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everything by sitelinkCharles Dickens is worthy of being called a masterpiece, sitelinkThe Haunted House is a selection of short stories on the theme of a haunted house, Dickens dashed off the joining story and two smaller contributions, and edited the other stories, The contributors included Wilkie Collins who wrote the only good story in the collection and Elizabeth Gaskell, along with three other writers whose names were not familiar to me,

At first I thought the stories would all be about ghosts in the particular haunted house which Dickens's hero and his friends were staying, but it seems that most of the stories were about incidents in the others' pasts that haunted them.
Compiled by Charles Dickens, and counting Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins among its contributors, this rediscovered work is an ingenious collaborative tale of the supernatural with indelible touches of pure Dickensian comedy.
When the narrator spies a deserted house from his railway carriage, he determines to take up residence, But local legend has it that this is a haunted house, and no servant will dare enter employment, Refusing to be thwarted, he instead invites a number of acquaintances to join him, commissioning each with the task of routing out any supernatural inhabitants, As they gather together on twelfth night, each recounts his version of the ghostly activities, I had about given up hope of finding a complete copy of THE HAUNTED HOUSE, It was included in two Dickens collections that I own, However, when I started the book in each one, I found that only the portions written by Dickens had been included, The book is a collection of stories contributed by six writers on one theme, My library had an eBook copy, . . and it, too, only had the Dickens portions! Finally, I ordered the Modern Library paperback edition published in, It had the complete text,

According to the Introduction by Wesley Stace, one of Dickens literary journals was called “All the Year Round, ” He came up with the idea for THE HAUNTED HOUSE as a holiday edition for Christmas, The British have a longstanding tradition of ghost stories during this holiday time, In fact, I have some DVD copies of shows produced by the BBC over a number of Christmas years, The emphasis here was not to be on scares, but on a theme,

A man and his sister lease a dilapidated house that is believed to be haunted, Servants take their leave after a short time, giving the occupants an idea, They will invite their friends to stay for the Christmas holiday in a “roughing it” atmosphere of managing the household duties on their own, Then, on Twelfth Night, they will have a special party at which they will detail any ghostly experiences that they encountered in their rooms,

In the first chapter, Dickens sets the stage Not to expect any supernatural visitations, Screams and moans in the house are tracked to their source and are either repaired or made quiet such as a rusted weathercock on the rooftop, One young townsperson in particular, taking pleasure in giving people a fright, is discovered and warned away from the property, So, there is no need to look here for something akin to “The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, ”

But, what will they find

The short book reminded me of one of those Writers Seminar assignments when attendees were given the start of a story and were then sent away to finish it their final result being shared with the group.
Dickens had a definite idea of what he wanted for the form of the stories, but he was the only one to actually follow that form in his offering, “The Ghost In Master Bs Room.
” Everyone else went in a different direction, . . Adelaide Anne Procter took the most extreme approach for “The Ghost In The Picture Room” by producing a long poem! Each was given one of the houses rooms as the setting and the occupants of that room as the central character.


Modern Readers, those who find a complete edition, tend to be confounded by what they discover in THE HAUNTED HOUSE, None of the stories is particularly scary, The “Master B” story by Dickens comes the closest to that, Yet, I did enjoy most of what I read, “The Ghost In The Double Room” by George Augustus Sala was the wildest ride with the most humor, Wilke Collins uses “The Ghost In The Cupboard Room” to tell an adventure tale reminiscent of Poes THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, Hesba Stretton unfolds a proper love story in “The Ghost In The Clock Room, ” And Elizabeth Gaskell relates a story that would be worthy of one told by Dickens in “The Ghost In The Garden Room, ”

Dickens is there at the beginning and the end, too, providing a framework in which the stories can reside, His hope for a thematic “Lesson Learned” is discarded, though, and the book ends abruptly,

As a sampling of creative British writers of the time, THE HAUNTED HOUSE is an enjoyable “place” to visit, If you are looking for ghostly tales to be told around the campfire, . . with some eerie voice chanting, “Whose got my golden arm”, . . youd best keep looking. That level of creepiness will not be found here at all, Link to the story: sitelink onlineliterature. com/dick Its Not the House Thats Haunted

