Dickens's Ghosts: An Altered Perspective

Research English At Durham

"Marley's ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature enquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, 'Was it a dream or not?." Scrooge's internal debate accurately reflects the mid-Victorian dichotomy on Spiritualism, mesmerism and the supernatural. Claire Horton, of Loughborough University, explains how in Dickens’s time the ability to see ghosts was linked to mesmerism, a practice that fired the imagination of the Victorians.

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