Christmas ghost stories: why the Victorians told them
Today we do ghosts at Halloween and carols at Christmas. For the Victorians, Christmas was the ghost season. Here is why a good fright and a warm fire belonged together.
A winter tradition
Long before Dickens, winter was the time for telling tales by the fire. The nights were long, the house was shut up against the cold, and a story told in the dark felt more real. The Victorians turned that into a habit, and into a publishing trade.
A Christmas Carol started it
Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol on 19 December 1843, and gave it a subtitle: "A Ghost Story of Christmas". It has four ghosts, a haunted man and a very frightening chain, and it was an instant bestseller. After it, a ghost at Christmas was something readers expected.
The Christmas number
Dickens kept going. His magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, produced special Christmas numbers every year, and many of them included ghost stories by him and by other writers. People bought them to read aloud to the family.
When the joke arrived
By 1891 the tradition was so familiar that Jerome K. Jerome could make fun of it. His comic book Told After Supper is set on Christmas Eve, where a group of guests tell ghost stories one after another and each one is sillier than the last. Our "A Ghost Story for Christmas" print is from that book.
M. R. James and the reading aloud
The scholar M. R. James wrote some of the best ghost stories in English, and he first read them aloud to friends at Christmas. His stories were about quiet, ordinary men who disturb something they should have left alone. They are still read aloud every December.
How to do it yourself
Turn the main lights off and put a single lamp on. Choose a short story you can read in 20 minutes. Read it slowly, and stop before the last line for a beat. A Christmas Carol is the obvious place to start, and the Ghost of Christmas Present is the warmest ghost in it.
More: 11 gothic novels to read this Halloween and Christmas gifts for book lovers.
Questions
- Why are ghost stories told at Christmas?
- It is a Victorian tradition: long winter nights, a gathering by the fire, and the success of Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 1843, which was subtitled "A Ghost Story of Christmas".
- What is the best Christmas ghost story?
- Many readers say A Christmas Carol for the warmest, and M. R. James for the creepiest.