Classic Ghost Story Writers: Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White (1982)

Recently Bronwyn and I rewatched this old British miniseries from the 1980s - The Woman in White. I remember back in the day experiencing ever increasing anxiety and horror as poor Jenny Seagrove sank deeper and deeper into the clutches of the evil Count Fosco.

Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1860)

Which makes it sound like some kind of comic melodrama, but anyone who's ever read the novel knows it to be anything but. The creepy, claustrophobic atmosphere of the story seems to come out of some profound depth of personal paranoia and depression. Some of this can be perhaps attributed to Wilkie Collins' habit of taking opium, which took an ever greater hold on him in the decades after this, his first great success.

Deadwood, Series 1, episode 10: Mr. Swearengen & Mr. Wu (2004)

But then, the nineteenth century was full of 'dope-fiends' (as Al Swearengen in Deadwood was wont to refer to them), and none of the others showed any signs of producing anything like The Woman in White ...

Kathleen Tillotson: Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954)

Or did they? Kathleen Tillotson's fascinating book on the English novel of the 1840s points out a number of its distinctive features: a greater sexual frankness, in particular, than was possible later, as the Victorian era gradually became more and more morally bankrupt and intellectually stultifying.

Given that the four novels she chose to illustrate her thesis were Dickens' Dombey & Son (1848), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848), she might actually have called it "Novels of 1848", if it weren't for the fact that that would have sounded as if she meant to draw some parallel with the Year of Revolution.

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1860)

What, then, of the novel of the 1860s - the decade dominated by Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White? If, like me, you have a taste for the intricate pathways of the disturbed mind, spiritualism and psychogeography, then this is certainly the period for you.

Dostoevsky did not begin to appear in English translation until the 1880s, so it would be difficult to draw close parallels with Crime and Punishment (1867) or his memoir of exile in Siberia, The House of the Dead (1862). Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862) certainly had a strong influence on the English writers of the 1860s, however.

But the fact remains that The Woman in White predated all this, so the craze for novels of mystery and the occult does have to be seen as a home-grown phenomenon - a reaction, perhaps, to the predominant social realism of the preceding decades.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret (1862)

Lady Audley's Secret was (in John Sutherland's words) "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels."

Lady Audley's Secret (2000)

Elaine Showalter accounts for at least some of its appeal when she summarises it as follows:

Braddon's bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number one down a well, thinks about poisoning husband number two and sets fire to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances are residing.

Wilkie Collins: No Name (1862)

The same anxieties about gender and the chafing constraints it imposes on individual freedom can be seen in Wilkie Collins' follow-up to the Woman in White. No Name is an almost equally fascinating novel, which has unfortunately languished under the shadow of its supererogatory predecessor. Its heroine, Magdalen, while not quite as anarchic as Lady Audley, is just as determined to make her way in the world - in spite of the unfair obstacle of illegitimacy.

Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend (1864)

By now Dickens, too, was affected by the trend. His last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, is a strangely labyrinthine narrative full of doubles and dead men who won't lie down. It does include a love story - of a sort - but the nightmarish vision of a spectral London it concentrates on makes it, for most Dickensians, either their favourite or their least favourite among his works. I am, mind you, decidedly of the former persuasion.

Some of these 'sensationalist' tendencies were already apparent in its immediate predecessor Great Expectations - with its speaking tombstones and hideous convicts - the return of the repressed with a vengeance. Our Mutual Friend took him much further down the peculiar paths of the guilty conscience, however.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)

There is a certain atmosphere of playacting, at times, even in the most bloodcurdling of these mystery novels. Those written by English writers, at any rate. The same could not be said of Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas. As in his ghost stories, Le Fanu shows every sign of believing what he writes, and of having a more intimate acquaintance with evil than any of his contemporaries.

Uncle Silas is grotesque, exaggerated, even burlesque at times, but it's not actually unbelievable. There's something only too credible about it all, since its author is clearly not joking. Killing a young girl for her inheritance is a standard melodramatic plot from way back, but if you did mean to do it, this might be how you might go about it. And, after all, it is something people do do - and did do - so it can't really be dismissed as a fantasy.

Wilkie Collins: Armadale (1866)

I suppose that Wilkie Collins must have felt the pressure of all this competition, because his next novel, Armadale, really pulls out the stops. I must confess that there were moments while reading it when I could hardly believe my eyes. Did he really just say that? Shipwrecks, doubles, hauntings - you name it, it's all there.

The fever of an opium dream is combined here with the precision of a forensic accountant. I think it's safe to say that there can be few weirder novels in the whole of English literature than Collins's Armadale.

Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)

But in the end, this was the one that scooped the pot. Long famed as the first English detective story, The Moonstone, too, has opium dreams, sinister orientals, lurking gypsies, damsels in distress, and all the usual trappings of a Wilkie Collins fantasia. The method of telling it through overlapping documents - while hackneyed enough - is deployed particularly effectively here.

I suppose, in the long run, it can't really be compared with the spectral complexities of The Woman in White, one of the great English novels, but it is understandable how many people still prefer The Moonstone to any of its predecessors.

Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

And, since one has to end somewhere when discussing the sensation novel of the 1860s, where better than with Dickens' last, unfinished serial, The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

It can't really be judged as a whole, since only the opening portions survive, but they're enough to convince readers then and now that a radical readjustment both of style and subject matter was going on in their favourite author. From the opening scene in an opium parlour to the strange, haunted cathedral which dominates it, Edwin Drood reads more like a precursor of Kafka than a natural outgrowth of what had gone before in Dickens' work.

Unfortunately it proved difficult for Wilkie Collins to keep up these levels of intensity in his subsequent fiction. Many of his later novellas and short stories show just as much invention and skill as these long works of his maturity, but his novels began to suffer from the diffusion of concentration attendant on his longterm addiction.

Sheridan Le Fanu, too, having written a succession of strange masterpieces in the 1860s, fell off in his later work (except, again, in short stories such as the ones in his 1872 collection In A Glass Darkly). If you do want to go on from Uncle Silas, though, all three of the novels below can be strongly recommended:

1. The House by the Churchyard. 1863. Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen. The Doughty Library. London: Anthony Blond, 1968.
2. Wylder’s Hand. 1864. New York: Dover, 1978.
3. Guy Deverell. 1865. New York: Dover, 1984.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (UK, 2012)

•

John Everett Millais: Wilkie Collins (1850)

William Wilkie Collins
(1824-1889)

Novels:


1. Iolani, or Tahiti as it was: A Romance. 1844 (1999)
2. Antonina (1850)
3. Basil (1852)
4. Hide and Seek (1854)
   • Hide and Seek, or, The Mystery of Mary Grice. 1854. Rev. ed. 1861. Introduction by Norman Donaldson. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1981.
5. The Dead Secret (1856)
6. A Rogue's Life (1856/1879)
7. The Woman in White (1860)
   • The Woman in White. 1860. Ed. John Sutherland. 1996. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
   • The Woman in White. 1860. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., n.d.
8. No Name (1862)
   • No Name. 1862. Ed. Mark Ford. 1994. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.
9. Armadale (1866)
   • Armadale. 1864-66. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977.
10. The Moonstone (1868)
    • The Moonstone. 1868. Introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers. Everyman’s Library, 979. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1944.
    • The Moonstone. 1868. Afterword by T. S. Eliot. 1928. Ed. Sandra Kemp. 1998. Penguin English Library. London: Penguin, 2012.
11. Man and Wife (1870)
12. Poor Miss Finch (1872)
    • Poor Miss Finch. 1872. Ed. Catherine Peters. Oxford World's Classics. 1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
13. The New Magdalen (1873)
    • The New Magdalen. 1873. Pocket Classics. 1993. Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1998.
14. The Law and the Lady (1875)
15. The Two Destinies (1876)
16. The Fallen Leaves (1879)
    • The Fallen Leaves. 1879. Pocket Classics. 1994. Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997.
17. Jezebel's Daughter [novelisation of Collins' play The Red Vial (1858)] (1880)
18. The Black Robe (1881)
19. Heart and Science (1883)
20. I Say No (1884)
    • 'I Say No'. 1884. Pocket Classics. 1995. Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1998.
21. The Evil Genius (1886)
22. The Guilty River (1886)
23. The Legacy of Cain (1889)
24. [with Walter Besant] Blind Love (1890)

Short Stories:


