Modern Ghosts, 1890-style

In 1890 Harper & Brothers of New York published a collection of seven stories entitled Modern Ghosts.  It includes an introduction by George William Curtis, and it was later reissued as volume 15 in the series of “The Continental Classics”—itself a very confusing series bibliographically. The copyright dates in the Continental Classics series range from around 1887 through (at least) 1915, but just when the series itself began to be packaged as such I have not been able to determine.  Under the copyright notice of 1890 in Modern Ghosts, there is a printing code of “M—R” in all the copies I have seen.  Translating this code into month and year, per Harper & Brothers usual practice, gives December 1917, so it is possible that the Continental Classics edition of Modern Ghosts came out at that time. Certainly the standard red cloth binding on it has a feel of the 1910s and not of the 1890s—the original 1890 edition of Modern  Ghosts was in elegant blue cloth with silver stamping.

The 1890 cover

But what about the contents?  It’s a pretty good collection, with a few classics by Maupassant (“The Horla “ and “On the River”—both translated from the French by Jonathan Sturges), as well as Gustavo Adolfo Becquer’s “Maese Pérez, the Organist” (translated from the Spanish by Rollo Ogden).  The other four tales are by lesser-known names, “Siesta” by Alexander L. Kielland (translated from the German by Charles Flint McClumpha); “The Tall Woman” by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (translated from the Spanish by Rollo Ogden); “Fioraccio” by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani (translated from the Italian by Mary A. Craig); and “The Silent Woman” by Leopold Kompert (translated form the German by Charles Flint McClumpha). “The Horla” is probably the only true classic, and it is the best story in the book.  But most of the others have some good moments, even if, as in a few, the narration meanders and takes its time before coming to what might be the supernatural. The translators names are given only in the table of contents, and little is otherwise said about the authors.

George William Curtis (1824-1892) was well-known in his day, a modern-thinking figure (a vocal abolitionist and supporter of women’s suffrage) who must have seemed an apt choice to introduce a book of non-traditional ghost stories.  Curtis’s introduction is mostly about the attraction of eerie stories, but he does come around at the end to mention some of the contents of the volume he is introducing:  “It is the most modern and contemporary contribution to the literature of ghosts, selected from authors in various parts of Europe—Norway, France, Spain, Austria, Italy—all of them masters in their way, and that sympathetic and delicate lightness of touch which is indispensable to the happiest treatment of such themes” (xii-xiv).  He concludes:

These little tales, like instant photographs, bring us nearer to the life of other lands, and apprise us that, in an unexpected sense, we are all of one blood—a blood which is chilled by an influence that we cannot comprehend, and at a contact of which we are conscious by an apprehension beyond that of the senses.

The book Modern Ghosts had one fan in Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. In the column of “Weird Story Reprints” which Wright ran in the magazine from July 1925 through January 1940, Wright reprinted (between 1926 and 1934) six of the seven stories found in this book. The only story Wright didn’t reprint is the final one, “The Silent Woman” by Leopold Kompert, which doesn’t really qualify as either a ghost or a supernatural story, but is rather one touching on Jewish legendry. So one can see why Wright did not select it for reprinting, though I note that it was reprinted in the anonymously-edited Best Ghost Stories (1919), published by Boni & Liveright in their nascent Modern Library series (later to be taken over by Random House). (The introduction by Arthur B. Reeve credits the selections to J[oseph] L[ewis] French,  who may have wished to remain anonymous to avoid direct competition with his by-lined anthology Great Ghost Stories published the previous year.)  

Modern Ghosts anticipates the work of Robert Aickman by more than half a century.