Peter Ackroyd | Dickens | Two Skeletons in a Cupboard (1990)

[Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevens, 1990 p358f] “…. It was that dark and melodramatic aspect of his personality which also made him a wonderful teller of ghost stories. His closest friend, Forster, noticed as much and commented that “such as his interest generally in things supernatural, that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism.” Sometimes this interest in the supernatural went no further than a kind of morbid jokiness; there was one reported occasion when he placed two skeletons in a cupboard, locked it, and then asked a local carpenter to force open the door, with predictable results.

But there were also times when he seems genuinely to have felt the presence of the uncanny; on two occasions he passed in the shadow of the Burlington Hotel, and on both occasions, so he said, he was invaded by a feeling of numbness and of cold. Yet these responses are perhaps only to be expected in a novelist who delighted in creating mysteries within his fiction, who used all the panoply of Gothic effects when he considered them to be appropriate and who, in a much more general sense, is filled with a morbid poetry of fantasy and death. 

Alexander Blok, the Russian poet, said that “… in reading Dickens I have felt horror, the equal of which Poe himself does not inspire”, and there is no doubt that there was within Dickens consciousness a private world built upon nightmares and fantasies and anxieties which he chose not to reveal to anyone; except, of course, to the readers of his fiction. ….”

 

Frances Donaldson | Evelyn Waugh | The Edifice

[Frances Donaldson, Evelyn Waugh Portrait of a Country Neighbour, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1967]

“…. When we first knew him [Mr Waugh] he strove against this paralysing boredom in odd ways. He went, as I have said, for walks over very long distances. Twice a week he spent the afternoon in the cinema in Dursley, irrespective, I think, of the film that was showing, once for each change of programme. He entertained himself with grandiose projects in his garden. He built what became known as The Edifice – a semi-circular stone wall about ten feet in height, surmounted with battlements and with a paved area beneath it. When this was finished he advertised for human skulls to adorn the battlements. He received a surprising number of replies, which I doubt he had expected, and he had to refuse most of the offerings. The Edifice was not a great success. Many people thought it hideous and [Mr Waugh] himself was not satisfied with it although he got pleasure from the building. A path in the garden was made by inverting and planting empty champagne bottles, ….” [p23]