Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

An engraving by R. Graves entitled 'The Ghost Story', circa 1870.

In his first full-length novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Charles Dickens gave us a peculiarly Victorian view of the Christmas tradition. The host of a Yuletide gathering, Mr. Wardle of Dingley Dell, informs his guests that “Everybody sits down with us on Christmas Eve, as you see them now — servants and all; and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories”. So begins a long association of the traditional ghost story with Christmas-time; a tradition that has largely died out, but one that should be revived.

Of course, the tradition of telling spooky stories at Christmas is much older than Dickens. It was already well-established in the early nineteenth century. In Old Christmas (from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 1819), Washington Irving describes a busy Yuletide fireside with the parson “dealing forth strange accounts of popular superstitions and legends of the surrounding country”. The tradition may be even older than this. Shakespeare wrote in 1611 “a sad tale’s best for winter: I have one. Of sprites and goblins”, while his contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote in his play The Jew of Malta (1589);

           Now I remember those old women’s words,
           Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales,
           And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night.

Now, even though contemporary scholars have not unearthed any conclusive link between the ghost story and Christmas festivities prior to the Victorian era (or indeed prior to Dickens), there clearly is (and has been) a link between the dark and dismal days of winter and tales of superstition and fantasy. Hence, Marlowe’s term ‘winter’s tale’; also used by Joseph Glanvill in his Saducismus Triumphatis (1681); a treatise on witchcraft in which he warns the reader not to dismiss the existence of supernatural powers as “meer Winter Tales, or Old Wives fables”.

This should be expected; winter is a time of death, when traditionally the bridge between the real world and that of the ancestors is shortest. It is not surprising that festivals of death, rebirth and superstition (Hallowe’en, Walpurgisnacht, Beltane etc.) occur during late autumn, winter or early spring. And it takes no stretch of the imagination to suppose that stories of uncertainty, fear, the spirit-world, evil apparitions and so on could have evolved in natural association with darkness and wintertime in the psyche of the human animal. Chilling tales for chilling times. So, as ‘Jack Frost nibbles at your nose’, the lands are blanketed by a white peril, the fruits of the land are scarce, and nights are cold and long, we naturally turn to each other, regaling each other with frightening tales, as we huddle around the fireside. Is it such a leap to associate a specific winter festival, that of Christmas, with those chilling discourses?

Of course, there is already a connection between Christmas and the ancient pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice or Midwinter (the shortest day of the year). There is no documentary evidence that Christmas was celebrated on 25th December before 336 AD and it is widely held that this tradition arose simply because it is nine months after the Annunciation, which by tradition was held to be 25th March by early Christians. It may have been convenient that 25th December was close to the dates of the Winter Solstice and the ancient pagan Roman midwinter festivals called ‘Saturnalia’ or ‘Dies Natalis Solis Invicti’. The word ‘yule’ comes from a Germanic word originally referring to the midwinter celebrations, not to Christmas itself. So, again, there is a good case for drawing associations between ‘winter tales’ and ‘winter festivals’; and by extension, between ‘ghost stories’ and ‘Christmas’.

But, it is probably true to say that Charles Dickens himself was responsible for formalising this loose association in the mind of the Victorian reader. Dickens’s allusion to his idea of a traditional Christmas in The Pickwick Papers is encapsulated in only two short chapters. But, the chapter entitled The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, told by the host Mr. Wardle, is a perfect

An illustration by John Leech for Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, 1843.

example of how Dickens began to meld together the traditions of Christmas with the traditions of story-telling, particularly the telling of spooky or gruesome tales of the macabre. In fact, it is often said that this chapter of The Pickwick Papers is actually the embryo of Dickens’s much more popular (and widely known) tale A Christmas Carol (1843). In ‘Goblins’ the gravedigger (a prototype of Scrooge) is kidnapped (by goblins instead of the ghost of Marley and his friends), but with the same result; a positive change in his disposition to himself and others.

The connection forged by Dickens has never since been broken. A Christmas Carol was an instant bestseller, and remains so to this day, having been adapted many times for film, TV, stage and opera. The story was not only a spooky yarn, it was allegorical, nostalgic and yet full of contemporary themes such as poverty, social injustice and redemption, exploring many of the prevalent social and philosophical ideologies of the early 1840s. It presented to the Victorian palate a sense of community, a great humanitarian yarn, with some ghosts thrown in for good measure. It was extraordinarily timely – and the Victorians lapped it up.

