14 Letter to Gordon Carey, 28 Jan. 1917: KCC MS MRJ:F/4.
15 James, ‘Some Remarks on “The Head of John the Baptist”’, Classical Review, 31/1 (Feb. 1917), 4.
16 Pfaff, James, 401.
17 Ibid.
18 Morris, King’s College, 63.
19 Cox, M. R. James, 174.
20 James, Eton and King’s, 13.
21 Ibid. 58.
22 M. R. James, ed. and trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924), pp. xi–xii: ‘It will very quickly be seen that there is no question of any one’s having excluded [the Apocryphal Gospels] from the New Testament. They have done that for themselves.’
23 Cox, M. R. James, 40, 111, 125.
24 Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1985).
25 Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Literature, 1914–1925 (Cardiff, 2009), 124, 129.
26 Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London, 1977), 124.
27 Mary Butts, ‘The Art of Montagu James’, London Mercury, 29 (Feb. 1934). For James’s response, see Cox, M. R. James, 141.
28 Michael Cox, for example, believes that ‘We can talk glibly about his being a “repressed homosexual”, but this seems a hopelessly inadequate summation of the complex cultural and personal factors behind his resistance to marriage’, and warns against ‘psycho-critical speculation’ (Cox, M. R. James, 165, 149). See also David G. Rowlands, ‘M. R. James’s Women’, in S. T. Joshi and Rosemary Pardoe (eds.), Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James (New York, 2007), 138.
29 Cox, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiv.
30 M. R. James, Introduction to James McBryde, The Story of a Troll Hunt (Cambridge, 1904).
31 Cox, M. R. James, 128.
32 Ibid. 55, 59, 132. For an account of James which in some ways parallels my own thinking here and in my reading of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, see Mike Pincombe, ‘Homosexual Panic and the English Ghost Story: M. R. James and Others’, in Joshi and Pardoe (eds.). Warnings to the Curious, 184–96.
33 Pincombe, ‘Homosexual Panic’, 188–91.
34 The analysis of these stories draws on important aspects of the feminist analysis of horror, in particular the ideas of Barbara Creed, and the hugely influential theories of Julia Kristeva. See e.g. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London, 1993); Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York, 1982).
35 Cox, M. R. James, 109.
36 James, Eton and King’s, 25.
37 Briggs, Night Visitors, 14.
38 George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, in Essays, ed. John Carey (London, 2002), 293.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE text for the majority of the stories here is based on the 1931 Collected Ghost Stories, overseen by M. R. James for publication. Where there are obvious errors, I have silently corrected them. Where available, I have consulted original manuscript sources, and have discussed substantive differences between MS and published versions in the Explanatory Notes. For the last three stories, published after the appearance of the Collected Ghost Stories (‘The Experiment’, ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’, ‘A Vignette’), I have used the earliest printed versions of the stories.
Details of composition and first publication can be found in the Explanatory Notes to the individual stories at the back of the book. Asterisks in the text refer to these notes; all footnotes are by M. R. James.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biography
Cox, Michael, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford, 1986). The most invaluable work for any student of James.
Lubbock, S. G., M. R. James (Cambridge, 1939). A personal memoir, written shortly after MRJ’s death.
Pfaff, Richard William, Montague Rhodes James (London, 1980). An exhaustive account of James’s scholarship.
Critical Studies
Carroll, Jane Suzanne, ‘A “dramar in real life”: Freaky Dolls, M. R. James and Modern Children’s Ghost Stories’, in Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie-Anne Stevens (eds.), The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre (Dublin, 2010), 251–65.
Cowlinshaw, Brian, ‘“A Warning top the Curious”: Victorian Science and the Awful Unconscious in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories’, Victorian Newsletter, 94 (Fall 2000), 749–71.
Fielding, Penny, ‘Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernity’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46 (2000), 36–42.
James, M. R., A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings, ed. Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden (Ashcroft, British Columbia, 2001), gathers together all of James’s stories and relevant writings, plus many very useful scholarly essays on aspects of his work.
Joshi, S. T., and Pardoe, Rosemary (eds.), Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James (New York, 2007), is a collection of essays on James.
Mason, Michael, ‘On Not Letting Them Lie: Moral Significance in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James’, Studies in Short Fiction, 19 (1982), 253–60.
Michalski, Robert, ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Exchange in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories’, Extrapolation, 37 (Spring 1996), 46–62.
