ix.

3 For further discussion of Gaskell’s interest in ghosts and ghost stories, see her letter to Mary Howitt, 18 August 1838, Letters, no. 12, p. 32, which describes a story she heard about the ghost of Lord Willoughby said to be still haunting his house in search of some law papers. Mary Howitt describes the telling of ‘ghost stories and capital tales’ when Gaskell came to visit on Christmas Day 1850 (An Autobiography, ed. Margaret Howitt, 2 vols. (London: Wm. Isbister, 1889), vol. 2, p. 65). Lady Ritchie also reminisces about a friend of hers who recalled with great delight Gaskell entertaining a party in 1864 with stories of ‘Scotch ghosts, historical ghosts, spirited ghosts with faded uniforms and nice old powdered queues’ (Lady [Anne Thackeray] Ritchie, Blackstick Papers (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1908), p. 213). Finally, see also Gaskell’s anecdote about her suggestion that she tell ‘some dismal ghost story’ to Charlotte Brontë ‘Just before bed-time. [Brontë] shrank from hearing it, and confessed that she was superstitious’ (Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), p. 406). Interestingly, however, Gaskell also appears to have had some reservations about the appropriate audience for her ghost stories; in a letter to an unknown correspondent dated 27 July [1855], she describes the publication of a collection of her stories, but she fears that ‘one or two of the [Household Words] stories might not so well do for young people. One is an unexplained ghost story for instance’ (Letters, no. 260, p. 365). The ‘unexplained story’ she refers to is probably ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, and it may be the depiction of a diabolically seductive phantom-child in the story she is particularly concerned about.

4 [Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘Clopton Hall’, in William Howitt, Visits to Remarkable Places: Old Halls, Battle Fields, and Scenes of Striking Passages in English History and Poetry (London: Longman, Orme, Browne, Green, & Longmans, 1840), pp. 135–9.

5 Cotton Mather Mills, Esq., ‘Life in Manchester. Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress, 1 (June 1847), pp. 310–13, 334–6, 345–7; Cotton Mather Mills, Esq., ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress, 2 (September 1847), pp. 149–52; Cotton Mather Mills, Esq., ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’, Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress, 3 (January 1848), pp. 4–7. See also Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, p. 172, for further discussion of the implications of Gaskell’s pseudonym.

6 Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 259.

7 Letters, no. 68, p. 106.