25. Mr Wray's Cash Box. Or, the Mask and the Mystery. A Christmas sketch (1852)
26. A Terribly Strange Bed (1852)
27. Gabriel's Marriage (1853)
28. The Ostler (1855)
29. After Dark (1856)
30. The Lady of Glenwith Grange (1856)
31. [with Charles Dickens] The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856)
    • Dickens, Charles, & Wilkie Collins. The Wreck of the Golden Mary. 1856. Illustrated by John Dugan. Venture Library. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1961.
32. [with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell & Adelaide Anne Procter] A House to Let (1858)
33. [with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Anne Proctor, George Sala & Hesba Stretton] The Haunted House (1859)
34. The Queen of Hearts (1859)
35. Miss or Mrs? (1873)
    • Miss or Mrs? 1873. Pocket Classics. 1993. Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1995.
36. The Frozen Deep and Other Stories (1874)
    1. The Frozen Deep
       • The Frozen Deep. 1874. London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2012.
    2. The Dream Woman
    3. John Jago's Ghost; or The Dead Alive
37. The Haunted Hotel (1878)
    • The Haunted Hotel. 1878. Penguin Red Classic. 2008. Melbourne: Penguin Group (Australia), 2009.
38. My Lady's Money (1879)
39. Who Killed Zebedee? (1881)
40. The Ghost's Touch and Other Stories (1885)
41. Little Novels (1887)
    1. The Queen's Revenge
    2. Mad Monkton
    3. Sights A-Foot
    4. The Stolen Mask
    5. The Yellow Mask
    6. Sister Rose
42. [with Charles Dickens] The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1890)
43. Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Ed. Herbert van Thal. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1972.

Non-fiction:


44. Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848)
45. Rambles Beyond Railways, or, Notes in Cornwall taken a-foot. Illustrations by Henry C. Brandling (1851)
46. My Miscellanies (1863)

Plays:


47. [with Charles Dickens] The Frozen Deep (1857)
48. The Red Vial (1858)
49. [with Charles Dickens] No Thoroughfare (1867)
50. Black and White (18––)
51. Miss Gwilt (18––)

Secondary:


52. Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. 1991. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1992.

•

Wilkie Collins: After Dark (1856)

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Michael Cox

Jerry Bauer: Michael Cox (1948-2009)

Admittedly this is rather a strange follow-up to Sheridan Le Fanu, but Michael Cox gets the nod because he's such an inspiration to nerdy bookworms everywhere.

In one of those classic don't-say-it's-over-till-it's-over turn-ups for the books, Cox published his first novel in 2006, in his late fifties, after a lifetime of compiling anthologies and chronologies and other humble aids to readers, only to find it a runaway success, sold to its eventual publisher John Murray at auction for £430,000!

Is The Meaning of Night actually any good? Well, perhaps not in the absolute sense, but it's a very competent and entertaining pastiche of High Victorian Sensation Gothic, not up to the mark of Wilkie Collins or Le Fanu at their best, but clearly the fruit of passionate adoration of their works.

I suppose my main problem with it is its hero, who veers from amoral Poe-like maniac ("William Wilson") to moony lover with scant consistency. Nor can I quite see why his aristocratic ambitions are of such great interest to so many of the people he meets (a criticism which applies even more sharply to its sequel, The Glass of Time).

I do in many ways prefer this second novel, though: Esperanza Gorst is a far more attractive and sprightly protagonist than her whining papa - though her taste in men is a little difficult to fathom (with the best will in the world, Cox is unable to make her ghastly pompous cousin Perseus seem in the slightest degree plausible as a love interest).

The great thing is, after editing all of those books of other people's work (including a very interesting biography of M. R. James), Cox finally nerved himself up to enter the arena himself. Then, tragically, he died of cancer a couple of years later.

Mind you, he credited his diagnosis with giving him the incentive to finish his long-meditated fiction project. Without it he might well have continued to pile up odd pages without ever finishing either book. However you take it, I think it has to be seen as a very encouraging story for all of those half-completed novels languishing in so many desk drawers. Never say die! Even without the worldwide success and the hugely swollen pre-publication price, Cox would still be a winner.

Seeing how others did it failed to intimidate him: he put himself out there, and his two books bid fair to become minor classics in their own right! Nor is his work as an editor and anthologist likely to be forgotten, either.

The list of his works below is not exhaustive - there are many anthologies missing: of golden age detective stories, thrillers, and a variety of other genres - but it does include all of the really significant highlights in his career as a ghost story writer and fancier (I hope):

•


Eiko Ishioka: Victorian Gothic Lolita (1983)

Michael Andrew Cox (1948-2009)

Biography:




M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (1983)



• M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fiction:




The Meaning of Night (2006)



• The Meaning of Night: A Confession. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2006.




The Glass of Time (2008)



• The Glass of Time: The Secret Life of Miss Esperanza Gorst, Narrated by Herself. 2008. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2009.

Edited:




The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986)



• The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert. 1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.




The Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1986)



• The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. Ed. Michael Cox. Illustrated by Rosalind Caldecott. 1986. London: Tiger Books International, 1991.




‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories (1987)



• James, M. R. ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.




The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu (1988)



• The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu: Ghost Stories and Mysteries by a Master Victorian Storyteller. Equation. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Thorsons Publishing Group, 1988.




The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991)



• The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.




The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories (1996)



• The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.




The Oxford Chronology of English Literature (2002)



• The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Ed. Michael Cox. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Michael Cox

Classic Ghost Story Writers: J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873)

The Perils of Green Tea

If you want to understand just why Sheridan Le Fanu stands out from all other Victorian ghost story writers, the easiest way is simply to pick up his late collection In a Glass Darkly and take it from there.

In a Glass Darkly (1872)

Of the five stories included in the book, at least three are perennial horror classics. The other two are pretty good also. They include the short novella "Carmilla," still probably the most poetic and haunting treatment of the vampire theme in existence; "The Familiar," a strangely psychological account of a haunting; "The Room in the Dragon Volant," a terrifyingly effective mystery story; "Mr. Justice Harbottle," a very original approach to the familiar theme of the haunted house, and, finally, perhaps most powerful of all, "Green Tea," where Le Fanu devises the most truly horrifying ghost in all of paranormal literature.

So much comes out of this book! Bram Stoker was greatly influenced by it. It's hard to imagine Dracula without "Carmilla" (which he in fact references directly in the associated short story "Dracula's Guest"). "Mr. Justice Harbottle," together with its 1851 analogue "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," also clearly inspired Stoker's short story "The Judge's House."

"Green Tea" is, however, sui generis. The Occult physician Martin Hesselius, whose selected papers In a Glass Darkly purports to be, certainly gifted certain of his traits to a long series of successors, including Stoker's Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Dracula, 1897), Algernon Blackwood's John Silence (John Silence, Physician Extraordinary, 1908), William Hope Hodgson's John Carnacki (The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, 1913), and even Aleister Crowley's Simmon Iff (The Scrutinies of Simon Iff, 1917-18). None of them came up with anything quite so worrying as the concept of "opening the interior eye" by excessive indulgence in green tea, taken late at night, however.

Green Tea (1872)

Mind you, Le Fanu's fiction is a pretty mixed bag. M. R. James said that Le Fanu “succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer”; whereas Henry James wrote that his novels were “the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight.” He may have meant that quite a few of them are likely to send you to sleep, however.

E. F. Bleiler once estimated that the proportion of mystery and detective to supernatural fiction in Le Fanu's output was something like four or five to one, and even the stories with ghostly overtones seldom commit themselves definitively to a paranormal explanation. Human psychology was always his major preoccupation, which is why so many of them seem so startlingly - if not modern, at any rate proto-Freudian.

Uncle Silas (1864)

If you like lengthy Victorian sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins' classic The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868), however, you'll find Sheridan Le Fanu to be a worthy rival to that master of intertwined plots replete with somnambulism, stolen identity, and downright raving madness.

Uncle Silas (1864) is Le Fanu's one undoubted classic in this line. It's not that the plot of the book is so clever, rather the appalling strain on the nerves built up by so much terror and suspense in so horribly confined a space. Almost all of his other books have something to be said for them, though: some individual contribution to the mystery genre.

For myself, I find the madhouse scenes in The Rose and the Key (1871) particularly effective - and while it's hard to have patience with Wylder's Hand (1864) as a whole, the strange utterances and prophecies which emanate from at least one of the minor characters lend it a particular poetic atmosphere all its own.

The Passing of J. Sheridan Le Fanu (2016)

The same characters - under different names - tend to recur almost obsessively in Le Fanu's fiction: innocent and easily affrighted young girls are one of his staples; another is a particularly reprehensible and amoral type of self-indulgent young man: Captain Richard Lake in Wylder's Hand would be one example, Sir Henry Ashwoode in his very first novel, The Cock and Anchor (1845), another.

Even though their machinations - like those of Uncle Silas himself, the epitome of this type - always come to ruin, Le Fanu seems fascinated by the mechanics of their smooth roguery. His bona fide heroes and heroines seem, by contrast, more one-dimensional and far less erotically charged. An atmosphere of erotic complication - confused gender identities and lines of attraction - is an almost invariable feature of a long Le Fanu narrative, in fact. As well as his fourteen full-length novels, he wrote many novellas and long short stories, not all of them collected to this day.

