Colonial Guilt and Spectral Hauntings in Selected Short Stories of Dickens

 

Colonial Guilt and Spectral Hauntings in Selected Short Stories of Dickens

 

Partha Haldar,

Department of English,

University of Kalyani,

West Bengal, India.

 

Abstract: Charles Dickens’s engagement with the Gothic and supernatural is well-documented, but much of the critical focus remains on his major novels and novellas, such as Great Expectations, Bleak House, and A Christmas Carol. While these major works offer significant insights into Dickens's use of spectral figures and atmospheric suspense, his shorter Gothic fictions remain comparatively under-examined. This paper aims to focus on three specific short stories by Dickens: “The Trial for Murder” (1865), “The Signalman” (1866), and “The Black Veil” (1836), and attempts to analyse them through the theoretical lens of Postcolonial Gothic. Postcolonial Gothic, as defined by Judie Newman and elaborated by Alison Rudd, is “a mode employed by writers from very different locations to address...the unresolved conflict between the imperial power and the former colony (72).” Existing scholarship has extensively analysed the role of ghosts in Dickens’s fictions. David Seed sees the ghost in “The Signalman” as a symbol of growing anxiety about modern life and the dangers of industrial progress. Louise Henson views Dickens’s spirits as echoes of social guilt tied to urban neglect and public health failures. Andrew Smith, from a Marxist angle, reads the ghosts as signs of hidden economic power and invisible labour shaping everyday life. Jill L. Matus draws on trauma theory to show how Dickens’s ghosts reflect the haunting impact of past disasters that keep repeating in the present. While these studies provide valuable insights, they overlook the imperial dimension of Dickens’s hauntings. This research builds on their work by arguing that Dickens’s ghosts are not just symbols of personal, social, or economic anxieties but are also phantoms of empire and spectral manifestations of Britain’s colonial guilt, returning to haunt the imperial centre.

 

Keywords: Spectral figures, Atmospheric suspense, Unresolved conflict, Phantoms of empire, Colonial guilt

 

Chapter 1: Media and Imperial Erasure

 

