in england, all ghosts are victorian
I realised this fact today as I inspected an old black-and-white photograph of a whaling village in Nantucket, with its solid pragmatic buildings and dirt road, populated solely by Victorians and a single horse and cart. The Victorians have been on my mind for a while. I have a growing suspicion that the Victorian era has neglected to die, that it’s still walking about in zombie form, that it perhaps needs to be woken before it can be properly laid to rest, or with greater violence torn out of our living cells. But I digress.
If it’s not immediately obvious that all ghosts are Victorian, this is because of two cunning tricks that have been played. The less cunning is that played by the writers of ghost stories, describing ghosts who appear not to be Victorian at all. But this is an illusion. These ghosts are either thinly disguised Victorians or else the ghosts of children (and in England, every childhood is governed by the spirit of the Victorian era1). Or else they come from other parts of the world, where the Victorian monopoly does not apply.
The more cunning trick was played by history, or perhaps by the Victorians themselves by having a fondness for ghost stories and telling so damn many of them. This was an incredibly sneaky piece of misdirection, making the Victorian-ness of ghosts appear to be mere historical correlation. Don’t be taken in.
Have you heard the one about the Shadow? You bury it, it comes back darker than before. You lock it up, it comes back stronger than before. Finally, you are able to trap it in the earth under the roots of a yew tree. Victory! But there are strange shadows among the leaves. Shadows in the fields, in the sky, a whole landscape of shadows.
Why this should be true is a great mystery.