Washington Irving, in his book of Christmas traditions, Old Christmas, also remembered the telling of ghost stories – in his case, about a ghostly Crusading knight – at Christmas. Even Dickens, advocating so influentially for the more wholesome Christmas, did so through a ghost story in A Christmas Carol. Like the folklorists spinning beguiling fantasies of ancient pagan rituals, Jerome, Borlase, Dickens and the Jameses (M.R. and Henry) were tapping into the old need for darkness within the new, Victorian, family Christmas, when people were meant to be getting cosy round the tree or roasting
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