Charles Dickens' To Be Read at Dusk (1852).

He would have found his way here sooner or later.  That's because he's one of the Big Names.  He belongs to that select group of writers whose fame and renown grants him the kind of status which allows us to know of him, even if we've never read so much as a single word he ever wrote.  This is the weird game that history likes to play with those lucky handful of authors whose writings were good enough to leave such an impact on their times, that they became this strange kind of pop culture juggernaut.  Time hasn't been able to erase our awareness of Charles Dickens, though it has managed to flatten our understanding of who he is, and what he did.  If he's known for anything these days, then it all comes down to just one, or maybe a handful of his efforts.  The most well known of course remains the Christmas Carol.  It's become so much a staple of the Holidays, that we've paid the author the worst sort of compliment he could have imagined.  We've taken what was meant as a social plea for the plight of the poor and the English working class, and turned it into a Hallmark Card about "keeping good cheer" at least once near the end of every year.  I have said that pop culture has a way of playing tricks on those artists who manage to stay alive in it.  I should also point out that sometimes these trick can turn a good reputation into the worst sort of cruelty.

Still, for better or worse, this bit of historical irony is what has allowed Dickens to survive in the memories of countless fans who have never heard of him from his numerous volume of books.  Beyond the Carol itself, he's perhaps remembered also as the author of books like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and for being the creator of both David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.  That's a handsome sampling so far as pop culture memory goes.  The saving grace there is that all of the books and characters just listed do go a long way toward giving a fair overview of the writer, and a good idea of his best strengths as an artist.  Dickens has been lucky in that regard.  He may not have escaped all the vagaries and tricks that time and history likes to play on those it can bother to remember, he never gets it as bad as others.  Instead, the former street urchin who once had to earn his keep by the sheer will power of his words as a grubbing journalist now gets to take up the same shelf space as his most famous forebearer, Shakespeare, and alongside his near contemporary, Jane Austen.  They seem to have become a trio of gold standards that all the rest are compared to.  Or at least that's seems to be the effort on someone's part out there.  It might all be a construction of the Ivory Tower, yet at least these Names are being recognized in some way for the genuine strength of their talents as writers and storytellers.

At the same time, the fact remains there was always more to Dickens' reputation that just these handful of later Sketches by Boz.  He's also written plenty of other stories that no one, not even tenured academic scholars, have bothered to give much time or attention to.  Since The Scriblerus Club has a policy of shining the spotlight on the stories that fall through the cracks, it does make enough sense to try and see if the formula can be applied where you wouldn't expect it.  What happens if we take a well known writer, and then bring the audience's attention to some of his lesser known efforts?  I think it can be done, and what's interesting in this case is that it follows up on, and continues a bit of criticism from a previous post.  The last review published on this blog was about an item in Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  The big revelation of that article was how the chilling story of "The Dream" had its origins in a very specific literary source.  It's possible to claim that the true author of that story is a Victorian Gothic writer by the name of Elizabeth Gaskell.  She's an important, yet overlooked architect in the construction of the modern Horror genre as we now know it today.  This importance extends all the way to a greater understanding of such genre tropes as the Final Girl.

It all got its start thanks to the efforts of writers like Liz Gaskell and Anne Radcliffe.  The review of "The Dream" goes into greater detail on these topics, and there has to be more worth exploring on the topic of how women constructed the Horror genre as an expression of protest and satire.  For now though, the relevant thing about that previous article is that it was mentioned in passing that one of Gaskell's friend was none other than the author of A Christmas Carol.  She remained a contributor to not just one, but two magazines owned by Dickens, Household Words, and All the Year Round.  It was a position and a friendship she would maintain to the end of her life.  In fact, as pointed out in "The Dream" review, it seems that Dickens himself might have tried his hand at bringing Liz Gaskell's untold tale of modern day Folk Horror to life in a short story of his own.  It's the content of that short story that I'd like to unpack, examine, and compare/contrast now.  It's a story that's meant "To Be Read at Dusk".

The Story.

What makes this story somewhat unique, perhaps even a bit groundbreaking from a contemporary perspective, is the way Dickens handles his setup.  The story opens with the establishment of a deliberate and by now familiar framing device.  It begins with a nameless narrator who's spending a vacation weekend at a convent hostel located at the foot of an mountain region known as St. Bernard's Pass.  It's an actual location, one that straddles the border between Switzerland and Italy.  Tonight, our narrator is busy trying to escape the conversation of an American gentleman whose main concern seems to be bragging about his latest business acquisition.  The storyteller decides to take in some night air, despite the cold of the Winter outside.  In doing so, he notices a group of couriers gathered together in the yard of a nearby railroad depot.  As the traveler takes in the night, snatches of the workmen's conversation begins to drift towards him, and the narrator finds himself drawn just close enough to their circle to eavesdrop on the conversation without being spotted.  It seems the couriers are all engrossed in a very peculiar topic of conversation, in between rounds of pass-the-bottle to keep warm.  The conversation all seems to revolve around two related topics.  Just what is a Ghost, and what kind of situation can be described as Ghostly?  There's also a lingering third question hanging over the discussion: Do you suppose such things can be real?

These questions lead two of the couriers (an Italian and a German, respectively) to commence to tell of accounts that happened, not so much to them as to the people who used to employ them for a short amount of time, before a unaccountable tragedy struck.  What makes each tragedy peculiar was the inexplicable note of the Uncanny that lingered about each affair.  From there, we are treated to two separate stories told in sequence.  The first concerns the tale of a woman haunted by dreams in which the face of a man she's never met keeps stalking her in her sleep.  This dilemma continues until the lady in question can no longer tell if she's wide awake or living through one of her nightmares.  Her husband decides to take her to rest at an Italian villa, where things seem to improve.  Things seem to be going back to normal until another guest arrives to discuss affairs of business with the lady's husband.  He's a certain Mr. Signor Dellombra.  Our heroine has never heard of the man before, yet she's is willing to greet and treat their new visitor with grace and courtesy.  That is until the Signor arrives at the villa, and our heroine discovers that he has the exact same face of the man who's stalking her in her dreams.

