Original subtitles

(SOFT, SOMBRE MUSIC)

"Why do you come to haunt me thus?"

'I come as I am called.' replied the ghost.

"No, unbidden," exclaimed the chemist.

"Unbidden, be it" said the Spectre.

"It is enough. I am here."

Charles Dickens ghost stories are as haunting now

as they were when they were written over 150 years ago.

They are of their time, but of all time.

Alive with the Victorian thirst for the supernatural

and the enduring appeal of the otherworldly.

Full of drama,

I think Dickens' ghost stories are a gift for actors.

Always characterful.

They say in general that she was murdered

and the howl, he 'ooted the while.

Chillingly dark.

The phantom slowly,

gravely,

silently approached.

Disturbingly real. Stay with me.

I'm too frightened to be left by myself.

And unsettlingly psychological.

Show me the monarch whose angry frown was ever feared

like the glare of a madman's eye.

Whose cord and axe were ever half so sure as a madman's grip.

Oh, it's a grand thing to be mad.

Recently I've been on a deep dive into Charles Dickens' ghost stories,

and I found that his writing really resonates with me.

Many of his ghost stories explore the workings of the mind.

And while some of them are pure invention,

others were inspired by Dickens' own encounters

with the unexplained.

By blending his real life experiences with his imagination,

he created some of his finest work

and became a master combining his phantoms with his fiction.

Charles Dickens grew up in an age of rapid and unstoppable industrial

and technological advances.

The railway network, expanded,

printing presses steamed into action,

and for the first time, the masses had access to published material.

Being able to communicate over long distances

through the new telegraph system must have seemed fantastical.

And as the magic of photography developed,

images of loved ones could be preserved forever,

even after death.

In this bewildering world of change,

the Victorians were desperate to find some certainty,

not just in everyday life, but in life beyond death.

And ghost stories captured the imagination.

Charles Dickens developed a passion for the macabre

from an early age,

fuelled by the scary stories his nanny, Ms Mercy, told him

at bedtime.

One of her favourites was The Tale of Captain Murderer,

which she performed, Dickens wrote,

'By clawing the air with both hands and uttering a long,

low, hollow groan.

So acutely did I suffer from the ceremony,

that I sometimes used to plead, I thought,

I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story

again just yet.

But she never spared me one word of it.

Her name was Mercy,

though she had none on me.'

As a youngster,

Dickens was an avid reader of the Terrific Register,

a penny dreadful magazine.

Full of stories of cannibalism, murder and ghosts.

He was hooked by the way a terrifying tale had the power

to appal and enthral

with a heightened sense of the theatrical.

When he became a writer himself,

Dickens delighted in performing his work to friends and family.

He wrote some of his earliest ghost stories here at his home

in Doughty Street in London.

Now the Charles Dickens Museum.

Where Frankie Kubicki is the deputy director of programs

and collections.

What have we got here?

So we're standing in Dickens' drawing room.

So this is sort of the public space of the house

where we would have invited friends, family to relax.

But it's also quite a special space because in it

we know that he used to give these performances,

special extracts of his stories to his friends that he's writing.

So it's something that we like to celebrate in this room.

The idea Dickens, the actor, Dickens, the performer.

So this is almost like his little theatre.

Yeah.Would he have perform his ghost stories in here?Yeah.

Interestingly, his good friend, who was an actor,

was sobbing at one performance and Dickens writes to his wife,

Catherine, 'You would know what it is to have power.'

You know, this feeling of being able to provoke

this emotion from someone.

I mean, that's one of the things I love about theatre

and about performance is that you do have a certain sense of power

over your audience. I could just imagine, you know,

Dickens being this- a wannabe actor, but just revelling in the idea

that he has people in the palm of his hands,

particularly something, as you say, with these ghost stories,

because I mean, they're sort of-

I mean, they would literally be hanging on his every word,

I would imagine.

'A chilled, slow,

earthy, fixed old man.

A cadaverous old man of measured speech.

An old man whose eyes,

two spots of fire

had no more motion than if they had been connected

with the back of his skull by screws, driven through them,

riveted and bolted outside among his grey hairs.'

The detail in which Dickens describes his apparitions

is chillingly credible.

He was keen to find evidence that ghosts might really exist,

and in 1859,

he wrote to the well-known spiritualist, William Howitt,

asking him to recommend any haunted house whatsoever within the limits

of the United Kingdom, where nobody can live,

eat, drink, sit, stand, lie or sleep

without spirit molestation.

