Scary Short Fiction by Famous English Authors

Premonition By Henryk Weyssenhoff (1859-1922) Oil on canvas, c. 1893

In this post, we'll take a look at two pieces of short fiction--call them novellas or novelettes or whatever you like--by two very different English writers: Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Both stories were published in 1859 and both deal with the supernatural, which is unsurprising given the popular Victorian obsession with the occult, mesmerism and psychic phenomena. One story is a prototypical ghost story with a hefty dose of esoteric theorizing, the other a hybrid that combines elements of science fiction in the gothic tradition and a narrative technique that was ahead of its time. The first story aspires to rationality and objectivity, the other is told through a gauzy mesh of subjectivity.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a prolific writer of novels, mostly historical fiction, along with some verse and a few plays that span a career of over six decades (we looked at two of his books last year). His prose could be a bit flabby and pompous, but he was an internationally known literary rock star, and while his work falls short of what many consider truly timeless, classic literature, a few of his novels are at least fun to read. George Eliot was one of the greatest English novelists who ever lived and whose work set new standards for the novel as an art form in the mid-nineteenth century. Bulwer-Lytton was an aristocrat and politician who was very interested in unexplained phenomena and theosophy; Eliot was an intellectual heavyweight and dyed-in-the-wool rationalist of more humble means who shared similar interests. When these stories were first published, he was close to the end of his long career and she was just beginning hers. Today, her books continue to be read and studied, his not so much. 

In addition to being fine Halloween reading, taken together, these two pieces display an interesting contrast of narrative styles.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1803-1873
 Illustration by Carlo Pellegrini

The Haunted and the Haunters Or, The House and the Brain (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This first person narrative is a matter-of-fact account of a night spent in a haunted house on Oxford Street in London. Upon hearing a friend's account of an abortive attempt to rent and occupy rooms there for a week (they lasted three days), the narrator, excited by the idea of spending a night in a haunted house soon comes to agreeable terms with the owner and sets off with his manservant, his dog, a revolver and a dagger. For the narrator, this is a fact-finding mission to observe and find rational explanations for so-called supernatural phenomena, and he relates what happened in great detail.

Things start off with the usual hearing of footsteps, the moving about of furniture, mysterious letters and a cold, depressing room that functions as the "heart" of the house. As night approaches, a dark, weighty, will-quenching oppression grips the heart of the narrator as ghosts from the house's past play out the circumstances that led to their tragic ends. These gothic, melodramatic elements are kept in check by the narrator's persistence of will to remain objective by resisting fear. Indeed, that's a central theme of the story; by not succumbing to fear, a rational explanation for seemingly otherworldly phenomena can be found in the form of a human agency rather than a supernatural one. 

I won't spoil the story for you, but the convoluted explanations found for these disturbances are obscure, to say the least. While the author's journalistic style strives for objectivity, the pseudo-scientific blather that attempts to explain the disturbances is only so much malarkey. But if one is willing and able to suspend disbelief, The Haunted and the Haunters is a fun ride and a classic ghost tale for the nineteenth century thinking man. Whether you're a true believer or scoffing skeptic, if you have any pulse at all, the ghostly descriptions alone will raise at least a few empirically challenged hairs and inspire purely subjective feelings of dread. This piece can be taken at face value, and that's precisely what we should expect from a good ghost story.

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George Eliot
(Mary Ann Evans)
1819-1880

The Lifted Veil (1859) by George Eliot

This one is something altogether different. In The Haunted and the Haunters, Bulwer-Lytton strives for objectivity, and although the holes in his narrator's logic are large enough for a ghost to fall through, the tone of the story remains one of dispassionate inquiry. In George Eliot's The Lifted Veil, the narrator's point of view is subjective to the point of being untrustworthy, and his morbid fascination with his own psyche colors his interactions with everyone around him. 

At this point some of you might want to read the story first before reading my little analysis. I don't exactly spoil the ending, but I do discuss some key story details.

