Profs & Pints Alameda: Ghosts, Christmas, and Dickens

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Ghosts Christmas and Dickens” with Sara Hackenberg professor of English and teacher of courses on Charles Dickens at San Francisco State University and faculty member of the Dickens Project at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Christmases past present and future all are likely to include retellings of A Christmas Carol the classic Charles Dickens tale of Scrooge’s encounters with ghosts. As often as many of us have read that story or watched it performed we might never have paused to ask: What the heck were all those ghosts doing in a tale told during the warm and fuzzy holiday season weeks after Halloween?

Come learn about the fascinating English tradition of the Christmas ghost story as well as how Dickens tapped into and reinvented that genre with Professor Sara Hackenberg a scholar of Dickens and of 19th century popular fiction including horror and the gothic.

You’ll learn how hundreds of ghost stories and other chilling tales were published and told in England over the holidays as a means of passing the season’s long nights. Dickens in writing A Christmas Carol in 1843 made the link between ghosts and Christmas more explicit using the Yuletide spirits he described as allegorical agents of redemption. He changed how people thought about both the holiday ghost story and Christmas itself.

A Christmas Carol was not the only holiday ghost story Dickens wrote however and he personally experienced a transformation in his approach to ghosts in his writing. Initially dismissive of the idea of actual ghosts Dickens had treated those in A Christmas Carol more as comic devices than as unnerving apparitions. By contrast his final Christmas ghost story the 1866 tale “The Signal-Man” took specters much more seriously. Based on a tragedy that Dickens had experienced firsthand and survived the infamous Staplehurst train crash of 1865 “The Signal-Man” used truly spooky ghosts to convey the trauma of train accidents and critique the industrial systems that drive modern economies. Through it Dickens meditated on deaths that haunted him throughout the rest of his life.

Professor Hackenberg’s talk is sure to send a chill or two down your spine. It might even leave you eager to tell your own ghost stories this holiday season. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17 or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

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