THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories Read online

  THE PHANTOM COACH

  Collected Ghost Stories

  Amelia B. Edwards

  THE PHANTOM COACH

  ISBN: 9781553102007 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553102014 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  for Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2012

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 1999

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2012

  Introduction © Richard Dalby

  Cover artwork © Paul Lowe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Richard Dalby

  My Brother’s Ghost Story

  The Eleventh of March

  Number Three

  The Discovery of the Treasure Isles

  The Phantom Coach

  The Recollections of Professor Henneberg

  An Engineer’s Story

  The Four-fifteen Express

  The Story of Salome

  A Service of Danger

  The New Pass

  In the Confessional

  Sister Johanna’s Story

  A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest

  Monsieur Maurice

  Was It an Illusion?

  Appendixes

  Four Stories

  A Legend of Boisguilbert

  My Home Life

  Sources

  THE PHANTOM COACH

  Introduction

  Did you ever feel a creeping,

  That awoke you from your sleeping,

  That made your pulses flutter and bristled all your hair;

  While a horrid stealthy crawling

  Prevented you from calling,

  And something seemed to tell you that a ghost was coming there?

  From Amelia B. Edward’s

  ‘The Cross of St Nicholas—a legend of Brighton’, 1880

  AMELIA B. EDWARDS, Mary E. Braddon, Charlotte Riddell, and Rhoda Broughton have always been held in high regard as the four greatest women writers of ghost stories during the mid-Victorian era. Whereas Riddell and Broughton had most of their best ‘weird’ and ‘twilight’ stories collected into single volumes during their lifetimes, the supernatural tales of Edwards and Braddon were never gathered into genre collections; they were only spread loosely among other genres, mainly romance and crime, normally in three-decker format, and later in cheaper reprints. Most of the short stories of Amelia B. Edwards are contained in two bumper collections, Miss Carew (1865, 3 vols.) and Monsieur Maurice (1873, 3 vols.), now both extremely rare in any edition. The present volume represents the first-ever complete collection of all of Edwards’s supernatural tales within one volume.

  Amelia B. Edwards was one of the most remarkable women of the Victorian age. Besides being a popular novelist, poet, journalist, historian, and writer of ghost stories, she was also one of the greatest travellers of the nineteenth century, and an archaeologist of world renown. Acclaimed as the ‘Queen of Egyptologists’, she probably did more than any other person to save the priceless antiquities and heritage of ancient Egypt from destruction.

  She was born Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards* in London on 7 June 1831, the daughter of a banker who had previously served under Wellington in the Peninsular War. Like most girls of her era, she was educated at home by her mother (with additional help from tutors), and at an early age she showed a great flair for drawing, writing, and music.

  Amelia was always a great reader, favourite writers being Harrison Ainsworth, Walter Scott, and the Brontës, though in later life she much preferred Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray. In her essay ‘The Art of the Novelist’ (Contemporary Review, August 1894), she praised these three writers as superior to all others with their realistic depiction of human nature.

  She was a published poet by the age of seven, when her poem ‘The Knights of Old’ was printed in a penny weekly; she sold her first story, ‘The Secret of a Clock’, five years later. A manuscript she sent to George Cruikshank for his Omnibus magazine had such mature and impressive drawings on the reverse of the story that he immediately visited the author, and was amazed to find these caricatures were really the work of a fourteen-year-old girl. Cruikshank offered to take Amelia as an apprentice but her parents refused, believing oil paints could prove disastrous to her ‘delicate’ health. Many of her later stories concerned (or were narrated by) artists. In the 1870s she was a close friend of Cruikshank’s greatest successor in satirical art, Gustave Doré (as recorded in Joanna Richardson’s biography of the artist).

  Amelia learnt to play the guitar and piano, but a promising career as a singer was cut short due to regular troublesome colds and sore throats. (‘The Autobiography of Alice Hoffmann’, the longest story in Miss Carew, features a heroine who suddenly loses her voice while on the verge of a brilliant singing career.) At the age of nineteen, she became the organist of St Michael’s Chapel in Wood Green, where her cousin Matilda Betham-Edwards fondly recalled (in Mid-Victorian Memoirs, 1919) her extempore variations on a theme by Bach which held the listeners enthralled at the end of every service.

  Edwards abandoned her musical career a year later, after a visit to Paris with her cousin inspired a story (involving a mysterious disappearance) which was published in Chambers’s Journal in 1853. The payment for this story determined her resolve to be a full-time writer.

  In the 1850s she became a journalist—then a rare profession for a woman—working on the staff of the Saturday Review and the Morning Review, for which she wrote mainly music, art, and literary criticism, as well as leading articles. Her first novel, My Brother’s Wife, was published in 1855, and several more followed in quick succession, notably The Young Marquis (1857), a beautiful volume containing many fine illustrations by Birket Foster and Edmund Evans.

