Just the name Charles Dickens is enough to fill the ghost-story reader with images of snowy Christmas and Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens, through his novel A Christmas Carol and his frequent publishing of ghost stories in Households Words and All the Year Round, came to quantify the Victorian love of ghosts and Christmas.
Charles Dickens will be largely remembered as a creator of characters, Oliver Twist, the Artful Dodger, David Copperfield, Little Nell, fat, jolly Pickwick and numerous others. He will also be remembered as a social reformer, the man who embodied the drudgery and despair of the working man during the hey-deys of the Industrial Revolution. But before these things, Dickens was a lover of ghost stories. His nanny, Mary Weller, frightened the six year old Charlie with penny-dreadful-style gore-fests like those recounted in “Captain Murderer and the Devil’s Bargain”. Of his terrorizing nurse he says “…Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”
But Dickens did not begin his holiday hauntings with Scrooge and Marley but worked slowly up to that book with small episodes tucked into larger serials. Right from The Pickwick Papers (1836) onward did he utilize the ghost story as editorial, emotional counter-point and with many installments to be provided on such short notice, filler.
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