I am sure that I will not spoil anything when I tell you, right at the start, that you must not expect a haunted house in this collection of short stories.
Rather, each of the stories included in this collection tell you something about the fears, worries and preoccupations of the minds of their respective narrators, This could be the breeding ground for some truly spinechilling yarns, but alas! the title The Haunted House is misleading in that the house is not haunted at all.
I am telling you this beforehand lest you should approach this collection with wrong expectations, as I most certainly did,



The Haunted House is a collaboration of Dickenss with a handful of other writers and it appeared in theChristmas number of Dickenss periodical All the Year Round.
Probably Dickens wanted to live up to the publics expectation of his delivering his annual Christmas story without putting too much time into it, His collaborators were wellknown writers to the Victorian reader, although only two of them Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell have stood the test of time, And if you look at the two stories these two contributed you might get an idea why this is the case, because these two contributions are the best tales in the whole collection.
Collins gives us the tale of a sailor who goes through two hours of mortal anguish when he is manacled and put into the hold of a ship containing explosives with a burning candle and a slow match wick ready to light.
It is not a ghost story but a tale of terror redolent of Edgar Allan Poes The Pit and the Pendulum, Gaskells story is about a couple of honesttoGod farmers whose son is an ingrate and underhanded goodfornothing, How far will this villain go in his attempts at obtaining his parents modest fortune Not only is there a very dramatic ending, but Gaskell also manages to give us a vivid impression of her characters and the atmosphere.


Dickenss introduction is also amusing to read as he makes fun of peoples sensationalist gullibility when it comes to haunted houses, but the tale he contributes is downright silly.
A similar experience in silliness, and in an annoyingly contrived attempt at original prose, can be seen in George Augustus Salas story, The first story in the collection was written by Hesba Stretton, and it has a certain touch of Brontëan sentimentality and pathos, which made it the most unpalatable story of the bunch for me.
Last, not least, there is a long narrative poem by Adelaide Anne Procter, which is superior to Sala and Strettons efforts, though still not as convincing as the tales given by Collins and Gaskell.


All in all, I did not particularly enjoy this short story collection, but nevertheless I would recommend the two outstanding tales by Gaskell and Collins,
DNFing about a third of the way through, I really like the idea of this book, but it has way too many characters for what it's trying to do, If you had the main guy that we met in the first chapter and just documented his interactions with the ghosts in each of the rooms, it would be a better and clearer story.
Instead, we have a different character staying in every room, and then those characters start telling the ghost's stories, and it's hard to catch who is actually talking since we don't actually know any of the characters in the first place.
Irkçı, sexist ve kötü fikirler barındıran bir kitap,puan verecektim ama kitabın başları gerçekten güzeldi, Virginia Woolf'un Charles Dickens tan neden haz etmediğini şimdi anlıyorum, Köpeğinin adını Türk koyması, barbar olarak betimlemesi, ve ikinci kısımı kaplayan saçma harem bölümleri kitabı mafetmiş, Halbuki çok güzel başlamış bir kitaptı, Ayrıca feminizm e " zavallı erkekler zaten maaşı siz kadınlar için harcıyor, Sizi kısıtlıyor gibi gözükse de onlar size baskı yapmıyor aslında : " şeklinde zavallı bir bakış açısı var, ki Dickens'ın karısınıtane çocuk yaptıktan sonra "şişman ve çirkin" diyerek kendine genç bir metres bulduğunu hatırlatmak isterim dickens öldükten sonra metres "yaşlı adamın bana dokunması iğrençti" diyor.
Kısacası Dickens' a karşı çok doluyum, Not so 'classic' Charles Dickens

Sad to say, this was my first experience with reading Dickens, Might have been better to have read one of his more famous tales as he has, to this day, quite the reputation of being a great writer of the Victorian Era.

This novella, compiled by him and edited by him, includes stories from other authors as well as himself, Some being short , some being a bit longer, some ghostly, and others not ghostly at all, But I still found this book very interesting and reading it gave me a chance to obtain a feel for the writing style of Dickens,
I will definitely experience this author again, I would recommend, if you are just getting started with Charles Dickens, that you do, as I did not, read one of his more proliferus writings that made him one of the 'literary geniuses' of his era.
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