The Future As Poltergeist
The standard model, as it were, of the ghost story sees the present haunted by the past. But in A Christmas Carol, where the past is nostalgic and sweet-natured, and the present jolly, it is the future that properly haunts Scrooge — and in ‘The Signal-Man’ Dickens describes the present as terribly haunted by, precisely, the future.
This is a striking thing, new in culture, and distinct — which is to say, different to earlier modes of conceiving the future. This is a big claim, I know, and will require some unpacking. The contrary position would be: human beings have long dreaded their deaths, which they (which we) know is out there, somewhere, in our future. But that’s not really what I’m saying.
What I am saying is quite involved, since it brings together two of my passions: my love for Dickens on the one hand, and my passion for and engagement with science fiction on the other — a mode Dickens himself never* wrote. It is in fact a claim about the mode of futurity Dickens writes into the two ghost-stories mentioned in the opening paragraph. [*There are a couple of short-piece edge cases, but let’s not get into that].
The frame here is that the nineteenth-century saw a new kind of future-imagining. It’s Paul Alkon’s argument, advanced in The Origins of Futuristic Fiction (University of Georgia Press 1987) — that, basically, there was no such thing as a future-set fiction until the end of the eighteenth-century.
Alkon discusses a few, scattered earlier titles notionally set in the future, before expanding upon the success of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (‘The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One’ 1771) as the book that really instituted the mode of ‘futuristic fiction’ as such. Mercier’s book is a utopian reimagining of France set in the titular year, and it was in its day extremely popular. Indeed, its popularity led to a large number of imitators. Broadly: before Mercier utopias tended to be set today, but in some distant place; after Mercier utopias tended to be set in the future.
Through the early nineteenth-century loads of books were set in ‘the future’, many of them utopian works in exactly this Mercerian mode, such as Vladimir Odoyevsky’s The Year 4338 (1835) and Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1836). But alongside this ‘new’ version of futuristic fiction was a vogue for a second kind of futuristic fiction, secularised (to some extent) versions of the old religious-apocalyptic future-imagining. The big hit in this idiom was Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s prose-poem Le Dernier Homme (1805) — the whole of humanity bar one dies out, leaving Omegarus alone, to wander the earth solus, meditating upon mortality and finitude. Eventually Old Adam himself makes an appearance, and the novel ends with the graves giving up their dead and various other elements from St John’s revelation.
In the decades that followed there were a great many of these ‘last man’ fictions, some reworkings of Grainville’s text, others ringing changes upon his theme — Auguste Creuzé de Lesser poeticised and expanded Grainville’s novel as Le Dernier Homme, poème imité de Grainville (1832), adding-in various materialist SFnalities (a flying city, a plan to build craft and explore the solar system and other things). And husband-and-wife team Etienne-Paulin Gagne (L’Unitéide ou la Femme messie 1858) and Élise Gagne (Omégar ou le Dernier Homme 1859) reworked and expanded the Grainvillean original in respectively more spiritual and more materialised ways. In Britain, Byron’s striking and gloomy blank verse ‘Darkness’ (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826) both engage the theme. Shelley’s novel is interesting, though its telling doesn’t entirely escape turgidity: a tale of political intrigue, war, a deadly pandemic set in AD 2100 that details the extinction of the entire human race, save only the titular ‘last man’, Lionel Verney, who wanders the depopulated landscapes and muses on nature, mortality and the universe.
We might style these two modes of imagining the future as spinning ‘positive’ (utopian) and ‘negative’ (apocalyptic) valences out of their futurism, but let’s not do that, actually. It would be clumsily over-simplistic of us. I’m more interested in the way the two modes feed into one another. Grainville’s novel ends with a more-or-less straight retelling of the Revelation of St John. Creuzé de Lesser’s poetic rewriting of Le Dernier Homme follows Grainville’s lead, but adds in materialist and secular ‘futuristic’ details (those flying cities and projects to explore other planets I mentioned). Shelley’s Last Man jettisons the religious element altogether. We’re deep into the tradition that, through Verne and Wells and the US Pulps and Golden Age, broadens into science fictional futurism — a mode that remains, I suggest, broadly secularised but in ways that retain a significant, latent religious component.
Why does the Mercier-ist style of ‘futuristic fiction’ come so late? Why does it arrive, specifically, at the end of the 18th-century? Darko Suvin argues that it is to do with the American and French Revolutions — revolutionary thinking requires a secularised sense of a future that can be planned, and which improves on the present — as opposed to the apocalyptic sense of a future that wraps-up and ends this mortal world so common in the older religious traditions. Novels like Mercier’s map that secularised future fictively.
There may be something in this.
