Memory, Plague, Publication: The Ghosts in The Haunted Man and Modern Social Consciousness

Abstract

This study observes the representation of ghosts in The Haunted Man to decipher Charles Dickens's awareness of communities or social consciousness. The ghosts in this novel are depicted as the mean of communication; they have power to form a group of people and make them share a certain idea and consciousness. Media-based societies began to be formed in the Victorian Age. Traditional village-type of communities kept its identity by direct exchange of information among the people living in the area. The societies in the nineteenth century, in contrast, arose from elusive networks that connect people living in different places by such means as newspapers and railroads. The present sociologists would call this collective entity which enabled the modern societies to emerge the media. In the nineteenth century, however, what we call the media today was not yet named and only few people were conscious of it. In order to express this mysterious informational complexity which produce the modern public, Dickens used ghostly images into which three other form of influence are integrated: memory, plague and publication. This analysis suggests that The Haunted Man is the novel which is directly linked to Dickens's understanding of the media.