"At Chrighton Abbey" (1871)

This long story by the Victorian author Mary Elizabeth Braddon may be a bit of a dud in the payoff, but it's so much fun getting there I'm inclined to overlook the fizzle. Another story I know by her, "Good Lady Ducayne," a vampire story from much later in Braddon's career, has much the same strengths and weaknesses. There's a very strong pull to her tales from the start—she starts in laying on the class details in order to fix her characters in place. I suspect in general that she was a little disapproving of the supernatural. Both stories feature important characters who are notable skeptics, proved right in the vampire story. Here, not so much—our feet-on-the-ground hero, everyone's favorite beloved poor cousin Sarah, has a vision that must be taken as otherworldly (even as she resists it as such herself). So score one for the supernatural—a family curse that will not be denied—but I still get the sense Braddon disapproves. This is mostly a splendid Victorian Christmas story. The extended family gathers at the family estate, Chrighton Abbey, for all of the month of December and into the new year, which is how Christmas should be done. It's my favorite part of the story as long as the ghost bits are going to go bust. It's social manners with a keen eye. Cousin Sarah is dropping in for the first time in 12 years and everyone is so happy to see her. A marriage is in the offing between the Chrighton heir Edward and a proud young woman. As eldest son and chief heir, Edward is the target of the family curse, which is executed in the last third of the story. Sarah's vision foretells it too. There's another ghost story of about this vintage, John Berwick Harwood's anonymously published 1861 "Horror: A True Tale," in which the ghost goes corporeal and is seen actually wrestling in bed with the poor cousin hero—whoa! No such bolts of inspiration here (for that, see also F. Marion Crawford's 1885 "The Upper Berth"). There's not even really a ghost. Just a family curse that always seems to bear out. Even so, I like the style of the storytelling here, laying out the history of a great family and its estate and holdings and all the incidentals of how they live, for better or worse, with great problems and small. It's a terrific story of the holiday season, like the movie Fanny and Alexander, which also happens to be weak in the scary ghost story department. Apparently some of these people didn't get the memo from Andy Williams.

Read story online.
Listen to story online.