The Children's Ghost Story in America by Sean Ferrier-Watson (review)

Sean Ferrier-Watson's The Children's Ghost Story in America opens a scholarly conversation about the ways in which ghosts have, over time, taken particular shapes in children's literature published in the United States. Ghost stories included in Ferrier-Watson's discussion involve the spirit of a dead person returning to the land of the living, as well as stories in which only the perception of a ghost—"a mock ghost story" (11)—is featured. Not included are stories featuring "reanimated corpses" (10), such as those about zombies or vampires, as Ferrier-Watson focuses on "qualities of the ghost that appear to transcend traditions, specifically those qualities that distinguish the ghost from some of its more gruesome doppelgangers" (11). Within these parameters, Ferrier-Watson traces the development of the ghost story in North American English-language children's literature from its early appearances in nineteenth-century periodicals, such as The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, to its twenty-first century new-media manifestations termed creepypastas. Ferrier-Watson identifies three types of ghostly constructions in texts for young readers—as mock ghosts with rational explanations, as supernatural beings with otherworldly origins but little agency, and as transmediated and transnarrative creatures that take on increasingly horrific lives of their own—and he explores the sociocultural implications of such constructions. First, however, he steps back and describes some of the conditions that affected the transmission of ghost stories prior to the nineteenth century.

The English Reformation, coinciding with developments in printing, both disrupted and transformed English language ghost stories in general. In the introduction, Ferrier-Watson discusses how Protestant skepticism over the Catholic Church's teachings of the supernatural, as well as over the church's motives for perpetuating such teachings, led to a disdain for ghost stories. At the same time, folkloric ghost stories were moving from the fluidity of the oral tradition to being preserved in print, at least for adults. In the seventeenth century, Ferrier-Watson notes, John Locke "argued that children should be sheltered from stories of spirits and goblins" (14), an argument that may have influenced John Newbery and other early publishers in their choices of what material was appropriate for children and what was not. This double-standard resulted in the conspicuous absence of ghosts in stories published for children through the first half of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the increasing popularity of ghost stories published for adults, most notably Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published in 1843. When ghost stories for children appeared, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were mock ghost stories in which what appeared to be a ghost was quickly revealed as having a rational explanation. Characters who believed in the supernatural were deemed silly and gullible. Ferrier-Watson not only discusses a number of such stories in his first chapter, but he also includes, in the back matter, an extensive bibliography of mock ghost stories to encourage further research.

While adults may have intended mock ghost stories to inoculate children against superstition, Ferrier-Watson suggests they provided American children with "a healthy sense of the uncanny" (40) and that they revealed various types of ghosting—making people invisible or relegating them to the shadows—that occurred among people of different classes and races. In chapter 2, Ferrier-Watson considers the ways in which mock ghost stories featuring girls—many of which were written by female authors—"became active locations for social and political reform, which very possibly influenced a new generation of women" (80). Mock ghost stories continued to be published through the first half of the twentieth century and still can be found today, but wars, technological developments, and other societal changes in the first decades of the twentieth century presaged a change in the kind of ghost stories written for children. In chapter 3, for example, Ferrier-Watson explains that, with the rise of modernism, adults began to believe children should be taught to confront...