A straight-up Victorian ghost tale, no chaser: no framing or distancing devices, no rationalist explaining away, just first-hand reports of supernatural phenomena — this is the unabashed ghostly. With its use of the haunted portrait, this tale has affinities with Oscar Wilde's classic The Picture of Dorian Gray and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait," to say nothing of the portrait-come-alive episode in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. This is also another Victorian Christmas ghost tale; it was first published in Frozen In, a series related in a snow-storm, the 1869 Christmas edition of Bow Bells Annual (Cox & Gilbert, Victorian Ghost Stories [Oxford UP, 1991], 491). Appropriately enough for a winter's tale (oops, no, that's Shakespeare), this is yet another C19 Gothic-tradition work (cf. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Captain of the Pole-Star") that features ships in icy Arctic waters, a reflection, no doubt, of C19 British maritime mastery and the economically driven desire to find the Northwest Passage — to say nothing of the profitability of the whaling trade, which figures in Doyle's story. Yet Hood's tale goes beyond that, with its interrogation of the ability of The Law to reach into those remote corners of the world where the Union Jack waved....