Here is a laughably simplified plot synopsis: Latimer is a sensitive male type in the Romantic tradition, not unlike Goethe's Werther. He prefers nature and poetry to science and business. After a childhood illness, he is seized by intermittent visions of the future and develops the ability to read the minds of those around him. He becomes enamored with Bertha, his brother's fiancee and the only one in his circle whose thoughts he cannot read. Despite glimpses into an grim future in which they are unhappily married, he marries her anyway after his brother is killed in a hunting accident. Their marriage is a disaster, and as time goes on, they drift apart and Bertha becomes inexplicably close and secretive with one of their maids. Dr. Meunier, one of Latimer's school chums, shows up for a visit just as the maid becomes ill with peritonitis. The doctor suggests to Latimer that, since the maid will surely die anyway, he would like to perform an experimental procedure to resuscitate her--namely, to give her a blood transfusion. He does so, and the maid wakes up and speaks of the secret she would have otherwise taken to her grave…but I digress. No spoilers here.

Does Latimer really have psychic powers or has he merely convinced himself of it? He gets a few predictions right, but he ignores the most important one that foretells an unhappy marriage to a cold hearted woman who is incapable of loving him. Even if he had psychic powers, they don't seem to have done him any good. Or is he so self involved that he projects his insecurities and miseries on everyone around him? Why should we believe his tortured version of what happened? Who knows? Who cares? 

George Eliot uses a literary device called the unreliable narrator. We should question Latimer's truthfulness because he lacks objectivity. For all we know, the whole story could be a smoke screen. The best parts about using this narrative device is that she can fiddle with how she presents the chronology of events (the story opens with Latimer's death) and keep the attentive reader guessing as to the sanity of her protagonist (although a face value interpretation is also possible). George Eliot made her reputation on realist prose, so this story is a real curiosity and an ambitious experiment in narrative technique that anticipates some of the innovations of modernism by forty or fifty years.

Apart from the clairvoyance, the real sci-fi element of the story doesn't occur until the very last pages. In 1859, blood transfusions were still in the experimental phase and were not known to bring the dead back to life. But hey, we can't blame George Eliot for being a woman of her time, especially when her writing technique and imagination were so far ahead of her time. Although the plot contrivances don't really work, Eliot's prose is as rich and full of the wonderful subtlety and complexity that characterizes her work. 

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Here Lies Literature: Curious Epitaphs

Illustration by John Blair Moore

October marks our one year anniversary! On October 26, 2012, the very first essay was posted to the blog and The Overleaf has been chugging along ever since. Thanks to those of you who have read and enjoyed the blog over the past year. I hope you'll continue to check in. 

Last October, the second article I posted dealt with three nineteenth century horror novels and the films they inspired. I like the idea of writing about books for Halloween reading, so this year we're establishing a new tradition in which essays in the month of October will be devoted to scary, or at least Halloween-appropriate, literature.

The great thing is that there's no shortage of good books to choose from. In addition to the many stone-cold literary classics we've explored, there is a growing number of oddball titles appearing on Project Gutenberg that would have slipped through the cracks and probably been lost to history were it not for the deluge of public domain titles that have been made available as eBooks. In the coming year, I'm making a point to write more essays on a few of these oddball titles. The first of this season's Halloween picks is one of them--a nineteenth century collection of epitaphs collected from gravestones in Great Britain and the United States.

Curious Epitaphs (1883) by William Andrews

The epitaph is literature that serves a practical purpose. For centuries, when a family or community cared enough about someone to bother to erect a monument in honor of his or her memory, they called in two folks with special skills--the stonecutter, who created a suitable stone relief, and the poet who encapsulated the dearly departed's life and essence in a few words. Imagine…the poet's job was actually deemed important. 

Of course, sometimes a parish clerk or sexton had to fulfill the duty of parish poet, and sometimes local amateurs filled the bill. Some prominent citizens even wrote their own epitaphs to ensure a firm grasp of their legacies from the grave. In any case, results were mixed. At their best, epitaphs could be succinct, artful summations of lives, highlighting the good deeds and redeeming qualities of their subjects, forging in stone the life stories that might have otherwise been lost and giving their subjects a lasting, dignified monument. Epitaphs could be funny, profound, cautionary and weird, sometimes all at once. At their worst, they could be long winded, self serving, pompous wheezes that serve only as metered and rhymed public relations copy, enshrining the deceased in a chiseled halo of folderol.

