Byron’s Ghosting Authority

I. Seeing Ghosts

Grim reader! did you ever see a ghost?   No; but you have heard—I understand—be dumb! . . . For certain reasons, my belief is serious. Serious? You laugh:—you may; that will I not; My smiles must be sincere or not at all.¹

Thus the poet of Don Juan teases us, on the cusp of its last completed canto, published in 1824, in the wake of a couple of decades of bestselling ghost-stories.² The year before, Byron had convinced Lady Blessington “that he was sincere in his belief in supernatural appearances; he assumes a grave and mysterious air when he talks on the subject, which he is fond of doing, and has told me some extraordinary stories relative to Mr. Shelley who, he assures me, had an implicit belief in ghosts.” Yet with Byron, it’s always dicey distinguishing sincerity from a performance of sincerity with a grave and mysterious air. He likes to talk the talk of ghost-story, and (the Lady has just written) “likes very much to be listened to, and seems to observe the effect he produces on his hearer.”³ Telling the stories is one way to effect belief, exploiting that “supernatural” genre whose force, in Coleridge’s memorable phrasing, is “to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”⁴ Ghosts are so constitutive for this kind of procurement as to seem its spectral logic, made to order.

Back in the prime of the gothic novel, the 1790s, Joanna Baillie theorized the appeal of ghost stories in relation to a more than willing audience for procurement:

The workings of nature in this situation, we all know, have ever been the object of our most eager enquiry. No man wishes to see the Ghost himself, which would certainly procure him the best information on the subject, but every man wishes to see one who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation and wildness of that species of terror.⁵

If the ghost is the unwanted, unmediated vision, the magnetic aesthetic affect is the spectacle, a text of wild reactions. “‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to,” recalls Mary Shelley of that fateful, fertile night in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1816 that produced Frankenstein.⁶ Fresh from devouring “volumes of ghost stories,” the group was stoked further by Byron’s recitation of ghostly Geraldine’s ghastly unveiling in Christabel, a product from Coleridge’s adventure into the supernatural, pressed to a horrific sublime of story-telling: “Behold! Her bosom and half her side——- / A sight to dream of, not to tell!”⁷ For Byron, the telling is clearly, sincerely, the thing.

Against this posturing, Mary Shelley’s ghost-enchanted (at times ghost-conjuring) husband pressed the issue.⁸ “We talk of Ghosts,” and if “Lord B.,” Percy Shelley wrote in her journal in August 1816, did not “seem to believe in them,” he, ever the Idealist, would demur: “I do not think that all the persons who profess to discredit these visitations, really discredit them, or if they do in the daylight, are not admonished by the approach of th loneliness & midnight to think more respectfully of the world of Shadows.”⁹ This “respectfully” has a nice wit on the subject: not just a review of the profession, to allow shadows of imagination, in midnight-loneliness, to produce a world of Shadows, but also, literally, a second sight.¹⁰ That capital “S” promotes shadows to substantive, alternative reality.

At this limit, however, ghosts keep close company with irony, prone even to flirting with it. “I have heard that when Coleridge was asked if he believed in ghosts,—he replied that he had seen too many to put any trust in their reality,” jested Mary Shelley in a not altogether jesting essay “On Ghosts.”¹¹ It is, tellingly, a similar ghost-joke raised by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious: “Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.” The...