Just the name Charles Dickens is enough to fill the ghost-story reader with images of snowy Christmas and Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens, through his novel A Christmas Carol and his frequent publishing of ghost stories in Households Words and All the Year Round, came to quantify the Victorian love of ghosts and Christmas.
Charles Dickens will be largely remembered as a creator of characters, Oliver Twist, the Artful Dodger, David Copperfield, Little Nell, fat, jolly Pickwick and numerous others. He will also be remembered as a social reformer, the man who embodied the drudgery and despair of the working man during the hey-deys of the Industrial Revolution. But before these things, Dickens was a lover of ghost stories. His nanny, Mary Weller, frightened the six year old Charlie with penny-dreadful-style gore-fests like those recounted in “Captain Murderer and the Devil’s Bargain”. Of his terrorizing nurse he says “…Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”
But Dickens did not begin his holiday hauntings with Scrooge and Marley but worked slowly up to that book with small episodes tucked into larger serials. Right from The Pickwick Papers (1836) onward did he utilize the ghost story as editorial, emotional counter-point and with many installments to be provided on such short notice, filler.
Pickwick and his friends tell five ghost stories in the course of the book, starting with “The Lawyer and the Ghost”. In this initial story the author states his position on the existence of ghosts: why do they haunt unpleasant places, when you could be someplace nice. The tenant of the haunted house asks this question of a ghost who haunts the wardrobe. The specter replies, “Egad, that’s very true; I never thought of that before…we must be very dull fellows, very dull fellows, indeed, I can’t imagine how we can have been so stupid.” And disappears never to return. Dickens has begun his long career of ghost-stories writing with humor, something he would use more often than not, as well a sense of editorializing. The ghosts of Dickens are often ideas played out rather than frightening specters.
“The Queer Chair” is a modern fairy story rather than a tale of haunting. The ghost, a chair who has human features rather than a spirit of the dead, could as easily be a fairy or some other supernatural creature.
The plot concerns Tom Smart, a delivery man who finds himself in a cozy inn on a rainy night. Tom likes the establishment, the food, the punch, the serving girls and especially the widow landlady. But she is being pursued by a tall suitor, whom Tom takes an immediate dislike to. Once in bed, the odd-looking chair of the title begins to form human features, the legs and arms become man-like, the backing a head. The chair tells how he fears he will be sold off when the widow marries the scoundrel, who has a wife and six kids and many debts. Tom uses a letter from the wardrobe to prove the suitor a villain and marries the widow. The chair is not mentioned again, but has served it purpose like a fairy godmother or other supernatural assistant.
“The Ghosts of the Mail”, in the same vein as the other stories in The Pickwick Papers, uses the ghostly as a vehicle to do something else. The phantom coaches of the retired mail service take the man back in time to engage him in derring-do reminiscent of an American tall-tale. The narrator
of the previous tale now tells of his uncle, a good friend of Tom Smart. While in Edinburgh, the uncle, also a delivery man, leaves a dinner where his hosts have been drunk under the table, to find a collection of abandoned old mail coaches. While sitting on one coach he travels back in time to the days of three-cornerd hats and powdered wigs, rescues a beautiful woman from two rogues, who he bests in sword-play even though they are veterans and he only a natural fighter. The high-point of the story comes when the uncle impales the two villains on two different swords “…jerking their arms and legs about in agony…” like two bugs.
“A Madman’s Manuscript” is the odd-man-out in The Pickwick Papers. Rather than a humorous tale utilizing ghosts, it is a Poe-esque tale about insanity written from the point-of-view of the lunatic. Like Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Black Cat”, the narrator is known to be unbalanced but the reader is driven on by the power of his madness to see what happens next.
The story concerns a rich young lord who has congenital insanity. He hides his ailment while reveling in his deception. He marries a beautiful young woman who is forced into the marriage by the poverty of her family. When the man tries to cut her throat with a razor she goes mad and dies. When her brother comes to confront the husband, the lunatic loses his facade and tries to kill his accuser. The secret is out and the young lord is chased through the streets and finally locked up. It is in the asylum that he pens the manuscript, a cliche of the pulps of a hundred years later, but refreshingly new in Dickens’ time. It is a technique that Robert Louis Stevenson would use in “Markham” and Guy de Maupassant in several tales.
