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’.
That people have seen ghosts and reported their sightings is incontrovertible — whatever ‘ghosts’ may be. That those accounts here have been written by people of sobriety and sound mind is too. Hysteria has no place in these ghost sightings, nor does insanity or drunkenness. The stories are almost prosaic, the viewers ordinary people, often rather pedestrian, unimaginative and dull. A lot of clergymen in the 18th and 19th centuries saw ghosts, and a lot of people in castles, isolated houses and lonely cottages heard them.
The book has a rough shape, with sections devoted to phantoms inside houses, poltergeists, animal spirits and so on, but the arrangement is fairly haphazard. There are few accounts of ghost sightings from the 20th and 21st centuries, which cannot be because people have stopped seeing or hearing ghosts. They have not.
No novelist could get away with producing stories with so little interest or point, and which are not even particularly frightening. A fictional ghost may continue to haunt this world because of a desire for revenge, to see justice done — perhaps to the person who murdered them, or caused some terrible accident. Or it may be desperate to remain close to a particular still-living person — a child, a lover. It may be mischievous, restless, spiritually troubled, or simply evil. Such ghosts, when seen or sensed, heard or even smelled, may terrify because we are easily frightened by what we do not understand — indeed, by what we do not believe in, despite the evidence of our own senses.
The point of the ghost story in this case is the effect it has on the living. In The English Ghost, most of those experiencing ghostly phenomena react with temporary disbelief, fright or bewilderment. They may move away, and certainly often leave the house or hotel room quickly. Or they may simply shrug, make a note or write a letter about what they have seen and carry on regardless.
Many ghosts are heard but never seen. I heard a ghost when I was a child. My maternal grandmother and aunts lived in a solid Victorian house in Southport and I was staying with them, as a child of six or seven. We were in the front sitting-room playing cards when there was the sound of the front door opening and closing and of heavy footsteps crossing the hall, and going up the stairs. Then they ceased. My grandmother looked up. ‘There’s Fred.’ I asked who Fred was, because this was an all-female household. ‘The ghost’, I was told, matter-of-factly, before the card-game resumed without further comment.
I have no explanation. I do know I heard what I heard and that my grandmother said what she said, but that’s it. Not very interesting, you will agree, and that, ultimately, is one verdict on this mildly diverting rag-bag of tales. They do not frighten or alarm, and they have no real point. No conclusions are drawn. Perhaps they cannot be.
I have been wondering quite why Peter Ackroyd has bothered to compile it at all, and my explanation, for what it is worth, is that he had a paid researcher with time on his hands and set him to go through ghost-story records from around the country and put together a nice, varied selection. There is a bibliography, and the sources of all the tales — old magazines and annals mainly — are carefully recorded. Not an unpleasant research task for a trainee. That is my theory anyway. ‘Whether the reader chooses to believe in it is another matter.’
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