Ghosts by Gaslight

After all, the time of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) was by its own declaration an age of spreading enlightenment—the growth of literacy; the rapid introduction of mass-manufacturing technology; the propagation of humane values; the termination of the slave trade; legislation to curb cruelties inherent in industrial labor; and, on a literal level, the provision of ever more illumination to Britain’s (and America’s) cities, first by means of gas lighting, then with electricity. Let there be light! And yet even as the darkness of the streets and of some forms of economic deprivation was alleviated, the ghosts imagined by the population multiplied. Old fears, old phantoms and bogeys, old conceptions of bad luck and supernatural revenge combined with new wraiths and monsters born of the torments of social change and ideological awakening; and from the far corners of the British Empire returning soldiers, administrators, traders, travelers, and missionaries imported foreign narratives of yet more apprehension: accounts of Arabian Nights djinns, Transylvanian vampires, accursed rajahs, Chinese phantasms, West Indian duppies, and African totems. Real-life terrors like the depredations of Jack the Ripper mingled in the popular fancy with these improbable but direly potent materials; and in response, even as some Victorian fiction described hopeful or apocalyptic technological advance, many other tales brooded on the fantastic and the ominously irrational. The purposeful light of extrapolation competed with the looming darkness of the horrid.

This anthology pays innovative tribute to both of those streams of Victorian storytelling: the scientific romance and the classic ghost story, as they matured through the Great White Mother’s reign and in that of her rotund and jocular son Edward VII, before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought shattering disillusionments. After all, a century later, speculative fiction continues to honor the two forms: steampunk novels and stories regularly recapture (and recomplicate) the gadget-encrusted early science fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, while leading horror and dark fantasy authors (many of them represented in this book) pay recurrent homage to the ghostly tale. So . . .

Why not a feast of fine new stories, filled with the pleasurable disquiet of things that go bump in the night and, at times, the thrills of sinister, arcane machinery as well? Perhaps the paradox of Victorian superstition-amidst-enlightenment can be resolved by way of this mixture; and anyway, the results are bound to be extremely entertaining. Thus
Ghosts by Gaslight,
in which seventeen of the best contemporary writers of supernatural fiction revisit the world of fog and fear that our ancestors knew only too well, on both sides of the Atlantic.

A
S YOU’LL SEE
reflected in many of the stories in the present volume, the Victorian/Edwardian period’s fiction of the fantastic and the ominously irrational sometimes went far beyond instilling simple fright and awe. During the heyday of the classic ghost story in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were plenty of sensationalistic (and ephemeral) writers whose contributions to the many fiction magazines were all about cheap, garish effects; but their efforts were counterweighed by more profound, psychologically penetrating tales from such major literary names as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, Mrs. Oliphant, and Ambrose Bierce—and many writing in languages other than English. These authors were not slumming in a superficial popular genre; they had quite serious intent. And they were joined in this by inspired specialists in the supernatural, some of whom remain well known today for their spooky brilliance: J. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson. Henry and M. R. James (no relations), in their very different efforts like “The Turn of the Screw” and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” employed ghosts and other phantoms of the nocturnal hours to cast light on the interior of the human psyche; this was the collective goal. In the hands of all these practitioners, ghosts signified aspects of the mentalities of those still living: a man visiting a haunted house was in a real sense haunting it himself, witnessing apparitions that echoed the proceedings of his own subconscious. Just as the emerging discipline of psychiatry was beginning to probe the subtle, contradictory workings of the human brain, the Victorian and Edwardian canons of the ghostly were projecting upon the printed page flickering specters of our repressed desires and our most terrible impulses. The ghost, in the final analysis, is very often Us. And likewise the vampire, the werewolf, and the many further doppelgängers embodied in literary nightmares.

This approach continues in
Ghosts by Gaslight,
with many a fresh twist. Ghost stories are gothic fictions, in that their objective landscapes—old manor houses, creepy backwoods, art galleries where the portraits stare out more purposefully than usual—are also intensely subjective. When Laird Barron’s hunters range the monstrous Washington wilderness in homage to Algernon Blackwood’s menacing panoramas of haunted Nature, and when John Langan’s Henry-Jamesian protagonist ventures into far more settled but still eerie precincts back east, they are going home to themselves, to self-knowledge. Such knowledge can be utterly horrifying, merely disturbing, subtly discombobulating, quietly domestic, or even somewhat antic. But of whatever color, it is revealing of what we have not been able, or willing, to realize about ourselves. So the part of
Ghosts by Gaslight
that is ghostly is about its afflicted characters staring into the mirror, at their grave reflections, amidst cries of terror and looming shades of night.

But what of the gaslight, which can help to dispel the darkness? The “scientific romances” of Wells, Verne, and others anticipated future times—often very near futures—in which expanding frontiers of knowledge would deliver to humankind, or privileged sections of humankind, enormously increased power over Nature. These were Promethean fictions that expected the prodigious leaps of innovation already being experienced (from horse-drawn carts and carriages to widespread railways in just a generation! from cities of dangerous shadow to modern metropolises with brightly lit streets in just a few years! from crude telegraphy to radio in almost no time!) to continue, to the point where submarines would patrol effortlessly the greatest depths of the sea, airships would wander the skies with serene impunity, and the first spacecraft, propelled by giant cannon or miraculous Cavorite, would allow swift visits to the moon. Human beings would at last ascend beyond their cruel enslavement to the earth’s surface, the cycle of the seasons, and the harsh laws of economics. Society would alter radically: utopias were glimpsed in many stories of this kind, whether socialist, anarchist, arcadian, or aristocratic. Grand visions indeed, promising so much . . . And yet Prometheus suffered dreadfully for bestowing the gift of fire upon mankind; and the scientific romancers were only too conscious of the perilous downside of technology run amok. For every victorious adventure there was a waiting catastrophe: the world devastated by novel weapons, political tyranny augmented with new instruments of oppression, aliens invading,
Homo sapiens
speciating into warring tribes of hominids. Early science fiction indeed illuminated the future, but black clouds of war and chaos cast warning shadows across the prospect. Current steampunk writing reflects this balance faithfully: in the stories that follow are to be found such things as death in well-built cities, gear-shifting mummies, ghosts in Faraday cages, the dark matter of balloons, and, of course, machines . . . machines that trap nightmares, machines that trap ghosts, machines that trap and enslave souls.

G
ASLIGHT AND ITS
successor, electrical lighting, lit up immense panoramas for the Victorians and Edwardians, in real life, in reason, and in the imagination. Indeed, the ghost story, as a form of psychological fiction, was a part of the general enlightenment, inasmuch as it shone a torch on the nature of the psyche, permitting expanded understanding of how we ourselves work. Equally, the vast threats unveiled by the scientific romance were necessary, instructive premonitions of the imminent upheavals of world war, revolution, and economic depression. We need light to see our ghosts by, even if it is merely some sort of ectoplasmic refulgence. Ghosts of the past and ghosts from the future unite in the chilling glow of this anthology, extending wisdom as well as fright, fateful comprehension as well as blind terror; and all in highly entertaining form, in some cases as pure fuliginous horror, in others as awestruck observation, or as yearning towards otherworldly radiance, or as cunning satirical fun.

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