“Of all the vulgar superstitions of the half educated, none dies harder than the absurd delusion that there is no such thing as ghosts. All the experts, whether spiritual, poetical, or scientific, and all the others, non-experts, who have bestowed any serious attention upon the subject, know that they do exist.”
-- William T. Stead (1897), journalist
I came across Peter G. Biedler’s third edition of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”, which contains some critical and supplementary material, so I decided to dive into this pleasant literary lake for a while. It’s a fun little ghost story and well worth the read. As this quotation from Mr. Stead shows, in the late nineteenth-century, ghosts were taken more seriously than they perhaps are now.
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Eclipses in old days used to drive whole nations half mad with fright. To this day the black disc of the moon no sooner begins to eat into the shining surface of the sun than millions of savage men feel “creepy,” and begin to tremble at the thought at the approaching end of the world. But in civilised lands even the most ignorant regard an eclipse with imperturbable composure. Eclipses are scientific phenomena observed and understood. It is our object to reduce ghosts to the same level, or rather to establish the claim of ghosts to be regarded as belonging as much to the order of Nature as the eclipse.
-- William T. Stead
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