The second story concerns an encounter with a spectral wraith that a wealthy young man had one night while trying to turn in for bed.  The specter entered the room, and crossed the space between the door and the desk where certain family papers and documents pertaining to personal fortunes were kept.  The wraith examined some of these papers with care, almost as if the make sure everything was in order.  Then the ghost looked at the protagonist of this story for just a moment, before vanishing into thin air.  What made the whole experience so uncanny was just this.  The ghost looked very much like the main character's very ill brother.  Once this story is concluded, the focus of the narrative shifts back once more to the nameless narrator at the foot of St. Bernard's Pass, where the party of couriers might have one more uncanny surprise in store for him.    

Dickens, Gaskell, Schwartz, and the Folktale Context.

The first thing that strikes us about this short story is its lingering sense of familiarity and unease.  There are good reasons for both reactions, and it helps to unpack the story ideas that help create them one at a time.  The sense of familiarity comes from the reader's recognition of a familiar format of the modern Horror genre being played out more or less complete and intact in an earlier period of English literature.  Part of what's remarkable about this short story is not just how much content Dickens is able to pack inside the space of just 11 pages of manuscript.  It's also the way he formats all of it that turns the sense of familiarity into a gradual shock of recognition.  What the author of the Christmas Carol has done here is nothing less than present his readers with an early version of what we now know as The Anthology Show format.  It's the same type of storytelling formula that most of us come to know from a usual list of suspects that includes Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Tales From the Darkside, and above all, Tales From the Crypt, The Twilight Zone, and films like Stephen King's Creepshow and its own affiliated Shudder spin off series.  All of these are examples of a shared format that most of us know in one way or another; whether through direct exposure or word of mouth.  Dickens is able to surprise his readers here when he gives us proof that the entire setup was a well known trope even in his own days.

It's this unexpected yet delightful sense of sense of discovery that becomes the first hallmark of this series of nested narratives as they unfold for us.  It's a case of the writer serving as a novelistic version of the Horror Host by establishing a stage set and filling it in with a premise that will allow for the performance of not one, but two, maybe as much as three Tales of the Uncanny.  It's Dickens having a bit of fun by playing his own version of the Crypt-Keeper for us, in other words, by proving to the reader that he has enough talent in him to present us with his own Horror anthology series within the space of a single short narrative.  If the setup contains a note of fun through recognition of a familiar format, then it's the expected reaction of unease that needs a bit more unpacking in order to explain what makes this series of nested stories tick.  The interesting way in which this story works its effects upon the reader is down to a number of factors.  What makes "To Be Read at Dusk" fascinating is just how many interesting ideas Dickens is able to pack into his narrative.  In the strictest sense, of course, this is nothing new for the author.  Instead, one of the trademarks of Dickens' abilities as an artist was to juggle a hefty number of complex and often very sophisticated themes within the space of an entire novel.

What makes this overlooked Horror anthology so fascinating is that here the writer proves he's able to accomplish this same feat within the space of a single short story.  What's more remarkable is that he keeps up his usual sophisticated techniques by spinning not one, but as much as three layers of a narrative compiled into a single dramatic frame, and all of it takes place on the page.  Let's just say that on a stylistic level, this is a good example of Dickens showcasing one of the reasons why he remains a longstanding favorite of English Majors and Book People.  The curious part is this scholarly reputation hasn't kept him from being popular with mainstream audiences, and it's the content of this short story which helps provide part of the answer for why that should be.  What's remarkable about "To Be Read at Dusk" is that it has to count as one of the few times where we see Dickens engage with a specific form of storytelling known as the Folk Tale.  That first part of the title is important, as it designates this particular kind of tale as an example of a collective narrative.  It's a story constructed over time by, for, and of the people, and in particular of the cultural pastimes, or folkways, of which this type of story functions as an expression of.  The trick with folktales is that they're almost like textual museums.

Part of the reason there are so many academics out there devoted to the collecting and preserving of these old, and sometimes forgotten legends is because as a cultural expression of societies and times gone by, most tales in this Tradition contain repositories of forgotten ways of life and belief that can sometimes tell us a lot about who we are, and where we've been as human beings, for better or worse, as the case may be.  It's the existence of these folkways, or buried knowledge rooted deep in the soil of stories like "The Fisherman and the Djinn", "Dick Whittington and his Cat", or "The House Carpenter" that somehow manages to keep such ideas resurfacing in the minds of audiences and critics even today.  All that a story like "To Be Read at Dusk" does is prove that the architect of Bleak House had an easy familiarity with such folklore, and here we see him utilizing several samples of it in the service of his story.  Now if this doesn't sound like the Dickens you grew up with, or heard about back in high school English, then it just goes to prove what I said above about The Curse of a Good Reputation.  In Hollywood, there used to be a saying, "You're only as good as your next picture".  Well, time and tide seem to prove that you only matter to the extent of whatever stories captured our Imaginations to the point where we sort of can't ignore it.  The rest of what you've done doesn't exist, no matter how good.

This seems to be an unspoken, ongoing social practice in the way audiences throughout the centuries have treated even the artists we like.  It's a real shitty way to treat someone with talent, if I'm being honest.  And such a straight jacket form of thinking about the author does nothing to change the fact that Charles Dickens was an avid fan of folklore stories growing up.  This is a criminally neglected aspect of the artist's life, and hence of the writer's toolbox that Peter Haining outlines for us in his introduction to the writer's Complete Ghost Stories.  "Charles Dickens's fascination with ghosts and the macabre which he reveals in the pages of his books and stories can be seen today as one of the most inevitable elements to have emerged in his writing. For in his very earliest years he was introduced to the grim and the ghoulish through the stories told to him by his nursemaid, a remarkable young woman called Mary Weller, whom he referred to in later life as Mercy, 'though she had none on me'. 

