complete ghost stories charles dickens

Complete Ghost Stories

Charles dickens.

329 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1866

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"[...] bukankah hal ini suatu berkah yang istimewa bagi Anda, karena Anda dapat mengingat sebuah kesalahan di masa lalu, lalu memaafkannya?" (hal. 247)

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The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens Library Binding – January 1, 1983

• Library Binding $7.80 12 Used from $4.00 1 Collectible from $22.50
• Paperback $24.95 1 Used from $24.95
• Print length 341 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Franklin Watts
• Publication date January 1, 1983
• ISBN-10 0531098850
• ISBN-13 978-0531098851
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Franklin Watts (January 1, 1983)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Library Binding ‏ : ‎ 341 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0531098850
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0531098851
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
• #1,641 in Ghost Fiction
• #11,396 in Classic Literature & Fiction
• #22,966 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Charles dickens.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth where his father was a clerk in the navy pay office. The family moved to London in 1823, but their fortunes were severely impaired. Dickens was sent to work in a blacking-warehouse when his father was imprisoned for debt. Both experiences deeply affected the future novelist. In 1833 he began contributing stories to newspapers and magazines, and in 1836 started the serial publication of Pickwick Papers. Thereafter, Dickens published his major novels over the course of the next twenty years, from Nicholas Nickleby to Little Dorrit. He also edited the journals Household Words and All the Year Round. Dickens died in June 1870.

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• SERIES: Classics
• Pack Qty: 64
• Published: 02/05/1997
• ISBN: 9781853267345

Charles Dickens

Complete ghost stories.

• Waterstones
• Bookshop.org

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during Charles Dickens’ lifetime.  He had always loved a good ghost story himself, particularly at Christmas time, and was open-minded, willing to accept, and indeed put to the test, the existence of spirits.

His natural inclinations toward drama and the macabre made him a brilliant teller of ghost tales, and in the twenty stories presented here, which include his celebrated A Christmas Carol , the full range of his gothic talents can be seen.

Chilling as some of these stories are, Dickens has managed to inject characteristically grotesque comedy as he writes  of revenge, insanity, pre-cognition and dream visions, he indulges also in some debunking of contemporary credulity.

Stories include:

• The Queer Chair
• A Madman’s Manuscript
• The Goblins who Stole a Sexton
• The Ghosts of the Mail
• The Baron of Grogzwig

A Christmas Carol

• The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
• To be Read at Dusk
• The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber
• The Haunted House
• The Trial for Murder (to be taken with a grain of salt)
• The Signalman
• Christmas Ghosts
• The Lawyer and the Ghost
• Four Ghost Stories
• The Portrait-Painter’s Story
• Captain Murderer and the Devil’s Bargain
• Mr Testator’s Visitation
• A Child’s Dream of a Star
• Well-Authenticated Rappings

Other titles by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist (Collector’s Edition)

Collector's editions.

Barnaby Rudge

Bleak House

Christmas Books

David Copperfield

Dombey and Son

Great Expectations

Little Dorrit

Martin Chuzzlewit

The Mystery of Edwin Drood & Other Stories

Nicholas Nickleby

The Old Curiosity Shop

Oliver Twist

Our Mutual Friend

The Pickwick Papers

A Tale of Two Cities

Children's Classics

A Christmas Carol (Adult Edition)

A Christmas Carol (Collector’s Edition)

Great Expectations (Collector’s Edition)

Articles related to Complete Ghost Stories

Chills at Christmas

The Newgate Controversy Part One

The Spirits of Charles Dickens

Publication: The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens

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Contents (view Concise Listing)

Secondary verifications.

• Authors & Illustrators

Charles Dickens

Ghost stories.

Bringing together all Charles Dickens' ghost stories – twenty in all – including several longer tales. Here are chilling histories of coincidence, insanity and revenge. To paraphrase Joe in The Pickwick Papers : Charles Dickens 'wants to make your flesh creep'. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Ghost Stories is illustrated by various artists, with an afterword by David Stuart Davies. Throughout his illustrious writing career, Dickens often turned his hand to fashioning short pieces of ghostly fiction. Even in his first successful work, The Pickwick Papers , you will find five ghost stories, all of which are included in this collection. Dickens began the tradition of 'the ghost story at Christmas', and many of his tales in this genre are presented here, including the brilliant novella 'The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain', which deserves to be as well-known as A Christmas Carol . While all his supernatural tales aim to send a shiver down the spine, they are not without the usual traits of Dickens' flamboyant style: his subtle wit, biting irony, humorous incidents and moral observations. It is a mixture that makes these stories fascinating and entertaining as well as unsettling.

Books by Charles Dickens

Bleak House

Our Mutual Friend

Scenes of London Life

Great Expectations

Oliver Twist

A Tale of Two Cities

David Copperfield

A Christmas Carol

The Pickwick Papers

Related articles, the best classic scary stories for halloween, 11 of the best charles dickens books (for every type of reader), mary shelley, frankenstein and the year without a summer.

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A Dickens of a Good Ghost Story

The novels of Charles Dickens are familiar to us all through TV adaptations and films. Less well known is how…

Bryan Kozlowski

“Ideas, like ghosts (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before they will explain themselves.” – Charles Dickens

If any author has haunted the houses of our imagination, then Charles Dickens is the literary spirit par excellence . Year after year, popular books and TV adaptations witness his recurrent visitations and remind us of his powerful hold on our minds – relentlessly going strong since his death in 1870. But few know of the personal hauntings that Dickens himself experienced, or how the supernatural influenced his most memorable works.

