Adelaide Sophia Claxton, The Party on the Stairs (c. 1875). Watercolour with bodycolour, 50 × 45 cm. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
The staircase is one of those odd places in a house where something uncanny always threatens to happen. One’s neither in the drawing room nor the bedroom, but somewhere in the thin air between – a suspended purgatory where secrets whisper through the bannisters. It’s here that Adelaide Claxton, Victorian watercolourist, daughter of the painter Marshall Claxton, and, curiously enough, an inventor of sorts, sets her stage. The Party on the Stairs (c. 1875) is less a picture than a séance on paper: a small girl, barefoot in her nightdress, finger pressed to her lips, has stumbled upon a gathering of ghosts.
These spectres aren’t the vulgar sheeted kind but figures of fashion – women in gowns, hair coiffed, faces delicately blurred, as though Time itself had grown tired of their chatter and smudged them into memory. They’re translucent but not absent, shaded in muted tones that suggest both presence and fading. The staircase curves, receding into darkness, and we feel what the girl must feel: curiosity stitched to dread. She is at once witness, intruder, and perhaps even guest at this spectral soirée.
Claxton’s technique is worth lingering over. Watercolour with bodycolour allows a peculiar balance: transparency for the ghosts, opacity for the living. Her brush seems to breathe the supernatural into existence – soft, vaporous lines for the apparitions, firmer strokes for the child. The composition draws our eye diagonally: the stair rail pulling us upward into shadow, our attention caught midway by the pale dress of the child, before sliding to the dim huddle of the ghostly party.
Notice the play of gesture. The child’s finger-to-lips is a brilliant stroke: it’s not fear in the Gothic-scream sense, but a command for silence, as though she herself has authority over the scene. The ghosts, meanwhile, are oddly social, conversing among themselves rather than staring at us with hollow eyes. They’re, one might say, more interested in their own company than in haunting the living. This is where Claxton’s humour and satirical eye slip through. She’d worked for magazines, after all, and her brush often winked at the absurdities of society. The ghosts on the stairs are society ladies still clinging to the eternal soirée, unable to give up their place on the guest list, even after death.
Is this not the perfect allegory for our age – the dead still talking while the living tiptoe past in silence? The girl’s innocence itself, barefoot, hair loose, the raw material of life not yet tailored into social costume. The ghosts are the opposite: dress, posture, etiquette, all fuss without substance. Shakespeare would’ve smiled: we’re indeed such stuff as dreams are made on, but Claxton sharpens the irony – these dreams gossip, fuss, and chatter endlessly, like Austen’s worst tea-table bores risen from the grave.
One might even read this as a child’s first encounter with History – capital H, powdered wigs and all. The past is always having its parties, its banquets, its revolutions, and the young must creep down the stairs of Time to peer at the commotion. The question is whether we tiptoe back to bed or walk down and join the dance.
Freud, though not yet born when Claxton painted this, would have leapt on the symbolism: the staircase as liminal passage between unconscious and conscious, the child’s confrontation with the uncanny, the ghosts as repressed memories of the household. Nietzsche might have enjoyed the satire – the will-to-party persisting even beyond the grave, a parody of the will-to-power. And the Bible, ever more succinct than philosophers, has Christ declaring: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’ (John 14:2). Claxton seems to add, ‘and many staircases – on which ghosts still loiter.’
The Party on the Stairs is not just a Victorian curiosity. It’s a painting that teaches us to look at thresholds: the moment between childhood and adulthood, the slip between past and present, the fragile step between the ordinary and the otherworldly. Claxton balances humour with eeriness, producing a work both playful and profound.
It is, in short, a party to which we’re all invited. Some arrive barefoot and wide-eyed; others arrive overdressed, late, and dead.
Wording 