"If we remember ourselves when young, or think of our own children now, open-mouthed and wide-eyed while being indulged with tales of giants and demons, ghosts and monsters —the staple ingredients of fairy stories which, generation after generation, are fed to young and impressionable minds—it is not hard to visualize the young Dickens partaking of the same fare in much the same manner. In his case, however, both the storyteller and the tales she told were to have a far more profound effect than that on most children. For it is not over stating the case to say that the macabre stories which Mary Weller recounted to the youngster at her knee were so powerful and terrifying as to colour his imagination permanently and shape much of the brilliant and enduring fiction which he later created. (Indeed, Andrew Lang, the contemporary novelist and critic, has no hesitation in declaring that Mary, 'was obviously a true genius as a narrator'.) The world of the supernatural to which he was introduced became vividly real to him, and through the medium of his stories he has made it likewise chillingly authentic for us. It is equally true to say that the ghost stories of Charles Dickens not only represent some of the high points of the genre, but have proved enormously influential upon many subsequent practitioners of the art of supernatural fiction.

Haining continues, "The impact of Mary Weller's stories on young Charles's imagination is not a matter of speculation, as one so often finds when tracing the formative influences in any great writer's life. Dickens himself in a number of letters, as well as in certain of his stories (vide the first item in this book), speaks of her exceptional gifts which became evident to him very soon after she had entered the employ of the Dickens family when he was just five years old. Mary's skill as a storyteller is all the more remarkable when we learn that she was just thirteen years old at this time! Although to all outward appearances she was a hard-working and conscientious servant, in the privacy of the nursery she had no compunction whatsoever in filling her young charge's head with the most macabre and weird stories.

"Writing much later as an adult, Dickens tell us that Mary was employed as his nurse for six years, until he was eleven. During this time she found many opportunities to speak of her interest in death and murder, in ghosts and demons- and even in cannibalism! The images which she conjured up in her stories imprinted themselves indelibly on his receptive mind: throughout his writing life he gave every indication of trying to exorcise these dark thoughts by pouring them into his stories. As Professor Harry Stone, the Dickens authority, has written in his study, Dickens and the Invisible World (1979), 'When Mary came to the Dickenses she brought with her a fantastic budget of weird stories and country superstitions, and she also brought with her a baleful imagination that embroidered and personalized everything that she related. Dickens proved an ideal audience, and Mary Weller practiced on him endlessly (1-4)'.  It was this early exposure to the darker side of the world of folklore in the nursery that accounts for the easy familiarity with which the writer handles his materials in this mini-Horror anthology.  It's also this folktale element that accounts for the way the stories work their spells upon the reader.  What's notable about this is how it brings Dickens into conversation with two other writers.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of "To Be Read at Dusk" is how it doesn't exist in a complete vacuum, like most of the writer's other works.  Instead, it's a case of Dickens working in dialogue with at least one of his contemporaries, and also of a later artist, way down the road in the 20th century.  The short story shares a lot in common with the Gothic fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, and of with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, by Alvin Schwartz.  The way this comes about is fascinating, as what we've got on our hands here is an overlooked, yet vital piece of literary history.  According to YouTube researcher Jon Solo, Schwartz's short story "The Dream" is derived from a story retold by a Victorian painter named Augustus Hare, in the second volume of his six part autobiography.  It's in this volume that Hare relates the story of a woman haunted by the face of a mysterious stranger that seems to keep stalking her in her dreams, until one day that same man shows up in real life, and appears to spirit her away to an unknown, possibly supernatural fate.  It's easy to see this narrative as the seed from which later films like A Nightmare on Elm Street would one day sprout.  The point of all this backstory for the Dickens anthology comes from the legend's transmission history, which according to Solo went like this.  Hare heard the story from a Mrs. Hibbert, who heard it from a Mrs. Gaskell from someone else.

According to critic Carol Martin, "Who entrusted Gaskell with the tale...is not clear (31)".  What stands out with crystal clarity, however, is the gap in Solo's otherwise reliable chronology of story transmission and composition.  According to him, what we're dealing with is the case of an old folktale being passed down by word of mouth until it reaches the attention of Alvin Schwartz, who turned it into one of the most iconic entries in the Scary Stories collection with the help of Stephen Gammell.  To be fair, this is true enough, so far as it goes.  The problem is there was one more artist serving as a link in the chain of transmission that allowed this story to reach Schwartz's attention as he studied the background of the tales he decided to include in his collection.  That missing link turned out to be the creator of Scrooge and Marley.  He seems to have been the unnoticed first audience to hear the story from Liz Gaskell and her otherwise unknown folk source.  It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when Gaskell might have told Dickens this Victorian Era version of "The Dream", yet it can't have been no later than 1852, when "To Be Read at Dusk" was both written and published in a now defunct literary journal known as The Keepsake.  Here is where Carol Martin helps fill in the blanks with her essay on Gaskell's Ghosts.  

It's there she's able to outline the shared literary context which allowed Elizabeth and Dickens to establish a mutual contact with the world of folklore as it existed in the Gaslight Era.  Martin starts by noting that Mrs. Gaskell's "depiction of life among the workers of Manchester in Mary Barton and North and South and of quiet, ordinary life in English villages in Cranford  and Wives and Daughters has appropriated critical attention to the neglect of the many short stories she wrote in the 1850s and 1860s for Charles Dickens' two weeklies, Household Words and All the Year Round.  The readers of these serials looked to their editor and his contributors to provide a wide range of subjects in short articles, from mundane topics such as "Houses to Let" and "Chloroform," to pathetic and moral tales like Gaskell's "Lizzie Leigh," which inaugurated the first number of Volume I of Household Words on March 30, 1850. But the tastes of the mid-century reader, particularly the reader of the extra Christmas numbers, made it imperative that no volume be complete without something about ghosts. David Punter says of All the Year Round that Dickens used it "partly as a means of commissioning tales of the supernatural, from Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell among many others," so one can observe that he sought such tales for its predecessor, Household Words. In its ten-year history, from 1850 to 1859, that periodical contains a curious blend of debunking articles on ghosts and witches which assume an enlightened, modern reader and stories which demand, at the least, the willing suspension of disbelief.

