But they were also men of imagination, curiosity, and wit, and the variety lies in the different approaches to supernatural fiction: here you’ll find tales of ghostly retribution and black magic spatterings of gore and glimpses “beyond the veil”. The authors whose works appear in these pages are not a diverse group: they were the privately educated sons of bankers, lawyers, schoolmasters, and clergymen, who would themselves go on to careers in academia, journalism, the army and the church. But it is the first to look more widely at the contributions that other club members made to the genre. James reading his ghost stories out loud. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat is not the first book to celebrate this momentous event in the history of supernatural literature, the earliest dated record we have of M. So instead, ten current members and one guest gathered in the rooms of the Junior Dean of King’s College and listened-with increasing absorption one suspects-as their host read “Two Ghost Stories”. Ramsay, had failed to make the necessary arrangements, however.
On the evening of Saturday, 28 October 1893, members past and present ought to have been enjoying a dinner in celebration of the club’s recently held 600th meeting.
It’s true that membership was only ever drawn from undergraduates and staff of Cambridge University, but the name was subject to variation, and it was for an evening of supernatural storytelling rather than rational conversation that the Chit-Chat has earned its modest place in the history of English literature. This rule, the first in the founding charter of the Chit-Chat, was not always strictly observed during the thirty-seven years of the club’s existence. “Preface” to Ghosts of the Chit-Chat by Robert Lloyd Parry