Strangely enough, although he's been canonised as a quintessentially Irish writer, only his first three novels are actually set there. All the others take place in old, off-the-beaten-track parts of England. It's hard to see that this makes much difference, though. His ancient, shadowy wooded estates really exist nowhere but in his own imagination, and that imagination remained staunchly Irish throughout his life: for the most part, though, the guilty Anglo-Irish culture of the Protestant ascendancy. It's no accident that Jonathan Swift has a walk-on part in his first novel, and that the sole topic of his conversation is his need to find a living on the other side of the Irish sea.

Le Fanu's own lifestyle was, by all accounts - at least latterly, after the death of his wife - bizarre. He wrote at night, in his grim old house in Dublin, with the help of copious doses of green tea. Like one of his own characters, he had a recurring dream that the house would come down on his head. When he was found dead one morning, at the fairly early age of 58, the doctor who examined him commented wryly that the house had fallen at last. He is reputed - though on somewhat uncertain evidence - to have died of fright.

All I can say in conclusion is that work is distinctly addictive. The more of it you read, the more appetite you feel for it. I've read about half of his novels, and am anxious to read all the others. There's something particularly satisfactory about lying in bed with what my own doctor calls "para-influenza" and reading a series of Le Fanu novellas and novels. The slightly visionary effect of the illness brings out the best in his long, convoluted - at times dreamlike - narratives.

The ghost stories, though, can be read at almost any time, in almost any mood. He was unquestionably a genius. His work may have its limitations, but is almost perfect of its kind within them. If you haven't experienced it yet, bon appétit!

Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu
(1814-1873)

1. The Cock and Anchor. 1845. Introduction by Herbert van Thal. The First Novel Library. London: Cassell, 1967.


2. The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O'Brien (1847)


3. Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851)
   1. The Watcher
   2. The Murdered Cousin
   3. Schalken the Painter
   4. The Evil Guest


4. The House by the Churchyard. 1863. Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen. The Doughty Library. London: Anthony Blond, 1968.


5. Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh. 1864. Ed. Victor Sage. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2000.


6. Wylder’s Hand. 1864. New York: Dover, 1978.


7. Guy Deverell. 1865. New York: Dover, 1984.


8. All in the Dark. 1866. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.


9. The Tenants of Malory. 1867. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.


10. A Lost Name. 1868. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.


11. Haunted Lives. 1868. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.


12. The Wyvern Mystery. 1869. Pocket Classics. 1994. Phoenix Mill, Far Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 2000.


13. Checkmate. 1871. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.


14. Chronicles of Golden Friars. 1871. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.
    1. A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay
    2. The Haunted Baronet
    3. The Bird of Passage


15. The Rose and the Key. 1871. Pocket Classics. Phoenix Mill, Far Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1994.


16. In a Glass Darkly: Stories. 1872. Introduction by V. S. Pritchett. London: John Lehmann, 1947.
    1. Green Tea
    2. The Familiar
    3. Mr Justice Harbottle
    4. The Room in the Dragon Volant
    5. Carmilla


17. Willing to Die. 1872. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.


18. The Purcell Papers. 1880. Serenity Publishers, LLC, 2011.
    1. The Ghost and the Bone-Setter (January 1838)
    2. The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh (March 1838)
    3. The Last Heir of Castle Connor (June 1838)
    4. The Drunkard's Dream (August 1838)
    5. A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess (November 1838)
    6. The Bridal of Carrigvarah (April 1839)
    7. A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter (May 1839)
    8. Scraps of Hibernian Ballads (June 1839)
    9. Jim Sullivan's Adventures in the Great Snow (July 1839)
    10. A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family (October 1839)
    11. An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald, a Royalist Captain (February 1840)
    12. The Quare Gander (October 1840)
    13. Billy Maloney's Taste of Love and Glory (June 1850)


19. The Watcher and Other Weird Stories. Preface by Brinsley Le Fanu. 1894. New English Library Classic Series. London: The New English Library, 1974.
    1. The Watcher
    2. Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess
    3. Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter
    4. The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh
    5. The Dream
    6. A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family


20. Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery. Ed. M. R. James. 1923. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1994.
    1. Madam Crowl's Ghost (from All the Year Round, December 1870)
    2. Squire Toby's Will (from Temple Bar, January 1868)
    3. Dickon the Devil (from London Society, Christmas Number, 1872)
    4. The Child That Went with the Fairies (from All the Year Round, February 1870)
    5. The White Cat of Drumgunniol (from All the Year Round, April 1870)
    6. An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (from the Dublin University Magazine, January 1851)
    7. Ghost Stories of Chapelizod (from the Dublin University Magazine, January 1851)
    8. Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling (from the Dublin University Magazine, April 1864)
    9. Sir Dominick's Bargain (from All the Year Round, July 1872)
    10. Ultor de Lacy (from the Dublin University Magazine, December 1861)
    11. The Vision of Tom Chuff (from All the Year Round, October 1870)
    12. Stories of Lough Guir (from All the Year Round, April 1870)


