Ghost Stories From Victorian Magazines

Ghost stories From Victorian magazines are the main source of most ghost story anthologies. Despite this fact, the same old chestnuts get used and re-used endlessly. The reason for this is many anthologists never looked at the original versions but at previously collected volumes. Hugh Lamb is the exception. This sad fact means there are literally hundreds of unreprinted stories by unfamiliar authors– and best of all, these tales are illustrated.

The big boom in English magazines began with The Strand and the railroad taking dominance as a form of transportation. People needed something to read on their forty-five minute trip to and from home. Modelling itself on certain American publications, George Newnes’s magazine featured a mix of fiction and nonfiction, ordinary and extra-ordinary, all with illustrations. The first and most popular of the fiction writers was A. Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories (with pictures by Sidney Paget). Sometimes Doyle would do a ghost story a Science Fiction piece.

But The Strand and Doyle had many imitators and competitors. Pearson’s, The Harmworth, The Ludgate, The Pall Mall Gazette, The Windsor Magazine and The Idler. In their pages we saw for the first time the amazing stories of H. G. Wells, E. F. Benson, Bernard Capes, E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace and many others but I’m not going to include those well-collected individuals. Instead I am going to pick a half dozen you have probably never heard of as well as look at images you’ve probably never seen.

“The Haunted Hand” by Henry Seton Merriman appeared in The Idler, July 1894. Illustrations were by R. Jack. What would you do if your hand was haunted? Unlike most severed hand stories, this one is still attached!

“A Gruesome Wooer” by Louis Creswicke appeared in The Ludgate, July 1897. Art by John H. Bacon. What better location for a creepy tale than in a railway car, where the readers of this story would themselves have been sitting? Be careful who you talk to. She might be the daughter of an ancient Egyptian!

“The Stone Rider” by Nellie K. Blissett appeared in The Harmsworth Magazine, July 1898. Illustrations were done by Max Cowper. Two friends unravel the terror lurking behind the stone rider, a statue covered in real armor.

“The Death Trap” by George Dalton appeared in Pearson’s Magazine, March 1908. The pictures are by Sigurd Schou. A Chicago policeman must face a strange terror. A monster tale set in the world’s most practical city.

“Mrs. Dishman’s Ghosts” by Orme Agnus appeared in The Windsor Magazine, June 1908. Art by Gunning King. When Mrs. Dishman’s sister dies, the family becomes haunted by the dead woman’s spirit.

“The Horror of Johnson’s Flats” by Arundel Begbie appeared in The Strand, June 1914 in the US edition. Illustrated by Thomas Somerfield. A good old fashioned monster tale set in America. You don’t expect devil fish in the middle of the desert.

Now I will be the first to admit none of these stories rank with anything written by H. G. Wells, M. R. James or even Jack London. But at the same time, they are no worse than much of what the Pulps published thirty years later. Did they deserve to be collected, anthologized, remembered? I think so. I know one of the themes I am going to look at in the future is Sargasso stories before and during William Hope Hodgson’s career. I didn’t realize how many of these there were.

Also, when one of these stories doesn’t quite pull off the weird frisson you hope for–the ghost seems too obvious or ordinary–it helps me appreciate the masters of the genre. M. R. James wrote after many of these authors but was able to elevate the form to its highest perfection. Often we know there were ghost stories before James, but we only know Charles Dickens and his crowd. There were many others, good, bad and ugly. These tales widen our perspective, which I believe, has become far too narrow. The illustrations that went with the tales are equally forgotten, and that is a shame, as these artists were a lot of fun.