Victorian Gothic: A selection of macabre and malevolent stories

In his groundbreaking book 'Inventing the Victorians', Mathew Sweet argues that, for all their obsessions and the straitlaced prudery which we associate with them, our Victorian forefathers were essentially the same as us. This may be partly true in terms of their social aspirations and their consumerism, but it is also fair to say that they were very much obsessed with death and funerary monuments. The twenty-first century reader need only visit cemeteries like Highgate and Kensal Green to realise that our nineteenth-century forerunners were fascinated by the "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," going as far as creating entire stone-hewn necropolises for their dead. In this anthology we bring together some of the finest Victorian writings on death and the supernatural from the pens of both well-known luminaries like Dickens or Thackeray and lesser-known authors like George MacDonald and Mrs Henry Wood. It is to be hoped that by reading these stories the modern reader will be able to gain an insight into the morbid peculiarities of the Victorian mind.