“The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is perhaps the most interesting of the five, for it is the dry run to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Gabriel Grubb is a mean-hearted sexton (or gravedigger) who drinks and works on Christmas. A group of goblins capture him and take him to their underground cave. There they show him scenes of his fellow humans, including a poor family whose small son dies (precursors to Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim) and beat him mercilessly. In the end he becomes a changed man but can not face his townsmen and goes off to another village to live. Stories of Grubb’s disappearance grow but he puts them to rest when he returns home, a truly changed man.
The similarities to A Christmas Carol are many. The meanness of Scrooge, the supernatural intervention and change are all there but none of the color or detail. What changes Grubb remains largely unseen and ineffective to the reader. In fleshing out the tale, Dickens invested it with a stronger theme, brighter characters and a truly Yuletide spirit.
Similarities to another author’s work are also apparent in “The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”, those of the American, Washington Irving. The goblins and underground lair are very similar to those in “Rip Van Winkle” and the leaving home to live elsewhere at the end is reminiscent of “The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow” in which Ichabod Crane leaves Sleepy Hollow never to return. These two stories appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1820) and were popular on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Baron Koeldwethout’s Apparition” from Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) is an important story because it is the first to use a truly ‘Dickensian’ ghost. The narrative follows a young baron who marries and quickly finds domestic life both emotional unfulfilling and financially ruinous. He becomes so despondent that he attempts suicide. To achieve this he hides in a crumbling tower, drinks heavily and prepares to cut his own throat. It is then that he is visited by “… a wrinkled hideous figure, with deeply sunk and bloodshot eyes, and an immensely long cadaverous face. He wore a kind of tunic of a dull bluish colour…was clasped or ornamented down the front with coffin handles. His legs too, were encased
in coffin plates as though in armour…” This weird spirit is the Genius of Despair and Suicide. He tempts the baron onto death but the lord regains his sense of humor at the last, driving out the spectre and re-arranging his life.
The Genius of Despair and Suicide is interesting for two reasons. First, he is the first true Dickens-style ghost, not a dead person so much as an idea embodied in the form of a ghost. He is the predecessor to the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come in A Christmas Carol and the Haunter in “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain”. Secondly, he is decked out in a strange, symbolic attire much like Jacob Marley and his chain of money boxes.
It is also interesting to note the Baron Koeldwethout like the uncle of the bagman, Tom Smart, and Gabriel Grubb sees his unearthly visitors only after consuming large amounts of alcohol. Dickens may have been hedging his bets with his readers, as if to say, I don’t really believe in ghosts. In “Baron Koeldwethout’s Apparation” the names of the two families are puns on alcohol, “Grogzwig” and “Swillenhausen”. Dickens would later declare his exact beliefs in the stories, “The Haunted House” and “Well-Authenticated Rappings”.
In “The Mother’s Eyes” from Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840), Dickens returns to the Poe-esque style of tale. A man alone at Christmas meets a tall, deaf man and they become friends. The deaf man relates a terrible story from a prison in the time of Charles the Second. The story is a confession of a murderer, who’s sister-in-law once terrified him with her condemning stare. When the woman and her husband die, the killer adopts the boy as his wife is the sister of the boy’s mother. The lad has done nothing to warrant the uncle’s hate except possessing the same condemning eyes.
The man cuts the boy down with his sword and buries the body under a newly sodded lawn. The terror of discovery is so bad that he either dreams of his capture or stares at the spot. He is finally apprehended when blood-hounds are brought in to find what they think is a lost boy. The dogs smell the dead child and tear at the lawn. The killer’s guilty action quickly place a rope around his neck.
This early tale shows two of Dickens’ influence. The more obscure is once again Washington Irving. Dickens tells how the deaf man possesses a pipe once belonging to a German Student and hints at terrible stories about him. This would seem to be referring to Irving’s “The Adventure of the German Student”. The other influence is again Edgar Allan Poe. The guilt and burial are reminiscent of Poe’s masterpiece, “The Tell-Tale Heart”.
