12 Victorian Ghost Stories

Victorian writers excelled at the ghost story. Here editor Michael Cox brings together well wrought tales of haunted houses, vengeful spirits, spectral warnings, invisible antagonists, and motiveless malignity from beyond the grave. Traditional in form but inventive and infused with a relish of the supernatural, these classic ghost stories still retain their original power to unsettle and surprise.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Collection of thirty-five English ghost stories written during the Victorian Era.

This book argues that theology is central to an understanding of the literary ghost story. Victorian ghost stories have traditionally been read in the context of agnosticism – as stories which reveal a society struggling with Christian orthodoxy in a new ‘Enlightened’ world. This book, however, uses theological ideas from St Augustine through to modern theologians to identify a theological journey taken by the protagonists of such stories, and charts each stage of this journey through the short stories it examines. It also proposes a theory of reader participation which creates an imaginary space in which modern epistemology is suspended. The book studies the work of four major authors of the supernatural tale: Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James.

The first-ever collection of Victorian Christmas ghost stories, culled from rare 19th-century periodicals During the Victorian era, it became traditional for publishers of newspapers and magazines to print ghost stories during the Christmas season for chilling winter reading by the fireside or candlelight. Now for the first time thirteen of these tales are collected here, including a wide range of stories from a diverse group of authors, some well-known, others anonymous or forgotten. Readers whose only previous experience with Victorian Christmas ghost stories has been Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" will be surprised and delighted at the astonishing variety of ghostly tales in this volume. "In the sickly light I saw it lying on the bed, with its grim head on the pillow. A man? Or a corpse arisen from its unhallowed grave, and awaiting the demon that animated it?" - John Berwick Harwood, "Horror: A True Tale" "Suddenly I aroused with a start and as ghostly a thrill of horror as ever I remember to have felt in my life. Something--what, I knew not--seemed near, something nameless, but unutterably awful." - Ada Buisson, "The Ghost's Summons" "There was no longer any question what she was, or any thought of her being a living being. Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived." - Walter Scott, "The Tapestried Chamber"

Ghostly coaches shuttling the mildewed cadavers of its ill-fated occupants; a young orphan being lured to a frosty death by a pale, little girl with a mangled shoulder; a man spends the night in a room with a fatal past; a restless ne'er-do-well recognizes his fiancee with her throat cut in a twilit vision; a beautiful woman is sold by her uncle to a corpse living beneath a church... These are the images that haunted their authors' brains and found their way into the Golden Age of the British ghost story... As industrial Britain steamed away from its feudal-agrarian past, a sense of self-deceit and insecurity - a lingering of violent potential and national shame - pervaded the collective unconscious of the world's preeminent empire. This psychological malaise manifested itself in the English ghost story, which saw its golden era in the Victorian Age. The unsettling works of Dickens, Gaskell, Blackwood, Hardy, Nesbit, Conan Doyle, M. R. James, Braddon, Broughton, Oliphant, Wells, and Le Fanu grace this brief homage to that unique literary era of elegance, mystique, and horror.

This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter's night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The unquiet souls of the dead, both as fictional creations and as 'real' apparitions, roam the pages of this haunting selection of ghost stories by Rex Collings. Some of these stories are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of tales of the supernatural. There are stories from distant lands - 'Fisher's Ghost' by John Lang is set in Australia and 'A Ghostly Manifestation' by 'A Clergyman' is set in Calcutta. In this selection, Sir Walter Scott (a Victorian in spirit if not in fact), keeps company with Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and other illustrious masters of the genre.

By flickering candlelight, these haunting tales were carefully penned by some of greatest writers of the Victorian era, including Sheridan Le Fanu, Catherine Crowe and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The Victorian era has been dubbed the "Golden Age of the Ghost Story", producing some of the most iconic and masterful ghost stories the genre has ever seen. In this exquisite collection, you will find 14 terrifying tales which have been haunting readers for more than a century. Be transported to cobwebbed crypts, creaking manor houses, and dusky moors, where peril lies just around the corner. Includes: • The Dream - Sheridan Le Fanu • The Italian's Story - Catherine Crowe • Eveline's Visitant - Mary Elizabeth Braddon • The Body Snatcher - Rudyard Kipling • And many more! Perfect for horror lovers, these classic ghost stories are sure to terrify and entertain in equal measure.