English Book Club: ‘The Canterville Ghost’ by Oscar Wilde

The Canterville Ghost is a short story by Oscar Wilde. It was the first of Wilde’s stories to be published.

The story is about a family who moves to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead nobleman, who killed his wife and was starved to death by his wife’s brothers.

The story begins when Mr Otis and family move into Canterville Chase, despite warnings from Lord Canterville that the house is haunted. Mr Otis says that he will take the furniture as well as the ghost at valuation.

At first, none of the Otis family believe in ghosts, but shortly after they move in, none of them can deny the presence of Sir Simon de Canterville. The family hears clanking chains, they witness reappearing bloodstains “on the floor just by the fireplace”, which are removed every time they appear in various forms.

But, humorously, none of these scare the Otis family in the least. In fact, upon hearing the clanking noises in the hallway, Mr Otis promptly gets out of bed and pragmatically offers the ghost Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator to oil his chains. Despite the ghost’s efforts to appear in the most gruesome guises, the family refuses to be frightened, and Sir Simon feels increasingly helpless and humiliated.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. Wilde’s mother was of Italian descent. Until he was nine, Oscar Wilde was educated at home, where a French bonne and a German governess taught him their languages. He then attended Portora Royal School. Wilde left Portora with a royal scholarship to read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874 and afterwards, he moves to England and join the Oxford Union.

In London, he was introduced to Constance Lloyd and the couple married in 1884.

After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still being performed in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The charge carried a penalty of up to two years in prison.

In 1897, in prison, he wrote De Profundis, which was published in 1905, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46.

 

The Canterville Ghost has inspired many cinema adaptations. The first one was released in 1944 and was directed by Jules Dassin and starred by Charles Laughton. Ther have been many other minor adaptions and in 2017 will be presented a new one, an animation movie which will have the voices of outstanding british actos like Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

You can find his books (in catalan and spanish and in english too) at Biblioteques de Vilanova catalogue: Oscar Wilde

The English Book Club will meet again to coment this book on saturday April 1st.

Here you can see a feature clip of the first original movie.