A Christmas Carol (1843) is without doubt Dickens’ best and most famous work. I won’t bother to recount a plot so well-known to so many readers. The book was an instant classic and has sold steadily since it was written. It’s success was followed by other “Christmas books”: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man and the Ghost Bargain. Of these only the last is a supernatural tale, and will be looked at next.
The writing of A Christmas Carol seasoned Dickens’ talent for writing about ghosts. The earlier tales for the most part are humorous when not in imitation of Poe. But after the adventures of Scrooge, Dickens’ tales take on a gloomier feel, closer to the idea of the Victorian ghost story. With “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” (1848) Dickens writes the only other novel-length ghost story. Where the story of Scrooge is about a wicked man turned to good, “The Haunted Man”, as it is often abbreviated, is about a good man turned to evil then returned to good.
The story concerns a chemist named Redlaw. He has lost his sister and feels terrible guilt and sorrow over the incident. Redlaw is a kind and giving person but appears to others to be “a haunted man”. What haunts him is his specter of guilt. This ghost, who resembles most Baron’s Koeldwethout’s Genius of Despair and Suicide as well as the double in Poe’s “William Wilson”, makes the offer to remove his pain and suffering. The result is that Redlaw becomes indifferent and morose without care for others. His presence is enough to make others uncaring, first a poor family named Tetterby, then their sick neighbor, a scholar.
Realizing his curse, the only person Redlaw can associate with is a street urchin, a creature more animal than human. The chemist follows the boy to a house filled with the sick. There he finds his servant and the servant’s father at the death bed of a long lost brother. Redlaw’s sickness infects them and they abandon the dying man.
The ending to “The Haunted Man” is Dickens at his most sickeningly sweet but is rescued by the characterization of Mrs. Swidger. Redlaw meets with his haunter again on Christmas morning, hearing sweet music. All the evil he has done is reversed by the presence of Milly Swidgers, and the servants, the Tetterbys and the student are filled with joy and forgiveness. If Dickens had left the story here the tale would have seemed to possess a tacked-on happy ending. He saves it from maudlin sentimentality with the character of Milly, who leads Redlaw through his rehabilitation, to appreciate his sorrow as a devise for forgiving the wrongs done to us by life. Understanding this, Redlaw forgives the loss of his sister and allays the ghost’s curse.
If Dickens had thought he was writing another Christmas Carol he must have been disappointed. “The Haunted Man” lacks the movement of Scrooge and his ghosts, is murky and its ending is less exact than that of Scrooge who shows his joy rather than discussing it as Mrs. Swidgers and Redlaw do. More likely Dickens was exorcising the ghosts within himself. His sister, Fanny, had died of consumption the summer before. The glowing, loving character of Mrs. Swidgers is no doubt Fanny as Dickens idealizes her. Redlaw embodies the author’s own misery and pain.
“A Child’s Dream of a Star” (1850) is a short fable about a boy who wishes he could join his lost relatives in heaven. Each night after their deaths he has a dream of them joining the others and the angels. The boy grows to be an old man and finally joins them on his death. The tale is not haunting but typical of Dickens sentimental side. Like the ending to “The Haunted Man”, this story seems to point to an author who indulges in sentimentality and nostalgia.
“Christmas Ghosts” or “Ghosts at Christmas” is an article from A Christmas Tree (1850) . In it, Dickens lays out two of the traditions of Christmas for which he has become famous: snow and ghosts. It may be hard for someone, like myself who lives in a snowy region, to understand what is so unusual about a White Christmas, but London, England is rarely visited by heavy snow at Christmas time. The snowy Christmases of Dickens may have come from a period in his childhood when it snowed for seven Christmases in a row.
More importantly, Dickens summarizes all his favorite ghost story plots, many of which will be familiar to fans of the genre. The author speaks in a sentimental fashion which slips all too easily into an unintended sarcasm. Though Dickens helped spawn the Victorian ghost story, one almost wonders if even he has had too much of rattling chains and evil portraits. This can only be fathomed by the tonality of his words and is open to interpretation.
Of the plots he mentions he includes: the dead servant girl who killed herself for an unworthy lord, the phantom stain that can’t be removed, the clock that strikes thirteen, heralding death, the phantom coach, the compact that brings a friend back from the dead, the girl who sees her own dead self in premonition of her death, the distant relative who appears but has really died in a far country, and the orphan boy who was killed cruelly but appears to maiden aunts. The catalogue could be much longer, but these are the cliches of Dickens’ time.
