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), which addresses the issue of money and its relationship to identity which characterised Dickens’s ghost stories. However, before discussing The Haunted Hotel it is important to examine some of Collins’s major writings of his heyday in the 1860s – The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), and Armadale (1866) – as they foreshadow his later representations of the ghostly. 2 Both The Woman in
It is crucial to acknowledge the major contribution that women writers made to the ghost story during the period. The selection of authors discussed here is necessarily limited but gives a representative flavour of how women writers engaged with the specific issues of love, money, and history. There is the danger that such a thematic approach simplifies the range of the female
2 Money, marriage and remembrance: telling stories from the Cavendish financial accounts Alison Wiggins ‘Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals,’ so Sir Thomas Cromwell tells himself in Hilary Mantel’s fictionalised depiction.1 Mantel compellingly dramatises for us how Tudor financial accounts were sources of hidden stories, and we regularly find Mantel’s Cromwell turning to them to access alternative versions of events. This chapter performs, as it were, the inverse process to Mantel: it begins with a book of
Money, not merely as subject in literature but also in its very form and function, exhibits qualities of spectral evanescence, fetishised power over the imagination, and the uncontrollable transgression of boundaries and limits, which closely parallel the concerns and anxieties of Gothic literature. Yet it is in the writings of economic theorists and commentators on market society like Adam Smith and Karl Marx that these Gothic anxieties about money are most clearly articulated. Stevensons short story ‘The Isle of Voices’, read in the context of his comments on money in his other writings, is one of the few fictional texts which uses these properties of money to create what might be called a ‘financial Gothic’ narrative, which nevertheless has insights and implications for the narratives of capitalist modernity in general.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the term ‘uncomfortable houses’ was used to describe properties where restless spirits made life unpleasant for any living persons who tried to claim these supernatural residences as their own. This article uses the idea of ‘uncomfortable houses’ to examine how this ghostly discomfort related to larger cultural issues of economics and class in Victorian Britain. Authors such as Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant used the haunted house story as a means of social critique which commented on the financial problems facing many lower- and middle-class Victorians. Their stories focus on the moral development of the protagonists and reconciliation through the figure of the ghost, ultimately giving readers the happy endings that many male-authored ghost stories lack. Riddell‘s ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ and ‘Walnut-Tree House’ and Oliphant‘s ‘The Open Door’ serve as important examples of this ‘suburban Gothic’ literature.
This article explores Riddells representational strategies around gender: in particular her male narrators and her female characters made monstrous by money. It argues that Riddell, conscious of social prohibitions on financial knowledge in women, employs male protagonists to subversive effect, installing in her stories a feminine wisdom about the judicious use of wealth. Her narratives identify the Gothic potential of money to dehumanise, foregrounding the culpability of economic arrangements in many of the horrors of her society. While they contain pronounced elements of social critique, they ultimately however defend late-Victorian capitalism by proff ering exemplars of the ethical financial practice by which moneys action is to be kept benign.
Edward Hemmerde and Francis Neilson were both Liberal MPs at the outbreak of the First World War, bound together by a common commitment to the principle of land taxation. A shortage of money, at a time when MPs had only just started to receive salaries, led them into extra-parliamentary co-operation in the joint authorship of plays. But the two men fell out over the profits from their literary endeavours. One or other was clearly not telling the truth. Although he gave up his parliamentary career in opposition to British involvement in the war, Neilson later prospered greatly as a writer in the United States. Meanwhile, Hemmerde turned to his career as Recorder of Liverpool, but the wealth that he craved eluded him. This article reminds us that financial impropriety among MPs is no new phenomenon, while highlighting the difficulty of establishing certain historical truth in the face of conflicting documentary evidence.
the Gothic they nevertheless inform a particular model of the Gothic imagination which appears in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Riddell, and more subtly, Henry James. Punter identifies ambivalence as central to Gothic representations of class, desire, and history and it is also key to understanding the relationship between theories of money and the Gothic. The danger is that one could be crudely