Charles Dickens' journals
Household Words and
All the Year Round had Extra Christmas Numbers each year, and several of these contained stories co-authored by Dickens and staff writers who shared his social activism.
A list of the collaborations between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins is available on the Victorian Web site, and the text of the journals is available on the Dickens Journals Online site.
The Haunted House was the
All the Year Round Extra Christmas Number for 1859, and was co-authored by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell, all established novelists; Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria's favourite poet; George Augustus Sala, journalist and novelist; and Sarah Smith (writing as Hesba Stretton), a prolific author active in missionary and charitable work.
The narrator sees a house which he believes to be haunted, and invites a his sister and a party of friends to stay there to investigate. He and his friends tell seven stories about their spooky experiences, including love in a Seraglio, tragedy on a Yorkshire farm, and horror in a ship on the Spanish Main.
'The Ghost in the Garden Room' was published as 'The Crooked Branch' in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1860 collection of short stories
Right at Last, and Other Tales. 'The Ghost in the Cupboard Room' appeared as "Blow up with the Brig!" in Wilkie Collins' 1875 collection
Miss or Mrs? and Other Stories in Outline.
The source was the plain text files on the Dickens Journals Online site, checked against the images of the original pages. I have silently corrected typos and inconsistencies, italicised the names of ships, set off a letter in blockquote, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.
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