“The Last Words of the Old Year” (1851) is not so much a ghost story as an editorial masquerading as a story. In it Dickens has the Year 1850 commenting on his passing reign. Dickens targets all the social ills that most worry him as a humanitarian: the state of the sewers, the lack of lifeboats on steamships, the lack of secular education, and many other current political issues. There is no real supernatural or ghostly events.
“To Be Read At Dusk” (1852) demonstrates the change that has come over Dickens and the ghost story itself. This tale lacks the typical Dickensian feel with funny names and symbolic spirits, but reads like a typical ghost story. It could be a work by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Ameilia B. Edwards or even Algernon Blackwood. The ghost story by the 1850’s had become genrified in its methods, to some extent thanks to Dickens himself.
The story concerns a man who overhears some couriers in the Swiss mountains, telling of unusual happenings. The story has two parts which weakens its over-all structure. The first episode, and the longer and more interesting of the two, is about a newly-wed bride who has a dream of a man with a dark face and grey mustache. The husband and servants search the ancient schloss they have rented for a painting with the face but find none. (Here Dickens uses a ghost-story cliche to divert the reader. This prop dates back to Horace Walpole and the Gothic School.) Later, the couple meet Signor Dellombra who looks exactly like the man in the dream. The husband seeks his friendship in an attempt to cure his wife of her fears. Ultimately he kidnaps her and they are never seen again.
The other episode is less interesting. It tells of twin brothers, one becomes ill and sends his spirit to warn his brother of his sickness. The addition of this tale is anti-climatic and one wonders why Dickens includes it? Is it filler or is he simply using the same hodge-podge structure that he used in Pickwick and later in “Captain Murderer and the Devil’s Bargain”?
“The Ghost Chamber” (1857) is another “typical” ghost story about two men who stay a night in a haunted house. At the stroke of one a strange old man enters, takes a seat and relates the story of an evil man who marries a woman for her money but does not inherit after her death. To get his hands on her fortune, he places his weak-willed daughter in a private school and coerces her to marry him. Once married, he drives her to death. When she asks repeatedly, “I will do anything you wish. I beg your pardon, sir. Forgive me!” he answers by commanding her to “Die!” which she does. The murderer is pleased that he has killed her and inherited her money but his plan fails when a young man, who has watched the wife longingly, reveals the husband’s guilt. The man kills the lad and buries him under the tree outside the manor. Wanting to escape the house, the killer is now trapped in the house lest his secret gets out, which happens when lightning strikes the tree, drawing much attention to the spot.
The husband is hung, and in death is condemned to haunt the ghost chamber, the room the two visitors have chosen, until two men hear his confession. This never happens because one of them is always driven to sleep, prolonging the ghost’s torment. The tale ends with the two men arguing about what really happened in the room.
Though a standard ghost story in many respects, it does feature one very creepy bit, reminiscent of Dickens’ better parts of A Christmas Carol. The ghost husband is himself haunted by two fellow ghosts, the lad who dwells in the tree and the wife: “…She and I were there. I, in the chair upon the hearth; she, a white wreck again, trailing itself towards me on the floor. But, I was the speaker no more, and the one word she said to me from midnight until dawn was, ‘Live!'”
“Well-Authenticated Rappings” (1858) or “The Rapping Spirits” is a strange piece though it seems to hint at Dicken’s feelings toward Spiritualism, which was at its height during the later part of his career. The story is the supposed report of a spiritualist seance. The spirits seem little more than spoiled children while the mediums buffoons. The intentionally effect is humorous. Dickens may have liked a good ghost story but didn’t care too much for table tipping and automatic writing that was the craze of the 1850’s.
“The Haunted House” (1856) is a confused conglomeration in its modern form. It would have made four good stories but instead is episodic and unsatisfying. The reason for this is that Dickens wrote it as part of a Christmas number of All the Year Round. The story was filled out by the stories of other writers including Amelia B. Edwards. These are missing so the piece seems incomplete.