O’Briain, Helen Conrad, ‘“The gates of hell shall not prevail against it”: Laudian Ecclesia and Victorian Culture Wars in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James’, in O’Briain and Stevens (eds.), The Ghost Story, 47–60.
Young, B. W., The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History (Oxford, 2000), contains a chapter on James’s ‘Hanoverian Hauntings’.
No writer on James can ignore the indefatigable work of Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe, editors of the M. R. James newsletter and journal Ghosts & Scholars, a mine of notes, observations, and textual archaeology.
On the Ghost Story and the Supernatural
Briggs, Julia, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London, 1977).
O’Briain, Helen Conrad, and Stevens, Julie-Anne (eds.), The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre (Dublin, 2010).
Davies, Owen, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (London, 2007).
Killeen, Jarlath, Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff, 2009).
Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1985).
Russell, Jeffrey Burton, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca, NY, 1977).
Smith, Andrew, The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester, 2010).
Sullivan, Jack, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, Ohio, 1978).
Westwood, Jennifer, and Simpson, Jacqueline The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London, 2005).
Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, the Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (London, 2001).
A CHRONOLOGY OF M. R. JAMES
Life
Historical and Cultural Background
1862 MRJ born in Goodnestone, Kent.
Wilkie Collins, No Name; Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies.
1865 James family move to Great Livermere, Suffolk.
Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats born.
1873 Enters Temple Grove School.
Death of Sheridan Le Fanu; John Henry Newman, Idea of a University.
1876 Enters Eton as King’s Scholar.
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
1882 Newcastle Scholar, Eton; enters King’s College, Cambridge.
Death of Charles Darwin; Society for Psychical Research (SPR) founded.
1885 Graduates with Firsts in both parts of the Tripos.
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; birth of D. H. Lawrence.
1886 Appointed assistant director of Fitzwilliam Muse
um, Cambridge.
Gladstone prime minister for third time; Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Haggard, She; Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
1887 Awarded Fellowship at King’s, for dissertation on the Apocalypse of Peter.
Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.
1889 Becomes dean of King’s.
1892 Visits St Bertrand de Comminges and St Michan’s church, Dublin.
Gladstone prime minister for fourth time; death of Tennyson.
1893 Appointed director of Fitzwilliam Museum; reads ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘Lost Hearts’ to Chitchat Society.
1895 Awarded D. Litt. degree; publishes first MS catalogue; ‘Canon Alberic’ and ‘Lost Hearts’ published.
Oscar Wilde trial; Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan.
1899 Visits Denmark with James McBryde and Will Stone.
Boer War; Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim.
1900 Tutor of King’s; second Danish holiday with McBryde and Stone.
Boxer Rebellion; British Labour Party founded; death of Oscar Wilde.
1901 Visits Sweden.
Death of Queen Victoria and accession of Edward VII; Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
1904 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; death of James McBryde.
Conrad, Nostromo; Barrie, Peter Pan.
1905 Elected provost of King’s; ‘The Edwin Drood Syndicate’.
Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity.
1911 More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.
Conrad, Under Western Eyes; D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock; Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden; Albert Einstein, General Theory of Relativity.
1913 Becomes vice-chancellor of Cambridge University.
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Sax Rohmer, The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way.
1918 Becomes provost of Eton.
First World War ends; Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians; Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West.
1919 A Thin Ghost and Others.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’; John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
1922 The Five Jars.
James Joyce, Ulysses; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land; F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu; Benjamin Christensen, Häxän; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Irish independence and civil war; BBC formed.
1924 The Apocryphal New Testament.
Death of V. I. Lenin; Josef Stalin assumes power in Russia; E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain.
1925 Abbeys; A Warning to the Curious.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; P. G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf; Benito Mussolini declares himself dictator of Italy.
1926 Eton and King’s.
British General Strike; Francisco Franco declares himself dictator of Spain; birth of Queen Elizabeth II; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; John Logie Baird demonstrates television.
1928 Limited edition of Wailing Well.
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’; Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf; Walt Disney, Steamboat Willie.
1930 Awarded the Order of Merit; Suffolk and Norfolk.
Haile Selassie crowned Emperor of Abyssinia; Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.
1931 The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves; James Whale, Frankenstein; Tod Browning, Dracula.
1936 MRJ dies on 12 June, at Eton.
Italy annexes Abyssinia; Berlin Olympics; Dylan Thomas, Twenty-Five Poems; Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn; Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza; William Cameron Menzies, Things to Come.