But Dickens remained dubious when no phantoms appeared

in Howitt's recommended houses

and showed his scepticism. in his story, the Haunted House.

(CLEAR THROAT) "Is it haunted?" I asked.

The landlord looked at me,

shook his head and answered.

"I say nothing."

"Oh, then it is haunted."

"Well," cried the landlord, in an outburst of frankness

that had the appearance of desperation,

"I wouldn't sleep in it."

"Huh? Why not?"

"If I want it to have all the bells in a house ring with nobody

to ring them,

and all sorts of feet treading about with no feet there.

"Why then," said the landlord, "I'd sleep in that house."

"Is anything seen there?"

The landlord looked at me again.

And then, with his former appearance of desperation,

called down his stable yard for "Ike!"

"This gentleman wants to know," said the landlord,

"if anything's seen at the Poplars."

"Hooded woman with a howl," said Ike in a state of great freshness.

"Do you mean cry?"

"I mean both, sir."

"A hooded woman with an owl. Dear me.

Did you ever see her?"

"I seen the howl."

"Never the woman?"

"Not so plain as the howl. But they always keeps together."

"Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly as the owl?"

"Lord bless you sir, lots."

"Who?"

"Lord bless you, sir. Lots."

"Who is- Who was the hooded woman with the owl? Do you know?"

"Well," said Ike, holding up his cap with one hand

while he scratched his head with the other,

"They say in general that she was murdered,

and the howl he 'ooted the while."

(OWL HOOTS)

Dickins' scepticism wasn't going to get in the way

of a good story.

And in the Haunted Man And The Ghost's Bargain,

the phantom he conjures is frighteningly believable.

'Ghastly and cold,

colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features

and his bright eyes and his grizzled hair and dressed in the gloomy

shadow of his dress.

It came into his terrible appearance of existence,

motionless, without a sound.

As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of the chair,

ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair back.

Close above him.

With its appalling copy of his face, looking where his face looked

and bearing the expression his face bore.

This then, was the something that had passed and gone already.

This was the dream companion

of the Haunted Man.'

Charles Dickens knew exactly how to set the scene

for a good ghost story.

Ghost stories belong to dusk.

The hour when the daylight starts to melt away

and the shadows begin to stalk.

The shape shifting moment between light and dark.

'When twilight everywhere released,

the shadows prisoned up all day, they now closed in

and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts.

When they stood glowering in corners of rooms

and frowned out from behind half open doors.

When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects,

making the nurse an ogress, the rocking horse a monster,

the wandering child, half scared and half amused,

a stranger to itself.

The very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant

with his arms akimbo,

evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen

and wanting to grind people's bones to make his bread.

When these shadows, brought into the minds of older people

other thoughts and showed them different images.

When they stole from their retreats in the likenesses

of forms and faces from the past,

from the grave,

from the deep, deep gulf

where the things that might have been and never were.

Her always wondering.'

One of Dickens earliest scary stories is

The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.

Published in 1837,

it tells the tale of a mean and miserable man

reformed by supernatural creatures.

If it sounds familiar, it is.

A few years later,

the idea evolved into one of Dickens' best known ghost stories.

A Christmas Carol.

What Dickens did with the publication of A Christmas Carol

in 1843 was he established or re-established

an old tradition by which

Christmas becomes associated with tales of the supernatural.

He himself got it from earlier traditions,

but it was the publication of A Christmas Carol

that really cemented that link between the ghost story

and Christmas.

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

'The spirit stood among the graves and pointed down the one.

He advanced towards it, trembling.

The Phantom was exactly as it had been,

but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,"

said Scrooge,

"Answer me one question."

"Are these the shadows of the things that will be?

Or are they shadows of the things maybe only?"

Still, the ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

Scrooge crept towards it,

trembling as he went.

And following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave.

His own name.

Ebenezer Scrooge.'

A Christmas Carol originally was a difficult part of Dickens' life.

His last novel really wasn't a success,

and therefore he undertakes to finance it himself

because he believed in it, but his publishers didn't.

He had a really clear idea of the type of book he wanted as well.

It was to be a Christmas gift book,

it was to be a beautiful edition with beautiful colour illustrations,

which were incredibly expensive in the Victorian period.

Something really that you'd be proud to give to someone.

