ASIN: B00ATHLFQW
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Pages: 12
Mary Ann Beard (1831-1883) wrote The Church Lane Ghost as a short, comic poem in the style of Robert Bloomfield’s The Fakenham Ghost. It was printed in 1867 by J Thurston of Maryport Street, Bristol, but is now difficult to locate. This present edition aims to make the poem available to a new generation.Bloomfield’s poem The Fakenham Ghost is indirectly acknowledged in The Church Lane Ghost by the reference to “Fakenham’s dame”, Bloomfield’s heroine. This poem, first published in 1802, circulated widely in the first half of the nineteenth century, frequently printed in editions intended for children. Mary Ann Beard may well have regarded her own poem as being primarily for children. The “sheeted dead” of the poem is a quotation from Horatio’s speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1.The setting for The Church Lane Ghost appears to be the Church Lane of Rudgeway, Olveston, now the ...
