Dickon the Devil | A Ghost Story by J. Sheridan Le Fanu | A Bitesized Audio Production

Barwyke Hall in Lancashire has remained empty and neglected for some twenty years, following the death of Squire Bowes. When a solicitor is appointed to administer the estate, he hears the strange story which has given the place a bad name, and left it so long untenanted... A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, you may like to consider supporting me on Patreon:   / bitesizedaudio   Or for occasional one-off contributions, you can Buy Me a Coffee here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bitesize... Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish author who was arguably the most important single contributor to the development of the literary ghost story in the Victorian era, hugely influential on future generations of authors including E. F. Benson and M. R. James, who described him as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". He was born in Dublin into a literary family; his mother and grandmother were writers, and his great uncle was the celebrated playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan ('The Rivals' etc), and his niece Rhoda Broughton also became a popular writer of ghost stories in the later 19th century. He wrote in many genres, but his best known works are his contributions to gothic horror and supernatural novels and novellas, including 'Uncle Silas' (1864) and 'Carmilla' (1872), one of the earliest vampire stories. He published many short ghost and mystery stories in various magazines in Ireland and England – including several contributed to Charles Dickens's 'All the Year Round' – from the 1850s through to the early 1870s, although they remained uncollected in book form until 1923 when M. R. James compiled and edited the volume 'Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery', which revived interest in his work some 50 years after Le Fanu's death. 'Dickon the Devil' was Le Fanu's last published ghost story. It first appeared in the Christmas 1872 edition of 'London Society', shortly before he died in February 1873. It was later published in book form in the 1923 collection 'Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery'. Recording © Bitesized Audio 2020.