"Gaskell's own work is similarly Janus-faced. Her stories include short fragments or anecdotes about ghosts and two rather long tales that offer no explanations at the end for the supernatural phenomena they contain: "The Old Nurse's Story," first published in Household Words in the extra Christmas number of 1853, and "The Poor Clare," published in three installments of Household Words, December 13, 20, and 27, 1856. Other stories, such as "The Doom of the Griffiths," depict curses fulfilled, but preserve an ambiguity that forces the reader to decide whether supernatural or psychological explanations are called for. Still others, especially "Lois the Witch," exploit the reader's interest in the supernatural, but ultimately see hysteria and sexual disturbance, not witchcraft, as the dominating forces in the community of Salem.

"This mixture of the supernatural and the realistic is not, of course, peculiar to Gaskell. One finds it too in the work of her major Victorian contemporaries, Dickens, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte. Dickens was not only fond of the Christmas ghost story from his own pen, but he also introduced ghosts into, for instance, Bleak House, where the ominous step on the Ghost's Walk at Chesney Wold is heard more and more loudly as Lady Dedlock's doom nears. Likewise, George Eliot, in Adam Bede, a novel Gaskell much admired...introduces into her otherwise realistic narrative the mysterious tapping of the willow wand that signals the drowning of Thais Bede. And Charlotte Bronte, Gaskell's close friend, makes crucial to her plot the inexplicable midnight calls of Jane Eyre and Rochester, which send Jane back to search for him (27-28)".  All of this background detail is meant to layout a snapshot for the reader of the context that's missing from Jon Solo's tracing down of Alvin Schwartz's sources.  It serves to highlight an aspect of "The Dream" that even its compiler and re-teller seems to have missed.  It's this forgotten aspect of Dickens as a link in the transmission of "The Dream" that grants a better vantage point not just on Schwartz's text, but also of Dickens' own version of the same story told at dusk.

A Vital Theme in the Text.  

Once you understand that Dickens forms something of a missing link in a chain connecting Gaskell to Schwartz, then it becomes possible to figure out how a story like this should be read.  It makes "To Be Read at Dusk" a forgotten specimen of folklore in mid-transmission from one storyteller to another.  The irony being that Dickens represents a link where the chain of transmission broke off, and almost got lost forever.  What this does is place his short story something of a middle ground between Gaskell and Schwartz.  We've got three authors retelling the same folktale, and the question to ask when examining Dickens' efforts is what context and themes is he using in telling his version of "The Dream"?  Critic Carol Martin provides the best place to start from, as she's the one who discloses that it was Gaskell who first told Dickens the story of the Dream Stalker.  All old Boz did was to take that basic premise, and retell it in his own way.  According to Martin, "The contrast between Gaskell's handling of this tale and that of Dickens is illustrative of her own affinity for the folk origins of the ghost story and of her close relationship with the people among whom such stories originated. Gaskell preserves the link with the supposed origins of the tale by connecting it with people known to her, whereas Dickens provides a more literary and distant context: his tale is told by a traveler who overhears it from couriers at the St. Bernard's Pass. 

"Again, where Gaskell has the mysterious person whose face haunts the young bride appear but once and then without a name or an identity, almost as a shadow, Dickens calls him by the suggestive appellation Signor Dellombra. Gaskell's denouement is swifter and more ominous; the stranger's single appearance and the husband's brief absence are followed almost immediately by the lady's disappearance. Dickens draws out the whole with the husband's attempts to persuade his wife of the unreasonableness of her fears; his lengthy absence, along with Dellombra's frequent visits, may even hint a possible "rational" explanation. At the least, it raises the question, Was the lady seduced, repenting even as the carriage leaves, a 'la Isabel Vane in the best-selling East Lynne a few years later (32)"?  This question of whether or not the events of the story have a supernatural or logical explanation is something that critics have spent hours of wasted debate on.  I tend to think that M. Grant Kellerman is the one who gets the closest to the truth of this overlooked anthology.  The gist of a post on his blog for Old Style Tales Press is that Dickens strategy in this story is to setup up a series of rational explanations for the uncanny events in his narrative, only to demolish each in turn, one after the other.

Kellerman can sometimes be a bit zealous in making his point, and some of his conclusions of what this means can be a bit over sold, yet his basic premise, in and of itself, seems tenable.  So does his idea that with his version of "The Dream", Dickens (and by implication, Liz Gaskell) is working with the trope of the Demon Lover folk archetype.  This is a particular trope of folklore wherein an inhabitant of the supernatural realm decides to take a human bride for himself, and more or less threatens the heroine with a form of toxic masculinity that first threatens, then stalks, and finally abducts her away against her will to the shadowy infernal realms of the lands beyond the veil of the living.  The title character of this trope can be a straightforward demonic entity, yet the age the lore itself pinpoints it as being far older , perhaps, than the advent of traditional Christian thought.  We're talking now about an idea that probably has its origins as far back as Classical Greco-Roman Mythology.  It's there where you hear stories of Zeus, King of Olympus, as he goes about his philandering ways with multiple women who happen to catch his fancy in the moment, and so he takes them to bed with him, and sometimes the results can range anywhere from merely "interesting" to downright gruesome, such as with myth of the Minotaur.

