"Nurse's Stories" (1860)

This piece by Charles Dickens has appeared under different names ("Captain Murderer," "Captain Murderer and the Devil's Bargain"). I found it in an anthology of stories and assumed that's what it was, a story—a rambling and strangely put together one. But it's actually closer to an essay or memoir, with Dickens (or the narrator) recalling in daylight the horrific stories a nurse used to tell him at bedtime. It appeared originally in The Uncommercial Traveller, a collection of pieces with a little theme of travel lightly thrown over to unite them. The first effect of "Nurse's Stories" is that it feels like someone crazy talking to themselves. There are elements that make the stories feel like fairy tales, unusually gruesome ones. Dickens—or his childhood nurse originally—is intent on getting under our skin, effectively doubling the impact with two stories related only by their intensity. The first is about Captain Murderer, a serial cannibal who marries and eats his brides ritualistically, three times: "he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones." The repetition along with the extraordinary scene described are part of what remind me of fairy tales. Captain Murderer comes to a bad end eventually and then it's off to a completely different story, this one about a family of shipbuilders named Chips. Each generation sells their soul to the devil for a specific list of products that are apparently irresistible to them: an iron pot, a bushel of tenpenny nails, a half-ton of copper (which they seem to be just toting around), and a rat that can speak. They're not as interested in the rat generally, but it comes with the deal. That story then goes off on a strange tangent about rats. This whole piece takes some getting used to—well, full disclosure, Dickens always takes some getting used to for me—but I like the rambling style here and when the narrator decides to be vivid he is quite vivid. It's obviously intended to scare with one overwhelming jolt after the next—that kind of horror, rushing you along, never letting you get your bearings. It's more effective than a lot of horror literature its age. In its antiquated way it's squarely in the mindfuck vein, which I can respect. I don't typically think of Dickens as a horror writer, but of course even the beloved A Christmas Carol is full of ghosts and creeps and let's not forget Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I've been impressed with the other forays I've seen by Dickens into the genre too.

Read story online.

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860)

One of the best book titles ever, first. As a slave narrative, it's in the mode of the adventure story, an escape tale almost exclusively. It's almost fun because the plan of William and Ellen Craft is so clever and yet full of deadly risk. It offers the usual view of human beings as property that was so common then and seems so grotesque now. The pervasive acceptance of that in these narratives remains one of their most disturbing elements. But there's less of that here. The plan is that Ellen will pose as a man and William's master, as the two of them travel together. Ellen is a "quadroon" (their word) and can pass for white. She cannot read or write, neither of them can, so they make her appear to have an injured right hand, and she asks others to sign and fill things out for her. Everybody uses the N-word and abolitionists are reviled. Ellen is privy to some unguarded conversations about the slavery question, which was then becoming more and more central in American life. The close calls here are suspenseful, often involving the necessity to show papers for William, which of course they don't have. At one point someone is suspicious because Ellen won't sign something. At another point someone gives her a business card and she makes a decision not to look at it because she might give herself away if it is upside down and she doesn't turn it right. William is the author and he occasionally indulges an impulse to be smug about the people they fool. But I'll give him that—what they did was brave. Going with the idea that many of these slave narratives were shaped toward simple points, the emphasis here is on their intelligence and resourcefulness. They could plan the initial getaway with lots of time to gather information and think it through. But once they were traveling north—a thousand miles is reasonably literal—they had to make their story work with whatever they encountered. And they did. It's a remarkable story. Sad then that they finally realized they still weren't safe in the North, as fugitive slaves, perhaps not even in Canada, and eventually settled in London.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)