“The Trial for Murder” opens with the narrator reflecting on how even the most intelligent and cultured people of Europe often hesitate to speak about strange psychological experiences. As he observes, “I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort (252).”This reluctance mirrors how imperial culture silenced alternate epistemologies like the indigenous knowledge systems, spiritual beliefs, that were often dismissed as irrational or unscientific (KambalaandMathe7-11).In Powers of Horror (1980), Julia Kristeva defines abjection as the process of “throwing off” that expels what is perceived as other or unclean from the established self. Just as a society expels what it finds threatening, colonial power expels indigenous identities and cultures from its sanitized narratives. The narrator’s insistence on “not setting up, opposing, or supporting any theory” serves as both a protective cover and a subtle admission that the very nature of these experiences defies simple explanation. The narrator’s methodical, almost clinical recounting of these accounts positions him as someone deeply aware of society’s hand in both suppressing and sanitizing these experiences. The latter part of the passage shifts focus to a notorious murder in England, drawing attention to the absence of any direct clue to the criminal’s individuality. It is noted that when the murder was discovered, no suspicion was initially cast on the man who was later brought to trial. The newspapers, too, provide no description of this figure.By refusing to give a detailed description of the murderer, the text forces the readers to reckon with the idea that imperial atrocities often remain anonymised and misrepresented in the official records. The murderer is someone whom the narrator wants to forget, just as the empire tried to bury its atrocities behind legal systems and national grand narratives: “I would bury the memory of this particular brute, if I could… (252).”The narrator emphasizes that “it is obviously impossible that any description of him can at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered (253).” This insistence serves as a critique of how news media functioned as allies of empire. British newspapers didn’t just report the empire, rather, they justified it. They shaped public perception to see colonization not as conquest or exploitation but as a benevolent moral venture. For instance, after the 1857 Indian Rebellion, British newspapers depicted sepoys as “mutineers” while ignoring the exploitation, such as land grabs, religious insults that sparked the revolt (Condos1–18).The British government and various organizations used all forms of media, including newspapers, to foster support for the Empire. This kind of propaganda often presented a romanticized or heroic view of colonial activities, focusing on exploration, adventure, and the establishment of order, rather than the harsh realities of colonial rule and its impact on local populations (Lloyd, 2007). The narrator states that he has a sudden vision where he sees the murder scene, but the corpse is absent there, and that absence gives him relief: “I was aware of a flash—rush— flow…it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of the dead body from the bed (253).” This is what Homi K. Bhabha terms the “unhomely moment (9)”, when colonial trauma erupts within the seemingly familiar space of the metropolitan centre, making the familiar terrifying. Without the corpse, the space appears "clear," uncontaminated, untouched, an imagined state before the burden of colonization, both for the colonizer and the colonized. When he calls the vision “perfectly clear,” he’s ironically showing his clouded perception constructed by a sanitized version of history. Just like newspapers erased or distorted imperial atrocities, the narrator’s mind participates in this erasure until the ghost, as a repressed truth, forces its return. Rudd writes that the Gothic often activates “a disturbing vision of the past erupting into the present,” dissolving the boundary between private memory and public trauma (73). The narrator emphasizes that his eerie experience happens “in no romantic place”; instead, it occurs in Piccadilly, the bustling heart of imperial London. When he “went to one of the windows to refresh [his] eyes”, he “saw two men going from West to East… The foremost man often looked back over his shoulder. The second man followed him… with his right hand menacingly raised (253).”The man walking in front is the murderer, and he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s being followed. Behind him is the ghost, who can be read as the colonized victim. His hand is raised in silent accusation, as if demanding justice, but crucially, “nobody heeded it.”The directional movement from “West to East” is significant here. In colonial history and literature, the movement from West to East has been symbolic of imperial expansion. The West, meaning Britain or Europe, moves towards the “Orient” as part of its so-called “civilizing mission”. The street is full of people, but only the narrator sees what is happening. Everybody else just walks past, unaware or unwilling to look. This reminds one of how colonial violence often went unseen or ignored in everyday Victorian life. The ghost’s raised hand becomes a symbol of justice that has been denied, a silent but powerful demand to be acknowledged in a world that refuses to listen or look. The first man, described as having an unusually lowering appearance, might symbolize the suppressed burden of colonial atrocities. The ghost’s face, described as “the colour of impure wax,” can be seen as a powerful symbol of the exploited colonial subject. The word “wax” carries associations of death, and “impure” suggests contamination, degradation, or loss of original vitality. The narrator mentions “Piccadilly” twice in this section because he is trying to ground himself and seeks reliability by reminding the reader that he is in a rational, ‘civilized’ place. But it connotes that even the brightest corners of the empire are not immune to the return of its buried past. In the courtroom scene, the prisoner’s immediate agitation and his urgent command to his attorney– “At all hazards, challenge that man!(257).” reveal the imperial power’s deep fear of rational scrutiny and the empire’s desperate need to silence any critical force that might disrupt its sacrosanct image. The ghost’s statement during the trial to the narrator, “I was younger then, and my face was not then drained of blood (258),” highlights the pre-colonial condition, a time when the colony possessed its own life and richness before it was hollowed out by imperial intrusion. Colonies, once rich in natural resources, culture, and agency, were systematically plundered by imperial forces, leaving them in a state of depletion. India was considered the "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire due to its vast resources and strategic location. In Africa, gold and diamonds were extracted from places like South Africa and Ghana (“Contemporary History Pre-1900, 14 Feb. 2023”). Beyond these material interests, cultural and ideological beliefs also fuelled the colonial expansion. The prevailing notion of the "White Man's Burden" fostered a sense of responsibility among many Britons to spread their culture, values, and Christianity to what they perceived as ‘less-civilized’ societies. Social Darwinism, with its belief in the superiority of certain races, further justified the domination over ‘other’ people. The ghost becomes a visual reminder of what the empire tries to forget - the damage left behind after its “civilizing mission” is complete. In the courtroom scene, when the defence suggests that the murdered man may have taken his own life, the ghost immediately reveals its previously concealed throat wound and gestures across it to show that such a wound could not have been self-inflicted. This moment powerfully echoes the way the British Empire often deflected responsibility for the suffering it caused in its colonies, blaming colonized populations themselves for economic collapse, famine, disease, or political unrest. Just as the ghost refutes the lie of suicide with silent but undeniable bodily evidence, so do the legacies of empire reveal the violence behind narratives of “native failure” or “inefficiency.”Similarly, when the woman witness declares that the accused is “the most amiable of mankind,” the ghost directly confronts her by pointing to the murderer’s face. Her uncritical loyalty reflects the mindset of many Victorian citizens, who were persuaded by imperial propaganda to believe in the moral righteousness of the empire. This figure parallels Marlow’s aunt in Heart of Darkness, who views colonial conquest as a noble mission of philanthropy and enlightenment. At the end of the story, the narrator finally delivers the guilty verdict, and the ghostly appearance vanishes. One may ask why does the ghost come to the narrator, and why can only the narrator sees it? Why not anybody else? One possible answer is that he represents the rational Victorian intellectual class. He is the head of the Department of a certain Branch Bank. His role reflects the Radical Liberals of the period, some of whom, like Richard Cobden and Herbert Spencer, were critical of British imperialism and its moral foundations (Pyke, 24 Dec.2018).The ghost chooses him because he can witness, reflect, and judge. The murderer senses this threat and admits in his final words, “I knew I was a doomed man, when the Foreman of my Jury came into the box… (261).”