But of course this made it a very expensive book.

But because if he wanted to make it more affordable,

he didn't really make very much money from a Christmas Carol,

even though it was amazing success.

The streets through which Scrooge travels on Christmas Eve

are full of ghosts,

and the spirits who visit him slip into real homes and graveyards.

But even with the unsettling suggestion that the dead

are sharing the world of the living,

Dickens implies that they might be merely figments of the imagination.

Scrooge even suggests that the Phantom of Marley

might actually be a result of indigestion.

'"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't," said Scrooge.

"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?"

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "A little thing affects them.

A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.

You may be an undigested bit of beef.

A blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese.

A fragment of an underdone potato.

There's more of the gravy than the grave about you.

Whatever you are."'

What the Dickens ghost story does, I think,

is articulate people's anxieties, their fears, their concerns.

But it also does it in quite a light, comic way, sometimes.

It's really important to remember that Dickens is a comedian

as much as someone who does scary stories.

I've come to love Dickens' sense of humour and mischief,

and he uses it to particular effect in the Pickwick papers.

In this scene, a lawyer enters into a spirited conversation

with a spirit.

'In this room, my worldly ruin was worked,

and I and my children beggared.

And since that day, I have prowled by night,

the only period at which I can revisit Earth

about the scenes of my long, protracted misery.

This apartment is mine.

Leave it to me.

"If you insist upon making your appearance here,"

said the tenant,

who had time to collect his presence of mind

during his prosey statement of the ghost,

"I shall give up possession with the greatest of pleasure.

But I should like to ask you one question, if you'll allow me."

"Say on," said the apparition, Stanley.

"Well," said the tenant,

"I don't apply the observation personally to you

because it is equally applicable to most of the ghosts

I have ever heard of.

But it does appear to me somewhat inconsistent

that when you have an opportunity of visiting

the fairest spots of Earth

for I suppose space is nothing to you,

you should always return exactly to the very places

where you've been most miserable."

"Your God. That is very true.

I never thought of that before," said the Ghost.

"You see, sir," pursued the tenant,

"This is a very uncomfortable room.

From the presence of that press, I should be disposed to say

that it's not wholly free from bugs,

and I really think you might find much more comfortable quarters

to say nothing of the climate of London,

which is, of course, extremely disagreeable."

"You are very right, sir," said the ghost politely.

"It never struck me till now.

I'll try a change of air directly."

And in fact, he began to vanish as he spoke.

His legs indeed had quite disappeared.'

Not all of Dickens' ghost stories were pure imagination.

Some were inspired by his own real life experiences.

In 1858, whilst visiting Lancaster,

Dickens was intrigued by the true story of a local woman

called Eleanor Hartmann, murdered by her husband Edward.

He had poisoned her with arsenic in order

to trigger money from various burial clubs.

A form of Victorian life insurance.

Found guilty of murder,

Hartmann was hanged at Lancaster Castle.

Attracting a crowd of over 8000 people.

Dickens, a vocal opponent of public execution,

was fascinated by the case,

and following his visit to Lancaster,

wrote The Ghost in the Bride's Chamber.

In this dark tale,

the story of a young murdered wife is told by a tormented apparition,

himself hanged at Lancaster Castle 100 years earlier.

'"I must tell it to you."

Said the old man with a ghastly and stony stare.

"What?" asked Francis Goodchild.

"You know where it took place.

Yonder."

Whether he pointed to the room above or to the room below

or in that old town,

Mr Goodchild was not, nor is, nor ever can be sure.

He was confused by the circumstances that the right forefinger

of the old man

seemed to dip itself in one of the threads of fire.

Light itself.

And make a fiery start in the air

as it pointed somewhere.

Having pointed somewhere, it went out.

"She was a bride," said the old man.

"She was a fair, flaxen-haired, large-eyed girl.

Who had no character.

No purpose.

A weak, credulous.

incapable, helpless nothing.

Not like her mother.

No, no.

It was her father whose character she reflected."'

A few years after Dickens wrote The Ghost in the Bride's Chamber,

a near-death experience would inspire

one of his most unsettling ghost stories.

In June 1865,

Dickens had been involved in the Staplehurst rail crash.

He'd been coming back from the continent with Nellie Ternan,

his mistress.

The train that he'd been travelling on had come off the rails

at Staplehurst. Is it really terrible accident.

Ten people died. There were 40 injuries.

