ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens was key to the Victorian ghost story’s development. Throughout his career he experimented with the form, producing several powerful and influential works. Best known are A Christmas Carol and “The Signalman”, although Dickens composed around eighteen ghost stories in total. A general survey of ghost story motifs follows this episode, including indelible blood stains, ominous portents, spirits that appear at the moment of a friend or relation’s death, and a family curse. Between The Pickwick Papers and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain the tone of Dickens’s ghost stories becomes darker, the spirits more menacing, and the haunting turns inward, taking on a psychological dimension. Despite the levity of these early ghost stories, Dickens sometimes puts the form to more earnest use, deploying supernatural intervention to prompt reform. The Christmas conversion in Pickwick’s “Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is the earliest example of this type.
