Ghosts and Family Legends

Richard Dalby’s ‘Mistresses of the Macabre’ volume 7
Jacket Art by Paul Lowe

Mrs Catherine Crowe (1790-1872) became the first great literary authority on the supernatural with her bestselling and extremely influential work The Night Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848). She was fascinated by spiritualism and the occult, and spent many years researching the subject, becoming the best known of all Victorian ‘ghost hunters’. Most of her best stories were related so that they read like fiction, and can be enjoyed either way, but are generally regarded to be much closer to fiction than fact! Although The Night Side of Nature has been reprinted many times right up to the present day, her later collection Ghosts and Family Legends (1859) has been unfairly neglected. The book was effectively a Christmas double-number of ghost stories, related (or invented) by friends of the author. There are six ‘Legends of the Earthbound’ of which only the first two will be familiar to present-day readers ... ‘The Italian’s Story’ (in Summers: Victorian Ghost Stories; and Van Thal: Told in the Dark) and ‘The Dutch Officer’s Story (in Parry: Hounds of Hell; and The Treasury of Victorian Ghost Stories). ‘Round the Fire’ consists of eight evenings with a larger selection of shorter ghostly tales and anecdotes, of which only the ‘Seventh Evening’ has been reprinted in recent decades (in Summers: Victorian Ghost Stories; and my own Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories). This landmark collection of ghost stories is long overdue for revival. [Richard Dalby]

Limited Edition Sewn Hardcover and SOLD OUT at the publisher