But it’s also worth noting that the futurism of L’An 2440 and Shelley’s Last Man is, qua futurism, pretty weak-beer. You can see from this frontispiece to a later edition of Mercier’s novel that France in the 25th-century is, in all respects save its more utopian social organisation, basically the France of the 18th-century.
Something similar is true of Shelley’s Last Man, a book whose Europe of AD 2100 is very redolent indeed of the eighteenth-century Europe into which Shelley herself had been born: a world in which the rich live in mansions and travel by horse and carriage whilst the poor struggle in the fields. The novel is also a roman-à-clef in which the son of the King and Queen of England, Adrian Earl of Windsor — Percy Shelley — falls in love with a Greek princess, while his friend Lord Raymond — Byron — strives to become Lord Protector, and the titular last man Lionel Verney — Mary Shelley herself — hangs out with them. The first third of the book is, essentially, pastoral (Verney, though of aristocratic stock, grows-up a child of nature after the financial ruination and exile of his father); the second third makes its way slowly through a set of political plots, war between Greece and Turkey, and only towards the end of the novel does the global population, ravaged by a deadly plague, fall away leaving Verney the last man standing.
The novel’s future is not entirely mired in the past: there are hints that new agricultural sciences have improved yields. Also: there are balloons. Here, Lionel decides to travel from London to Greece in the extraordinarily rapid time of 48 hours: ‘“And I go to-day,” I cried; “this very hour I will engage a sailing balloon; I shall be there in forty-eight hours at furthest, perhaps in less, if the wind is fair!’
The balloon rose about half a mile from the earth, and with a favourable wind it hurried through the air, its feathered vans cleaving the unopposing atmosphere … The pilot hardly moved the plumed steerage, and the slender mechanism of the wings, wide unfurled, gave forth a murmuring noise, soothing to the sense. Plain and hill, stream and corn-field, were discernible below, while we unimpeded sped on swift and secure, as a wild swan in his spring-tide flight. [Shelley, Last Man ch. 4]
But it is not until later in the nineteenth-century that secular future-fiction began styling its imagined worlds as, in multiple key ways, different to the world out of which they were written — differently furnished, technology-wise, its characters differently dressed, its social and personal weltanschauung differently construed. Perhaps the first book to do this was Edward Bellamy’s prodigiously successful Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the ‘bestselling American novel of the 19th-century’ stakes. The point here is that Bellamy takes an 1880s individual, ‘Julian West’, into his AD 2000 such that West’s contemporary preconceptions can be repeatedly startled by the technological and social-justice alterations that the future has effected. Indeed, in Looking Backward the latter are construed by the former. As J. Bradford DeLong points out in his Slouching Towards Utopia (2022), ‘at one point the narrator-protagonist is asked if he would like to hear some music. He expects his hostess to play the piano.’ But instead his hostess reveals a marvellous machine by which music performed by the greatest musicians in the world is piped directly into your home.
Bellamy’s point is going to be that the technological marvels of the year-2000 allow for the incredible amplification of even the wonders of civilization — in this case, the wonder of civilization that is the incredible versatile piano. This alone would be testament to a vast leap forward. To listen to middle-class music on demand in around 1900 you had to have — in your house or nearby — an instrument, and someone trained to play it. It would have cost the average worker some 2,400 hours, roughly a year at a 50-hour workweek, to earn the money to buy a high-quality pianoforte. Then there would be the expense and the time committed to piano lessons. Listening to middle-class moderate-quality music in your house was a privilege reserved to the rich. It was something that Edward Bellamy dreamed would be democratized in the world of technological abundance and human solidarity that he dreamed that the year 2000 would see. Anyone could listen to music in their house! And not just the performance of one amateur performer! Professional music, orchestral music — and you would have a choice of one of four currently-playing orchestras that you could dial up on your speakerphone. That was what Edward Bellamy chose as his example of the wonders of human flourishing that technology and solidarity, the utopia that he thought was hidden in the womb of the then-present.
By the end of the century, most notably with the variegated futuristic fictions of H G Wells, the notion that the future would be in substantive ways different to the present had bedded itself into the emergent genre, such that it is — now — a core aspect of science fiction’s many futures. Nowadays ‘futuristic fiction’ simply comes with the sense, more or less axiomatically, that the future will be different to the present, not just in the old utopian-writing sense that a notional 1776, or 1789, will usher in a new form of social justice and harmony (according to whichever utopian crotchet or social-reform king-charles-head happens to be yours), but rather that change will happen across multiple fronts, have intricate and widespread ramifications. That the future will be a different country, and that they, that we, will do things differently there.
It is perhaps worth also mentioning that Wells’s innovations in the form include the first full-on dystopia, 1899’s When The Sleeper Wakes, as well as the gloriously vivid and memorable ‘terminal beach’, visited by the far-future exploring rider of 1895’s Time Machine. In this, Wells fuses the apocalypticism of ‘Last Man’ style future-fictions with the materialist future-as-difference traditions of Bellamy and his many imitators. That’s proved an influential melange.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To go back to Dickens.