In Curious Epitaphs, there is much in the way of shrewd wit, reflecting a healthy and even whimsical attitude toward death that can only be embraced by people who had little choice but to make peace with it one way or another. Before the twentieth century, lives were shorter, disease more rampant, women were far more likely to die in childbirth and infant and child mortality were grim facts of life. Reading through these epitaphs made me realize how improvements in health and living standards have sheltered us from the reality of death in a way that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. One seldom finds a tombstone in this day and age that exudes a sense of humor.

If William Andrews' introduction is to be believed, his book was a runaway hit, selling out its first edition quickly in 1883. It may come as a surprise to some that a potential bummer of a book like this should be so popular, but it doesn't surprise me at all; these epitaphs give us glimpses of life stories just as novels and history books do. Through the gravestone etchings of those long gone, we can recognize the common thread of humanity connecting their individual lives--and their collective fate--to our own. 

Anyway, here are a few examples of what can be found within this most curious volume:

Simple, concise phrasing that carries a message more profound than one might expect is always a pleasure to find, especially on a gravestone. Consider the mind-bending recursive quality of this epitaph, chiseled on the tombstone of Frank Raw, of Selby, Yorkshire-- the guy who, until then, was responsible for chiseling epitaphs on tombstones:

Here lies the body of poor Frank Raw,

Parish clerk and grave-stone cutter,

And this is writ to let you know

What Frank for others used to do,

Is now for Frank done by another.

Some of the best epitaphs are replete with inside jokes and/or groan-inducing puns, like this one for a watchmaker:

Here lies, in horizontal position,

the outside case of

George Routleigh, Watchmaker;

Whose abilities in that line were an honour

to his profession.

Integrity was the Mainspring, and prudence the

Regulator,

of all the actions of his life.

Humane, generous, and liberal,

his Hand never stopped

till he had relieved distress.

So nicely regulated were all his motions,

that he never went wrong,

except when set a-going

by people

who did not know his Key;

even then he was easily

set right again.

He had the art of disposing his time so well,

that his hours glided away

in one continual round

of pleasure and delight,

until an unlucky minute put a period to

his existence.

He departed this life

Nov. 14, 1802,

aged 57:

wound up,

in hopes of being taken in hand

by his Maker;

and of being thoroughly cleaned, repaired,

and set a-going

in the world to come.

This punny epitaph makes very clever use of the name of one Dr. William Cole, Dean of Lincoln, who died in 1600. It approaches eloquence while holding fast to the obvious gag:

Reader, behold the pious pattern here

Of true devotion and of holy fear.

He sought God’s glory and the churches good.

Idle idol worship he withstood.

Yet dyed in peace, whose body here doth lie

In expectation of eternity.

And when the latter trump of heaven shall blow

Cole, now rak’d up in ashes, then shall glow.

Here's one for a sportsman, presumably a cricketer, near Salisbury. It's straight to the point, combining universal truth with a grin-inducing pithiness:

I bowl’d, I struck, I caught, I stopp’d,

Sure life’s a game of cricket;

I block’d with care, with caution popp’d,

Yet Death has hit my wicket.

How about this one found on the gravestone of a bellows maker:

Here lyeth John Cruker, a maker of bellowes,

His craftes-master and King of good fellowes;

Yet when he came to the hour of his death,

He that made bellowes, could not make breath.

Indeed. Or consider the unassailable truth of these lines:

Here I lie, at the chancel door,

Here I lie, because I’m poor;

The farther in, the more you pay,

Here I lie as warm as they.

I could go on forever. This is a fascinating, well researched book that is more than a mere catalog of epitaphs. The author includes many morsels of backstory and context on the lives soliloquized here, sparking the imagination and often inspiring a giggle. Who would have thought a book full of tombstone scribblings could be so fun? This is the kind of eBook you can pick up and put down at will, which makes it the perfect bus or train commuter's companion. Think of it as a literary palette cleanser. That's probably the best way to read it, too, because these bits of past lives should be savored.

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