Christmas Spooktacular? "The Haunted House" by Charles Dickens

"The Haunted House" by Charles Dickens (and friends)A review

 Charles Dickens is often credited with having “invented” Christmas as we know it. This claim might be exaggerated (as is argued here), but one can hardly contest the fact that his “Christmas novels” are a major contribution not only to the literature of this feast, but also to what might be termed its “social iconography”. Works such as “A Christmas Carol” or “The Chimes” both fed and met the expectations of the periodical-reading public whilst tapping into the tradition of telling ghost stories during long December nights.

“The Haunted House” dates from 1859 and was published in Dickens’s weekly periodical 'All the Year Round'. It is a collective effort featuring contributions from several of Dickens’s friends and regular collaborators. Dickens himself acts as master of ceremonies and provides the frame-story, about a group of acquaintances who spend Christmas at an allegedly haunted house, with an agreement that they recount their experiences on Twelfth Night. Given the title and premise, one would be forgiven for expecting a supernatural work or even a prototype “Haunting of Hill House”. Alas, this is nothing of the sort. Many of the contributors either interpret “haunting” in a metaphorical sense or else merely use the ghost as a “prop” for a totally different sort of tale. Just to give an example, Hesba Stretton writes a moralistic love story whilst George Augustus Sala’s narrator claims to have been visited by “the Ghost of the Ague”, prompting a rather tiresome slapstick piece about a wretch with an uncontrollable tremor.

This Hesperus Press edition includes a foreword by novelist and Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd. He is decidedly lukewarm in his praise for this work, singling out only Dickens’s contributions for their quality. Even about these, he has some serious reservations which are, frankly, justified. Indeed, apart from the background narrative, Dickens contributes a strange and rather uncomfortable story about a group of infants at a school who decide to set up a harem. It is likely that Dickens meant to satirise a contemporary fad for “Orientalism”, but to a modern reader, his tale raises disturbing spectres of both paedophilia and (although Ackroyd does not specifically mention this) racism.

Ackroyd still considers the remaining chapters as inferior, and here I beg to differ. I must confess that, except when I’m in the mood for him, I tend to find Dickens’s prose heavy and his humour smug. In The Haunted House, for instance, I much preferred his friend Wilkie Collins’s rollicking seafaring tale or, despite its streak of melodrama, Elizabeth Gaskell’s domestic tragedy about a son who disappoints his simple parents’ expectations. And yes, Adelaide Ann Procter’s “sacred legend in verse” (featuring a nun visited by the Virgin Mary) is over-written at times, but its Medieval setting and deliberate archaisms give it pleasant Pre-Raphaelite and Gothic overtones, not unlike Flaubert’s The Legend of Saint-Julian the Hospitaller.

Still, a few ghostly scares would not have been amiss...

Paperback, 134 pages

Published 2002 by Hesperus Press (first published 1859)

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Among the several Christmas (and ghost) stories penned by Dickens, A Christmas Carol remains the favourite of many.  Its plot and characters have inspired several reworkings: movies, animated pictures, musicals...  One of its several incarnations is as a ballet, with music by Carl Davis incorporating popular Christmas carols.  Here's a snippet from the Northern Ballet Theatre production: The Old City of London On Christmas Eve

The charm of A Christmas Carol has travelled beyond the English-speaking world.  Proof of this is "Shadows" or "Mister Scrooge", an opera composed in 1958 - 1959 by Slovak composer Jan Cikker.  Admittedly, the sound quality in this recording is hardly impressive, but this is a little-known work which deserves an outing:

Lovers of Victoriana and of ghost stories (or both, in which I would comfortably belong) will certainly have heard of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, a veritable Renaissance man: antiquarian, folklorist, hagiographer, novelist and writer of studies on ghosts and werewolves. He was also a hymn-writer and (what is relevant for this Christmas post) translated the lyrics of the haunting carol "Gabriel's Message" from the Basque.  Here's a moving performance by Voces8, accompanied by some beautiful classic art.

I have mentioned some problematic aspects of Dickens's work.  Of course, the author was writing in a very different context, where the British Empire was the empire "on which the sun never sets". In the 20th Century, with the various countries of the Empire seeking and obtaining self-governance and/or independence, the idea of a "Commonwealth of Nations" was born.  I will leave it up to scholars of post-colonialism to discuss whether there is any point in recognizing the "Commonwealth" or whether this very idea is, itself, an outdated remnant of Empire.    (Hopefully) less controversially I am going to propose a festive piece by Malcolm Arnold: his Commonwealth Christmas Overture, commissioned by the BBC in 1957 for the 25th Anniversary of King George V's first Christmas broadcast. About 8 minutes into the piece, Arnold lets loose with electric guitars and Caribbean percussion.  Lest anybody accuse the composer of facile cultural appropriation, it is worth reminding that Arnold - himself an outsider to the "serious" musical establishment - included "Caribbean music" also in his 4th Symphony as a reaction to the 1957 Notting Hill riots, later stating that he had been dismayed at the fact that something like that could still happen in Britain.   

I'd like to end this brief festive playlist with a recent work by Japanese-born composer Dai Fujikura (b. 1977).  His "Ghost of Christmas" was premiered in 2017 by its dedicatee Enrique Mazzola, at the helm of the Orchestra National d'Isle-de-France.   It is inspired by Dickens's A Christmas Carol and seeks to portray a passing stranger looking in through a window and getting a glimpse of a household celebrating Christmas.  If this leads you to expect an upbeat piece of pastiche Victoriana, think again… Fujikura’s piece is fragile and mysterious, a handful of fleeting impressions, crowned by the sound of Santa’s sleigh, its vision tantalisingly just out of reach… Merry Christmas…