Compare and contrast the ways in which the writers present the supernatural and mysterious in a set of 19th century short stories.

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English Literature Unit 2: compare and contrast the ways in which the writers present the supernatural and mysterious in a set of 19th century short stories

   Before 1914, and the First World War, the world was a completely different place. In the 19th Century, there were far fewer people in the world, at just under six billion (and there are now approximately six and a half billion). This meant that there would have been fewer towns and cities, and more people would have lived in the countryside.

   But as the years went by, the population in towns went up, but the size of towns remained the same, meaning they became more cluttered. Because people were living in close proximity, germs and viruses were spread very easily rapidly. The towns, being so cramped, dirty and foul smelling, lead to diseases going round them like wildfire, such as cholera and plague. But as microbiology was so primitive, only the cleverest people knew that it was minute creatures that were causing the illness. Others didn’t know what it was, and often blamed it on supernatural creatures, and the work of the devil. This may have been why people started writing stories about these supernatural beings torturing them and doing unearthly things. This could have lead to the beginning of the supernatural, horror and gothic genre.

   I have recently studied four short stories in this genre: The Monkey’s Paw, by W.W. Jacobs, The Red Room, by H.G. Wells, The Signalman, by Charles Dickens, and A Terribly Strange Bed, by Wilkie Collins. I then went back to thoroughly restudy The Red Room and A Terribly Strange Bed.

   ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ and ‘The Red Room’ are both set in the mid 19th century which is what I believe to be a very dark era. This is because after it went dark, the only way you could see what you were doing, and what was ahead of you was the by the light of a naked flame. Naked flames don’t give out a lot of light, and it would be hard to see your way around at night; night-time was a time when a lot of mysterious happenings occurred. A Terribly Strange Story is a dark story about death, deceit and cold-blooded killings. The Red Room concerns the themes of ghosts, ghouls and the supernatural.

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   In ‘The Red Room’, a young man has come to investigate strange ghostly happenings in the famous Red Room in gothic castle (Lorraine Castle). Three odd pensioners, simply known as ‘the man with the withered arm’, ‘the old women’ and ‘the man with the shade’, look after the castle. Wells describes them so well, that it can make the reader feel as if they have actually seen them. He describes ‘the man with the shade’ as ‘more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself with a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a ...

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