 

Chapter 2: Embodying Colonial Trauma

 

Similar to the narrator of “The Trial for Murder”, the protagonist in “The Black Veil” is a young surgeon who is unexpectedly visited by a spectral figure. The visitor is “a singularly tall woman, dressed in deep mourning…The upper part of her figure was carefully muffled in a black shawl…and her face was shrouded by a thick black veil (4).” This veiled woman, shrouded in mystery and silence, can be read as the embodiment of Africa itself, rendered opaque and unknowable within imperial imagination. The descriptor “black” is not incidental. In the imperial venture, blackness has long been racialized and associated with Africa, functioning as both a literal and symbolic marker of the colonial ‘other’. As a contemporary 19th-century map described it, Africa was “the refuse of the world, and the reprobation of nature,” populated by “ferocious animals, venomous reptiles,” and “barbarous or brutish” people who were listed alongside “monkeys” and “minerals” as Africa’s “principal productions”. The map also states that “the greater part of Africa, may be considered as absolutely unknown…All that we know is…a complete collection of the most ferocious beasts and the most uncivilized men (Rumsey Collection, 1800).”

 

In this story the woman has come to seek medical assistance for her son, but when the surgeon asks, “you are ill?”, the woman replies, “I am…very ill not bodily, but mentally.” Here she identifies herself as a figure of collective trauma, bearing the psychic wound of empire. The surgeon’s inability to locate the woman’s grief leads him to settle on a classic colonial logic that she is “mad”. In this moment, the surgeon unwittingly performs the epistemic violence that colonial institutions enacted for centuries by interpreting native suffering as delusion or hysteria. He thinks if she is so desperate, then why does she delay treatment? It is because the veiled woman knows that any medical help is futile because her son’s execution has already been scheduled. Nevertheless, she seeks somebody to witness, confront, and morally reckon with. Her utterance, “Though even I see the hopelessness of human assistance availing him, the bare thought of laying him in his grave without it makes my blood run cold (6)”, reveals her deeper intent to ensure the colonial body is not discarded unseen. The surgeon’s journey towards the woman’s address mirrors the classic experience of a European descending from the ‘civilized’ place to the repressed zone. The path is lined with “stagnant pools,” “filthy gardens,” “filthy-looking women”, and “ruinous cottages”-a space that mimics the descriptions of colonial outposts, rendered in Gothic terms. When the surgeon arrives at her place, the woman in the black veil doesn’t appear to welcome him, instead, her son, who is later revealed to be a ghost, opens the door. Her son is described as an “ill-favoured man, with black hair.”When the surgeon asks, “Am I in time? (12)”, the man replies, “Too soon! (12)”The man’s response, “Too soon!”, can be read as ironic or even sarcastic. This utterance reflects the delayed arrival of the British conscience to the scene of colonial suffering. The man is lying upstairs being murdered, which embodies the colonial subject who has already endured the violence of empire, even before the Radical Liberals began to question it. He becomes the abject corpse of empire. As Rudd remarks, “…the postcolonial abject can be seen to represent the underside of the imperial project, the fundamental hypocrisy at the very heart of the civilising mission’s inability to account for both the indigenous peoples who were already there and the numerous cruel and inhuman practices employed in subjugating them and their land (75).”When the surgeon is finally led to the body, he finds a man who is “motionless,” “bandaged,” and unrecognizable. The surgeon suddenly discovers that the veiled woman’s son is one of the men hanged that very morning. The surgeon utters the line, “There has been violence here (15)” twice before confirming, “This man has been murdered (16).”The veiled woman replies: “That I call God to witness he has—pitilessly, inhumanly murdered! (16).”The surgeon, as a representative of Britain's rational, liberal intellectual class, is summoned to act not as a distant analyst but as a direct witness to physically confront the violence that imperialism commits under the guise of law and order. His crime is never named, and his trial is referred to as an “every-day” event, mirroring how imperial Britain normalized the execution of its subjects across the colonies, often without adequate representation or recognition, moreover, under vague or racially charged allegations. The son’s namelessness and facelessness align with what postcolonial historians have identified as the “Black Peril”. Ann Laura Stoler writes in her book that European men imagined European women to be desired by colonized men, leading to the belief that European women needed protection from the "primitive" sexual urges of the colonized men. This perceived threat was often labelled as the "Black Peril" in Africa and the British Empire. These kinds of rape charges against colonized men were often based on perceived transgressions of social space, such as being found near a white residence or entering a European woman's room. These broad definitions of dangerous behavior made most colonized men potential threats as sexual and political aggressors and the empire decreed “the death penalty for any person convicted for the crime of rape or attempted rape upon a European woman or girl (Stoler 58)”. But surprisingly, rape laws were race-specific, where sexual abuse of black women was not classified as rape and rapes committed by white men not leading to prosecution (Carnal Knowledge58).

