There’s so much here – gentle but knowing satire of English and American attitudes, real pathos in the plight of the ghost, and a lovely thread of romance – it all works together beautifully. One final, desperate act had unexpected consequences, and led to exactly the right ending. He deployed every trick he had in his armoury, but nothing worked. Lubricating oil was proffered when he clanked his chains, detergents were deployed when he left bloodstains, and young children aimed their peashooters whenever they caught sight of him. The Canterville Ghost haunted Canterville Chase for more than three hundred years, but things changed when his home was sold to an American family. But it’s a little book with substance, and, though it is so readable that it is easy to read very quickly, it rewards careful reading because the story telling is subtle and there are interesting little touches as well as very obvious pleasures in these stories.
It is a very little book – just 104 pages, containing two short and one very, very short short stories. I completely forgot that there were more short stories, until this attractive little volume from the Hesperus Press appeared. When I read The Picture of Dorian Grey I was smitten, and I was so disappointed that Oscar Wilde had left the world no more novels that I could read. I still have that book, and I think I love it just as much as she did. She loved that book, she read it many times, and she saved it to pass on to her children. Sparkling with his trademark wit, this classic tale is one of Oscar Wilde’s finest stories and is presented here with three other comic mystery stories, ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’ and ‘The Model Millionaire’, all of which were first published together in 1891.Ĭontains: ‘The Canterville Ghost’, ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’, ‘The Model Millionaire’ and ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’.My mother, when she was a very small girl, was given a beautiful copy of The Happy Prince and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde.
As the spirit is deserted by his capacity to scare, Virginia, the Otises’ daughter, gets to know him and learns the tragic tale behind his sad fate. However, the ghost struggles to intimidate his new victims, as they counter his ghoulish behaviour with typically transatlantic pragmatism, offering lubricator for his chains and cleaning up the stains with detergent. Their disbelief is soon shattered by the nightly sound of rattling chains in the hallways and the appearance of mysterious bloodstains in the living room. When the Americans Mr and Mrs Otis and their four children move into Canterville Chase, its previous occupant Lord Canterville warns them that the ghost of his ancestor still haunts the house.
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