Conclusion

Summary

Multiple discussions of an idea suggest its topicality. Whilst this study is by no means exhaustive, enough evidence has emerged to state with some confidence that the idea of ghosts shaped some of the most pivotal debates and discussions that preoccupied the people of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The precise meanings of ghost stories were energetically contested, and interpretations reflected a circularity of influences in which the ideas of natural philosophers, politicians and clergymen overlapped with, and drew upon, those of ordinary men and women. Whether ghosts were conceived as tangible entities or as symbolic representations of spiritual or moral truths, the idea of the preternatural realm was sufficiently elastic to allow ghost beliefs and stories to adapt to the contours of a rapidly changing cultural environment. The boundaries between the natural and preternatural worlds were certainly redrawn in these years, and in some respects they became more stringent, yet the souls of the dead continued to haunt the physical and imaginative landscapes of English society.

One vital reason that ghost stories were able to maintain their relevance against the often corrosive critique of scientists and satirists was due to the flexible literary conventions of these tales. The fact that ghosts drifted through so many different print media highlights the fact that a settled genre of ghost stories had yet to emerge. Ghost stories maintained a powerful reputation for exposing immorality and sin, but the nature of such transgression was not confined to a particular time and place. As a result, ghost stories could be easily updated to reflect the specific problems of eighteenth-century life. The changing form and content of these narratives therefore tells the historian a great deal about the cultural preoccupations that shaped Augustan and Georgian England.

Ghost stories were cast as moral censors of an increasingly commercially-focused society. This assumed particular importance in a climate where fragile personal reputations were made and broken by strict codes of personal and civic morality.