The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume Four
Edited by Christopher Philippo
Long winter nights, cold evenings around a fire, and an age-old and surprisingly widespread belief that spirits roamed around Christmas… these are the ingredients which likely led to the usage of telling ghost stories during the festive season. In the Victorian era, this tradition took a literary turn. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is, essentially, a work of supernatural fiction, as are the rest of his Christmas books (except, perhaps, The Battle of Life). But Dickens was hardly an exception, and there were myriad authors, some better known than others, who contributed to the genre. This tradition culminated in the stories of M.R. James (1862 – 1936), originally conceived as Christmas Eve entertainments to be read out to friends and later published in critically acclaimed collections. In the 1970s, the producers of the “BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas” series turned to “Monty”’s stories for inspiration, cementing the link between Christmas and ghosts in the popular imagination.
Devotees of supernatural fiction have long been aware of this connection but, for some strange reason (possibly, due to the hype surrounding Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of The Mezzotint for the BBC), it seems to have been suddenly “rediscovered” by mainstream publications around Christmas 2021: from the Guardian to the Spectator, from the History Channel website to the religious journal First Things. In a round-up of “ten best Christmas books”, Esquire deservedly mentions Valancourt Books’ collection of “Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories”. I say “deservedly” because the book featured in the Esquire article is actually just the first of a several volumes of Victorian festive chillers issued by this publisher. The series is currently in its fifth instalment and, along the way, Valancourt have unearthed and revived many forgotten stories by obscure and less-obscure author.
Volume 4, edited by Christopher Philippo, provided me with plenty of ghostly fun over Christmas 2021. Admittedly, Philippo gives a rather generous interpretation of “Victorian”. He does not concentrate on British authors, as the term “Victorian” would suggest, but instead draws material from US magazines and newspapers of the 19th Century, in which a parallel Yuletide custom of ghostly fiction appears to have been equally thriving. It is this American context which made this volume special to me. It is clear, when considering the collection holistically, that US authors were seeking to create (or recreate) a homegrown repertoire of supernatural fiction for a country which was still relatively young. And so, we find the traditions of the ghost story and the wider “Gothic” tradition transplanted to distinctly American settings, from the New Orleans of Joseph Holt Ingraham’s “The Green Huntsman” to Gold-rush era San Francisco in F.H. Brunell’s “The Ghostly Christmas Gift” to Porto Rico in Hezekiah Butterworth’s “Camel Bells or The Haunted Sentry Box of San Cristobal”. It is also interesting to note the multicultural influences at work here, with immigrant Continental traditions providing a distinctly un-English feel to some of the stories (for instance, “The Werwolves” is clearly inspired by French legends on the loup-garou). Apart from Robert W. Chambers, known to aficionados of the weird tale as the author of The King in Yellow, the featured writers practically forgotten, even though some of them (such as Lucy A. Randall and Julian Hawthorne, son of the better-known Nathaniel) were widely published during their lifetime.
Philippo
casts his net wide and, apart from the stories, also includes an early example of
flash fiction (the surprisingly contemporary-sounding “Desuetude”), verse
(including a Jack-in-the-Box-shaped poem by HC Dodge), and perhaps more strikingly,
several unusual news items from newspapers of the era, often with a garish
element. This captivating and
entertaining collection is complemented by an opening essay by the editor and
by brief but informative introductions to each of the pieces.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!
ReplyDeleteIn writing my introduction I'd worried in part about whether people would accept that Victorians often used "ghost story" and especially "Christmas ghost story" to refer to essentially weird tales, rather than exclusively stories involving disembodied spirits of deceased human beings. In retrospect I wish I'd given more attention to the word "Victorian" as well, both to how it can be applied internationally and to a broader period than just Queen Victoria's reign. E.g.:
"Victorianism was a transatlantic culture—though in the largest sense it was only an English-speaking subculture of Western civilization. Inevitably, the English-speakers within the Western world shared many common influences, which were reinforced by the expansion of printed communication during the 1830s and the subsequent laying of the transatlantic cable."
Howe, Daniel Walker. Victorian America. U Pennsylvania Press, 1976. 4.
"Since Edward's reign was a comparatively short one, it does not have such a distinct literary identity as the Elizabethan or Victorian ages do, and there are hardly any 'Edwardian writers' who were not also late-Victorian writers beforehand or Georgian writers afterwards. Literary history therefore tends to treat the period either as a late extension of Victorian literature or as an interregnum before the arrival of modernism."
Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. London: Oxford UP, 1996. 103.
Even extending the American window beyond 1914 to 1917 isn't unique to me. I hadn't noticed at the time of editing, but the Victorian Society in America's journal The Nineteenth Century covers up to 1917. I don't know if their reason for that date was also the American entry into WWI or not, though one of their former directors did also refer to Queen Victoria personally being of less immediate relevance to America:
"'We are both a social and a cultural organization interested in the Victorian period in this country, as well as abroad,' says the society's director.
"'Queen Victoria's dates were from 1837 to 1901, but since Victoria was not our queen, we don't feel as obliged to stick to those dates. Our span of interest is really from the late 1790s to 1917. We are also quite interested in the European things because they influenced this country.'"
Hoffman, Marilyn. "A Victorian Love Affair." Washington Post. April 1, 1979.
First of all, it's an honour to have the editor of a volume I enjoyed commenting on my review.
DeleteThe points you raise regarding the definition of "Victorian" are very valid. I must say, however, that regardless of whether the meaning of the term as used in the title to this anthology is too wide or not (and that is indeed an interesting debate), it is precisely this US emphasis which, I felt, gave the collection its particular "flavour" and made it stand out.