Throughout his illustrious writing career, Charles Dickens often turned his hand to fashioning short pieces of ghostly fiction. Even in his first successful work, Pickwick Papers, you will find five ghost stories, all of which are included in this collection. Dickens began the tradition of the "ghost story at Christmas" and many of his tales in this genre are presented here including the brilliant novella, "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain," which deserves to be as well known as A Christmas Carol. While all his supernatural tales aim to chill the spine, they are not without the usual traits of Dickens' flamboyant style, his subtle wit, biting irony, humorous incidents, and moral observations. It is a mixture which makes these stories fascinating and entertaining as well as unsettling. To paraphrase the Fat Boy in Pickwick Papers: Charles Dickens "wants to make your flesh creep."
Charles Dickens' fascination with ghosts and the macabre is traced to his childhood, to the grim and ghoulish stories told him by his nursemaid, Mary Weller. Part of "Collector's Library" series, this title presents stories by Dickens' that are chilling histories of coincidence, insanity and revenge.
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth, where his father worked as a clerk. Living in London in 1824, Dickens was sent by his family to work in a blacking-warehouse, and his father was arrested and imprisoned for debt. Fortunes improved and Dickens returned to school, eventually becoming a parliamentary reporter. His first piece of fiction was published by a magazine in December 1832, and by 1836 he had begun his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. He focused his career on writing, completing fourteen highly successful novels, as well as penning journalism, shorter fiction and travel books. He died in 1870.
