The Raven Post

Biography

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7, 1811, and died June 9, 1870. He was a writer, author, and critic and is now one of the best-known figures in English literature. His most famous works include Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and many more.

Dickens was born in southeast England and was the second of eight children. When he was still quite young, his family moved to Kent, where he reportedly enjoyed an idyllic—if overly independent—childhood. When Dickens was just twelve years old, his father was imprisoned for debt, and in order to help support his family, the young boy began working ten-hour days in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. This experience no doubt influenced the author’s later depictions of factory life, child labor, and working-class squalor in many of his works, and indeed, socio-economic strife and labor reform are two of his bibliography’s most prominent themes.

Though Dickens entertained notions of becoming a stage performer, his literary career began before he could pursue this goal in earnest. His first published story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” appeared in Monthly Magazine in 1833. He then dabbled in political journalism and published his first collection, “Sketches by Boz,” in 1836. That same year, he began publishing what would become his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in monthly installments. He published countless novels and short stories over the course of his life but died following a stroke in 1870.

Despite much of Dickens’s bibliography centering on his characters’ many personal dramas and the division of social classes in Victorian England, several of his works indulge in a more fantastical sensibility. In particular, his 1848 novella The Haunted Man—a sequel of sorts to one of his most enduring works (and another ghost-filled tale), A Christmas Carol—makes use of eerie specters and mysterious doppelgängers to emphasize themes typical of his oeuvre, such as poverty, social inequity, and greed.

Below is a selection of Dickens’s most notable supernatural tales. Read at your own discretion—and please, enjoy.

Novellas & Short Stories by Charles Dickens

The Haunted Man (1848)
Captain Murder (1850)
To Be Read at Dusk (1852)
Hunted Down (1859)
The Haunted House (1859)
The Signal-Man (1866)