21. Best Ghost Stories. Ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1964.
    1. Squire Toby's Will
    2. Schalken the Painter
    3. Madam Crowl's Ghost
    4. The Haunted Baronet
    5. Green Tea
    6. The Familiar
    7. Mr. Justice Harbottle
    8. Carmilla
    9. The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh
    10. An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
    11. The Dead Sexton
    12. Ghost Stories of the Tiled House
    13. The White Cat of Drumgunniol
    14. An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House [non-fiction]
    15. Sir Dominick's Bargain
    16. Ultor de Lacy


22. Ghost Stories and Mysteries. Ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1975.
    1. The Room in the Dragon Volant (from London Society, 1872)
    2. Laura Silver Bell (from Belgravia Annual, 1872)
    3. Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling (from Dublin University Magazine, 1869)
    4. Ghost Stories of Chapelizod (from Dublin University Magazine, 1851)
    5. The Child That Went with the Fairies (from All the Year Round, 1870)
    6. Stories of Lough Guir (from All the Year Round, 1870)
    7. The Vision of Tom Chuff (from All the Year Round, 1870)
    8. The Drunkard's Dream (from Dublin University Magazine, 1838)
    9. Dickon the Devil (from London Society, 1872)
    10. The Ghost and the Bone Setter (from Dublin University Magazine, 1838)
    11. A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family (from Dublin University Magazine, 1839)
    12. The Murdered Cousin (in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851 - originally published as "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" in Dublin University Magazine, 1838)
    13. The Evil Guest (in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851)
    14. The Mysterious Lodger (from Dublin University Magazine, 1850)


23. Cox, Michael, ed. The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu: Ghost Stories and Mysteries by a Master Victorian Storyteller. Equation. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Thorsons Publishing Group, 1988.
    1. Schalken the Painter
    2. The Familiar
    3. The Murdered Cousin
    4. An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
    5. Ghost Stories of the Tiled House
    6. Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling
    7. Squire Toby's Will
    8. Green Tea
    9. Madam Crowl's Ghost
    10. Mr Justice Harbottle
    11. The Room in the Dragon Volant


24. Spalatro: Two Italian Tales. 1843. Mountain Ash, Wales: Sarob Press, 2001.


25. The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of J. Sheridan Le Fanu. 8 vols. UK: Leonaur, 2010.
    1. The Haunted Baronet / The Evil Guest / Carmilla / A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family / 10 short stories: A Debt of Honour; An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street; An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald, a Royalist Captain; An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House; Billy Malowney's Taste of Love and Glory; Borrhomeo the Astrologer; Catherine's Quest; Devereux's Dream; Doctor Feversham's Story & The little Red Man
    2. Uncle Silas / Green Tea / 5 short stories: Ghost Stories of Chapelizod; Ghost Stories of the Tiled House; Haunted; Jim Sulivan's Adventures in the Great Snow & Laura Silver Bell
    3. The House by the Churchyard / 1 short story: Dickon the Devil.
    4. The Wyvern Mystery / Mr. Justice Harbottle / 9 short stories: Madam Crowl's Ghost; Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess; Pichon & Sons, of the Croix Rousse; Schalken the Painter; Scraps of Hibernian Ballads; Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling; Squire Toby's Will; Stories of Lough Guir & Sir Dominick's Bargain.
    5. The Rose and the Key / Spalatro, From the Notes of Fra Giacomo / 2 short stories: The Bridal of Carrigvarah & The White Cat of Drumgunniol.
    6. Checkmate / 6 short stories: The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh; The Child That Went With the Fairies; What Was It?; Ultor De Lacy: a Legend of Cappercullen; Fireside Horrors For Christmas & The Questioning of Paddy Mullowney's Ghost
    7. All in the Dark / The Room in the Dragon Volant / The Mysterious Lodger / The Watcher / 3 short stories: The Drunkard's Dream; The Ghost and the Bone-Setter & The Legend of Dunblane.
    8. A Lost Name / The Last Heir of Castle Connor / 6 short stories: The Phantom Fourth; The Quare Gander; The Secret of the Two Plaster Casts; The Spirit's Whisper; The Vision of Tom Chuff & Some Gossip About Chapelizod.

