Thursday, 26 October 2017

Victorian Ghost Stories

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/23/ghost-stories-victorians-spookily-good

A ghostly 19th-century illustration

Ghost stories: Why the Victorians were so spookily good at them
  •  'Try not to be perturbed by the flickering candle, the fleeting shadows, the horned, hairy hand that appears at your elbow. Something moved? There's a face in the brickwork? A murderer, long ago, was buried in the cellar? Stay calm. Breathe deeply. The ghosts of Christmases past are gathering.'
  • 'It was the Victorian era, of course, when ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction – as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room seances.'
  • 'Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill – short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length.' - Sat around telling stories.
  • 'Charles Dickens produced his own highly successful ghost story, A Christmas Carol, in serial form just before Christmas 1843.'
  • 'Lighting was often provided by gas lamps, which have also been implicated in the rise of the ghost story; the carbon monoxide they emitted could provoke hallucinations.'

https://interestingliterature.com/2015/10/28/10-classic-victorian-ghost-stories-everyone-should-read/

Nottingham

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/citylife/ghostsandlegends/newstead_index.shtml

http://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/10-most-haunted-places-nottingham-137222

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