‘Let him lie where he is’: on one motif in British ghost stories

The British ghost story was a genre extraordinarily sensitive to the era’s climate and intellectual concerns, though sometimes it could be expressed quite paradoxically. In the peculiar branch of the genre sometimes defined as ‘antiquarian Gothic’, there are cases when the characters leave the discovered artefacts where they have found them or even destroy them, which seems unusual for a period when both specialists and amateurs were keenly interested in history and many significant museums were founded and opened for public. The matter is that, according to the rules of the genre, such artefacts function as portals into the past, the return of which is regarded as unwanted and plainly dangerous. In some cases, the artefact is actually a dead body (a mummy or a skeleton), and here the logic of folk narrative, widely used by late Gothic authors, comes into play: the body loses its ‘archaeological’ meaning and is regarded as the undead, someone who was not properly buried and is therefore now dangerous for the living. In such a case, the remains should be left alone or even destroyed (as, for example, was a common practice with vampires both in folklore and in Gothic fiction). Placing the body in a glass case in a museum can be interpreted as a peculiar version of improper afterlife, a travesty of a burial: the public space of a museum instead of the undisturbed grave. Such situations should by no means be read as a direct expression of the authors’ views (among ghost story writers were many professional historians or antiquarians), this is just a symbolic, sometimes comic, reflection of the ideas and intellectual concerns of the era. Thus, antiquarian Gothic is helpful for analyzing the history of ideas and can provide insights into the attitudes towards the past, the unusual and the unintelligible in the late Victorian and Edwardian era.