Sheridan Le Fanu

Dracula's Guest

[Bram Stoker: Dracula's Guest (1914)]

After this I promise to shut up about vampires for quite some time. It just occurred to me, when I reached the end of my first post on the subject, that I hadn't really broached the subject at all: just gone into the details of the various annotated editions of Dracula.

Then, when I got to the end of the second, I realised that while I'd discussed the mechanics of vampires and vampire-hunting, I hadn't even touched on why they appear to have this perennial appeal. I mean, it is rather odd, isn't it? Who would have thought that after Bram Stoker, after Dark Shadows, after Anne Rice, after True Blood even, that it would be Stephenie (sp.?) Meyer's Twilight series that went on to scoop the pool? I mean, one vampire's much the same as another, isn't it?

[Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Hunters (1967)]

There are some pretty obvious points one can make about vampires up front (enough to explain their attraction for adolescents, at any rate):

1. They never get old and lose their looks. What you see is what you get: forever.
2. They're always thin and yet never hungry - no dieting required (in fact, they can't even touch solids, so there's no temptation to pig out on junk food).
3. Their basically nocturnal cycle is very much to the taste of kids who're used to being sent to bed before they felt sleepy: nor can they be ordered off to class despite having been up all night partying.

They are, in short, the perfect teenagers. Oh, and they don't get pimples, either. Or have to worry about predatory creeps and stalkers. They are the creeps.

Ever since Stephen King gave it as his considered opinion that the film I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) was basically about acne, it's become clear that some primal human drive has to be behind any successful horror franchise. Fear of the vulnerability of sleep in A Nightmare on Elm Street; irritation at constantly being rebuked for bad table manners in various generations of zombie movies ... The points listed above might account for the appeal of the current, post-Buffy crop of vampire fictions, but what of those that preceded them?

If Dracula weren't considerably more than a tidied-up, reheated version of Varney the Vampire, I doubt we'd still be discussing it after so many years. There's a reason why Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker continue to rule the Gothic roost. Off the top of my head, I'd say that a good deal of Stoker's fascination with vampires comes from fear: fear of the mongrel, Eastern-European hordes - what at a later date might be called Eurotrash. I don't think it's a coincidence that there's so strong a resemblance between Count Orlock in Nosferatu and the evil predatory Jewish faces in Julius Streicher's Nazi propaganda rag Der Stürmer:

[Julius Streicher: Anti-Jewish cartoon in Der Stürmer (1933)]

[Max Schreck as Count Orlock in Nosferatu (1922)]

That isn't all, though. Stoker's morbid preoccupation with forbidden sexuality is umistakable in the novel: from the famous scene where Jonathan enjoys being toyed with by the vampire women, to Mina Harker's forcible seduction by the count, it's clear that the spirit of Freud was already abroad in the land, even before the 1899 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams.

Was Stoker a repressed homosexual? Was his strange career as Henry Irving's gofer and factotum in fact some kind of homoerotic love affair? It's hard to avoid the suspicion. Nor has the close resemblance between the mercurial Irving and the shapeshifting Count escaped the attention of commentators. The polymorphously perverse vampire of Stoker's imagination is clearly a fantasy figure on more levels than one: a lust-object almost perfectly poised between attraction and repulsion.

Stoker was no Edgar Rice Burroughs, though - no mere instinct-driven mouthpiece for the zeitgeist. One can continue to unpack his novels for items from the collective unconscious, but it's important always to remember how conscious an artist he was. The Jewel of Seven Stars (1943) is not just a rehash of Dracula with a vampire queen - it's an almost-equally complex masterpiece of horror fiction, playing as adroitly on the atmosphere of ancient Egyptian tombs as its predecessor does with castles in the Carpathians.

Take, for instance, the final piece in the jigsaw of Dracula: the short story entitled "Dracula's Guest," which first appeared in a posthumous collection of fugitive pieces in 1914:

[Bram Stoker: Dracula's Guest (London: Arrow Books, 1966)]

[Bram Stoker: Dracula's Guest (1914)]

It might have started as a production gimmick - the black bat which leaped out when theatre-goers opened their programmes for the revival of the play Dracula - but you can see from the contents list above that many of the stories in this collection have gone on to become classics of the genre: "The Squaw" and "The Judge's House" perhaps even more than the title story.

[Bram Stoker: Dracula's Guest (1914)]

"To his original list of stories in this book, I have added an hitherto unpublished episode from Dracula. It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband's most remarkable work", wrote Stoker's widow in her preface to the original edition. That's putting it mildly! The arguments about his allegedly "excised" chapter of Dracula have hardly stopped from that time to this.

