An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street - J Sheridan Le Fanu

 An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street - J Sheridan Le Fanu

Le Fanu was one of the finest ghost story writers of the early Victorian period. Belonging to the same generation as Poe and Dickens, Le Fanu was an important writer in an emerging literary culture in Dublin. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman. However, Le Fanu wrote criticisms of English policy, and he counted Irish nationalists among his friends. 

An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House in Aungier Street was first published, uncredited, in the Christmas 1853 edition of the Dublin University Magazine. It would not be republished until 1923, when M R James edited a collection of Le Fanu’s stories. Since then, it has frequently been included in anthologies and in collections of his stories.

The Account works in a manner that characterizes the best of Le Fanu’s short work. The first person narrative and the tone of reportage present the supernatural events of the story in the voice of reason. Le Fanu seeks to persuade us that he is just reporting the facts in the case, all the way to the twinkle of dry humour in the last sentence. 

Another factor grounding Le Fanu’s account is the location. Aungier Street is a real place in Dublin, quite possibly familiar for some of the readers of the Dublin University Magazine. James decided to remove the ‘Old House’ from the title in his collection. For Le Fanu’s first readers, it is significant that the events occurred in an ‘old house’, as the last paragraphs reveal, effectively keeping the ‘facts’ of the case in the past. The distant origin of the word `old’, having the sense of ‘already grown’, doesn’t help us here. House, though, may have a connection with ‘hide’, suggesting a place of concealment. This is clearly true of the house in the tale, as it also suggests something important that we know, but rarely consider, as we walk along any street.

Like ‘telling’ and, therefore, ‘tale’, ‘account’ has its roots in counting. Once again, a narrative is that which gives order to events. Tales and accounts both have the sense of legal depositions. Le Fanu is presenting us with the known details in an appropriate order. Readers of this story may find the ordering a little tortuous, though the delay in relating the roommate’s experiences has good psychological reasons within the story, as well as the obvious benefits to Le Fanu’s narrative. 

The key phrase in Le Fanu’s title is ‘Some Strange Disturbances’. Some is significant in that we are not going to be told of a single occurrence, though ‘some’ originally meant ‘one together with others’, which may be appropriate to the different manifestations in the story. ‘Strange’ had already taken on the meaning of ‘odd’ or ‘surprising’ some centuries before Le Fanu’s time. However, the original sense is preserved in ‘stranger’, ‘one from outside’, which has an interesting resonance in this context. A ‘disturbance’ is that which ‘creates total disorder’. The apparition in this story is not the simple, but nonetheless chilling, temporal echo of Dickens’s The Signalman. Here, the ghost is actively malignant, as the reader comes to realise. Le Fanu’s politics emerge into plain view by making reference to a hanging judge. Such a character can have only one meaning to his educated Dublin readership.

As usual, we should think about the truth that Le Fanu shows us. The fear of the historical imprint of violence is mostly gone from the lives of Western readers. Places of slaughter have become tourist attractions to be approached as though they are theme parks. And yet, the fear is there, under the surface, if we have our attention drawn to it. Le Fanu, though, is not merely playing with the fear of death. The echoes of malignity exist, even if such apparitions do not. The harm intended by the apparition is merely an extension of the harm committed in life. The story is just a winter’s ghost tale, but, of course, no work of art can claim innocence. Le Fanu’s choice of villain is a political choice: and a valid one.