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A woman sits in a room, mummifying inside her wedding dress. A man stands with a toasting-fork by a fire, his features, underlit by the spitting flames, casting hideous shadows on the dingy walls. And a fog gropes its way through the narrowing streets of London, stopping up the throats of its inhabitants.
Don’t let muppetry, or the sentimental productions whipped out at Christmastime mislead you. Charles Dickens is an author who loves to shake his readers up. His is a different, quietly unnerving kind of horror. His writing gets you under the skin of his characters, to find out what they will fight for, who they love, what their fears are, and what they will die for.
A hugely popular writer, and a creator of Christmas as we know it, the Victorian novelist is known for the humanity and warmth of his writing. His villains meet their fate at the gallows, whilst his heroes fall in love. But there is another, scarier side to his work to be found deeper within London’s grubby streets; streets that he walked compulsively. Dickens’s novels contain murder, plotting, scandal, perverse relationships, mangled love stories, lies, and dark desires. The author’s ‘favourite child,’ David Copperfield, is also a ‘posthumous’ one. An orphaned Pip has to conjure up his parents’ appearances from their tombstones. And Oliver Twist tells the story of a lost little boy swallowed up by the city of London. Articulators of bones, misers, hangmen, alcoholics, body snatchers, grotesques, undertakers, and, that horror of all horrors, the bumbling beadles, haunt his novels’ pages.
Lifting the rooftops from his characters’ homes, Dickens’s stories like to push Victorian buttons. They walk the line between comedy and horror. The author would speak about his characters as if they were alive and kicking, or let them speak through him at his public readings. Withstanding the test of countless adaptations, A Christmas Carol remains dark and haunting. Published in December 1843, Dickens’s preface to the book read ‘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. May it haunt their houses pleasantly.’ Nurse’s Stories is another brilliant and macabre read, whilst The Signalman remains one of his creepiest short stories.
Dickens’s characters are often caught up in larger systems of crime and punishment. Different illustrators set their drawings alongside his texts; drawings that would also exaggerate their horror. Oliver Twist’s Fagin is sentenced to death. In George Cruikshank’s illustration, ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’, he waits for the noose to squeeze around his neck. The noise of the blood-lusting crowd filters through the bars of the window; the sunlight shines feebly on his cringing figure. Gnawing at his fingernails, his eyes and teeth shine ghost-white against the gloom. It is impossible not to feel uneasy.
Grave Expectations, written by Sherri Browning Erwin, was published earlier this year as part of a new trend for horror mash-ups of classic texts. Its front cover promises ‘the classic tale of love, ambition, and howling at the moon.’ You know, that one. The one with all the werewolves. Despite giving me chills, (but for all the wrong reasons), the book does tap into what already exists in Dickens’s writing: an underlying vein of horror. Often, the scariest creatures in his novels, perhaps even more so that his supernatural personalities, are the humans themselves. His narratives tell of the institutionalised cruelty, exploitation, or plain indifference suffered by characters at the hands of others in the workhouses and schools, through to the law courts and the gallows. Rather than skulking in the shadows, these horrors hide in broad daylight. It is this very human monstrosity that is ultimately the most disturbing, both for us, and for the author himself.
Readers are often lured into a cosy sensation of safety. But Charles Dickens’s novels are very good at keeping secrets. He tells stories that are quirky, darker than you might imagine, and sometimes drop-dead scary. Perfect to snuggle up by the fire with this Halloween.
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