Dickens himself recounts how he went down into a ravine

below the bridge that the train had been travelling over,

and he tended to the sick and dying.

Dickens escaped physically unhurt,

but it exacted a real significant psychological toll on him.

He described the traumatic experience in a letter

written a few days later.

'I was in the carriage that did not go over.

But was caught on the turn among the ruins of the bridge

and stood alone.

The engine broken from it before the train gone down

into the valley behind.

I am shaken.

Not by the dragging of the carriage itself,

but by the work afterwards in getting out the dead and dying.

Which was horrible.'

At the time, in 1865,

people were beginning to understand that those sorts of

extreme experiences would produce traumatic effects.

It was called railway spine, actually, at the time.

Such a jarring effect of an accident might

really damage your nervous system.

And it was clear that Dickens was profoundly traumatised

for the last five years of his life

and he wrote this extraordinary story called The Signalman

about that experience, really.

It's an amazing, revolutionary, psychological exploration

of someone's traumatic state.

'"One moonlit night," said the man,

"I was sitting here when I heard a voice cry

'Hello. Below there.'

I started up and looked at that door

and saw this someone else standing by the red light

near the tunnel, waving as I just showed you.

The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and he cried out.

'Look out!'

I caught up my lamp, turned it on red

and ran towards the figure calling.

'What's wrong? What's happened? Where?'

It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel.

I advance so close upon it that I wonder if it's keeping

the sleeve across its eyes.

I ran right up at it.

I had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away when it was...

..gone."

"Into the tunnel", said I.

"Nah, I ran into the tunnel 500 yards.

I stopped.

Old my lamp above my head and saw the figures

in the measured distance.

I saw the wet stains steeling down the walls

and trickling through the arch.

I run out again faster than I had run in.

For I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me.

And I looked all around the red light with my own red light,

and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it,

and not came back down again. I ran back here.

I telegraphed both ways.

'An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?'

The answer came back both ways.

'All's well.'"

Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing down my spine,

I showed him how this figure must have been a deception

of his sense of sight.

And as to the imaginary cries that I do but listen for a moment

to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low.

And to the wild harp it makes on the telegraph wires.

But he would beg to remark that he had not finished.

I asked his pardon

and he slowly added these words, touching my arm.

"Within 6 hours of the appearance,

the memorable accident on this line happened,

and within 10 hours, the dead and wounded were brought along

through the tunnel over the spot where that figure had stood."

A disagreeable shudder crept over me.

But I did my best against it.

(STEAM TRAIN HOOTS)

I think if you don't believe in ghosts,

but you do believe in the hidden powers of the mind

to do things that we don't quite understand,

which is certainly Dickens' position,

then it doesn't matter whether the spectre comes from

an external supernatural source

or the internal workings of the mind.

And as long as they appear real to the sufferer,

then the perception is as good as the reality.

For Dickens, telling a supernatural story

became a means of investigating the secret workings of the mind

and its varying states of consciousness.

Some of his most powerful ghost stories are deeply psychological.

As Victorian mental science has begun to develop in the 1800s,

and psychology became a more formal study of behaviour,

physicians began to categorise what was known as madness

as a mental disorder.

Dickins was obsessed with altered mental states

and with madness and insanity and various kinds of mental

difference throughout his career.

So you find all kinds of representations of altered

psychologies throughout his fiction.

And one way that he achieves a balance between

suggesting supernatural intervention,

but without explicitly perhaps stating it,

is by his deep knowledge of contemporary psychology

and a sort of productive ambiguity where he never quite pins down

what's happening.

He leaves enough space for the reader to infer

that this may be supernatural, or it may be to do with

a kind of psychological state

that perhaps has not yet been sufficiently explored,

but which is right at the very edge of contemporary psychology.

(OMINOUS TONES)

'Yes.

A madman's.

How that word would have struck to my heart many years ago.

I would have roused the terror that used to come upon me

sometimes sending my blood easing and tingling through my veins.

I like it now, though. It's a fine name.

Show me the monarch whose angry frown was ever feared

like the glare of a madman's eye.

Whose cord and axe were ever half so sure as a madman's grip.

Oh, it's a grand thing to be mad.

To be peeped out like a wild lion through the iron bars,

to gnash one's teeth and howl

through the long still night to the merry ring of a heavy chain.

Hurrah for the madhouse.

It's a rare place.

