ghost story

This is going to sound pretty stupid, I guess, but, having never really paid much attention to publication dates and the like (I know. I know.) I'm only just realizing that Moby Dick was published within a few years of another of my favorites, A Tale of Two Cities. Which seems kinda nuts to me. Put the two books together, and suddenly Dickens looks so ... quaint. Old-fashioned. And his novel is the later of the two.

And yet the same ghost haunts both books.

The ghost in question is the infamous Cock-Lane ghost, a visitant who predates both M.D. and A.T.O.T.C by about a century. Haunting the Cock-Lane alleyway near Smithfield market in London, Elizabeth Lynes (or her sister Fanny, depending on which story you read) communicated with residents of an apartment by way of scratches and taps -- earning the ghost the unfortunate nickname, "Scratching Fanny." Her shenanigans almost got her husband charged with murder. That is, until the landlord's daughter was caught with wooden clappers up her dress. (Goodness, what an odd sentence to type.)

Dickens makes use of Scratching Fanny to deepen the satirical tone of his first chapter (that's right, the one beginning, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..."). In setting the historical scene for his tale, Dickens hints that people never seem to change or, more specifically, to wise up, writing:

"Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs."

Seances were rather fashionable at the time Dickens was writing. He was not a believer.

Melville, though, doesn't poke fun. When Ishmael addresses the reader at the end of chapter 69, his tone is nothing short of ominous:

"Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them."

Chapter 69 is called "The Funeral," and it comes at the end of several chapters detailing the pursuit, slaying and skinning (for lack of a better word) of a sperm whale. Once the layers of blubber have been removed, the pale carcass is cut loose from the Pequod to float in the ocean, beset from below by ravenous sharks and from above by predatory birds. Here is the passage that precedes Ishmael's reference to the Cock-Lane ghost:

"Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log -- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place ..."

To quote John Gardner's Grendel, "I sense some riddle in it."