The Ghost Story 1840-1920, A Cultural History

Smith, A (2010) 'The Ghost Story: 1840-1920, A Cultural History', Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Notes

Dickens on Ghosts - 

'always elude us. Doubtful and scant of proof at first, doubtful and scant of proof still, all mankind's experience of them is, that their alleged appearances have been, in all ages, marvellous, exceptional, and resting on imperfect grounds of proof; that in vast numbers of cases they are known to be delusions superintended by a well-understood, and by no means uncommon disease'.

Sasha Handley in Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (2007) maps the development of the belief in ghosts from the medieval period to the eighteenth century.
- religious connections between religious notions of the ghostly in both Catholic and Protestant contexts..
- For Handley, 'Ghost stories, whether real or imagined, were good for thinking with'.

Seeing the spectre: an economic theory of the ghost story
Gothic Marx

• Pg. 11 - 'Marx developed his theory of 'The Fetishism of Commodities' in Capital (1867), where he argues that an object, in the example of a table, contains the labour (life) which produced it. The question is one of visibility, an issue that is central to notions of spectrality:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties [...]. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.'