To Be Read at Dusk

Five couriers sit on a bench outside the convent at the top of the Great St Bernard, watching the sunset drain off the snow, and fall to arguing about things that happen without ghosts. The Genoese tells of an English bride who dreamed, before her wedding, of a dark man's face she had never seen, and then met its owner in Genoa. The German answers with a London merchant who sees his twin brother come into his room in white on the night the brother lies dying miles away. Dickens wrote the piece for The Keepsake in 1852 and lets the tales stand unexplained, as the couriers do. Fifty-eight plates by painters including William Powell Frith and John Atkinson Grimshaw, ranging from moonlit streets to a courtroom, set beside Dickens's tales of uneasy vision and things seen at a distance.