Is it really part of Dracula, to start with?

It didn't occur to Leonard Wolf to reprint it in the first edition of his Annotated Dracula (1975). The first commentators to include it were therefore Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, in their Essential Dracula (1979):

[Raymond McNally & Radu Florescu:
The Essential Dracula (1979)]

Their subtitle makes it clear that they regarded it as no more and no less than the missing "first chapter" of the novel. They accordingly placed it first in their book, before the narrative proper, and annotated it in much the same way as the rest of Stoker's text:

[McNally & Florescu: The Essential Dracula (1979)]

Stoker's then recently-rediscovered manuscript notes were used here (as elsewhere) to justify a good many assumptions on their part. Is this narrator really Jonathan Harker? The "episode" does seem unusually self-contained for a discrete chapter of a long novel. The parenthetical mentions of Wagner's Flying Dutchman and of Walpurgis Nacht (so familiar to readers of Goethe's Faust, or - for that matter - Gounod's opera) might seem to encrust it with almost too much significance for so early a moment in the story.

[Walpurgisnacht]

The next editor to include it was, predictably, Leonard Wolf, in his own Essential Dracula in 1993:

[Leonard Wolf: The Essential Dracula (1993)]

He includes it only as an appendix, though, and makes no attempt to annotate it in the same way as the rest of the novel. For him it's clearly an intriguing afterthought rather than an integral part of the story.

Which brings us up to 2008, and the indefatigable Leslie S. Klinger:

[Leslie Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008)]

Characteristically, Klinger hedges his bets. It's included as an appendix, rather than as the first chapter of the text, but he annotates it as thoroughly as the rest of Stoker's novel.

[Leslie Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008)]

You'll note that there are the usual hints as to "uncertainties" surrounding Harker's narrative (possibly written to mask a quite different set of events). This is emphasised even more strongly in his notes on the end of the story:

[Leslie Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008)]

Is the wolf meant to be Dracula, then, or merely (as Klinger claims) an emissary of the still far-off Count? Who can say? The title "Dracula's Guest" would seem to imply his physical presence in the story, but there's still no way of knowing if this title was Stoker's or Florence's.

More to the point, is the mysterious female revenant whose tomb the narrator takes shelter in ("Countess Dolingen of Gratz / in Styria Sought / and found Death / 1801" with underneath "... graven in great Russian Letters: the dead travel fast") actually meant as a reference to Sheridan Le Fanu's immortal "Carmilla" (1872), as McNally & Radescu suggest: "a countess whose activities took place in Styria, southeastern Austria, and who had been laid out in just such a tomb as Stoker describes here" [p.40]?

The mysterious warnings, the suspicious peasantry, the great white wolf, the beautiful apparition ... one thing is certain, "Dracula's Guest" is a masterpiece of dread and growing suspense. Whether it was written at the same time as the rest of the novel and left out for reasons of length (or structural coherence), or whether it was redrafted and tidied up subsequently (as I must confess I suspect), it encapsulates all the strengths and haunting themes of Stoker's novel in one short compass.

It doesn't, finally, matter very much whether one considers it part of the story or not, it's a brilliant piece of work in itself. It should remind us how much we're all still in Bram Stoker's debt - or should I say his shadow?

[Olga Kurylenko in Paris, je t’aime (2006)]

•
Further Reading:

As well as the stories in Dracula's Guest, you might like to check out some of those included in Peter Haining's useful compilation Shades of Dracula:

[Peter Haining: Shades of Dracula (1982)]

And here are some bibliographical details of the annotated editions which have served as the main focus of this discussion:

• Wolf, Leonard, ed. The Annotated Dracula: Dracula by Bram Stoker. 1897. Art by Sätty. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. / Publisher, 1975.


• McNally, Raymond & Radu Florescu, ed. The Essential Dracula: A Completely Illustrated & Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel. 1897. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979.


• Wolf, Leonard, ed. The Essential Dracula: Including the Complete Novel by Bram Stoker. 1897. Ed. Leonard Wolf. 1975. Notes, Bibliography and Filmography Revised in Collaboration with Roxana Stuart. Illustrations by Christopher Bing. A Byron Preiss Book. New York: Plume, 1993.


• Stoker, Bram. The New Annotated Dracula. 1897. Edited by Leslie S. Klinger. Additional Research by Janet Byrne. Introduction by Neil Gaiman. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Inc., 2008.

[Peter Haining: Shades of Dracula:
The Uncollected Stories of Bram Stoker (1982)]