Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's

best-selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn.

The Christmas Ghost Story is a very old tradition.

In this podcast, Bo Glorist and historian Francis Young gives a short lecture which he

delivered online for the Church's Conservation Trust, exploring where the idea of the ghost

story originates and what it tells us about approaches to the festive period from the

early medieval era through to the works of Charles Dickens and the great ghost story writer

MR James.

So the title of this talk is Christmas Ghosts.

And I think that anyone with even a passing interest in the literary form of the ghost

story will know that Montague Road's James, MR James, widely acknowledged as the greatest

master of the ghost story who's ever lived used to read a ghost story yearly at Christmas

time at King's College Cambridge to a select gathering of students and fellows.

James later wrote up finished versions of those stories for his volumes of collected ghost

stories.

But I think it's important to remember that by the late 19th century when James began these

readings, the Christmas Ghost Story was already something of a literary cliché.

Charles Dickens is a Christmas Carol which appeared in 1843 was depending on your view either

the summit of this tradition or a complete subversion of it.

Because a Christmas Carol, although there's plenty of ghosts in it, is clearly not really

about the ghosts themselves.

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