It’s been 10 years since the publication of my book A Natural History of Ghosts (see FT296:42-45). I probably should have written more in it about the writer Charles Dickens. The truth is I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Dickens. I read Great Expectations every other year, and I always open A Christmas Carol as Advent descends. Dickens was a considerable influence on MR James, who used to particularly enjoy reading out loud The Pickwick Papers to the schoolboys at Eton – when he wasn’t scaring them with immersive ghost stories of predatory skeletons in rural Dorset. It’s forgotten that nesting within Dickens’s comedy masterpiece there are five light-hearted ghost stories that are often stripped out and anthologised. And I was reminded of Dickens’s rather strange and interesting engagement with the supernatural while visiting a new exhibition on the subject, “To Be Read at Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural” recently. It’s in the house on Doughty Street, now beautifully preserved as the Charles Dickens Museum, where he lived in the late 1830s.
Dickens was a sceptic – it’s worth saying that from the outset. His natural antipathy and disgusted fascination with folly made scepticism an obvious position for him. Still – it’s an unexpected stance from the point of view of him purely as a writer rather than an eminent citizen, because he seems