THE GHOST STORIES
CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK
ST. BERTRAND DE COMMINGES* is a decayed town on the spurs of the Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to Bagnères-de-Luchon. It was the site of a bishopric until the Revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of tourists. In the spring of 1883 an Englishman arrived at this old-world place—I can hardly dignify it with the name of city, for there are not a thousand inhabitants. He was a Cambridge man, who had come specially from Toulouse to see St. Bertrand’s Church, and had left two friends, who were less keen archæologists than himself, in their hotel at Toulouse, under promise to join him on the following morning. Half an hour at the church would satisfy them, and all three could then pursue their journey in the direction of Auch. But our Englishman had come early on the day in question, and proposed to himself to fill a notebook and to use several dozens of plates in the process of describing and photographing every corner of the wonderful church that dominates the little hill of Comminges. In order to carry out this design satisfactorily, it was necessary to monopolize the verger of the church for the day. The verger or sacristan* (I prefer the latter appellation, inaccurate as it may be) was accordingly sent for by the somewhat brusque lady who keeps the inn of the Chapeau Rouge; and when he came, the Englishman found him an unexpectedly interesting object of study. It was not in the personal appearance of the little, dry, wizened old man that the interest lay, for he was precisely like dozens of other church-guardians in France, but in a curious furtive, or rather hunted and oppressed, air which he had. He was perpetually half glancing behind him; the muscles of his back and shoulders seemed to be hunched in a continual nervous contraction, as if he were expecting every moment to find himself in the clutch of an enemy. The Englishman hardly knew whether to put him down as a man haunted by a fixed delusion, or as one oppressed by a guilty conscience, or as an unbearably henpecked husband. The probabilities, when reckoned up, certainly pointed to the last idea; but, still, the impression conveyed was that of a more formidable persecutor even than a termagant wife.
However, the Englishman (let us call him Dennistoun)* was soon too deep in his notebook and too busy with his camera to give more than an occasional glance to the sacristan. Whenever he did look at him, he found him at no great distance, either huddling himself back against the wall or crouching in one of the gorgeous stalls. Dennistoun became rather fidgety after a time. Mingled suspicions that he was keeping the old man from his déjeuner, that he was regarded as likely to make away with St. Bertrand’s ivory crozier, or with the dusty stuffed crocodile* that hangs over the font, began to torment him.
‘Won’t you go home?’ he said at last; ‘I’m quite well able to finish my notes alone; you can lock me in if you like. I shall want at least two hours more here, and it must be cold for you, isn’t it?’
‘Good heavens!’ said the little man, whom the suggestion seemed to throw into a state of unaccountable terror, ‘such a thing cannot be thought of for a moment. Leave monsieur alone in the church? No, no; two hours, three hours, all will be the same to me. I have breakfasted, I am not at all cold, with many thanks to monsieur.’
‘Very well, my little man,’ quoth Dennistoun to himself: ‘you have been warned, and you must take the consequences.’
Before the expiration of the two hours, the stalls, the enormous dilapidated organ, the choir-screen of Bishop John de Mauléon,* the remnants of glass and tapestry, and the objects in the treasure-chamber, had been well and truly examined; the sacristan still keeping at Dennistoun’s heels, and every now and then whipping round as if he had been stung, when one or other of the strange noises that trouble a large empty building fell on his ear. Curious noises they were sometimes.
‘Once,’ Dennistoun said to me, ‘I could have sworn I heard a thin metallic voice laughing high up in the tower. I darted an inquiring glance at my sacristan. He was white to the lips. “It is he—that is—it is no one; the door is locked,??
? was all he said, and we looked at each other for a full minute.’
Another little incident puzzled Dennistoun a good deal. He was examining a large dark picture that hangs behind the altar, one of a series illustrating the miracles of St. Bertrand. The composition of the picture is wellnigh indecipherable, but there is a Latin legend below, which runs thus:
‘Qualiter S. Bertrandus liberavit hominem quem diabolus diu volebat strangulare.’ (How St. Bertrand delivered a man whom the Devil long sought to strangle.)*
Dennistoun was turning to the sacristan with a smile and a jocular remark of some sort on his lips, but he was confounded to see the old man on his knees, gazing at the picture with the eye of a suppliant in agony, his hands tightly clasped, and a rain of tears on his cheeks. Dennistoun naturally pretended to have noticed nothing, but the question would not [go] away from him, ‘Why should a daub of this kind affect anyone so strongly?’ He seemed to himself to be getting some sort of clue to the reason of the strange look that had been puzzling him all the day: the man must be a monomaniac; but what was his monomania?