Phantasmagoria (poem)

"Phantasmagoria" is a narrative discussion written in seven cantos between a ghost (a Phantom) and a man named Tibbets.

The narrator has come home one evening to find something "white and wavy" in his dimly lit room.

Hearing a sneeze, he addresses the Phantom, a shy creature who has caught a cold, he says, “out there upon the landing”.

In a "ceremonious" call, "First burn a blue or crimson light...then scratch the door or walls" (p. 14).

Ghosts are required to "Protect / the interests of the Victim...To treat him with a grave respect, / And not to contradict him".

He describes Inspector Kobold of the Spectre order, who spends his time at inns where port is served and is thus known as the “Inn-Spectre” (p. 21).

In Canto IV, the ghost makes a reference to Bradshaw’s Railway Guide (which Carroll had parodied as a young child in his “Guida di Braggia”).

Hailing from a long line of ghosts and of the order, the Phantom tells his family tree as such: His father was a Brownie; his mother was a Fairy.

The children were of different stripe – there was a Pixy, two Fays, a Banshee, a Fetch and a Kelpie, a Poltergeist and a Ghoul, two Trolls (“which broke the rule”), a Goblin and a Double, then an Elf, a Phantom, and finally, a Leprechaun.

Ghosts are required to spend a great deal of money on skulls, crossbones, coloured fire, the fitting of robes, and other expenses.

“Not a bit!” – imagine, he tells us, what it would take to satisfy a single child: “There’d be no end to it!” (p. 35).

Cover illustrations on the original book (Morgan Library copy) represent the Crab Nebula in Taurus and Donati's Comet, "Two distinguished members of the Celestial Phantasmagoria".