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Ghosts of Christmas Past: The Rise, Fall and Return of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Fireside Tales and A Christmas Carol
Paperback
General ChristianityBritish History
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 140
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Before there was Santa Claus, there was a ghost by the fire.
Long before Charles Dickens sat down to write about Jacob Marley's chains, Christmas had already become a season for telling stories of the dead.
On the longest nights of the year, families gathered by candlelight while storytellers summoned restless spirits, haunted houses, strange apparitions, and things better left unexplained. Then Dickens gave the tradition a new voice, and A Christmas Carol helped turn the Christmas ghost story into one of the most enduring traditions of the Victorian age.
Ghosts of Christmas Past follows that strange tradition from an early account of a winter night called Mothers' Night, through Dickens and his rivals at the magazine desk, the Victorian fascination with séances, and the women writers who transformed the ghost into a witness, warning, and storyteller.
Meet the writers who kept the Christmas ghost alive, from Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell to M. R. James, and follow the tradition through its golden age, its long decline, and the BBC revival that brought it back from the dead in 1971.
Why did we once think a ghost belonged at Christmas?
And why, after all these years, does one still feel strangely at home beside the Christmas fire?
Turn down the lights, gather close to the fire, and return to the Christmas when ghosts were part of the season.
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