of it…Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”Īlthough jolting shocks to Dickens’ young psyche, these early frights energized his nascent imagination like little else could. “So acutely did I suffer from the ceremony…that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. One of her favorite (and most gruesome) yarns was “Captain Murderer,” which she fiendishly accompanied “by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan.” Of her nightmarish narrations, Dickens would later write: Dickens vividly recalled the terrifying bedtime tales that his nanny, “Miss Mercy,” inflicted on his impressionable mind. Yet that retraining power took time to develop and was certainly absent in Dickens’ childhood – the memories of which, he claimed, were “responsible for most of the dark corners” of his mind.

And such was Dickens’ obsession with the supernatural, Forster was convinced that he would have “fallen into the follies of spiritualism,” had it not been for “the strong retraining power of his common sense.” “He had something of a hankering” after ghosts, remembered his friend and biographer John Forster.

But few know of the personal hauntings that Dickens himself experienced, or how the supernatural influenced his most memorable works. Year after year, popular books and TV adaptations witness his recurrent visitations and remind us of his powerful hold on our minds – relentlessly going strong since his death in 1870.

If any author has haunted the houses of our imagination, then Charles Dickens is the literary spirit par excellence. “Ideas, like ghosts (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before they will explain themselves.” – Charles Dickens

The complete ghost stories of charles dickens