Long before the Ghostbusters were around, with his pet raven Grip on his arm, Charles Dickens was a real-life Victorian ghost hunter. He didn’t just like writing stories about all things spooky, he was part of a big Victorian craze which went ghost mad. Even Queen Victoria herself used to try and communicate with her dead husband, Prince Albert, in seances. Magic was back in fashion in Victorian England. After years of hunting down witches, England decided to speak to the spirits and go into business with the dead in a big way.
The craze started with the Fox sisters. These two Americans visited London in 1848 and claimed to have made contact with a murdered man. It turned out to be a stroke of luck for them, as their new found ability to chat to those who had long since been buried started to make them a lot of money. They held seances with wealthy clients who were keen to gather round the table in the dark and have a chat with people they knew who had died. The Fox sister were only too happy to act as a supernatural telephone to deceased relatives, friends and lovers. Perhaps seeing the money that could be made if you realised you had your own personal hotline to the dead, the number of people hosting seances exploded.
Dickens’ fascinations with the supernatural through could have come long before the Fox Sisters. He told in his later life of the terrifying tales his nanny, “Miss Mercy”. She told him stories about characters like “Captain Murderer” and Dickens later explained how frightened he was of them. He admitted “I used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story”. Were his frightening bedtime stories the inspiration for his later classic ghost stories? More likely just some damp sheets.
In 1862 Dickens was said to have been a founder of the Ghost Club. These aren’t the oddballs you would expect who went around England chasing after ghosts; they were a group of highly respected and successful academic men who wanted to get to the truth of this new area of ‘science.’ It isn’t really certain what their investigations found out, but it sounds like Dickens would have needed some convincing. He said in an 1859 letter to his friend. “I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me…that the alteration of some slight circumstance would bring it within the range of common natural probabilities.”
Despite him sounding like a disbeliever here, Dickens himself claimed to have some strange healing powers. He believed in mesmerism. He boasted his magnetic powers had allowed him to cure his friend, Madam de la Rue, of her “spectres.” After ridding her of the ghosts that allegedly were the things making her anxious, Dickens began to spend a lot more time with her to try and understand how mesmerism worked. Mrs Dickens however was less than impressed and suggested that mesmerism wasn’t the only thing he was doing with Madam de la Rue.
So how can a man who worked so hard to uncover the truths about a corrupt and rotten Victorian society have become so involved in the mad world of dealing with the dead? Perhaps he was just a curious man whose interest in society took him down this path. Despite his interest, he always remained wary of people claiming to have magical powers. Sometimes however, perhaps Dickens took his fascination with the dead a little too far. After Grip’s death, Dicken’s had his raven stuffed and continued to carry him around.
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