Notes
These stories are designed to engender a chill in the listener which is not just due to the season. Stephen Critchlow, a characterful actor, is a collector of ghost stories and relishes putting across those slightly odd moments when things dont just seem to follow the normal process. Charles Dickens was chilling enough in his novels one only has to remember the entry of Magwitch in Great Expectations! but as a writer set deeply in the Victorian era and unashamedly a lover of the melodramatic, it comes as no surprise that one of the greatest classics of the genre was The Signalman. As a medieval scholar of a later period (18621936) M. R. James had a very different temperament but produced a string of classic ghost stories, of which The Mezzotint is one of the best known.
