This chapter discusses the intense visual imagery that has become characteristic of Sinclair's poetry. It considers the visual apparatus of Sinclair's major works, including Slow Chocolate Autopsy. It also studies the importance of the cinematic and visual, the diagrammatic mapping of fictional texts, Sinclair's geometric conception of urban space, and the visual components of Sinclair's texts. This chapter also identifies the strategies Sinclair uses to improve the effects of the ‘semantic drag’, which is a retardation of the narrative and syntactic flow caused by the intensity of the individual sentence.

In 1906, the Liberals won a landslide General Election victory. Once again they found themselves in a position to make their mark on the future direction of the drink question. This time, there was no ambivalence from the leadership about the importance which they attached to new drink legislation, and two years after coming to power they introduced a radical new Licensing Bill. Conscious perhaps that it would play well with the public, but also acting in defence of their own previous legislation, the Tory-dominated Upper House refused to accept the licensing legislation. It was another blow for temperance-minded Liberals and one which confirmed the deep distrust felt by the Liberal Party towards the Lords as a whole. In England, the flagging fortunes of political temperance were revived by war. This chapter examines the nationalisation of the entire drinks industry in Britain during World War I, along with socialism and the drink question, the creation of a Central Control Board to oversee the liquor trade, and the promotion of sobriety through improvement of pubs.

This chapter takes a look at the ghost stories of M.R. James. It studies the way the seemingly conservative Victorian and Edwardian world of James's tales hides a critique of an apparently amoral modernism. It notes that some of his tales put certain demands on readers, and reveals that James suggests that the donnish world is truly Gothic due to its consideration of the unfolding pictorial Gothic narrative. This chapter also discusses how the modernist literary culture of the 1920s can be re-read through a discourse of spectrality.

This concluding chapter reviews the different ways of reading the political significance of the spectre during a time when a number of political issues were communicated and reconstituted into other—ghostly—forms. It shows how Dickens, Riddell and Collins explore the way consciousness within a money-based society was created as if it were like money. It then considers the narratives on national and colonial identities that were opened up by studies of the spectral, and shows how to read spectrality. This chapter also discusses fictional spectres and spirit messages.

The single factor which distinguished the Victorian temperance movement from the raft of anti-drink activity that preceded it was the emergence of organised temperance societies. That is, local, and later national, associations whose defining feature was their goal of reducing or eradicating alcohol consumption across society. Evangelicalism was spreading the message of organised social and moral reform at the same time as increasing numbers of individuals who were publicly mooting the idea of partial or even total abstinence from alcoholic drinks. However, it was the ‘fusion of the idea of association with the idea of abstinence’ which was needed to kick-start the temperance campaign. In post-colonial America, as in Hanoverian England, alcohol consumption tapped into deep-set concerns about both freedom and national identity. Organised teetotalism was a revolutionary idea, especially among the working class. It was after the teetotallers conjured up their vision of a sober millennium that it became possible to think about entirely new levels of social and political freedom as being achieved through sobriety.

By 1918, the drink question in England had been transformed. The establishment of the Central Control Board (CCB) had shown that it was possible to impose central planning on the drinks trade. The CCB had encouraged leading brewers to work with the government in setting alcohol policy, rather than viewing legislation as a perennial threat. Levels of overall beer consumption had plummeted, from an average annual consumption of 214 pints per person at the start of the century to just 80 by the time of World War I. Beer was more expensive, it was weaker, and pubs faced unprecedented levels of competition from new forms of entertainment such as the cinema and organised sports. The most significant response to the post-war malaise within the brewing industry was driven by two brewing companies who had been closely involved with the work of the CCB: Whitbread, and Mitchells and Butlers. This chapter explores drinking places and popular culture in Britain, beer and Britishness, temperance movement, market forces, the consolidation of the brewing industry, and the development of new drinks.

This chapter introduces the ghost story, which previously incorporated a wide range of serious social issues. It examines the development of the belief in ghosts from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. It then tries to explain how to read the spectre, before ending with a detailed summary of the next eight chapters.

This chapter examines a theory of spectrality that relates it to a specific field of economics. It shows that the connections between economics and the ghostly relate to the perception of paper money, at a time when such promissory notes were redeemed for gold. It reveals that paper money was previously considered as spectral money (not ‘real’), and like ghosts had a liminal presence. This chapter also aims to present a new theorisation of the spectral that allows a re-reading of the economic contexts of the nineteenth century.

This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.

This chapter summarises Charles Dickens's view of the ghost story. It presents some close readings of A Christmas Carol, ‘The Signalman’ and ‘A December Vision’. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses ghosts to critique the economic system and to pardon capitalism. In ‘A December Vision’, Dickens tries to represent the ghost of the industrial economy as it spreads poverty throughout the country. Finally, it shows that Dickens's fascination with the allegorical mode of the ghost story and the ways such allegories can be read are addressed in ‘The Signalman’.

This chapter studies images of spectrality that can be found in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Haunted Hotel. It determines that Collins believed that money immorally or illegally acquired makes the self ghostly and visible to the amorality of the economic system. It then introduces ‘The Ghost in the Bank of England’, where Collins addresses the relationship between paper money and the ghostly.

The 1830 Beer Act triggered the most intense period of public debate on alcohol since the 1750s and radicalised the temperance movement in Britain. The appearance of prohibitionism would split the temperance movement, but it would also bring to a head the questions of liberty and State regulation. For all its fiery rhetoric, British teetotalism made little impact on actual levels of alcohol consumption. Moderate drinking threatened to undermine the whole temperance project by showing that alcohol was not inherently destructive. The Maine Law of 1851 sidestepped the limitations of moral suasionism by identifying the source of the problem not in drinkers, but in the drinks trade itself. There was the optimistic notion that, freed from the undue influence of the State, individuals will automatically choose to indulge their ‘higher’ faculties — something which, in the context of the debates over prohibition, presupposed a reasonable level of sobriety. However, what was left out of the equation on all sides was the possibility that drunkenness might sometimes be — to put it simply — a good thing.