Futile phantoms

But of course this new book is by Peter Ackroyd, celebrated biographer, historian and chronicler, a bit of a polymath, a man who has written wonderfully informative and erudite books about Blake, the river Thames, Venice, and introductions to all the novels of Dickens, so naturally one expects a good deal more from The English Ghost than from any of those other popular titles on the same subject. One does not get it.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, one thing distinguishes the fictional ghost from the ‘real’ and that is Purpose. Read through the several dozen tales of English ghosts here and you will find not a single one that has any raison d’être fantome. In 1865 Mrs Webb died in her cottage near Rugby, and soon after her neighbours heard doors being banged, walls thumped and furniture thrown about. In 1912 the Marquis of Hartington (future 8th Duke of Devonshire and misnamed the Marquis of Huntington here) saw a figure standing at the door of his room ‘dressed in nondescript clothes … the phantom was not at all transparent but solid and real.’ In 1880 Dr Jessop saw a hand reach out for the books he was consulting in a Norfolk library, and on turning, a man’s figure. ‘I decline to proffer any explanation, theory or inference about this spectral illusion.’

Which may be said for the rest of the ghosts and ghostly phenomena here described. Why are they seen? Who are, or were, they? What is the point of them, and is there another explanation for their apparent presence? Ackroyd makes no attempt to answer any of these questions. In his useful but hardly original introduction he merely notes that ‘the witnesses here fully believed in the reality of what they had seen or experienced’, then lamely concludes, ‘whether the reader chooses to believe in it is another matter’.