Today we are joined by Rachel from A Fair Substitute For Heaven, who talks about one of my favorite subject: Charles Dickens!

During October many readers pine for the fiction that makes our skin creep and crawl, for things that go bump in the night, for the chilling ghost stories of The Headless Horseman or James’ The Turn of the Screw. In literary fiction, Charles Dickens, fed heaps of the grueling macabre into his fiction. This Hallowe’en, I want to walk you through a few chilling vignettes of Dickens at his most gruesome. We’ll meet ghosts, thieves, witness murders, learn of Dickens’ penchant for descriptions of the gallows and paint a clear, rain-soaked cobblestoned world of gaslight and fright.

Here are a few examples of the dreariest Dickensian tales, a snapshot of some of their most malevolent characters and hopefully enough tingly-feelings to beguile you to revisit their worlds once more:

OLIVER TWIST

Photo Caption: Fagin waits to be hanged

There is a portentous sense of the macabre hovering in many of Dickens’ grim Victorian worlds including the conniving Fagin, the bandleader of a pack of boy thieves and Bill Sykes, the murderous henchman who skulks the streets of London at night: pilfering here and there, his mangy dog in tow.

Nearer the beginning of Oliver Twist, the scene is an undertaker’s: Oliver leads funeral processions for children’s funerals in a tall, be-plumed black hat and his forced to sleep in the dank dusk with coffins awaiting their next corpse.

According to eyewitness accounts, during Dickens’ numerous reading tours of Europe and North America, audiences were moved to fainting when Dickens read of the brutal death of Nancy at the hands of her lover, Bill Sykes.  Read more

Teresa

Teresa (nom de plume: Torrance Sené) is a self-proclaimed geek, a Janeite, a lover of werewolves and bad-ass angels, an aspiring novelist and an avid book reader who freelances as a web designer. You can follow her on Twitter at @eireannoir.

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