Dickens is well-known as a writer of ghost stories.  His most famous spooky tale is A Christmas Carol in which the spectre of Jacob Marley clinks about in ghostly chains and the old miser Ebenezer Scrooge is scared out of his wits by the Ghosts of Christmas.  Another tale is The Signalman in which a railwayman is haunted by an apparition and the last of his Christmas books was titled The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.  In this one, a man is haunted by his phantom twin.

In real-life there was a slightly ghoulish side to Dickens.  He loved to visit morgues and he seems to have been fascinated by dead bodies.  In his collection of journalistic writings called The Uncommercial Traveller, there is a number of morbid stories that he picked up on his travels.  In one called “The Shipwreck” he writes about how he visited the site of the tragedy of The Royal Charter, an Australian passenger ship that was wrecked off the coast of Wales with a loss of five hundred lives.  He was keen to interview witnesses including the clergyman who had to deal with the many bodies washed up on shore.  He lingers over the details with relish: “The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, could yet see how the bodies had been turned, and where the head had been and where the feet.” It’s almost as though he’s disappointed that he wasn’t there.

In another story from the same collection (“Some Recollections of Mortality”) he describes being near Notre Dame in Paris when a crowd of people come floating by.  He realises that they are taking a body to the nearby morgue – “an old acquaintance” he calls it – and he rushes to join them.  He and a few other coffin-chasers are thrown out and stand in the street, speculating about the corpse.  “Was it river, pistol, knife, love, gambling, robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how many bullets, fresh or decomposed, suicide or murder?” he asks and describes the little group as “ravenous” to know the details. In another story, “Travelling abroad,” he says: “Whenever I’m at Paris, I’m dragged by invisible force into the Morgue.”

With their reputation for being uptight and squeamish, one wouldn’t expect the Victorians to seek out sensation but that’s just what they did and Dickens was no exception.  The last public execution in England took place in 1868, two years before Dickens died.  Attending a hanging, or, in earlier times, the grisly punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering, was something of a spectator sport and Dickens attended at least a couple of such spectacles in his lifetime.

When he was living in Italy in the 1840s, he attended the beheading of a man who had robbed and murdered a woman at the roadside.  He writes:  “It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.”  His disgust didn’t stop him from observing the double hanging of Mr and Mrs Manning, who had murdered someone they knew and buried him under the kitchen flagstones, in Southwark a few years later.  To be fair to Dickens, he did write to The Times the following day complaining about the appallingly ghoulish behaviour of the crowd and went on to campaign for the abolition of capital punishment.

Halloween wasn’t celebrated in Victorian England in quite the same way as now but, if it had been, Charles Dickens, with all his theatrical flair, would probably have made a meal of modern traditions such as trick and treating.

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