The Haunted House

By Charles Dickens and Wesley Stace

On Christmas Eve, a party of friends descends on a purportedly haunted country retreat, charged with the task of discovering evidence of the supernatural. Sequestered in their rooms for the holiday, the friends reconvene on Twelfth Night at a great feast and share their stories of spectral encounter. “Conducted” by Charles Dickens and counting Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins among its contributors, The Haunted House examines quintessentially Victorian themes–sex and longing, nostalgia and loss–in ways that continue to resonate today. Ingeniously conceived and written, and spiked with flashes of Dickensian humor, this volume is a strange and sheer delight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 18, 2007
• ISBN: 9780307432285

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.

Reviews for The Haunted House

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of short stories, brought together weakly by a surrounding plot. The haunted house of the title is spotted by the author from the train, who decides it would be a good idea to rent it for a few months and stay there with a group of friends over the Christmas season. They have until the 12th Night to sleep in their allotted and supposedly haunted room, at which point they will regale the whole group with their own experiences. Here an added twist comes in - each of the stories was written by a contemporary of Dickens, who invited his literary friends to contribute alongside himself. The quality and style of the tales thus vary, and generally they have not aged well at all. What they all have in common is that there is very little in the way of ghosts or hauntings, which is somewhat disappointing. While the concept behind this is in my opinion a very good one, it is let down by its execution.

[passion4reading_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Having read Dickens's short ghost story The Signalman and being somewhat familiar with the works of Wilkie Collins, I was hoping for a literary experience of the same or at least similar calibre. Sadly, I was distinctly underwhelmed by the collection of short stories on offer here. The Haunted House appeared in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round in 1862 and features contributions by his friends Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, as well as the now rather unknown authors Hesba Stretton, George Augustus Sala and Adelaide Anne Procter. It consists of several unrelated short stories linked together by a frame narrative, in this case nine friends spending the Christmas holidays in a supposedly haunted house and describing their experiences on Twelfth Night. Apart from the rather melodramatic and moralistic overtones typical of the time, the stories had virtually nothing to do with what I understand by a haunted house or ghost story but dealt with rather more personal issues of hauntings. I'm sorry to say that I found the majority of them slightly baffling and not in the slightest bit affecting, the exception being Wilkie Collins's story Blow up with the Brig that at least raised the tension during reading. Unfortunately, this volume isn't exactly what I'd describe as a classic.

[donna47_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Edition doesnt have all the stories that make up this group but what I read was good