  Following her frequent visits to France and the Low Countries, it was perhaps inevitable that Edwards should turn to travel writing. Her first work in this genre was Sights and Sounds, a children’s picture book describing a holiday tour through northern Belgium. This was published in 1862 by Emily Victoria at the Victoria Press, a unique enterprise, with all the employees being women. The book featured a number of Amelia’s own illustrations.

  During the 1860s Amelia Edwards was a frequent contributor to All the Year Round, and became a member of the select band—alongside Mrs Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and Hesba Stretton—who provided ghost stories for Charles Dickens’s Christmas Numbers. Her four best-known ghost stories are ‘My Brother’s Ghost Story’ (1860), ‘Number Three’ (1863; aka ‘How the Third-Floor Knew the Potteries’), ‘The Phantom Coach’ (originally published under the title ‘Another Past Lodger Relates His Own Ghost Story’ as part of ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy’, which appeared in the 1864 Christmas Number of All the Year Round), and ‘The Engineer’ (1866; aka ‘The
Engineer’s Story’). All these were especially admired by Montague Summers, who included them in his Supernatural Omnibus (1931). Among her other Christmas stories for All the Year Round were ‘A Terrible Company’ (1861) and ‘The Professor’s Story’ (1862).

  It seems likely that she originally wrote one of her best ghost stories, ‘The Four-fifteen Express’, specifically for Dickens’s Mugby Junction special railway Christmas number in December 1866, alongside his own immortal classic ‘The Signal-Man’. However, as ‘The Four-fifteen Express’ far exceeded the required length, Dickens probably insisted on too many cuts or alterations which Amelia found unacceptable, and the story quickly went instead into the rival Routledge’s Christmas Annual that same month. After 1866, Amelia sent no more stories to Dickens (dealing mainly with Routledge and Tinsley’s Magazines instead), but was later wooed back to All the Year Round by his son and editorial successor Charles Dickens Junior with ‘In the Confessional’ (1871) and ‘Sister Johanna’s Story’ (1872).

  The majority of her ghost stories were originally published anonymously, and even Montague Summers could not identify the author of ‘The Story of Salome’ which he reprinted in The Grimoire and other supernatural stories (1936). Summers loved the ‘exquisite quality’ of this tale: ‘Here the author creates atmosphere by the deftest of touches, with soft tender strokes that are almost imperceptible in the lightness of their fall . . . The picture is drawn with a perfect accomplishment.’

  While retaining her initial anonymity, Amelia preferred to use male narrators in the great majority of her ghost stories (with only two exceptions), and frequently endorsed male camaraderie in stories such as ‘A Service of Danger’ and ‘An Engineer’s Story’. E.F. Bleiler has justifiably commented (in Five Victorian Ghost Novels, Dover 1971, which included ‘Monsieur Maurice’) on the wonderful atmosphere of Amelia’s stories which ‘usually reflect her delight in strange climes and landscapes, alien cultural personalities and modes of life. No other Victorian author of ghost stories surpassed her in conveying in brief form the colour and romantic atmosphere of the mountains of Italy, the ancient monasteries of Central Europe, or the hidden secrets of the forests of Germany.’

  ‘The Phantom Coach’ (sometimes reprinted under the title ‘The North Mail’) is one of the most anthologised and familiar of all Victorian ghost stories, and the theme of this tale was regularly copied by many later writers. ‘My Brother’s Ghost Story’ and the bulk of her later tales from 1867 to 1873 were set on the Continent, chiefly in Germany, Italy, and France, which she toured annually.

  Her earliest ghost stories, such as ‘The Eleventh of March’ (again with a Continental setting), seem rather antiquated and Gothic, but she quickly ‘modernised’ her ideas and style in tales like ‘Number Three’ and ‘The Discovery of the Treasure Isles’ (1864). This latter tale is a wonderfully bizarre yarn, ranking as the first ‘Bermuda Triangle’ story. It begins with an uncanny encounter with a ghost ship, and mixes in elements of Edgar Allan Poe, the Flying Dutchman, and Rip Van Winkle. The addition of a map showing the mythical Treasure Isles adds verisimilitude.

  Amelia Edwards also experimented successfully with a number of other genres, notably crime and murder mysteries, all now completely forgotten, but well worth reviving in a separate collection. Among her best ‘whodunnits’ are the novella ‘All Saint’s’ Eve’, and the story ‘The Tragedy in the Palazzo Bardello’. The bulk of these stories were gathered together in Miss Carew and Monsieur Maurice, both published by Hurst & Blackett. The latter collection was divided into two separately titled books by Tauchnitz: Monsieur Maurice (1873) and A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest (1874).

  Miss Carew was misleadingly advertised by Hurst & Blackett as ‘a New Novel’, whereas the title story was merely a framework device built around nineteen independent short stories, of which only six are supernatural (all are included in the present volume). Monsieur Maurice and other tales was reviewed succinctly in The Athenaeum (30 August 1873): ‘To write short stories is more difficult than to write novels of the ordinary length, and Miss Edwards is one of our best writers of novelettes. The tales in this volume are as good as those in Miss Carew, which is high praise.’ The novella title-story was previously unpublished, and was accompanied by thirteen other tales, including seven ghost stories—all reprinted from magazines and Christmas annuals.

