Edmund Reid

Victorian Fiction
The Last House in C-- Street
By Dinah Maria Mulock (Mrs Craik)
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Eduardo Zinna
Introduction
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, Gothic fiction, which had ruled unopposed since 1764, when
Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, started losing some of its supremacy to a humbler newcomer,
the ghost story. The world was changing, and the creatures of the night changed with it. They moved from
the dungeons of decrepit castles and the secret passages of ruined abbeys to the comfortable sitting-rooms
and manicured gardens of the emerging bourgeoisie. Their apparitions were no longer reported in three-volume
Gothic novels but in the pages of the monthly magazines. Still they came; and where they passed, they were not
forgotten.
Charles Dickens played a major role in the development of the
ghost story and its association with Christmas, both through the
stories he wrote and the stories he published in the magazines
for which he served as editor. In 1843, he subjected the miser
Ebenezer Scrooge to the ministrations of a parade of restless spirits
in A Christmas Carol. In 1851, he launched a special Christmas
supplement of his magazine Household Words and invited
writers to contribute to it. In subsequent years, he continued to
write ghost stories and to release Christmas supplements to his
magazines. When he started All the Year Round in 1859, he made
sure ghosts were not left out of its pages; he ran stories by Amelia
B Edwards, Rosa Mulholland, Charles Collins, R S Hawker and, in
particular, the early master of the ghost story, Joseph Sheridan
Le Fanu.
Many of the authors who supplied the magazines with
supernatural fare were women. Among them were Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, Charlotte Riddell, Margaret Oliphant
and Rhoda Broughton in the 1860s and 70s, later joined by Vernon
Lee, Edith Nesbit, Louisa Baldwin, Mary Cholmondeley and Violet
Hunt. Although they excelled as authors of ghost stories, women
had no special affinity with them. In many cases, educated
women who needed to support themselves and, sometimes, their
families, found in authorship lucrative opportunities which at
the time were not available to them in other fields. The work
of some of these women has already appeared in the pages of
Ripperologist; the work of others will not fail to follow.
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
Dinah Maria Mulock, afterwards known as Mrs Craik, was a
novelist, poet and essayist. The eldest daughter of Thomas Mulock, a nonconformist minister, and his wife, Dinah
Mellard, she was born on 20 April 1826 in Stoke-on-Trent. In 1839, an inheritance allowed the family to move to
London. A few years later, in 1844, Thomas Mulock, a charismatic but emotionally unstable man, deserted his
Ripperologist 147 December 2014 47