Published in 1869 by George MacDonald, this is the story of Uncle Cornelius, who is saved from making a bad match by witnessing a ghost — possibly of the past, possibly of the future.
The story Uncle Cornelius tells includes ...
- Classy Cane: Cornelius carries a knobbed walking-stick, which he may well need as a prop, given that he is somewhere in his sixties in Victorian Britain. Given that he's also an occult adventurer, it may well have other purposes.
- Cool Old Guy: "Uncle Cornie" is highly-intelligent, full of fascinating tales, and fond of telling them to his nephews and nieces.
- Cosmic Horror: Uncle Cornelius speculates that our visions of mythical monsters may come from strange spectral survivals of some sort of life before the organic life with which paleontologists are familiar.Uncle Cornelius: What if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the Earth's history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the world, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet invisible; and when, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, Gorgons and Chimerae dire, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating world upon that one which was being born of it ...
- Cute Ghost Girl: Although the ghost is of an elderly woman, even in his twenties Cornelius finds her more attractive than terrifying. This may be because he thinks Nerds Are Sexy.
- Framing Story: Sometime in the 1860's, old Uncle Cornelius tells his nephews and nieces a tale of how he wooed a woman and saw a ghost back in 1820, when he was a young man.
- Gentleman and a Scholar: Uncle Cornelius is well-to-do, polite, and highly erudite.
- Icy Gray Eyes: Uncle Cornelius has "large gray eyes" which highlight his intellectualism.
- Nerds Are Sexy: Seems to be one of the main reasons for the romance between Cornelius and Laetitia; they are both highly intelligent.
- Interestingly, Cornelius also finds something beautiful about the old female ghost, who may have had a very similar personality to Laetitia's.
- Nested Story: The main story, set in 1820, is related by Uncle Cornelius to his nieces and nephews sometime in the 1860's.
- Old Maid: Laetitia's fate, after Cornelius loses interest in her. We don't know if she had any other suitors, but she dies, apparently still single, just before the events of the Framing Story, in the 1860's.
- This may also have been the fate of the old woman whose ghost Cornelius saw.
- Red Herring: Cornelius' long speculation about myths originating from bizarre prehuman cycles of life on Earth has absolutely nothing to do with the main story, which is about his encounter with what appears to be a perfectly "normal" ghost.
- Regency England: The Nested Story takes place in 1820, when old Uncle Cornelius was a young man.
- Smart People Wear Glasses: Uncle Cornelius wears "spectacles of the most delicate hair-steel, with the largest pebble-eyes that ever were seen."