  The Times review praised the author’s subtle restraint and ‘the artistic manner in which Miss Edwards manages a whole troop of ghosts’ in Monsieur Maurice. ‘Although each tale contains a mysterious and unsubstantial visitor, it is kept in its proper place throughout, and made subordinate to the real purpose and interest of the stories.’

  In 1864 Amelia left London and moved to The Larches, a comfortable house in Westbury-on-Trym, near Bristol, which she shared with her lifelong friend Ellen Braysher. The house remained her base for the rest of her life. In this peaceful spot, she was able to devote the next ten years to the writing of a series of longer novels, all of which were initially serialised in the leading magazines of the period.

  The first of these books was Barbara’s History (1864; 3 vols.), which dealt with the experiences of a young English girl at a college in Germany. The book was heavily influenced by David Copperfield and, like that novel, was a great success with the public, establishing Amelia Edwards as a leading popular author. It was followed by Half a Million of Money (1866; 3 vols.), Debenham’s Vow (1869; 3 vols.), and In the Days of My Youth (1872; 3 vols.). All these novels are still extremely readable and timeless—like the novels of Anthony Trollope—with the female characters amongst the most lively and vividly drawn in Victorian literature. A typical comment at the time was made by the Athenaeum reviewer: ‘It’s a joy to be among them.’

  Travel and exploration began to dominate Amelia’s life in 1872, when she made an extensive tour of the Dolomite mountains in the Southern Tyrol, which were then largely unexplored. With a woman companion (named ‘L’, i.e., Lucy Renshawe; the travelling companions in stories like ‘The New Pass’ and ‘The Story of Salome’ are male equivalents of Amelia Edwards and Lucy Renshawe (or Ellen Braysher) on their prolonged Continental tours), she visited a number of obscure villages by ways that were impassable except by foot or mule. She described this trek in Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1873), which she humorously subtitled ‘A Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites’. Stylish and witty, and containing many humorous anecdotes, this book proved to be even more popular than her novels, and has since been reprinted many times—most recently by Virago as part of their Travellers series (which reproduced the folding map and all of the original illustrations).

  Towards the end of 1873, Amelia fled to Egypt in order to escape the constant rain and freezing winter weather in Europe. She knew very little about the country, but fell instantly in love with it on her arrival in Cairo. Armed with a measuring tape and sketchbooks, she sailed by native dahabiyah down the Nile as far as the second cataract, keeping a detailed diary and record of all the monuments, graves, and temples which she visited on the way, and even discovering one hitherto unknown buried chapel.

  She spent nearly two months at Abu Simbel, exploring and excavating the Temple of Rameses II, and was so outraged by the plaster ‘repairs’ on the sculptures at the pharaoh’s tomb that she ordered all the sailors on her dahabiyah to brew vast quantities of strong coffee to stain the plasterwork the same colour as the original stone. As she travelled, she gathered a considerable collection of antiquities, learning how to decipher the many hieroglyphics to be found on them. At the end of her mammoth journey, Amelia crossed into Palestine and travelled through Lebanon and Syria to Constantinople, visiting Damascus and Baalbec on the way.

  It took her two years to write up her account of this remarkable trip. A Thousand Miles Up The Nile was published late in 1876 (dated ‘1877’) in a massive 732-page quarto volume, selling at two guineas, bound in richly decorated cloth, and containing folding maps, seventeen wood-engraved plates, and sixty-t
wo vignettes, as well as a number of plans and facsimile inscriptions. This superbly written and scholarly book was immediately recognised as the definitive study of Egypt and its ancient civilisation, and the author’s masterpiece. It was greatly admired by all the leading archaeologists of the day, and remained a key text for all those involved in the field up until the Second World War, from Flinders Petrie to Howard Carter.

  By this time Amelia Edwards was generally regarded and esteemed as the greatest woman antiquary and archaeologist of her generation. Constantly horrified by the wanton desecration and destruction of priceless antiquities, she soon came to the conclusion that the only way to preserve these works of art was proper scientific excavation. After endless appeals and letters to the press, she succeeded (in 1882) in setting up the Egypt Exploration Fund; and from 1883 onwards the society sent at least one archaeological expedition to Egypt every year. ‘As it was her contagious enthusiasm that originally brought the members together,’ wrote one friend, ‘so it was her genius for organisation that smoothed over difficulties and ensured success. With her own hand she wrote innumerable letters, acknowledged the receipt of subscriptions, and labelled the objects presented to museums.’

  This and other high-profile activities, along with her strenuous support for women’s causes (she was vice-president of the Society for Promoting Women’s Suffrage), made her a role model for all independent-minded females. In a recent dramatised television documentary about her career, she was played to perfection by Margaret Tyzack.