I remember the days when I used to be afraid of being mad.

When I used to start from my sleep and fall upon my knees

and pray to be spared from the curse of my race.

When I rushed from the sight of merriment or happiness

to hide myself in some lonely place

and spend some of the weary hours in watching the progress

of the fever that was to consume my brain.

(OMINOUS TONES)

When I cowered in some obscure corner of a crowded room

and saw men whisper and point, and turn their eyes toward me.

I knew they were telling each other of the doomed madmen.

Why not?

It's long away again to mope in solitude.

I did this for years.

Long, long years, they were.

And the nights here are long, sometimes very long,

but they are nothing

to the restless nights and dreadful dreams I had at that time.

Makes me cold to remember them.

Large, dusky forms would slide,

jeering faces crouching in the corner of the room

and bent over my bed at night,

tempting me to madness.

I jammed my fingers into my ears, but they screamed it into my head.

Till the room rang with it.

At last.

The old spirits who had been with me so often before.

Whispered in my ear that the time has come

and thrust the open razor into my hand.

I grasped firmly,

rose softly from the bed.

And leaned over my sleeping wife.'

(MYSTERIOUS MUSIC)

The Victorians obsession with the supernatural

and the unexplained spread to public performances of magic

where the audience embraced the suspension of disbelief.

Dickens was fascinated by magic and illusion

and was a keen amateur magician himself.

Magic sort of falls under the same category

as ghouls and spectres.

Victorian magicians were definitely disguising their performances

as displays of the supernatural.

We know that Dickens himself was buying magic equipment

and putting on his own little magic shows.

Why do you think Victorians was so keen to believe in

these sort of anomalies?

There were just huge advancements in science

and all sorts of technologies

that just must have seemed totally impossible.

It was the beginning of optical effects being used on stage.

Reflection on a glass can appear to be a ghost

if you don't know that the glass is there.

And this sort of new appearance of optical effects on stage,

I think lends itself towards phantoms and spirits

and also stage machinery like newly designed special trapdoors

that could allow people to appear sort of slowly

onto the stage as if they were a ghost

passing through the floor, through the walls.

So I think it just when you invent a piece of magic,

I think the first place you take it probably is the supernatural.

Show me some of the tricks that the Victorians might

have been sort of fascinated by.

OK. Well, we know that Dickens saw street conjurers doing

this type of card trick. This is a very Victorian trick.

In fact, a deck of cards. They are all totally different.

Of course, that's sort of the point and I need you to touch the back

of any one you want,

so just touch one, doesn't matter which,

and have a look at it yourself. That's important. Remember it.

So that they can see and maybe we'll be able

to put it back into the middle of the deck.

And would you just give them a mix however you feel comfortable,

anyway you want so that they're totally mixed.

I'm now going to find that card again using a sword.

I will attempt to impale your card on the tip of this sword.

I do need to know what is the card that you chose?

It was the three of spades. The three of spades.

OK, now here's what you need to do for me.

You need to take those cards and throw them up into the air.

Try and get as much height as you can, I'm going to lunge

with the sword and impale one card on the tip.

With any luck, it'll be your card. Really?Yes. Are you ready?

OK. Here we go. OK. Go for it. One, two, three.

I did get one card.

The question is, did I get your card? It is? Yes.

The three of spades.

This idea of magic is really interesting,

if you start to think about Dickens' interest in the supernatural.

Again, it's pushing this sort of boundary between

what was real and what was an illusion.

And I think it's this idea of really pulling apart illusions

that he's really interested in.

In the 1860s, Dickens joined the Ghost Club,

a society set up to explore supernatural encounters.

He attended numerous seances and was scathing about what

he discovered there - publicly debunking the mediums

and their methods.

In contrast, Dickens was a firm believer in

the seemingly more scientific practice of mesmerism.

The theory behind mesmerism involved the mesmerist

passing his hands over the patient,

manipulating the animal magnetism flowing through their body,

and alleviating symptoms such as muscle spasms and hallucinations.

Dickens believed in the power of mesmerism

and became a keen practitioner himself,

often mesmerising family and friends,

during which they would enter a trance like state.

Dickens' most sustained and serious involvement

with mesmerism began in 1844, in Genoa, in Italy,

when he met Augusta de la Rue, the wife of a Swiss banker.

She was suffering from debilitating headaches,

insomnia and convulsions,

and Dickens was keen to try to help.

