England during the reign of Victoria is famous for industrial, scientific, and technological advances, as well as sexual repression. But it was also an era when the ghost story – and its extensions in longer fictions during one of the heydays of the English novel – flourished in print just as old traditions about the spirit world were being called into question by the many supposed “progresses” of the day. This seminar sets out to explain both the wide range of ghost stories during the time before and after Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in 1843 (which will be included) and the many ways that “ghostliness” was incorporated into seemingly “realistic” Victorian fictions from Dickens to Henry James, partly through their reworkings of the earlier “Gothic” tradition in fiction and drama.