“He had something of a hankering” after ghosts, remembered his friend and biographer John Forster. And such was Dickens’ obsession with the supernatural, Forster was convinced that he would have “fallen into the follies of spiritualism,” had it not been for “the strong retraining power of his common sense.”

Yet that retraining power took time to develop and was certainly absent in Dickens’ childhood – the memories of which, he claimed, were “responsible for most of the dark corners” of his mind. Dickens vividly recalled the terrifying bedtime tales that his nanny, “Miss Mercy,” inflicted on his impressionable mind. One of her favorite (and most gruesome) yarns was “Captain Murderer,” which she fiendishly accompanied “by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan.” Of her nightmarish narrations, Dickens would later write:

“So acutely did I suffer from the ceremony…that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it…Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”

Although jolting shocks to Dickens’ young psyche, these early frights energized his nascent imagination like little else could. And his love–hate relationship with ghost stories continued throughout adolescence. As a schoolboy, he avidly devoured each installment of the horror magazine The Terrific Register , despite how he said the tales made him “unspeakably miserable, and frightened my very wits out of of my head.”

Whether those wits became jaded over time, or the “power of his common sense” gradually sharpened, Dickens would prove much harder to scare in adulthood. Living in an age rife with supernatural speculation, he steadily developed the mind of a skeptic. Rather than being caught up in the Spiritualism craze that arrived from America in the 19 th century (with its séances and rampant rise in ghostly sightings), Dickens acquiesced to the scientific theory of his day, that paranormal phenomenon had a physiological basis: that apparitions were a result of, as he put it, “a disordered condition of the nerves or senses.”

But this never diminished Dickens’ inherent “hankering” for ghosts or intellectual curiosity in the hereafter. “Don’t suppose that I am so bold and arrogant as to settle what can and what cannot be, after death,” he once told a fellow writer. And acting upon that open-mindedness, later in life, he joined the London Ghost Club – one of the first paranormal research organizations, founded in 1862. Dickens also attended numerous séances, investigating their claims and, more often than not, debunking the phony phantoms of the “spirit business.” Describing the dubious sightings at one particular séance, Dickens mockingly questioned just what sort of spirits these mediums were employing:

“The seer had a vision of stalks and leaves, ‘a large species of fruit, somewhat resembling a pine-apple,’ and ‘a nebulous column, somewhat resembling the milky way,’ which nothing but spirits could account for, and from which nothing but soda-water, or time, is likely to have recovered him.”

Pithy skepticism aside, Dickens was the first to concede that while these exposés were comical, they were undoubtedly “less chilling than a ghost story itself.” Rational or not, Victorians were itching to be spooked, and as a self-supported writer, Dickens was quick to oblige them. Throughout his literary career, he wrote more than two dozen ghost stories, many of which appearing as smaller tales tucked into larger novels, including The Pickwick Papers , Bleak House , and Nicholas Nickleby . With such frequent and prolific trips into the paranormal, it begs to wonder if Dickens was entertaining the public as much as he was indulging his own ghostly appetite.

If the latter, he certainly was careful to construct his ghost stories with the common sense he was so respected for. Unlike the incredible and far-fetched stories of his childhood, Dickens’ ghosts reflect his own attitude towards paranormal phenomenon as a sensory-based “disordered condition.” Scrooge’s classic banter with Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, after all, is no coincidence:

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost. “I don’t,” said Scrooge. “What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?” “I don’t know,” said Scrooge. “Why do you doubt your senses?” “Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.”

While not the most terrifying encounter in Dickens’ arsenal, it illustrates a formula he would use for more eerie tales. A dabbler in the Victorian art of mesmerism – an early form of hypnosis – Dickens witnessed firsthand the disturbing mental “phantom” that could manifest in “shattered nerves.” Knowing that these psychological spirits were every bit as horrifying as physical ones, his most unnerving stories (such as “A Madman’s Manuscript” and “The Signal-Man”), solely rely upon susceptible minds to conjure up their own ghastly hauntings.

This unique blend of fantastic believability, authored by a skeptic with paranormal attractions, made the Dickensian ghost story an instant success – one that keeps on chilling our spines nearly two-hundred years later. And just like young Charles, we might suffer a little from the scare, but secretly, we don’t want the spine-chilling to stop. So it’s little wonder that days after his death, Dickens’ ghost was reportedly turning up in Victorian séance parlors, still narrating spooky tales from the other side of the grave. Fact or fancy, or another case of intoxicating spirits, one thing is certain: the ghost of his ideas have been turning up ever since.

Sources Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens: 1812-1842. New York: Sterling Signature, 2001; first published 1874. Boehm, Katharina. Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Dickens, Charles. Selected Journalism 1850-1870. London: Penguin UK, 2006. Dickens, Charles. Ghost Stories edited by David Stuart Davies. London: Collector’s Library, 2009. Brown, Nicola and Carolyn Burdett. The Victorian Supernatural. London: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Joyce, Judith. The Weiser Field Guide to the Paranormal. San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2011. Dickens, Charles. Complete Ghost Stories. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. House, Madeline, ed. The British Academy/The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume 12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. New York City: HarperCollins, 2009. Riccio, Dolores. Haunted Houses U.S.A. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Bryan Kozlowski is a member of The Dickens Fellowship and has published essays and articles on Charles Dickens and Victorian history. He writes from South Florida.

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