 

 

Chapter 3: Colonial Abject

 

The railway in “The Signalman” functions as an emblem of imperial modernity, a symbol of the vast technological advancement that enabled Britain to connect, extract, and dominates its colonial territories. Unlike the previous two stories, “The Signalman” presents a narrator who is not haunted by any spectral figure himself. Instead, he arrives at the signalman’s post for adventure. The narrator describes the signalman’s post as a “great dungeon,” a grim place surrounded by “dripping-wet walls of jagged stone,” an “earthy, deadly smell,” and the “gloomier entrance to a black tunnel,” all marked by a “barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air (263).” This landscape recalls the colonial imagination of alien and primitive terrains. Ken Gelder, drawing on J.M. Coetzee’s White Writing, notes that “Africa is routinely imagined as a ‘dark continent’ rather than, say, a ‘new world’ or an ‘earthly paradise’... in which the black man becomes a shadowy presence (Modern Gothic197).” In the same way, the narrator’s descent into the trench mirrors the colonial adventurer stepping into unfamiliar, haunted territory. He even remarks: “…it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world (263).”

 

Though the signalman is a European, he is depicted like a native: “a dark, sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows (263).” This physical profile aligns him with the previously mentioned 19th-century cartographic representations of African natives where black bodies have been described through physiognomic difference – “The natives, very different from the Europeans in their colour and forms, being of a black or tawny complexion, the hair woolly, the nose flat, and the lips broad (Rumsey Collection, 1800).”The signalman appears to have lost his ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity and instead resembles a native colonial subject. Patrick Brantlinger terms this fear as “going native,” which he defines as “an anxiety about the ease with which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery, and thus about the weakening of Britain’s imperial hegemony (Darkness, 229).”

 

The signalman is also haunted by a ghostly figure he cannot fully comprehend. He says, “I never saw the face. The left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved,—violently waved…with the utmost passion and vehemence (267).”This ghost’s desperate gesticulation seems like a cry to stop the train, symbolically, a plea to stop the ongoing exploitation of the colonies. As Alison Rudd explains through the figure of Amelia Fraser, “The Aborigines are transformed into vampires to become uncanny and abject at the same time. They are alienated from their land and their culture... left to roam the land like phantoms (80).” These spectral figures are not threatening but are weak, broken, and silenced. The spectre, in this story, cannot stop the exploitation, but it seeks the attention of Britain’s intellectual class to voice against it. Although the signalman is “well educated, perhaps educated above that station… a student of natural philosophy (265)”, but he feels powerless to stop it. As he confesses, “It is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do?... I, Lord help me! A mere poor signalman on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act? (271).”It is important to note that no one but only the signalman sees the ghost, not even the narrator. The narrator is suspicious about the signalman’s accounts and treats them as a psychological disturbance. He says, “A disagreeable shudder crept over me... It was not to be denied that this was a remarkable coincidence, calculated deeply to impress his mind (268).”Just like the surgeon in “The Black Veil”, who sees the veiled woman’s pain as madness, the narrator interprets the signalman’s haunting as a personal delusion. Since the signalman speaks of experiences that the imperial system does not want to acknowledge, he becomes a threat and thus needs to be terminated. He is no longer a ‘true Briton’, but an abject, “that which threatens identity and order... the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4).

 

Chapter 4: Conclusion

 

This paper attempted to examine how Dickens’s Gothic short stories, such as “The Trial for Murder,” “The Black Veil,” and “The Signalman”, reflect the spectral traces of colonial guilt when read through the lens of Postcolonial Gothic. Drawing on Alison Rudd’s theoretical framework, supported by Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, this analysis aimed to explore how the ghosts' hauntings in these stories are not merely personal or psychological phenomena, but embodiments of deeper cultural and historical anxieties. These spectral figures, as Rudd explains, seek to uncover and “retrace the unseen and unsaid of culture…the untold and unspeakable stories of colonial experience” (72).Whether in the courtroom, the medical chamber, or the railway trench, Dickens’s ghosts confront Britain’s sanitized image of empire by demanding witness, recognition, and moral accountability. While this inquiry tried to focus on colonial hauntings, other critical approaches, such as Trauma Studies, Ecocriticism, and New Historicism, remain equally valid and could offer valuable alternative readings of Dickens’s Gothic short stories.

 

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