CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) surely needs no introduction so let’s talk a little bit about his relationship to the horror genre. Nearly everything Dickens wrote contains elements of the grotesque – exaggeration (used for both comic and chilling effects) was one of the devices most natural to him. He had a steady interest in the supernatural, albeit with reservations. Several of his stories make fun of spiritualism (“The Lawyer & The Ghost”, “The Haunted House”, “Well-Authenticated Rappings”) but Dickens thought ghost stories were especially appropriate for the Christmas season and encouraged other writers to produce ghost stories for the holidays including Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins.

Dickens first and best ghost story was “A Christmas Carol” (1843), which was an enormous success, and later tales include “The Haunted Man & The Ghost’s Bargain” (1848) (an allegory) and “The Trial For Murder” (1865), along with this one. In THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELER (1860) he wrote that the horror stories told to him in childhood by his nurse had had a lasting effect – “If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase), I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to against our will.”