ABSTRACT
The relationship between Christmas and ghost stories has its roots in the oral tradition of the fireside winter’s tale of “sprites and goblins”, which can be traced back at least as far as the fifteenth century. Hervey’s account foreshadows what the Christmas ghost story was to become in the Victorian period, under the auspices of Charles Dickens in particular. Dickens’s Christmas ghost stories took the winter’s tale in a direction that embraced modern print-cultural innovations, helping to establish the Christmas hearth as a particularly appropriate spatio-temporal location for the telling of ghost stories. Betraying a typically Victorian evangelicalism, the spirits who visit Scrooge on Christmas Eve are intent on the reformation of one individual. The Christmas ghost story, which Hervey had painstakingly differentiated from the winter’s tale and which Dickens had done so much to transform into a major literary vehicle for the ideals of spiritual, social, and national redemption, had come full circle.
