A selection of seven classic ghost stories set in the season of falling leaves and lengthening shadows, by authors including M. R. James, Charles Dickens, Amelia B. Edwards, Charlotte Riddell, Edith Nesbit and Bernard Capes. Story timestamps can be found below.

These stories are already available on the channel as individual uploads if you prefer to listen that way, although I've taken the opportunity while producing this anthology to remaster and re-edit some of the older recordings. (Note: as they were recorded episodically you may notice a slight variation in acoustic/audio quality between stories.)

Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:40 Was It An Illusion?, by Amelia B. Edwards (1881)
00:55:27 The Trial for Murder, by Charles Dickens (1865)
01:28:33 The Tractate Middoth, by M. R. James (1907)
02:15:00 Walnut-Tree House, by Charlotte Riddell (1878)
03:20:29 Man-size in Marble, by Edith Nesbit (1887)
03:59:18 The Corner House, by Bernard Capes (1909)
04:39:18 The Shadow in the Corner, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1879)
05:36:51 Credits, thanks and further listening

Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me (and get access to exclusive content):

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About the authors:

Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831–1892) was a prolific journalist, traveller and Egyptologist, as well as a hugely popular English novelist of the Victorian era. She devoted herself to writing professionally from the early 1850s, producing novels and travelogues, including 'A Thousand Miles up the Nile' (1877), which is still widely read and admired today.

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medievalist and scholar, and is probably the best known and most celebrated English ghost story writer of the 20th century, although he actually began composing supernatural tales in the late Victorian era, beginning with 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook' and 'Lost Hearts' (both 1893). During a long academic career, M. R. James developed a tradition of reading his ghost stories aloud to a group of friends, most famously on Christmas eve, and the majority of his published stories were first heard in that setting.

Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906), often credited in typical Victorian style under her husband's initials as "Mrs. J. H. Riddell", was born Charlotte Eliza Lawson Cowan in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland. She moved to London in 1855 and married Joseph Hadley Riddell, a civil engineer, two years later. She apparently turned to writing to make a living after her husband lost all his money, early in their marriage. In all she wrote 56 novels and short stories, of which several had a supernatural theme.

Although best remembered today for her children's stories, including 'The Railway Children', Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) also wrote several novels and numerous short stories for adults, many of them with a horror or supernatural theme. She married Hubert Bland, a bank clerk, in 1880. They were both active in Labour politics, and were co-founders of the Fabian Society in 1884. She lectured on socialism and politics, and wrote political essays, sometimes in collaboration with her husband under the name Fabian Bland, although she was less active in this area as she grew more successful as a writer of fiction.

Bernard Capes (1854–1918) was born in London to a large family, one of eleven children (including an elder sister, Harriet Capes, who was a noted author of children's books). He began his writing career as a journalist and made countless contributions to popular magazines of the era, including the Illustrated London News, Pall Mall Magazine, The Idler, Cornhill Magazine, and Blackwood's.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was born in London. She was privately educated, although her childhood was disrupted by her parents' separation when she was five years old. She worked as an actress in her early 20s, and was successful enough to support her mother and herself, before turning to writing fiction. She had an early success with 'Lady Audley's Secret' (1862), one of the best known of the "sensation novels" which were hugely popular in the mid-Victorian era.

Recordings © Bitesized Audio 2021–24.

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