What I’m trying here is to see, by laying it out, whether there is an argument of some significance that can be established. Does it begin with Dickens? So, to strike the keynote again: in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), Scott’s ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ (1824) or Pushkin’s Queen of Spades (1834) the present is haunted by the past, as is the case in most ghost stories. But in Christmas Carol and ‘The Signal-Man’ the present is haunted by the future.
How does this future fit with the modes of futurism I’ve been discussing?
It is different, I think. Consider prophecy. Would you say that St John’s Revelation haunts the Bible? Surely not — surely it is the beginning, not the end, of the Bible that haunts its length, its characters and storytelling, and through it haunts the world Christianity made. I mean, of course, original sin. The creation of the first spirit, Adam, is the creation of the first ghost, an actualised spectre, a kind of legendary pre-revenant, in the light of his actions. His life and the lives of all his descendants — all of us — is haunted by his peccatum originale: that poltergeist of anxiety and malignancy. John’s apocalypse, by comparison, is a dream, a fantasy.
This is the old style. For most of human history, that distinctive mental capacity we possess to project ourselves imaginatively into the to-come has been put at the service of a set of limited and particular things, a realm of possibility and planning conceived along, basically, one axis. The original futurists were the first farmers — a development from the timeless intensity of the hunt, in which humans no more have need for elaborate futurological skills than do lions and eagles, cats and dogs. Farmers, though, must plan. We cannot farm unless we know that the seasons will change and that we must plan for that change. We plan, though, on the basis that the future will be, essentially, the same as the past — that spring will follow winter, that next year will be basically like this year. Such that we store-up food for the winter secure in the knowledge that when our stores are depleted Spring and Summer will replenish them. Or perhaps, as with Pharaoh’s dream of the seven lean cattle devouring the seven fat ones — the Bible’s first prophecy — we look into the future so as to plan for an extended quote-unquote ‘winter’ (a famine or drought, a war, a long voyage, whatever). This dream is important, and Joseph interprets it; but he isn’t haunted by the dream. On the contrary, it is the making of him. These dreams of the future empower him.
The contrast between this and stories like Carol and ‘The Signal-Man’ is a significant one. Scrooge’s first two ghosts mark difference — his happy past as contrasting with his miserable present, the joyous celebration of Christmas all around him contrasting with his miserable solitude and christmaslessness — but they do so in order to set up the third ghost. The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge a more radical difference: now he is alive, then he will be dead. This difference is our existential ground, unavoidable, constitutive of who we are. Like a defibrillator paddle, it shocks Scrooge out of his involuted miserabilism into something more sociable and performatively-jolly, but it continues to haunt the story, even through into its quote-unquote ‘happy ending’ — we can see, in the trying-too-hard capitalisation of ‘Tiny Tim, who did NOT die’ in the penultimate paragraph, a writer straining to deny the undeniable, for of course Tim dies, as everyone does.
‘The Signal Man’ chooses the railways as its tenor (its, if you’ll excuse the pun, vehicle for its ghost story) for several reasons, but one is that trains run inexorably forward down a narrow track, from which they neither can nor do deviate. CD’s story is saying: the locomotive is death, and we are standing in its track, and neither we nor it can change our situation. It will destroy us: the only question is when.
There is another reason why Dickens chooses the railway as vehicle for his story: its modernity. As against the (again) ‘standard model’ of the ghost story as linked with the dead hand of the past, trains are bang up to date, and that’s the point. ‘Ghosts did not go out when electric light came in,’ says Karl Miller, ‘though it could be felt at the time that this was bound to happen.’ He is reviewing The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and noting that whilst such stories might ‘look like a trick of the moonlight and candlelight of the past’ most of the pieces in that volume ‘are taken from the well-lighted twentieth-century’. Dickens’s modernity was modern stock-market usury and railway locomotives rather than electric lights, but both are a long way from the cuirass-and-helmet archaic past of Hamlet. What Dickens is saying (what Dickens is innovating) is the capacity of the future to haunt us in both a material and a spiritual sense — a new kind of futurity, captured here via the mode of the ghost story.
Is this new? Does it really correlate with a new mode of imagining the future as such? It’s a big question. The task, perhaps, is to look back before the French Revolution, before the shift to Taylor’s Secular Age, and find examples of people or characters haunted by the future. Cassandra, maybe, although there seems to me something significant in the fact that, though she cannot unsee the inevitable doom that is coming, and though she tells everyone, nobody believes her. This is a specific curse by a god, not a general condition. Dickens’s Signal-Man is signalling something more ubiquitously comprehended. The future is a poltergeist, ever terrifyingly new, never to leave us alone.
