The Victorian obsession with Ghosts

No collection of Victorian tales would be complete without a ghost story, hence the inclusion of The Diocesan Exorcist’s Tale.  Of course, there were ghost stories before and after the nineteenth century, but the Victorian period was the golden age. One obvious reason is the proliferation of magazines like Blackwoods and The Strand, all of them eager for tales of the supernatural. The short story is the perfect vehicle for ghosts. It is hard to sustain atmosphere and the willing suspension of disbelief over the length of an entire novel. (Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is an obvious exception here.)

But the proliferation of magazines only explains why so many were written; it does not explain the taste for them in the first place. I think two things were in play. One is the slow decline in religious belief throughout the nineteenth century and, with it, belief in personal immortality. Along with spiritualism (also a mid- to late-Victorian phenomenon), the ghost story might be seen as an attempt to re-instate it or provide a substitute. A second factor is the Romantic view that no grief should go unremarked, unannounced, unmourned  or unavenged. That suffering might be futile was unthinkable.

What put an end to this, I suggest, was the mass slaughter of the First World War. Ghosts of a sort put in a brief appearance at the beginning of the war in the widely believed story of the Angel of Mons, which began life as a magazine story called The Bowmen of Mons by Arthur Machen. As the war progressed it became increasingly difficult to believe that supernatural agencies were involving themselves in the murderous clash of empires, where the dead were numbered in their hundreds of thousands. Compared with the reality of life at the front, the traditional ghost story with its hand-wringing spectres must have looked downright twee.