The Victorian Ghost Story

An Edinburgh Companion

Andrew Smith (Reader, University of Sheffield)

$230

Hardback

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English

Edinburgh University Press
31 August 2025

Literature: history & criticism; Literary studies: general; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers

Series: Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic

The most thorough analysis of the Victorian ghost story to date.

The Victorian Ghost Story: An Edinburgh Companion invites readers to interrogate the multi-layered, multi-vocal conversations that occur within the Victorian ghost story. Its twenty-four chapters provide a historical overview of the development of the ghost story and explore it in light of the 'new' contexts of the 1800s, including mechanisation, imperialism, Romanticism and religion. As a much-needed survey of critical work on the ghost story, it features detailed analysis of major Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell and Henry James and it examines the places haunted by Victorian ghosts: haunted houses but also haunted museums, Fells, pyramids and seascapes. By engaging with ecocriticism, race, colonialism, class and gender, this interdisciplinary Companion constitutes a significant scholarly contribution on the Victorian ghost story and how it relates to a broader Gothic tradition.

Edited by: Andrew Smith (Reader University of Sheffield)
Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781399521499
ISBN 10: 1399521497
Series: Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 31 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield, where he co-directs the Centre for the History of the Gothic. He is the author or editor of twenty-six published books including Dickens and the Gothic (2024), Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One (2022; winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith prize), Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History (2016), The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007; revised 2013), Victorian Demons (2004) and Gothic Radicalism (2000).

Reviews for The Victorian Ghost Story: An Edinburgh Companion

Charles Dickens famously complained that ""ghosts...'walk' in a beaten track"". This fascinating collection of specially commissioned essays, by specialists in the field, proves conclusively that in Victorian fiction ghosts spent most of their time off the beaten track, making the invisible visible and in the process often challenging the repressions of the status quo. The Victorian Ghost Story is bound to haunt its readers for a long time to come...--Sir Christopher Frayling, Royal College of Art