By Paul Michael Durivage

The first nuisance in Charles Dickens’s “The Haunted House” is a fellow passenger with too many legs. The narrator has spent an uncomfortable night on a train, sleeping badly and resenting the man opposite him. When he notices the stranger listening intently and taking notes, he assumes that the observations concern the railway. An engineer might have a reason for finding the bumps interesting. The actual explanation is considerably less useful: the gentleman has been communicating with spirits.

Dickens lets this conversation become ridiculous before the narrator reaches the house. In “The Mortals in the House,” his opening contribution to the collaborative Christmas number published in All the Year Round in 1859, comedy establishes the person who will guide us toward the haunting. We meet a man who enjoys spotting nonsense. We also meet a man whose irritation makes him very entertaining, and whose confidence deserves watching.

The traveller’s account of the afterlife is wonderfully disappointing. Great minds have returned from death to circulate commonplaces, muddle familiar sayings and exchange pleasantries. Galileo’s contribution concerns the temperature at which water freezes. Milton has apparently disowned Paradise Lost. The revelation that thousands of invisible spirits occupy the carriage makes the ordinary business of travelling sound even more overcrowded than it already is.

The joke sharpens when a proverb arrives with its last word changed from “Bush” to “Bosh.” The narrator suggests the correction. His companion insists on preserving the communication as received. That tiny argument catches the whole difficulty: once the source has been declared extraordinary, even a mistake becomes something to defend. The spirits have acquired a remarkably convenient protection from editing.

The narrator, meanwhile, is hardly a detached examiner. He has already treated the stranger’s long legs as unreasonable conduct. He tells us that the other man has “several legs too many,” as though an exhausted passenger’s inconvenience were an anatomical fact. His annoyance is recognizable enough to win our company. It also gives us a reason to separate his judgment from his mood. Dickens makes the skeptic funny before allowing him to make fun of anyone else.

On leaving the train, this irritated man finds relief in the morning landscape. The rising sun and the order of the universe seem a welcome answer to the cramped, foolish conversation. The contrast is almost suspiciously reassuring. Having escaped one person’s elaborate claims, he appears ready to trust what can be seen clearly in daylight.

The house itself initially seems to support that confidence. Dickens opens the chapter by denying it the usual theatrical assistance. There is no storm to excuse our unease. A goods train remains visible nearby. The place belongs to an ordinary world in which people travel, arrange accommodation and inspect property. Even the supposed haunted house is available to rent on reasonable terms. Anyone seeking supernatural grandeur must first deal with the letting arrangements.

Yet the narrator cannot maintain the distance he has established. Looking at the neglected property, he pauses to explain why early morning is his most ghostly time. Familiar people lie asleep and unresponsive. Everyday occupations have stopped. An empty seat or a closed book suggests a life interrupted. His attention turns ordinary stillness into an anticipation of death.

Then comes the quiet admission that changes the opening: he once saw an apparition of his father. The father was alive and well. The image disappeared when the narrator tried to touch its shoulder, and “nothing ever came of it.” That last qualification is especially affecting. The experience produced no grand warning or useful revelation. It remains a thing he says he saw, without an explanatory conclusion attached.

This admission does not make the railway passenger right. It changes what the narrator’s skepticism can reasonably promise. He can reject a foolish report without having explained every disturbance in his own experience. The laughter has brought us close enough to hear that distinction. A voice that was briskly correcting somebody else’s nonsense now describes a moment when looking, speaking, and reaching failed to settle what was there.

The interruption is carefully placed. No incident at the property forces him to tell this story about his father. The morning itself draws it out. Before he has collected the village’s accounts, he has supplied a haunting of his own. His imagination is already at work upon the house, even as he prepares to question the imaginations of everybody nearby.

Dickens carries this unsettled mixture into the village. The narrator tries to investigate the house’s reputation, but the available evidence keeps retreating. A hooded woman has supposedly been seen with an owl. Ikey has certainly seen the owl; the woman is less clear. Asked for reliable witnesses, he can offer people who are inconveniently elsewhere. The exchange makes a ghost story seem like a rumour that has acquired furniture and refuses to move out.

Once the narrator rents the house, its practical defects help the rumours along. There are damp rooms, deteriorating surfaces, and a bell associated with Master B. The bell really does ring, though its ringing proves less than the household wants it to prove. The narrator eventually removes it. The dog’s alarming howls also turn out to have a connection to particular piano notes. Investigation yields results, but those results do not restore a peaceful home.

There is a harder edge to the comedy here. The narrator is much less generous toward frightened servants than he is toward his own bewildering vision. His descriptions of their intelligence, tears, and physical reactions can be cruel. His confidence is also the confidence of an employer accustomed to having other people manage the household. When his sister proposes living without servants, he admits the possibility had never occurred to him.

That limitation gives the chapter more texture than an uncomplicated victory of reason would have. His explanations may be sensible; his manner does not necessarily help anybody hear them. A persuasive speech collapses when someone reacts with fresh terror. Soon he finds himself listening in the dark and hearing enough strange noises to disturb his own nerves. His account of fear spreading through the household includes him, however much he would prefer to remain its supervisor.

The narrator’s treatment of Ikey adds another complication. He suspects the young man of manufacturing alarms, but also believes that Ikey is afraid of the house. False reports and sincere fear can coexist. That is a more troublesome possibility than a clean division between honest witnesses and calculating frauds. People can help produce the very atmosphere that frightens them.

Eventually the sister’s plan brings friends into the house. They agree to investigate honestly, share the work, and reveal their experiences on Twelfth Night. The place becomes cheerful. Practical men remove a noisy weathercock and other sources of night alarms. Their enthusiasm for climbing about in bad weather is itself comic, but it also gives the house an inhabited life beyond its reputation.

The opening has made room for that change because it has never depended entirely on keeping us frightened. Dickens has let us enjoy the inconvenience of living among other people, including the people who are certain they understand everything. By the time the house’s stories are ready to be told, laughter has made the company worth staying with. We can question the narrator, recognize his vanity and still follow him upstairs.

Paul Michael Durivage is a Michigan author whose fiction includes horror and workplace satire. His books and other writing can be found at Paul Michael Durivage Books.

Sources

Charles Dickens, “The Mortals in the House,” in The Haunted House, 1859. Text in Three Ghost Stories, Project Gutenberg.

Original publication context and chapter attribution: Victorian Short Fiction Project, Brigham Young University.