A Christmas Carol was inspired by Dickens’s own childhood and his own longing for a lost Christmas tradition, which may never have existed, except in his own imagination and prose. Three years before the novella was published, Queen Victoria had married Prince Albert. A German style of celebrating Christmas, which Albert had brought to the family home, was immediately popular – the sending of Christmas cards, the giving of gifts (which had hitherto been associated with Epiphany in January) and the decorating of Christmas trees. Dickens himself seems to be responsible for our association of snow-covered landscapes with Yuletide celebrations. Even though the UK, for example, only saw seven white Christmases in the 20th century, our Christmas cards often depict a snowy Christmas scene. Admittedly, it may be that Dickens had lived his own childhood through some particularly harsh winters (six of his first nine Christmas’s had been white) and he had carried this association with him through adulthood – and into his writing. In both The Pickwick Papers and the earlier Sketches by Boz (1833), Dickens had already alluded to this idealised Christmas tradition, a secular tradition, full of song, snow and candles, which was later to be born fully-formed in A Christmas Carol.

It is important to remember that, prior to Dickens, the traditions of Christmas were essentially dying out in England. In the mid-17th century, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, attempted to abolish the celebration of Christmas, since, he argued, the Bible did not instruct Christians to do so. This had a long-lasting effect and although Christmas continued to be observed by the pious, its traditions had largely succumbed by Dickens’s time. It can therefore be argued that Dickens not only established the connection between ghostly tales and Christmas, but also helped in the establishment of many of our modern Christmas traditions, with a bit of help from Victoria and Albert and others.

Dickens would continue to bolster the claim that Christmas was a time for telling ghost stories. Many of the greatest spooky tales of the Victorian era are to be found in the Christmas editions of popular periodicals; including but not limited to Dickens’s All The Year Round and Household Words. A more cynical view of this fact is that it was simply a form of commercialisation. These seasonal narratives were often created specifically for the Christmas market which was dominated by books and periodicals designed for giving as gifts. So, Dickens actually helped turn a secular tradition, or the even older oral tradition, into a commercial product. Cynicism aside, it is clear that the continuing popularity of the ghost story genre was a direct result of this rise in consumerism (something perhaps even more relevant today than then) and the publication of periodical literature. In fact, the abolition of Britain’s press taxation laws from 1849 onwards is sometimes cited as a reason for the increase in literacy levels in the late nineteenth century. It certainly made the popular press, and periodicals in particular, more affordable (and therefore more profitable) and hence more available.

Following the success of A Christmas Carol, Dickens published four more ghostly books specifically aimed at the Christmas market; The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man (1848). In the decade following these, the anti-gothic flavour of the Victorian ghost story reached its pinnacle. Although periodicals published macabre tales throughout the year, their Christmas numbers were incomplete without a ghost story. Dickens himself published nine Christmas editions of his journal Household Words from 1850 to 1858. Eventually other periodicals followed suit, such as The Argosy, Belgravia, The Cornhill Magazine, Temple Bar and St James’s Magazine among many others. The huge popularity of these seasonal issues bolstered and propagated this ‘new tradition’ of the Christmas ghost story. In Dickens’s 1850 Christmas number of Household Words he clearly states his position to the reader. In that issue, which also included the famous Christmas ghost story The Old Nurse’s Story by Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens contributes the prose piece entitled A Christmas Tree; a nostalgic, whimsical (and probably half-invented) rendition of Dickens’s own concept (and longing) for a Christmas tradition. In that piece Dickens tellingly writes, “There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories — Ghost Stories, or more shame for us — round the Christmas fire”, before explaining precisely what should happen in our Christmas spooky tale. A Christmas Tree, and the part often reproduced under the title Telling Winter Stories, is a relevant and crucial statement of where our association of ghosts with Christmas originates.

The cover of James Hain Friswell's 'Ghost Stories' (1856)

The ‘invented’ Dickensian tradition eventually became accepted as widespread and normal. Jerome K. Jerome says, in his introduction to his 1891 collection of stories, Told After Supper; “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories”. In 1898, Henry James wrote in his story The Turn of the Screw, “The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be…”.

Of course, the Christmas ghost story genre did not end with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. M. R. James, the recognised master of the modern ghost story, prefaced his 1904 collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, with the words “I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends, usually at the seasons of Christmas”. James certainly increased the popularity of the ghost story and in so doing merely added weight to the belief that Christmas was the time to tell them. Ever since, throughout the twentieth century, ghost stories have appeared with a Christmas theme. Although it’s relevance has changed over time, and has largely died out, there are still vestiges of this tradition today. In Andy Williams’s 1963 recording, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of Year, he sings “There’ll be scary ghost stories, And tales of the glories, of Christmas long, long ago”. And who can deny the importance of the essential winter-theme in Stephen King’s The Shining.

If you want to revive the Victorian passion for Christmas Ghosts, you can read a selection of twenty traditional Victorian ghost stories, all set at or around Christmas, in The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Volume 2). Wait until the dark of the snowy night (preferably on Christmas Eve), lock the doors, shutter the windows, light the fire, sit with your back to the wall and bury yourself in the Victorian macabre. Try not to let the creaking floorboards, the distant howl of a dog, the chill breeze that caresses the candle, the shadows in the far recesses of your room, disturb your concentration.