As belief in the Olympian Pantheon begins to subside, the nature of the gods starts to shift from that of these titanic figures to whom human beings are mere playthings, and instead begin to dwindle into the familiar figures of the Elf Kingdoms, full of all manner of sprites, pixies, boggarts, and other fair folk.  It's here that history of the legend begins to tie in with Kellerman's observation about the myth of the King of the Elves, or the Erlking.  A malignant entity of fear that is rumored to capture or take away any woman or child that he decides to take a "liking" to.  Kellerman here cites a poem by Goethe as an earlier example of the Demon Lover trope.  It's here that the critic's logic holds up the best.  I'd argue Kellerman manages to hit the target with this particular train of thought.  The final evolution of the Lover comes when even the old folk beliefs about elves becomes supplanted, and all you're left with are the very fiends of the pit.  In this way, we start to understand how a specific literary topos can shift and change in order to suit the specific, various, historic and cultural contexts that develop with the passage of time.  In the case of the Demon Lover, the line of descent and development goes from one of Epic Myth, to a more Fairy Tale oriented re-telling, until it comes to rest in the realms of Folk Horror.

The way in which the Lover trope has developed over time hints at a fascinating narrative in its own right.  One that concerns how the way we use tropes to tell stories can tell us a lot about how we imagine and construct our ideas about the genres of Fantasy and Horror throughout history.  For the purposes of Dickens' story, however, what matters about the trope is how it ties in with the themes of the Victorian Gothic genre as it was utilized by Gaskell and Dickens.  In my first post dedicated to unpacking this folktale, two things struck me about the Birth of Modern Horror fiction.  The first was how a considerable, even determinative amount of the genre's early output was written by women.  The second was how this led to the development of a forum that allowed women to have a voice of their own.  In particular, a common theme that gets the reader's attention time and again is the threat of violence against women.  It's a scenario that crops up with mounting frequency as the genre develops.  Go back and leaf through the novels or short stories that make up what was then thought of as the Gothic Movement in English Literature, and you'll be treated to a series of snapshots showcasing the face of the Horror story as it begins to assemble its identity one piece of writing at a time.  I think it's telling that the trope of Women in Peril is a constant feature of the format, and that a lot of it comes from women artists.  What the data tells you is that so much activity in their part is no accident.

It was female authors like Anne Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte who first gave us one of the genre's most familiar tropes: a Final Girl being stalked by either a psycho in a mask, or else a monster or revenant from beyond the grave.  Perhaps the greatest irony of Horror fiction is that it's just possible to trace a line from a novel like The Mysteries of Udolpho all the way to Scooby and the Gang solving mysteries, or Leatherface swinging his trusty McCulloch in a futile effort to blot out the Sun at the end of The Texas Chainsaw massacre.  Each image, and the concepts centered around it, all had their beginnings in a series of novels and short stories, most of which were written by women, and most of whom used the burgeoning format as a way of making their voices and struggles heard in a world that was trying to keep them silent.  It's a commonplace of Liz Gaskell's Gothic works, as well.  According to Martin, ". Tensions between propriety and truth, between doing what is expected from a woman, a wife, a mother, and acting and thinking according to her own beliefs run throughout Gaskell's letters. From such tensions come the conflicts and passions in her ghost stories. Like much of her other work, these tales show women of strong will and individual action, but they also delineate the ways in which women's power can be frustrated, turned even to a destructiveness which rebounds on the women themselves (33)".  All of this speaks to the instability of Victorian life and its moral compromises.

Nowhere did this sense of imbalance strike home harder for women like Gaskell or Jane Austen, than in the way it revolved around the (mis)treatment of women.  The result is the ongoing series of challenges, critiques, and interrogations of the power structures in place between the genders in the Gaslit period.  What made a writer like Liz Gaskell lucky in this regard is that fact that there's just something about the Horror genre which allows it to get away with soapboxing in a way that others can't seem to pull off.  A lot of it seems to be on account how the fundamentally bombastic nature of Horror leaves the artist a greater deal of leeway when it comes to moralizing, even if the point is as mundane and obvious as a plea for greater equality, and better treatment between the sexes.  In this respect, Dickens can be said to  be on and share in the same wavelength as that of Gaskell .  It's clear the main tale of "To Be Read at Dusk" shares the theme of implied violence against women, and with the exact same moral thrust.  In essence, Dickens' version of "The Dream" amounts to a snapshot featuring a male author reaching a sense of ethical enlightenment when it comes to the wrongful treatment of women, and who never hesitated to highlight this crisis even in his more mainstream works, such as with Oliver Twist.

It's something that the editorial team of the Cove Online Editions have picked up on, to an extent.  They're correct enough when they pick up on one of the keynotes of women in Victorian Gothic fiction.  "Female figures in fictional narratives usually play specific roles in conventional ghost stories, often they are utilized as collateral to draw attention to gendered realities: in the article “The 1890s Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith” Emma Liggins finds that Galbraith utilizes her ghost stories “to hold men accountable for their deception and violence, bringing vanished lower-class women back from the dead for revelation rather than consolation”. Dickens utilizes the endings of women as a warning against patriarchal violence, but instead of their ghost communicating the message, it is actually the last moments of their lives that send this critical message (web)".  This is an accurate observation, so far as it goes.  It stops being helpful when the editors take this valid standpoint, and then begin to paint Dickens' use of this pivotal Horror theme in the most reductive light imaginable.  They view it as an examples of "Dickens fallen women", and view the author as someone who takes the stereotypical Victorian view of girls who were cast out of that Era's "polite society" marking him as misogynist.

The punchline is how the very annotations that Cove Online provides for "To Be Read at Dusk" does all that's necessary to undermine the very reading of the text that they have provided.  There's a moment in the story just after  the story's Gothic Heroine has greeted a traveling nobleman to the villa where she's staying to rest her nerves, only to discover to her horror that this man has the same face as the one that stalks her dreams.  She's invited the very figure she was frightened of right into her own house.  Unless she does something, this means the Terror she's been struggling against will come for her under her very own roof.  Her husband, of course, tries to reassure that nothing is in any way wrong, or out of the ordinary.  And it's here that Dickens displays not just his intelligence, but also how clever he could be as a writer.  It's at this point in the story that Old Boz references, or rather hints at one of the worst superstitions, or folk beliefs that has ever existed about the female body.  In the words of the Cove annotations, "This archaic idea that the uterus of a woman interferes with the brain and other parts of the body is a classical tradition that persists in the Victorian period. Joel L. Schiff writes in his article “Hysteria and Victorian Women in Art” about the ancient Greek perception of the “wandering womb” was converted into a “concrete”, scientific diagnosis of “hysteria” in the 19th century (web)".