It begins with a man of a train meeting a spiritualist. As with “Well-Authenticated Rappings”, he shows his dislike for spiritualists. The man is engaged in writing down the words of 17479 ghosts including Socrates, Pythagoras, Galileo, Milton and prince Arthur, the nephew of King John. The ghostly messages are all cliches and commonly known. Dickens makes a pun with “A bird in the hand is worth to in the Bosh.”
The next episode tells how this traveler, rid of his spiritualist companion, finds and rents a haunted house. Unable to keep servants, he brings a large group of interesting friends to spend three months there, through the Christmas holiday. Each of the guests promises to reveal nothing of their experiences until after Twelfth Night, so as not to influence the others.
Up to this point the story has been much like a traditional ghost story with a few digressions. It is with Chapter Two that Dickens abandons his goal as ghost story writer and segues into a strange nostalgic fairy tale. The narrator has taken the room of the mysterious Master B. He sees the phantom in his shaving mirror then in his bed. The ghost leads him on many adventures of which only one is related: a dual tale of Arabian Nights as acted out by children. The tale ends with the narrator admitting the only real phantom is the ghost of his childhood. He is resigned to sharing his bed with Master B’s skeleton. The tale ends there as mysterious and unfinished as it began.
As mentioned at the beginning, “Captain Murderer and The Devil’s Bargain” from The Uncommercial Traveller (1860) are told as one recollection of the bloody stories of Dickens’ nanny, Mary Weller. The first is a folk-tale similar to “Bluebeard” or “Mr. Fox”. A cannibal captain marries girls and asks them to make a pie crust. Once ready, he cuts them up and eats them. The heroine allows this to happen to her but laces the pie with poison. The second and more effective tale smacks of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” in its infestation of rats. The story is about a shipwright named Chips who makes a deal with the Devil as his father and grandfather before him. One of the conditions of the deal is that a talking rat will live with the man. Chips defies the Devil and sells the rat. After this the builder is haunted by rats. They are in his food, clothes, everywhere. That no one can see them does not matter. He is locked up as mad. Later, he is hired onto one of the king’s ships where he can hear the rats plotting to sink the ship. His entreaties go unheeded and everyone dies. His dead body floats ashore, covered in rats.
Dickens’ rats are well remembered. He says, “…At intervals ever since, I have been morbidly afraid of my own pocket, lest my exploring hand should find a specimen of two of those vermin in it.” Later horror writers would use rats with similar effect, including Bram Stoker and Stephen King. J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s evil, ghostly monkey in “Green Tea” has a similar haunting effect as the unseen rats. H. P. Lovecraft would have a talking rat creature in Brown Jenkin from “Dreams in the Witch-House”.
Also from the same book, “Mr. Testator’s Visitation” (1860) is a short piece reminscient of Pickwick, in which a poor man borrows some furniture without permission. The owner turns up months later, a drunken man who consumes all the man’s gin then disappears, a ghost. The tale is brief but
humorous.
“Four Ghost Stories” (1861) is four vignettes like those mentioned in “Christmas Ghosts”, published anonymously in All the Year Round. The first tells of a painter who is asked by a woman strange to him if he could remember her face so that he could paint it. Later he is asked to paint her portrait by her father. The woman had died two years ago, on the day the painter had met her. The second unnamed piece is brief and the least interesting of the four. A woman is separated by her brother who goes to India. The siblings have made a pact that if either should die, they will appear as an apparition to the other. This happens and the tell-tale letter comes by the next mail. Story Three is another version of the same story.
A sailor wishing to earn a young woman’s hand, dies at sea but appears to his intended bride. Story Four is probably the best of the quartet, involving a fairy-tale style. A woman is godmother to a baby belonging to small people living in the well. For this she is given shavings which are made into two metal fish and some coins. If she keeps the metal pieces, her family will be blessed, but if they lose any of them then evil will follow. Several generations later, the family misplaces one of the fish and is thrown into poverty and dishonor. The count who is narrating the story tells how he is summoned to Sweden by an unknown dying man. He has the missing fish. Upon his return the Count’s fortunes instantly improve.
“The Portrait-Painter’s Story” (1861) is Dickens’ own true ghost story. He published “Four Ghosts” September 1861, only to have the actual participant of the first of the four tales complain that he had written about the events before him. Not only did Dickens write the story from tales he had heard, but even guessed the correct date for the death of the daughter, September 13th.
