Charles Dickens did not believe in ghosts.
He said so, repeatedly, and he meant it. He was a rationalist, a reformer, a man who trusted evidence over superstition. When people around him swore they'd seen the impossible, Dickens was the one who wanted to examine the room, check the timeline, find the ordinary explanation hiding underneath.
Which makes it strange that he spent twenty years unable to stop writing about the impossible.
It started with detectives. In the 1850s, Scotland Yard's new Detective Branch was still a novelty, and Dickens was fascinated by it. He rode along at night with Inspector Charles Field through the worst parts of London, watching him read a room, a face, a lie, in seconds.
Dickens wrote it all up for his magazine, Household Words, presenting Field to readers as something close to a magician who simply happened to work for the police.
Then, strangely,…
