The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

"The Dream Woman" (1855)  

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

“The Dream Woman” was written by Wilkie Collins and first appeared as “The Ostler” in Household Words (Christmas Number, 1855). Collins (1824-1889), an English novelist and opium addict, wrote mysteries and sensation novels. Unlike most mid-level novelists of his era, Collins is still well-thought-of and read today. “The Dream Woman” is an entertaining story of a pastoral haunting.

Isaac Scatchard is a withered old man with sorrow in his past. As a younger man, in his late 30s, he was notoriously unlucky with jobs, always through no fault of his own. At the time he had never had a sweetheart, and in fact the only thing good about his life was his dear mother. One night Isaac is awakened by a dreadful series of sensations and sees a woman with a knife in her hand about to stab him. She lunges at him twice, but he rolls out of the way each time. The candle lighting the room goes out, and when Isaac relights the candle the woman has vanished. Isaac is frightened by this dream. So is his mother, who demands from Isaac all the details from the dream, especially about the woman’s looks. As time passes Isaac forgets about the dream, although his mother does not. Some months later Isaac prevents a woman, Rebecca Murdoch, from killing herself. Isaac falls in love with Rebecca and brings her home to meet his mother. Mrs. Scatchard is horrified, because Rebecca completely resembles the murderous woman Isaac saw in his dream. But Isaac is in love with Rebecca, and he marries her, despite the fact that Mrs. Scatchard always avoids her daughter-in-law. Eventually Isaac’s relationship with Rebecca sours. They fight, and he ends up hitting her, and she stalks out of the house, vowing never to see him again. That night Isaac feels the same frightening sensations that he did before his first vision, and when he awakens he sees Rebecca standing next to his bed with the knife in her hand. He stops her from stabbing him and then leaves his house and sells it. But when he looks for Rebecca she has disappeared, and the police are unable to locate her. Since then he has dreamed about her almost every night. His sleep is troubled, for he is sure that she is looking for him.

In 1873 Collins revised and expanded “The Dream Woman” for a public reading, giving Rebecca a disreputable backstory as a husband-murdering femme fatale (see: Fatal Woman) and depicting her as ultimately succeeding in killing Isaac.

It clearly offended some of Collins’ audience and the local press when he read it in Philadelphia in October 1873: “It was not pleasant to hear a famous Englishman describing, before several hundred pure girls, how one wretched, fallen woman, after mysteriously killing her man, had captivated two more, and stabbed another to death in a drunken frenzy.”¹ 

“The Dream Woman” is entertaining if not outstanding. Collins conjures up a rural atmosphere and concisely brings Isaac to life. Collins’ style is a readable one, and the basic scenario is a good one for a horror story, and the open-ended denouement of the story is significantly ahead of its time. But to call the story a “classic,” as some critics do, is to over-estimate the virtues of “The Dream Woman.” It’s simply a well-written mid-Victorian ghost story, and one that, in its insertion of murder into the domestic sphere, is a clear anticipation of the later sensation novels which Collins would virtually invent with The Woman in White. (The 1873 revision of “The Dream Woman” ties it much tighter to the sensation genre, but after the genre had gone through its most fruitful period and was beginning to wane).

Recommended Edition

Print: Otto Penzler, ed., The Big Book of Ghost Stories. New York: Vintage Crime, 2012.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008719899