19th century A. S. Harvey praises the story in
Lady Windermere's Fan' & the further Teaching of Oscar Wilde" for
The Ludgate Monthly in 1892, writing, "The humor of the professional funny man is a different kind of humour altogether to the quaint fun of 'The Canterville Ghost,' ... It makes you scream again, when you imagined it was serious for a moment, and finishes up with the sweetest little touch of pathos imaginable" (p. 260).
William Sharp writes for
The Academy in 1891 that "much the same kind of thing has already been far better done by
Mr. Andrew Lang; but it is disfigured by some stupid vulgarisms". He criticizes Wilde's rude and stereotyping portrayal of Americans, concluding, "It is the perpetration of banalities of this kind which disgusts Englishmen as well as 'cultured Americans'. One should not judge the society of a nation by that of a parish; the company of the elect by the sinners of one's own acquaintance" (p. 194). A critic in
Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art writes in 1891 that both "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and "The Canterville Ghost" have "abundance of humour, if not of novelty", and "an impression that the idea is much better than the treatment of it", due to inconsistency in tone and abrupt style changes. They state that the story is spoiled by the character of the ghost, "who is neither one thing nor the other, neither flesh nor spirit", and that the ending is "absurdly incongruous and out of place" (p. 226).
20th century Philip K. Cohen writes in "Marriages and Murders: 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' and 'The Canterville Ghost, in
The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (1978), that the story shows the misery of a double life and features an "unmasking" – a common feature in Wilde's works – that reveals the suffering of the "anguished sinner", who seeks "the peace that forgiveness brings". Cohen explains the title as expressing the conflict between materialism and idealism, explaining that the Hylo-Idealisists – a small group that emerged in England in the 1870s and 1880s – stood for atheism, so the juxtaposition with the Christian elements of the story aligns with the title "when one interprets its hyphen as an indicator of opposition; Wilde continually stresses the conflict between materialism, represented by the combining form hylo-, and Christian idealism. In this philosophical romance, the idealists overcome obstacles set up by the hylists". Cohen also writes that "The Canterville Ghost" shows Wilde testing the fairy-tale genre, which he wrote more in later. Lydia Reineck Wilburn writes in "Oscar Wilde's 'The Canterville Ghost': The Power of an Audience" (1987) that the story shows Wilde grappling with questions about the function of audience, like how important the audience is and should be to an artist.
21st century Michèle Mendelssohn asserts that the story comments on the English and American cultures through contrasting "American pragmatism and artistocratic English superstitions", (p. 167) "science versus belief, realism versus gothic conventions, and the natural versus the supernatural", (168) and how Virginia saving the day may suggest that American men are weak and shirking their responsibilities in "Notes on Oscar Wilde's Transatlantic Gender Politics" (2012). Nick Freeman writes in "The Victorian Ghost Story" in
The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2012) that "by the late 1880s ... the type of ghost story which had brought pleasant frissons to earlier Victorian readers had become stale and was falling victim to parodists", but that "Wilde somehow combined witty parody with an affecting friendship between the ghost of Sir Simon de Canterville and Virginia Otis" (p. 100). Jarlath Killeen writes in "Braindead: Locating the Gothic" in
The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories (2014) that "the Gothic is reduced to a mechanical and hammy piece of amateur theatrics needing to be put out of its misery by the virginal innocent usually terrorised within it" (p. 55) in the story. Christopher S. Nassaar writes in "Oscar Wilde and the (Attempted) Murder of Conscience" (2014) that the ghost and the twins have no conscious, but that the conscience intervenes in the form of Virginia. She saves the day, but "spoils the fun"; the first part of the story when hijinks ensue is more entertaining (p. 4). Benjamin Morgan states that Wilde satirised the "bland commercialism" (677) Americans included as part of their national identity (p. 685) in "Oscar Wilde's Un-American Tour: Aestheticism, Mormonism, and Transnational Resonance" (2014). Kimberly Lutz cites Cohen and Wilburn in "Serious Comedy? Finding Meaning in 'The Canterville Ghost (2009), adding that death is depicted as a "deserved rest" for "the exhausted actor". Lutz also writes that The Canterville Ghost" parodies actors, dandies, American materialism, aristocratic excess, ghost stories, and Gothic conventions", and describes the comic theme of "the farcical result of the American/British culture clash". ==Adaptations==