"The Haunted House" is a set of short stories published in 1859 for the weekly periodical All the Year Round. [1] It was "Conducted by Charles Dickens", with Charles Dickens writing the opening and closing stories, framing stories by Dickens himself and five other authors. [1]
The stories appeared in the Extra Christmas Number on 13 December 1859. Dickens began a tradition of Christmas publications with A Christmas Carol in 1843 and his Christmas stories soon became a national institution. The Haunted House was his 1859 offering.
In Dickens's opening story, The Mortals in the House, the narrator's ("John") health "required a temporary residence in the country." Knowing this, a friend of the narrator had chanced to drive by the house—situated close to a railroad stop mid-way between Northern England and London—and had written to the narrator suggesting he travel down from the North and look the place over. It was a large mid-eighteenth-century manor house on two square acres with a "sadly neglected garden," recently cheaply repaired, and "much too closely and heavily shadowed by trees." The house itself is "stiff ... cold ... [and] formal" and "in as bad taste, as could possibly be desired by the most loyal admirer of the whole quartet of [King] Georges." It was "ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and ill-fitted." It was "damp ... not free from dry rot" and redolent with the "flavour of rats."
The house's reputation for being haunted has caused it to become "an avoided house," and although the narrator decides to rent it for six months (from October to March) and live there with his spinster sister (Patty), they cannot retain any servants due to a plethora of bizarre house noises. Therefore, by mid-November, Patty suggests that she and John "take the house wholly and solely into our own hands" and live without servants, with the exception of Bottles the stable-man who is deaf and therefore not bothered by the haunted noises. Patty further suggests that they invite a group of friends to come down and form a "Society" that would occupy the house for three months and "see what happens" as far as supernatural activity in the house is concerned. [1]
Seven friends arrive at the end of November and draw lots for different bedrooms. Patty retains her own bedroom and John draws the bedroom of the apparently very troublesome ghost of Master B whose servant bell was always ringing until John had the bright idea of de-belling it. John and Patty's first cousin John Herschel and his wife (newlyweds) draw the "Clock Room," Alfred Starling (a young fellow of twenty-eight who "pretends to be fast") draws John's room—the "Double Room." Patty's closest friend Belinda Bates, "a most intellectual, amiable, and delightful girl" with a "fine genius for poetry, who combines "real business earnestness" with "Woman's mission, Woman's rights, Woman's wrongs" draws the "Picture-Room." Sailor Jack Governor who was once engaged to Patty "slings his hammock" in the "Corner Room," and his friend Nat Beaver (captain of a merchantman) gets the "Cupboard Room." Finally, friend and family solicitor Mr. Undery (an ace at whist) draws his lot for the "Garden Room." The friends agree to keep silent about any ghostly experiences until they gather on Twelfth Night unless "on some remarkable provocation" they have to break their silence on the subject of any haunted goings-on.
The ghosts the characters see have no connection with the house, and are not even really ghosts; the stories are of injustice, terror, or regret. [1]
The tales are all very different, but each has an element of the strange and scary. Some of the house guests have heard stories from ghosts while others have had out-of-body experiences. Wilkie Collins tells a seafaring story of Spanish pirates and the torment of a candle that, as it burns, takes the narrator ever closer to explosion and death. Dickens himself contributes The Ghost in Master B's Room, a very peculiar tale of the ghost of innocence that hints at the author's own feelings of melancholy. Elizabeth Gaskell contributes a strong story of working people in the north of England. The closing story, The Ghost in the Corner Room, is again by Dickens. [1] [2]
"The Haunted House of 1859" was one of the attractions at Dickens World in Chatham, Kent, England. [3] [4]
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851–1853), North and South (1854–1855), and Wives and Daughters (1864–1866), all of which were adapted for television by the BBC.
William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1859), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre.
Household Words was an English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens in the 1850s. It took its name from the line in Shakespeare's Henry V: "Familiar in his mouth as household words."
All the Year Round was a Victorian periodical, being a British weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom. Edited by Dickens, it was the direct successor to his previous publication Household Words, abandoned due to differences with his former publisher.
The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home is a novella by Charles Dickens, published by Bradbury and Evans, and released 20 December 1845 with illustrations by Daniel Maclise, John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield and Edwin Henry Landseer. Dickens began writing the book around 17 October 1845 and finished it by 1 December. Like all of Dickens's Christmas books, it was published in book form, not as a serial.
Jacob Marley is a fictional character in Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Marley has been dead for seven years, and was a former business partner of the miser Ebenezer Scrooge, the novella's protagonist. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by Marley's ghost, who wanders the Earth entwined by heavy chains and money boxes forged during a lifetime of greed and selfishness. Marley tells Scrooge that he has a single chance of redemption to avoid the same fate: he will be visited by three spirits, in the hope that he will mend his ways; otherwise, he will be cursed to carry much heavier chains of his own.
A Little Princess is a 1917 American silent film directed by Marshall Neilan based upon the 1905 novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This version is notable for having been adapted by famed screenwriter Frances Marion.
"The Signal-Man" is a first-person horror/mystery story by Charles Dickens, first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round.
"A House to Let" is a set of short stories by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. It was originally published in 1858 in the Christmas edition of Dickens's Household Words magazine. Collins wrote the introduction and collaborated with Dickens on the second story and ending, while Gaskell and Proctor wrote the third and fifth chapters respectively.
The bibliography of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) includes more than a dozen major novels, many short stories, several plays, several non-fiction books, and individual essays and articles. Dickens's novels were serialized initially in weekly or monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.
The Little Stranger is a 2009 gothic novel written by Sarah Waters. It is a ghost story set in a dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire, England in the 1940s. Departing from her earlier themes of lesbian and gay fiction, Waters' fifth novel features a male narrator, a country doctor who makes friends with an old gentry family of declining fortunes who own a very old estate that is crumbling around them. The stress of reconciling the state of their finances with the familial responsibility of keeping the estate coincides with perplexing events which may or may not be of supernatural origin, culminating in tragedy.
Tavistock House was the London home of the noted British author Charles Dickens and his family from 1851 to 1860. At Tavistock House Dickens wrote Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. He also put on amateur theatricals there which are described in John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Later, it was the home of William and Georgina Weldon, whose lodger was the French composer Charles Gounod, who composed part of his opera Polyeucte at the house.
The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall is a ghost that reportedly haunts Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. It became one of the most famous hauntings in the United Kingdom when photographers from Country Life magazine claimed to have captured its image. The "Brown Lady" is so named because of the brown brocade dress it is claimed she wears.
This is a bibliography of the works of Wilkie Collins.
"A Terribly Strange Bed" is a short story by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1852 in Household Words, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens.
The Poor Clare is a short story by English Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell. First serialised in three installments in 1856 Charles Dickens' popular magazine Household Words, The Poor Clare is a gothic ghost story about a young woman unwittingly cursed by her own grandmother.
Lois the Witch and Other Tales is an 1861 collection of five stories by Elizabeth Gaskell. The book was published by Bernhard Tauchnitz in Leipzig.
"The Trial for Murder" is a short story written by Charles Dickens in 1865. It was originally published under the title "To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt" as a chapter in Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions in an extra Christmas volume of the weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round. It was later published in 1866 in a collection of ghost stories known as "Three Ghost Stories", along with "The Haunted House" and "The Signal-Man".
The Haunted House public domain audiobook at LibriVox | Novels |
|  |
|---|---|---|
| Short stories |
| |
| Short story collections |
| |
| Plays |
| |
| People |
| |
| Novels |
|  |
|---|---|---|
| Short story collections |
| |
| Short stories |
| |
| Non-fiction |
| |
| Related |
| |
