To Be Read at Dusk

Five couriers are talking outside a convent on the summit of the Great St Bernard Pass. They are overheard by the narrator, as two of them relate short ghost stories.

One is of a woman who abandons her husband for a man who’d previously appeared in her nightmares, and another is of a man who sees an apparition of his brother, and is thereby warned of his death.

First published in English literary journal The Keepsake in 1852, To Be Read at Dusk is the first of Dickens’ four short stories originally published in 19th-Century periodicals.