The portrait-painters story tell show the artist was contracted by a family named Kirkbeck to do a portrait. Their card does not have an address so he forgets about the job. Traveling months later he stumbles across the family again and visits them. While on the train to their home he meets a beautiful woman who says they will meet again. At the Kirkbeck’s he sees her again but no one acknowledges her presence. The next day the servant has no recollection of her.
Months later, close to Christmas, the artist meets her again in his studio. The woman gives him a picture of a Lady M. A. who she feels looks like her. The visitor wants him to do a portrait from memory. The artist does a couple of quick sketches and she is gone. Before she leaves she warns him of the portrait “…much depended on it.”
Traveling again, the artist gets stuck in a small boring country town. To liven up his forced visit he looks up an old friend. The man who responds to his message is not his friend, but a Mr. Lute. The artist had mysteriously put the wrong name on the letter. The man invites the artist to his home to paint a portrait of his dead daughter. The surviving sister warns the painter that her father is insane, seeing visions. The artist attempts to paint the portrait with little success until the sister mentions the portrait of Lady M. A. which has disappeared. The artist retrieves it with his own sketches and completes the job. The father’s sanity is confirmed as he had seen his daughter on the train, at the Kirkbeck’s and in the artist’s studio in his visions.
“The Goodwood Ghost Story” (1862) marks a change for Dickens. This spare ghost story is told with economy, lacking the usual Dickensian idiosyncrasies (possibly because he didn’t write it?). The plot concerns a widow who dies in a carriage accident. At the time that she is attempting to gasp her dying words, her ghost is seen in the family barn, many miles away. The ghost does not speak. The widow leaves two daughters who are not claimed by any relatives. The narrator sees the woman’s ghost one last time, late at night, and understands at last what she is trying to say: “Take care of my children.”
This more modern style along with a lack of corresponding records has caused some critics to think the story the work of another. It appeared in All the Year Round anonymously, but when one reads the stories that followed “The Goodwood Story” you will see that Dickens had abandoned the style of A Christmas Carol for that of the modern Victorian ghost story writers.
“The Trial For Murder” (1865) is perhaps Dickens’ most famous ghostly tale after A Christmas Carol. A man looks out his window and sees two men, one following the other. The first man looks harried, while the second has a face “…the color of impure wax.” This second man shows up again through a sealed door in the narrator’s house. It is then that the man realizes this fellow is a ghost. The narrator is able to allow his servant to see the ghost too when he touches him.
Later the narrator is selected for jury duty. The defendant is the first man, a murderer, who realizes that the narrator is on the side of his haunter. The criminal tries to challenge the man’s selection but can give no reasonable explanation. The narrator becomes the jury foreman and is haunted with a thirteenth, phantom juror. The narrator sees the second man, the ghost of the murderer’s victim, whispering in the ears of the jurors in their secluded quarters. The jurors eventually come to a verdict of “guilty” and the phantom disappears, with justice having been served.
Dickens’ final spinetingler is the often anthologized, “The Signal-Man” (1866). Like “The Goodwood Ghost Story” it has a clear, straight forward style. The tale tells of a man who likes to visit a lonely railroad man who operates a station beside a tunnel. The railroad man jumps at the other’s first words, called down to him, “Halloa! below there!” Later, the visitor gains the railroader’s confidence and finds out why the signalman is nervous. He has seen a phantom beside the tunnel, his face obscured and his arms motioning him to step aside. This ghost had foretold a terrible accident on the track as well as a single lady’s death. The signal man feared and waited in haunted silence for its third premonition. The
visitor promises to return to him but when he does the signal man is dead, killed by a train, the driver calling out “Halloa! Below there!” and waving his arms.
Dickens grew despondent about the way people celebrated Christmas. In later years, he came to see that though his classic of Ebeneezer Scrooge lost none of its popularity, its message was often lost on the public. This souring shows in his later stories but he never abandoned the ghost story. As the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) shows, Dickens loved Christmas to the last. The incomplete novel is set at Christmas and many people have guessed what Dickens might have written later on in the book. Was it a straight mystery? Would it have contained ghosts and spiritualists?
