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Reviewed by:
  • The Ghost in the Garden Room
  • Ruth Glancy
The Ghost in the Garden Room. By Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Fran Baker. [Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Volume 86, Number 1 (Spring, 2004).] (Manchester: The John Rylands University Library of Manchester. 2005. Pp. cxxiv, 84. 2005.)

One of the most interesting and influential innovations in Victorian publishing was Charles Dickens's "Christmas numbers," carefully planned special editions of Dickens's weekly journals that appeared every Christmas from [End Page 690] 1850 to 1867 and reached an audience of over quarter of a million eager readers. Dickens loved the whole idea of storytelling—a setting conducive to the telling of tales, storytellers with a tale (often from their own lives) to tell, and a captive group of listeners gathered around a Christmas fire, snowed up in an inn, or bobbing about in a lifeboat awaiting rescue. He invited other writers to contribute and tried to give them free rein within guidelines intended to make the number coherent and the theme explicit, not an easy task and one that eventually defeated him. The intention of the numbers was always, as Dickens said of his earlier Christmas books (A Christmas Carol being the most famous), "to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land."

Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Ghost in the Garden Room" was written for the 1859 number, "The Haunted House," the intention of which was to debunk the kind of spiritualism (rappings, mediums, séances, etc.) that Dickens deplored because many Victorians mistook it for genuine religious experience. Dickens intended the stories to show that the inhabitants of the house were haunted by ghosts of their own making—their former selves or former experiences—thereby bringing about a deeper understanding of life and human relations. As Fran Baker points out, Elizabeth Gaskell's ghost story was well suited to this framework: a prodigal son, believed to be dead, returns to his parents' home in a manner more threatening than any ghostly visitation. In order to make the story fit the framework, Dickens gave the story to a lawyer who had heard it from the judge who had presided over the case against the son and was still haunted by the memory of the faithful, suffering mother.

Like most journalism, Dickens's Christmas numbers disappeared into obscurity long before the twentieth century, but in recent years literary scholars have been unearthing them and looking at them through a twenty-first century lens. Fran Baker's edition is one of a number of studies that consider the stories or poems from the point of view of the contributing writer in order to shed light on Dickens's editorial methods and the difficulties of collaborative authorship. We know Dickens's intentions, but how did the other writers feel about this literary production? Scholars concentrating on Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, or Adelaide Procter are inclined to find fault with Dickens's editorial control—his adjusting and framing in order to achieve cohesion. Thus in her discussion of the re-publication of "The Ghost in the Garden Room" in different forms and collections (it was renamed "The Crooked Branch") Fran Baker speaks of the story having been "rescued" from the ephemeral format of the Christmas number and from Dickens's editorial hand. Baker takes issue with Dickens's giving the story to a male narrator (the lawyer) to tell, and she argues that when Gaskell was able to publish the story apart from this framework she was able "to reinstate the single narrative voice articulating essentially female concerns, which had been suppressed by the double layer of male narration Dickens imposed on the tale." The nature of the suppression is never clear, and elsewhere Baker provides excellent proof that the story as it [End Page 691] appeared in Dickens's Christmas number was very much Gaskell's, clearly related to her other work and deriving from her roots in the rural north of England. If the story "addressed some radical and specifically female concerns," Dickens certainly approved of it and left those concerns in Elizabeth Gaskell's able hands. That...

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