This is an extract of my first blog written for Wordsworth Editions. I have added a link to their site if you would like to read the full article. The above image is the statue of Roger Conant, first citizen of Salem, which stands outside the Salem Witch Museum in Massachusetts, which I was fortunate enough to visit back in 2018.

The name Elizabeth Gaskell probably conjures up associations with her more well known social realist novels such as Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1855) and Cranford (1853).  Yet, during much of her writing career she remained fascinated with the supernatural and produced numerous ghost stories.  In her biographical work The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) Gaskell relays an anecdote of her telling a ghost story to Charlotte Bronte shortly before bedtime.  Bronte apparently ‘shrank from hearing it, and confessed that she was superstitious’. Many of Gaskell’s ghost stories were originally published in the popular journal Household Words, edited by none other than Charles Dickens. Often, her stories would appear in special editions produced for Christmas, because, as we all know, the festive season is the season for ghosts. A comprehensive selection of these tales have been gathered together in Tales of Mystery and the Macabre as part of the Wordsworth Mystery and Supernatural series, featuring an introduction by David Stuart Davies.

I should point out that Gaskell’s gothic stories are not merely chilling ghostly tales lacking in the kind of political and social issues addressed in her novels. If anything, the gothic form gave Gaskell greater freedom to engage with concerns which were dear to her heart, such as social and political injustice particularly as it related to women’s lives.  Many of her gothic tales take as their point of inspiration actual or legendary events, two such examples being her short story ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ and her novella ‘Lois the Witch’. Yet these supposed similarities are a little misleading as when you delve deeper into her gothic tales it becomes apparent her ghost stories employed a variety of narrative styles and subject matter. For example, the inspiration for ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ originates from a Haworth legend of a woman who was seduced by her brother-in-law and became pregnant.  She was locked up by her father and shunned by her sisters and the ghosts of the woman and her daughter were said to have haunted the local area.

Other stories in the collection are similarly varied in nature. For example, ‘Disappearances’ is more of a series of anecdotes rather than a story with a single narrative focus, and as the title suggests, relays accounts of various people who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. In contrast, ‘The Poor Clare’ whilst also fictionalizing local legends and actual events, adopts a stronger supernatural stance, whereas ‘The Squire’s Story’ is much more satirical in style.

‘Lois the Witch’ casts back to New England, America in the 1690s and takes as its inspiration the events of the Salem Witch Trials. The American setting may seem unusual, but Gaskell wrote the story with an American audience in mind.  However, it was initially serialized in All the Year Round in October 1859, an appropriate offering for Halloween.  The Nineteenth Century British reader would probably have had some familiarity with the Salem Witch Trials, as a number of paintings were produced during the Century detailing various scenes from the trials. Gaskell’s research on the historical context surrounding the Salem Witch Trials was largely based on the work of Unitarian Boston minister Charles Upham’s Lectures on Witchcraft, Comprising a History of the Delusions of Salem, in 1692 published in 1830.

The basic events of the Salem Witch Trials are that in 1692, 19 people were convicted of witchcraft and taken to Gallows Hill, which was a barren slope near Salem Village, where they were hanged.  Another man who was over 80 years old was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Many languished in jail for months on end without trials.  Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended. There was nothing particularly new or unusual about accusations of witchcraft. What was significant was the rapidity with which the charges spread and the fact that all claims and accusations of witchcraft were believed.  More people were executed in the Salem Witch Trials than had previously been executed in the history of New England.

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