The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History (review)

The first scholarly monograph on the subject of ghost stories since the late 1970s might be considered overdue, due to widespread theoretical interest in the figure of the ghost, best attested to by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993). The first thing to note, then, is that Andrew Smith is not interested in addressing theory’s ghosts. He argues, rather, that the Victorians produced their own “discourse of spectrality” through which “a variety of socio-political concerns became articulated” (168). Primarily, his book explains the key role that ghost stories played in the production and representation of Victorian subjectivity, as often outside of literature as within it: in tracts of political economy, ideas about love, and spiritualist visions.

The book’s main focus is on the relationship between the figure of the ghost and money, though this focus drops away in the last three chapters, and especially in the weakest chapter, on colonial ghosts. Smith establishes a sophisticated set of relationships between ghosts, subjectivity, and money and provides a productive framework for the literary analyses that are the core of the book’s project: readings of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and M. R. James get a chapter each, and the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Rudyard Kipling are also analyzed.

The book is at its best in two different registers. The first produces a set of close readings of ghost stories, especially Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843) and “The Signalman” (1866), and M. R. James’s “The Mezzotint” (1904) and “The Haunted Dolls’ House” (1925). The second, especially in the opening chapter on economics, offers a broader cultural analysis of the discourse of spectrality. As a sustained argument for why ghost stories are a crucial medium in which the monetization of consciousness—the particular ways in which “consciousness is formed in a money-based society” (34)—is established and explored, the book deserves admiration and a wide reading. It thoroughly situates its arguments within critical conversations, though perhaps overly deferentially at times. Smith never seems to disagree with critics, but rather to add to or extend arguments and observations made by others. Maybe it’s a mode of English politeness, but there is an odd slipperiness to the book’s engagement with other scholars: nothing gets argued, and there’s no confrontation. No one is wrong, but in consequence it’s hard to feel that there’s anything at stake. A feature of the book’s argumentative method produces the same result, but for different reasons: the book allows for complicated, sophisticated, and multidirectional relationships of causality and borrowing between authors and discourses, but the cost is that rather than tracking down causal links, changes and developments, or patterns of influence, Smith focuses on a “discourse of spectrality,” producing mere associations of likeness. A symptomatic sentence: Dickens’s “is a position which bears some similarity to Marx’s view” (43). Likewise, phrases like “is related” or “closely related to” and “is linked to” occur regularly; they make it hard to see what’s at stake in the parallels being described.

The drawing of faint connections is a problem in another sense, which is that Smith discovers ghostliness in everything. For instance, William Jevons’s account of political economy, Smith says, makes human subjectivity “disappear. . . . Subjects therefore become ghostlike as they are configured as versions of the living dead, in which abstract quantities of pleasure and pain appear to abstrusely influence their decision making in the marketplace” (26). But Smith never quotes Jevons using spectral language, nor did Jevons’s theory tangibly produce or influence a discourse of spectrality. This kind of conceptual creep helps account for what is perhaps the book’s oddest feature, given its title, which is that it isn’t really about ghost stories at all, in at least two ways. First, its primary interest is...