What's remarkable about this casual bit of ancient misogyny is the peculiar note of barbaric control that lurks behind it.  It tells of the unspoken need for a women to be so under the thumb of a toxic masculinity, that any real question of a proper relationship with another human being is out of the question.  This is a form of psychological cowardice so complete, that it's able to achieve a chilling level of clinical purity.  In order for the lunatic to exist, everyone else must diminish to the level of mere puppets and playthings for the patient to take out his wrath on, in a never ending search for a form of mental satisfaction that his own disorder has barred him from.  Hence the vicious cycle perpetuates itself, until one day the patient turns the same wrath used to dispose of every woman it comes across onto himself.  Thus removing the problem from the equation of life in the most brutal and final matter possible.  It's a theme that Dickens tackles at various points in his own writings, and perhaps the best example of this remains his portrayal of Bill Sykes, the villain of Oliver Twist.  If it proves anything, then it might be the maxim that not all folklore is good.  Sometimes the customs and folk ways of the past are left to die for a reason.  Once again, the Cove annotations provide a valid reading at this point.

"The tradition is that women are irrational because their uterus interferes with their ability to reason, and therefore, the men of the story use reason against an “overly-emotional” mistress Clara. The incorrect ideas of the past carry on through the men continuing to believe these falsehoods; the past haunts the present of the narration, and the favor for data and reason costs the life and wellbeing of the mistress. It is their dismissal that brings her sickness, not a wandering uterus (ibid)".  The only demand I would make for that annotation is that the words Reason and Data be placed in "air quotes", because not only is it clear that the proper use of facts isn't being utilized in this scenario by the men in the protagonist's life, it's also clear that Dickens is aware of this bit of dramatic irony as the writer holding the pen.  Since this is the Victorian Era, he can only hint that he believes it's superstitious nonsense to use a woman's own body as an argument for their moral inferiority.  The culture of his time was of such a repressive nature that to make such commonsense claims openly could have ended his literary career, and he might have been forced back into the street pauper's life from which he came.  This time, however, he would be barred from life in the higher classes of British Victorian society.  These were the working conditions in which writers like Dickens and Liz Gaskell had to operate under to stay alive.

The fact that the editors at Cove Online fail to recognize these facets within the text, and the glaring social inequalities to which the writer hints at says a great deal more about the editors as readers, than it does about Dickens and his skills as an artist.  The text itself speaks of a man in full sympathy with the themes of women like Gaskell, and how these same liberatory ideas are encoded into her own works.  In that sense, Elizabeth is allowed to have her own voice within the pages of Dickens.  Just as with her own stories. Dickens version of "The Dream" is about the plight of women, and the ways in which they are exploited not just by toxic men, but also of an entrenched social order that acts as an incubator for the kind of clinical instabilities that perpetuate an ongoing crisis  of violence against women.  This makes the story of the Dream Stalker the most important out of the tales Dickens spins in his anthology.  It's still not the entirety of the story Dickens has to tell.  There are at least two other yarns the narrator has to spin for our amusement, and what they reveal ends up on a notable bit of fun.

Conclusion: Something of a Forgotten Pioneering Effort.

In addition to "The Dream", it's just possible to make the claim that Dickens is able to incorporate at least two other entries from the Scary Stories collection into his own anthology.  These would be the "The Thing" and what's perhaps the shortest piece in any of Schwartz's volumes, "Strangers".  The first tale listed concerns a pair of friends who have a bloodcurdling encounter with a ghastly, skeleton looking figure one night in the middle of nowhere, only for the phantom to be a harbinger of encroaching death for one of the protagonists.  The second item details a very brief encounter between strangers on a train, one of whom turns out to be a ghost.  Like "The Dream" each entry in Schwartz's collection is a retelling of old folk sources, and the way Dickens handles these same raw materials is such that while certain details might be different, there's still enough of a family resemblance in terms of the major plot beats to help us realize that all we're being given is the same narrative on a different day, while wearing a slightly different coat of paint.  Even though Dickens sees fit to elaborate on Schwartz's straightforward, Spartan approach to descriptive prose, you can still tell which entries in the latter collection match up with the ones that Dickens spins for Gaslight patrons under his own efforts.

Boz's version of "The Thing" concerns a wealthy man who, just as he's about to turn in for the night, spots his identical twin sibling entering the room to examine some important financial document among the family papers, before throwing his older brother a knowing look and vanishing into thin air.  The protagonist summons his servant and tells him of a premonition that his little brother might be very close to death.  They make haste for the younger sibling's estate and discover that they have arrived to late.  The gentleman in question has indeed passed away due to illness.  The creepy part is that he breathed his last just at the moment when the apparition entered the older bother's room to look through the family papers, heh-heh-heh!  As for the simple plot that is "Strangers", it turns out that this passing encounter which a mortal has with an inhabitant of the spirit world is the folktale Dickens turns to for use as the over-arching frame device for his anthology narrative.  No sooner has a German courier finished recounting this Victorian Era version of "The Thing", when the entire huddle of hushed conversation that the narrator's been eavesdropping on this whole time falls mysteriously silent.  When our fictional host for the evening takes a look at the scene, he finds that the group of storytellers have mysteriously vanished.  Not only did he not even hear the group of working men pick themselves up and start to move off, it's also implied that none of them seems to have left any track in the snow.

"To Be Read at Dusk" ends on this ominous note, with the narration asking the readers just how many more ghosts there might have been haunting the events of this story from the very beginning.  It's an intriguing way to end a narrative like this, and leaves us with the final question of just how good or not the whole thing is?  On the whole, I'd have to give it a passing enough grade.  My own reaction to this forgotten Horror anthology has been a bit peculiar, and I think a good description of it can tell us a lot about what our current expectations of the genre are like, and yet how it's still possible to slip our minds back into older forms not just of reading, but also of reacting in accordance with the way scary stories were told in days gone by.  My initial reaction was to wonder just how well Dickens efforts would hold up in today's climate?  There's a lot of ways in which this story showcases the ways in which Dickens' writing can be "of its time", on occasion.  The catch there is I don't mean the usual charge of values dissonance brought on by negative and racially or culturally insensitive stereotypes.  I'm talking strictly about questions such as what's the right way to a frame a Horror story like this one, here?  That's because part of the magic inherent in most Tales of Terror comes down to the setup and the payoff.

The mistake to avoid here is saying that there's anything like a hard and fast rule in place here.  There's not such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of what makes for a good work of shivers.  In that sense, Horror is very much like Comedy, in a way.  The ability of each genre to pull off its intended effect is down just as much to the luck of the draw, as it a question of sheer talent.  A lot of it can depend on context, and the sight of Boris Karloff sending a collective shriek through the audience as he emerges from behind a door in his iconic Frankenstein's Monster makeup could just as easily illicit laughter from modern audiences.  Even if the spell isn't broken, and the viewers maintain a respectful silence for the impact that Karloff's performance is able to leave, it would still be a more muted reaction than its initial cultural flashpoint.  Even if what's hip today isn't passe by tomorrow, that's still no guarantee that a lot of the luster hasn't faded from its initial moment of brilliance.  Let's take the way Dickens formats his version of "The Dream" as the best example of what I mean.  Here's the way the creator of Oliver, Scrooge, and David Copperfield showcases the big horrific reveal.

It starts with the husband of our Gothic Heroine informing his butler that 'A gentleman who is presented to me will dine here today. He is called the Signor Dellombra. Let me dine like a prince (240)'.  The servant reflect on how "It was an odd name. I did not know that name. But, there had been many noblemen and gentlemen pursued by Austria on political suspicions, lately, and some names had changed. Perhaps this was one. Altro! Dellombra was as good a name to me as another. When the Signor Dellombra came to dinner (said the Genoese courier in the low voice, into which he had subsided once before), I showed him into the reception-room, the great sala of the old palazzo. Master received him with cordiality, and presented him to mistress. As she rose, her faced changed, she gave a cry, and fell upon the marble floor. Then, I turned my head to the Signor Dellombra, and saw that he was dressed in black, and had a reserved and secret air, and was a dark remarkable-looking man, with black hair and a grey moustache. markable-looking man, with black hair and a grey moustache. Master raised mistress in his arms, and carried her to her own room, where I sent la bella Carolina straight. La bella told me afterwards that mistress was nearly terrified to death, and that she wandered in her mind about her dream all night (ibid)".  Now the logic of this scene is easy enough to explain in context.

In the parameters of the story's haunted secondary world, the Heroine has just received the fright of her life, because the face that's been stalking her in her nightmares has somehow come to life, and appears right before her in the one place where she was supposed to feel safe.  In and of itself, this is pretty standard stuff, yet it's a useful and respectable way to handle a tried and tested trope of the genre.  The one problem might be the language used to tell the story.  I don't know if others got the same initial impression that I did.  It's just the I came away reading that for the first time thinking something about the description might not have been quite right.  The action in the narrative happens more or less as you'd expect, yet the way it's told leaves perhaps something to be desired.  There's something antique about Dickens's sentences in this moment.  It's the sense of at least an appreciable Gothic effect waiting to spring like demonic Jack out of the Box, and yet the moment never quite lands, even if the action of the plot is there to be performed more or less to the letter.  Yet that that's where the whole problem lies, it's an ironic case of the letter trying to catch up in any possible proper way to the spirit of the text.  Something scary has happened, and yet the otherwise impeccable diction that helps bring the family of Phillip Pirrup to glorious, even enchanted comic life is now seen stumbling over how to scare people.

It's not the sort of result we came here to find.  If it isn't what's expected, then it's certainly not something we ever thought we'd get from the same talent that is able to imbue those moments where Pip visits Miss Havisham in her creaking old manor, or where the the shade of Jacob Marley visits Scrooge on Christmas Eve, with such brilliant gothic potency.  What makes it even more perplexing is that Dickens is responsible for yet another genre offering, "The Signalman", which is often cited as perhaps the best example of Dickens skills as a teller of ghostly fiction.  Having had the chance to run across "The Signalman" for myself, and under the best circumstance possible (i.e. slogging off the assigned reading course in High School English 101 out of boredom, and hence discovering a hidden gem through goofing off and/or thumbing my nose at "The Man") I can vouch for the validity of those claims.  The story of a railway worker haunted by a specter carrying a light at the end of a tunnel embankment is one of those stories where the quality is self-evident right from the very first opening lines.  It's good enough to be an episode for a legit TV Horror anthology.  Which, in point of fact, has actually happened to "The Signalman" on at least one occasion that I am aware of.  Being featured as part of Great Britain's annual BBC Christmas Ghost Story offerings, alongside the Carol itself.  In fact, come to think of it, that's a short story which functions as a much better re-telling of "The Thing".

