The Haunted House (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
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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.
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Reviews for The Haunted House (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
55 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Having 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Edition doesnt have all the stories that make up this group but what I read was good
Book preview
The Haunted House (Fantasy and Horror Classics) - Charles Dickens
THE
HAUNTED HOUSE
Fantasy and Horror Classics
By
CHARLES DICKENS
First published in 1859
Copyright © 2020 Fantasy and Horror Classics
This edition is published by Fantasy and Horror Classics,
an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any
way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.
For more information visit
www.readandcobooks.co.uk
Contents
Charles Dickens
I THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE
II THE GHOST IN MASTER B.’S ROOM
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Landport, Portsmouth in 1812. When he was ten years old, his family settled in Camden Town, a poor neighbourhood of London. A defining moment in the young Dickens' life came only two years later, when his father – the inspiration for the character of Mr Micawber in David Copperfield – was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison. As a result, Dickens was sent to Warren's blacking factory, where he worked in appalling conditions and gained a first-hand acquaintance with poverty. After three years Dickens resumed his education, but the experience was highly formative for him, and would later be fictionalised in both David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
Dickens' writing career began in around 1830, when he started to write for the journals The Mirror of Parliament and The True Sun. Three years later, he became parliamentary journalist for The Morning Chronicle, and also began to have some successes with his fiction: His first short story, A 'Dinner at Popular Walk', appeared in the Monthly Magazine in December of 1833, and his first book, a collection titled Sketches by Boz, was published in 1836. However, his real breakthrough came in 1837, with the serialised publication of Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – the work was hugely popular, and transformed Dickens into a well-known literary figure.
Over the next few years, at an almost incredible rate, Dickens wrote Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge (1840-41). In 1842, he travelled with his wife to the United States and Canada (where he gave lectures denouncing slavery), and in the years following produced his five 'Christmas Books'. During the fifties, after brief spells living in Italy and Switzerland, he continued to write at a seemingly inexhaustible pace, producing some of his best work: David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861).
During the latter stages of his life, Dickens turned his focus from writing to giving readings. In 1869, during one such reading, he collapsed, showing symptoms of a mild stroke. He died at home one year later, aged 58. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, where the inscription on his tomb reads: He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.
Dickens is now regarded as the greatest writer of the Victorian era, and one of the greatest English authors since Shakespeare.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
I
THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE
Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional ghostly