The Chattering Dead:

Charles Dickens and the first-person ghost

Long before M.R. James drew the curtain and lowered the light, there was Dickens—animated, voluble, theatrical (wonderful!) Dickens—who gave us ghosts that talked. Not merely moaned or wailed, but chattered, negotiated, remonstrated. For all his vast influence, Charles Dickens is not often credited as a ghost story innovator. Yet in A Christmas Carol, The Signalman, and even in forgotten oddities like Tom Tiddler’s Ground, he helped inaugurate one of the most potent tropes in English supernatural fiction: the first-person-submerged ghost narrator.

M.R. James was attentive to Dickens. Though their sensibilities diverged, Monty had a distinct appreciation for A Christmas Carol, admiring what he called its "earnest intention and happy ending"—a rare mark of approbation from a man not usually sentimental about the afterlife. To be fair, however, beyond the appearance of Jacob Marley, James was not convinced that it really was a ghost story. More pertinent, though, is James’s attention to narrative structure, particularly the way Dickens uses the first-person-submerged or what I term the moi-même narrator to destabilize the story’s boundaries. Consider the opening moments of A Christmas Carol:

Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

The reader can only wonder whether this ‘I’ is meant to be Charles Dickens, in his own person, stepping from behind the narrative curtain to speak momentarily in that first-person-submerged, moi même, mode of narration. This anonymous storyteller technique, which M.R. James would favour throughout his ghost-story career, may have been gleaned from Dickens, whom he admired, but it is more likely that Le Fanu provided the model in stories such as “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh,” “Schalken the Painter,” and “Squire Toby’s Will.”

In his own tales, James adopts and then adapts this technique. As he once explained to a friend, he borrowed the tendency to employ the personal, unidentified narrator who gradually, and often unknowingly, uncovers the horror. In this way, Dickens may have helped Monty find a narrative mask—an indirect form of self-presentation. What in Dickens might be exuberant performance, however, becomes, in James, a kind of misdirection: a scholar recounting an anecdote, unaware of the spiritual horror accruing just offstage.

“The Signalman,” perhaps Dickens’s most fully realized ghost story, is deeply Jamesian in mood—or I should say, more accurately, that James is—in a significant way—Signalmannered. The story presents a narrator who, while not “submerged” nevertheless tries, earnestly and impotently, to make sense of a haunting. The story unfolds with a quiet inevitability, and its climactic horror is delivered not through violence but through implication. James took note.

What Dickens discovered is that a ghost is most disturbing when related by an unimpeachable—because unreachable—source. James refined that insight to its coldest edge: a narrator, practically wraith-like himself because invisible, who speaks our own language of doubt and unease whilst telling us something we desire but should never know.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: Kissing cousins: The detective story and the ghost story