Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story

Why were so many ghost stories published between 1850 and 1930? Why were readers so eager to be scared, and why did such writers as Dickens, Stevenson, Kipling and Henry James find artistic satisfaction in writing them? "Night Visitors" explores these questions, looking for explanations in the underlying anxieties of the age, as well as of the individual writers. The mysterious and unknown capacities of the mind, the duality of the soul, the nineties obsession with diabolism, the dangers of science, mesmerism, and drugs, were all recurrent themes, dramatized in supernatural tales such as "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray", and "The Turn of the Screw". Contributions were also made by writers whose reputations rest exclusively on their ghost stories, among them Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and M.R. James. Beginning with a summary history of the ghost story up to the mid-nineteenth century, "Night Visitors" goes on to provide a more detailed account from the 1880s up to the First World War, the impact of which, coinciding with Freud's radical explorations of inner fears, helped to send the ghost story into decline. Walter de la Mare was to be its last and greatest exponent. The book ends with an epilogue on ghosts in the work of Hardy, Yeats and Eliot.