This juvenile involvement with the ghostly and the ghastly stayed with Dickens throughout his life and all his novels to some extent were affected by this interest. Dickens devoured this publication avidly. The boy’s literary education was further advanced by his discovery of The Terrific Register, a weekly ‘penny dreadful’ which provided sixteen pages of gruesome tales of horrors, murders and sadism, all of which were illustrated in an unrestrained fashion. I do not in the least pretend that such things cannot be…’ He wrote on one occasion: ‘My own mind is perfectly unprejudiced and impressionable on the subject of ghosts. These dark fantasies not only stimulated Dickens’ embryonic imagination, no doubt setting him on the course that would bring him international fame as a writer, but also fostered his enduring fear and curiosity concerning the mystical world.

This fascination began when he was just a child and his nursemaid, a remarkable girl called Mary Weller, recounted a whole series of ghastly and ghoulish tales to entertain and indeed frighten her young charge. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.Ĭharles Dickens had a life-long interest in ghosts and the supernatural. ‘I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. Festive Humbug! A seasonal tale of Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol by David Stuart Davies.

Charles dickens a christmas story