He mesmerised Madame de La Rue multiple times,

regularly writing to her husband about his progress.

'Having been asleep some 20 minutes,

I drew her into a conversation as follows.

Occasionally, with some little difficulty,

and by dint of repeating the same question two or three times.

"Well, where are you today?"

"On the hillside, as usual."

"Yes."

"Quite alone?"

"No." "Are there many people there?"

"Yes. A good many." "Men or women?"

"Both."

Suddenly she cried out in great agitation.

"Here's my brother. Here's my brother."

And she breathed very quickly. And her figure became stiff.

"Where? In the crowd?"

"No, in a room."

"Who is with him?"

"Nobody."

"What is he doing?"

"Leaning against a window, looking out.

Oh, he's so sad.

So sad."

Shedding tears as she spoke and showing the greatest sympathy.

After a time, she said with increased agitation:

"He is thinking of me."

And after another interval,

she cried that she had found out the reason of his despondency.

That he thought himself forgotten

that the letters had been miscarried and he had not received them.

Then she fell back in the chair,

like one whose mind was relieved

and said it was gone.

And she saw him no more.'

If you are put into a mesmeric state,

you are in this condition that's not a normal consciousness.

It's somewhere between waking and sleeping,

somewhere between actually life and death.

And it's a very uncanny state.

You are very suggestible.

The doctor or the healer has an ability to assert a will over you.

So we all know those performances

where hypnotist make people do things they don't want to do.

And again, Dickens as a publisher,

as a writer, as a performer, is someone who is also very interested

in this exertion of the will.

In his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood,

published after his death in 1870,

Dickens explores this potential for mind control and even coercion

through the sinister character of John Jasper

and his obsession with the schoolgirl, Rosa Bud.

'He has made a slave of me with his looks.

He's forced me to understand him without his saying a word.

And he's forced me to keep silence without his uttering a threat.

When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands.

When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips.

When he correct me and strikes a note or a chord

or plays a passage...

..he himself is in the sounds,

whispering that he pursues me as a lover

and commanding me to keep his secret.

I avoid his eyes.

He forces me to see them without looking at them.

Even when a glaze comes over them, which is sometimes the case.

And he seems to...

..wonder away into a frightful sort of dream

in which he threatens most.

He obliges me to know it.

To know that he is sitting...

..close at my side.

More terrible to me than ever.

Tonight when he watched my lips so closely as I was singing,

besides feeling terrified...

..I felt ashamed.

Passionately hurt.

It was as if he kissed me and I couldn't bear it,

but cried out.

You must never breathe this to anyone.

But you said tonight that you would not be afraid of him

under any circumstances.

So that gives me, who am so much afraid of him,

courage to tell only you.

Hold me.

Stay with me.

I'm too frightened to be left by myself.'

Dickens loves this power to terrify or to frighten.

He wants to have an impact on his readers,

and he wants to have a personal relationship with them.

And of course, through a ghost story, you can really do that.

That's what the Gothic does very well,

is it puts you in a zone of uncertainty.

You're not quite sure whether you're in the natural world

or the supernatural world.

In public, it tended to be that Dickens was coming down

in favour of the natural,

as a businessman writing stories,

he came down in favour of the supernatural

because that was just so much more successful.

Because his principle subject is the human mind,

his ghost stories haven't dated because the psychology

that he was exploiting and that he was seeking to understand,

I think has remained more or less the same ever since.

I've become fascinated by how Dickens was able to harness

the power of his audiences' imagination.

He recognised that psychological spectres

could be just as terrifying as physical ones

and wove them into some of his most unsettling narratives.

The ghosts which haunt his work are a reflection

of what his readers wanted to see.

The master of his art,

Dickens didn't need to subscribe to the supernatural himself

to make his audience believe his stories.

Above all, he recognised that the lines between

what were phantoms and what was fiction

were best kept blurred.

'The phantom slowly,

gravely,

silently approached.

When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee

for in the very air through which this spirit moved,

it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come,"

said Scrooge.

The spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.

Although well used to ghostly company by this time,

Scrooge feared the silent shape so much

that his legs trembled beneath him

and he found that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow it.

The spirit paused a moment

as observing his condition and giving him time to recover.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this.

It thrilled him with a vague, uncertain horror to know

that behind the dusky shroud

there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him while he,

though he stretched his own to the utmost,

could see nothing

but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.'

AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk