THIS PRESENTATION IS PERFORMED IN VICTORIAN COSTUMES
Since its publication in 1843 the novella A Christmas Carol has transformed our present day notions of Christmas. But Charles Dickens’ tale of familial joy and repentance was actually rooted in ghost stories. A closer examination of other works will uncover his lifelong interest in the paranormal. In fact, Dickens wrote a ghost story every Christmas. These include, but are not limited to The Signal Man, The Cricket in the Hearth “The Ghosts of the Mail” and “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”
is perhaps the most interesting of the five, for it is the dry run to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Jacob Marley’s ghost materializes from a door-knocker in A Christmas Carol. There’s a household delicacy to these manifestations. In “The Signalman,” the railway is a haunted place the minute the tracks had been laid. He used the technological advances of his time like the railroad, to generate their own ghosts and paranormal spirits.
Many think that the ghosts in A Christmas were modeled after he wrote the Pickwick Papers in which Pickwick and his friends tell five ghost stories in the course of the book, starting with “The Lawyer and the Ghost where he states his position on the existence of ghosts: why do they haunt unpleasant places, when you could be someplace nice. The tenant of the haunted house asks this question of a ghost who haunts the wardrobe. The specter replies, “Egad, that’s very true; I never thought of that before…we must be very dull fellows, very dull fellows, indeed, I can’t imagine how we can have been so stupid.” And disappears never to return. Dickens has begun his long career of ghost-stories writing with humor, something he would use more often than not, as well a sense of editorializing.
HOW AND WHY DID CHARLES DICKENS BECOME INTERESTED IN GHOST STORIES?
Four possible answers: His childhood influences and reading predilections, life in Victorian London, his near-death experience on a train, and his involvement in The Ghost Club. uncanny began in his teens, when he pored over tales of phantoms, murder and cannibalism
 This is Charles Dickens Nanny ” Mercy” who scared the wits out of him while giving him an appetite for the supernatural which he would use in the ghost stories he wrote every year as well as The Christmas Carol. |  This is Catherine Dickens, Charles’ wife whom he practiced hypnotism on and witnessed his presence at many séances during the Victorian years. |
 Ellen Ternan, Dickens mistress who was with him during the Staplehurst train crash which injured and killed people. This event changed his life drastically. |  A fellow member of the club that Dickens founded: London’s Ghost Club, which still exists today. |