Dickens at the British Library

Currently the British Library has a compact and free exhibition on Dickens and ghosts. Just up the stairs inside there is a sweet little annex with deliciously rich ‘taster’ displays of books, posters and objects around Charles Dickens’ obsession with mesmerism, ghosts, and the unexplained.

I’m sure we all know Christmas Carol and so are aware that Dicken could write a unique and compelling ghost story, what perhaps is less known is that he had a lifelong obsession with them. Not, of course, that he believed a word about spirits and ghouls – but he did believe that the human mind was capable of creating powerful forces in many ways more thrilling than in the fairy tales.

Dickens was regularly mocked in his lifetime. Partly because of he consistently highlighted deprivation and poverty, which led to one opponent stating “there’s no pleasure that equals the reliving of one’s miseries.”

He even sparked a genre of spoof ghost stories like “The Ghost in the Wardrobe” who regularly revisited the scene of its lifetime miseries. the story itself questions the ghosts motivations for such a self-mutilating habit.

I rather like the tale of The Signalman, which I confess I’d never heard of before now, where a railway worker foretells doom and accidents, including his own grisly end.

Dickens however, was not just about the Gothic apparition of Miss Haversham or the ghostly presence of Jacob Marley – he wwas also fascinated by Mesmerism, an early form of hypnosis which was thought to work through harnessing bodily liquids that were part of or ancient animal spirits.

t all makes for a fascinating quarter of an hour or so, so if you’re passing do pop in.