"The Signalman" is an example of the Old Fashioned Ghost story at its best.  It's one of those examples where the inherent level of talent on display lends the narrative this sense of charm and chills which seems inevitable, yet is very difficult to pull off well.  The fact that the author of the Ghost of Christmas Future was able to pull this off should come as no surprise to anyone.  That's a short story I left excited and thrilled to have read.  It reminded me of why I became a fan of the genre in the first place, and hinted at the richness that can still be found even in the oldest offerings the format holds in its historical back catalogue.  It was a class act winner all the way, and I left that encounter promising myself that I would one day have to see what other spooky tricks the Inimitable Boz had up his sleeve.  Somehow I've wound up asking myself what went wrong with "To Be Read at Dusk"?  Considering the level of skill and immediacy that the author is able to imbue into the Gothic elements of his other fiction, even those that don't ostensibly count as works in the Horror genre, I'm forced to conclude that this counts as a story done for the work, rather than for the passion.  An example of the former is Martin Scorsese making a film like Casino, where it's pretty clear he's just phoning things in, and the best staples of his directorial toolbox are reduced to card board figures who become a series of Animaniacs parodies.

An example of Gothic art done in a moment of passion is found in the way Dickens constructs the character of Miss Havisham and the history that makes her the ghoulish emotional leech that she is to the two main leads of Great Expectations.  It's in the care and detail Dickens lavishes on the dark and brooding moors that make up the countryside that is Pip's home life.  There are passages in Great Expectations where Dickens showcases one of his greatest strengths as a storyteller, in which he's able to strike a winning balance between Horror and Humor that serves to add to the dimensionality of his secondary world and the characters who inhabit it.  We get the sense that we're not just dealing with living people, but with a landscape that is somehow alive in an indefinable yet vibrant sense.  These are the reasons why Charles Dickens is remembered as one of the greatest writers of all time, and its the palpable absences of these same qualities in "To Be Read at Dusk" that leads me to conclude the author must have been treating it as a chore of work.  Something that was needed to fill out a last minute blank spot in a monthly, end-of-the-year Christmas Annual at one point.  There's none of the same sense of investment that you get from works like "The Signalman", or longer works such as Bleak House.

The result is not a case of the author holding back, so much as struggling to find just the right spark the story needs to achieve that remarkable sense of literary half-life that is the hallmark of Boz's best efforts.  The fact that it's missing here, in a setting where it's not just needed, but where one gets the sense it could also reach its creative heights, is the clearest sign that a good chunk of this anthology will now remain forever untold.  That's kind of a shame, too.  Because even with a less than stellar effort, it is possible to get an idea of how the stories Dickens tells his audience here can still hold up under better circumstances.  There's nothing wrong with the narrative in and of itself.  It just needs the proper words in place, in order to have its true voice.  In point of fact, one of the remarkable aspects about the yarns Dickens spins here, is that they improve considerably once the reader replays the basic actions in the mind's eye focusing strictly on the performance the anthology's cast of character have to put on.  It's there the reader gets a decent enough hint at the kind of Gothic power these ancient narratives are supposed to hold within their performances, regardless of the words used.  I think the best suggestion of how this works is to simply state that when it came time to picture what the figure stalking the heroine's dreams might have looked like in Dickens' rendition of the tale, it came as no surprise to see none other than Vincent Price throwing his old, trademark smile of menacing charm right back at you, the reader.

Let that image stand for the idea of the kind of power a story like this is meant to have.  In addition to serving as the perfect image summation for the kind of tale that's supposed to be told, there is also the added bonus of a talented Horror icon like Price going up against Stephen Gammell's Pale Woman illustration.  Now I know the Scary Stories illustrations will be revered and feared forever for a reason.  I also know that a guy like Price has a fanbase that's just as devoted.  So it makes for an interesting contrast of scare styles.  One of them is immediate and visceral.  The other is careful, deliberate, and calculated.  Price's approach to Horror is one that knows the visceral always has its place.  Even the original version of The Fly is an early indicator of the Cronenbergian style Body Horror will come to define the genre during the 80s.  Price's type of storytelling just knows that even this has to be built-up in, not so much the right way, as much as with the best methods possible, whatever they might be.  I get the impression that his is how Dickens version of "The Dream", "The Thing", and "Strangers" are meant to be constructed, in order for them all to function with as much of whatever is the right atmosphere.

As things stand, I'm kind of torn on this one.  It's not like I can give it a complete passing grade, even if it's written by one of the best names in the history of English Literature.  A scary story poorly told is one of the sorriest sights in the history of the genre, and I'm the kind of guy who'll got to bat for directors like Mick Garris.  What makes Dickens failure all the more noticeable here is because of the knowledge I have over just how good he can be as a writer.  To see talent like that falter in an arena that plays to all his inherent strengths is one of those times when the embarrassment of a good job done bad hits with a double sting.  At the same time, it's like there are also moments where I have to admire what little Dickens has managed to accomplish here.  While he might not be able to give this tale as much of the effort it needs to get fully off the ground, he still manages to prove that at least his heart was in the right place when he composed this early rough draft piece.  This is demonstrated by the sensitivity with which the writer is at least able to stay true to the spirit animating Liz Gaskell's version of "The Dream".  This is true in particular with regard to the theme of protest against the abuse of women.

You can see Dickens' tell-tale Big Heartedness in these moments, and its this, combined with the one bit of surprise this story has waiting for its readers.  I've called "To Be Read at Dusk" an anthology, of sorts, and there's a very real sense in which this is true.  It's got all the tell tale signs of the kind of setup that would later become a staple of shows like The Twilight Zone, or films like Stephen King's Creepshow.  It's the presence of these formats that we've all grown so familiar with that counts as the second striking aspect of this sequence of nested of narratives.  It comes with a neat combination of surprise and recognition that is able to stay with the reader from start to finish.  Even if the final results weren't as good as they could be, I came away with the sense that I had the kind of story on my hands that's still worth looking into, even if just as curio piece.  It's almost like a time capsule of the Horror genre in the midst of a crucial moment of transition.  This is the kind of story where the careful reader can catch a glimpse of the format striving toward what it's future incarnation will be like.  You can see the future of Schwartz's own collection contained in its DNA, as several short stories are lined up awaiting their final form.  It's a snapshot of the Gothic story as it molds itself into its modern identity.  For this reason alone, "To Be Read at Dusk" is worth the read as kind of a helpful museum piece.