They seemed to belong to another age, an older age, an age when things spiritual were different from this of ours, less certain; an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond denying.
From The Red Room by H.G. Wells
Where Have all the Ghost Stories Gone?
Freud they say killed the ghost when he persuaded us that phantoms come not from without but from within. For Sigmund all mental aberrations originate in the unconscious mind, and even the ultimate spook, God Himself, is really just a manifestation of the fear of an angry father on a grand scale. To put it simply, psychology and not the light of the dawn laid the ghost.
But there’s also a social and political aspect to the decline of the ghost tale. After the Great War people had had enough of death, and although the likes of E.F. Benson and Lady Cynthia Asquith’s editions of The Ghost Book certainly kept the ghost story going for a while, interest in it was in decline and after the Second World War it faded even more. Then there’s the argument that every genre has its day. The ghost story had its glory hour in the Victorian and Edwardian era, so best leave it at that and enjoy the exceptional tales they passed on to us. I mean, it’s not as though there’d be a stampede to buy The Best Ghost Stories of the 1950s. Well, perhaps, but why did the ghost tale flourish in the nineteenth century anyway?
The argument for the historical rise and fall of the ghost story goes like this. The ghost tale came into its own in the short story form and so was perfectly suited to the plethora of magazines and periodicals that were published in the Victorian era. And because education standards were rising there were more child, and later adult, readers. As M.R. James said, “The proper habitat of our game is the magazine, the annual, the periodical publication destined to amuse the family circle.” The short story form is impactful and arguably short is the most practical size for a ghost story which, if it were to go on for longer, might raise questions of credibility and believability. Of course the ghost story needs a fine writer and in the nineteenth century there were the undeniably talented pens of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit, Charlotte Riddell and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all of whom turned their hand to the ghost tale, and in so doing gave it a literary status that to be frank it has not held since.
Then there’s the Victorian interest in all things weird and marvellous. It was a world where séances flourished, mesmerists prospered and phantasmagoria abounded. It’s true that many people had moved from the countryside into a modern, urban environment, but many clung on to the old beliefs and superstitions. And in this sense you could argue that Gothic tales of castles and abbeys acted as a kind of psychological and spiritual counterbalance to the Age of Reason and wide-spread industrialisation. Interestingly, the emerging urban middle classes became fascinated by all things supernatural and in 1882 this was legitimised by the forming of The Society for Psychical Research. Add to this the Victorian obsession with death – think of all that Dickensian funeral porn – and it’s easy to see why the literary world took to the ghost. Only then came the twentieth century and the rise of the rationalist and scientific materialist, with views of the world where, after Darwin, Einstein and Freud, pretty much everything was explainable. Ghosts included.
You could say then that for the last hundred years or so what we’ve had is the ghost story without the ghost. As Elizabeth Bowen said in the introduction of The Second Ghost Book (1952), edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, “Ghosts have grown up.” Her point was that the modern age exploited the horror of what was latent in real life rather than the winding sheets and bones you may come across in castles and graveyards. You might add that modernist ghosts stories tend to be existentially disturbing rather than outright frighteners. And what they’re about, or what even goes on in them, isn’t always clear and so you have to look between the lines for meanings and understanding. An early example is Edith Nesbit’s The Shadow (1905), a tale of implications rather than actualities, where what the shadow is, or what represents or projects, can’t easily be put in words. A previous generation might have simply said ‘sin’, but that’s a word modern readers eschew. Yet it’s that very struggle to find meaning in its ambiguities which makes The Shadow such a brilliant tale – and one that lurks in your mind and stays with you long after you’ve put it down.
All that said, the one thing a straight forward supernatural story doesn’t require is a rational explanation. There’s not need for psychological angst or neurosis complexes. A ghost is a ghost – it’s that simple. And that has certainly been my own attitude putting together my own collection.
