Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M.R. James

  James also readily admitted that he was often inspired by real locations for the settings for his stories: “If anyone is curious about my local settings, let it be recorded that S. Bertrand de Comminges and Viborg are real places; that in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You,”’ I had Felixstowe in mind; in ‘A School Story,’ Temple Grove, East Sheen; in ‘The Tractate Middoth,’ Cambridge University Library; in ‘Martin’s Close,’ Sampford Courtenay in Devon; that the cathedrals of Barchester and Southminster were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury and Hereford; that Herefordshire was the imagined scene of ‘A View from a Hill,’ and Seaburgh in ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is Aldeburgh in Suffolk.”

  During his research of old texts, he also uncovered and transcribed various tales of hauntings and folklore in the British Museum. These were eventually published in their original Latin as “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” with abundant footnotes by James, in the July 1922 edition of the English Historical Review, not receiving their first English-language publication until 1978, when they were presented in The Man-Wolf and Other Horrors, edited by Hugh Lamb.

  The author’s own belief in the supernatural was, at best, ambivalent. “I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me,” he wrote. During a debate on the existence of ghosts during his early years at Eton, James admitted that he “could not but believe in anything and everything when in bed,” and some years later he remarked to the Irish baronet [Sir John Randolph] Shane Leslie (recounted in the latter’s 1955 Ghost Book), “Some of these things are so, but we do not know the rules!”

  In his 1926 memoir, Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial 1875–1925, James also recalled: “Ghosts and ghostly phenomena are rare in colleges and highly suspect when they do occur. Yet, on the staircase next to mine was a ghostly cry in the bedroom. Other professors knew of it, and knew whose voice it was believed to be—a man who died in 1878.”

  He also revealed that at least one of his tales—possibly “The Rose Garden,” according to a later reminiscence by Montague Summers—was suggested by a vivid dream.

  “Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most shocking forms,” observed H.P. Lovecraft, whose own stories were also often inspired by dreams, “and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome province.”

  “The goblins and phantoms devised by James are truly creative and are presented through images often so keen and vivid as to evoke an actual physical shock,” echoed Clark Ashton Smith. “Sight, smell, hearing, taction, all are played upon with well-nigh surgical sureness, by impressions calculated to touch the shuddering quick of horror.”

  M.R. James continued his Yuletide readings for many years, as his friend S.G. Lubbock recalled in his memoir: “His reading of them aloud was—like his reading of the Bible—entirely untheatrical and immensely effective. In his later years, when the supply of new stories had ceased, he could generally be persuaded to read one of the old ones on Christmas night at King’s, especially as it was youth, in the shape of some choral scholar, that would thrust a volume of them into his hand. He dined at King’s on the Christmas night of 1934 and read us the Punch and Judy story [‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’]; and that was the last.”

  M.R. James’ friends had been urging him for years to publish his ghost stories in book form and, although initially disinclined to the idea, he did eventually agree to have them collected in four hardcover editions, published by Edward Arnold of London.

  The first, Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (the title is hyphenated on the book’s title-page but not the cover), contained eight stories and was published in November 1904 to some somewhat lukewarm reviews, although the reviewer for The Guardian was full in his praise: “In this book are no ordinary hauntings or common-place apparitions, but real, inexplicable, horrid Things belonging to another world, such as might have been summoned by medieval wizards to their own lasting undoing. We do not hesitate to say that these are among the best ghost stories we have ever read.”

  “In this volume,” James later explained, “‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ was written in 1894 [actually, more likely 1893] and printed soon after in the National Review; ‘Lost Hearts’ appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of the next five stories, most of which were read to friends at Christmas-time at King’s College, Cambridge, I only recollect that I wrote ‘Number 13’ in 1899, while ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ was composed in summer 1904.”

  The collection, which also included “The Mezzotint,” “The Ash-tree,” “Count Magnus” and “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” was reprinted the following year by Longmans Green in America.

  “The stories themselves do not make any very exalted claim,” James wrote in his Preface. “If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.”

  About one of the stories included in the book, H.P. Lovecraft wrote: “‘Count Magnus’ is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion.”

  James’ friend, Eustace Talbot, told the author: “You have succeeded in giving me two bad nights and one jumpy walk on a dark foggy evening in the country when every tree became possessed of horrible long arms and every step was dogged by hideous echoes about ten yards behind.”

  Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary also featured four atmospheric illustrations by a close friend of the author, James McBryde. Ten years James’ junior, McBryde had arrived in Cambridge from Shrewsbury in 1893 to read Natural Sciences and the already distinguished academic soon encouraged his new friend’s habit of “dropping in uninvited at a late hour of the evening, and joining a congregation which was usually to be found in the inner room.”

  By 1904, McBryde had enrolled at the University’s Slade, and was studying to become an artist. When it was suggested that he might illustrate James’ first collection of ghost stories, even the author’s interest in the project was rekindled, and he wrote to his young friend: “They are at present in a very rough manuscript. Shall I have them typewritten or bring or send them as they are? Or do you remember any of them well enough to sketch out any ideas?”

  McBryde’s contributions to the book were his first professional commission, and he undertook it with gusto. In May 1904, he wrote to the author: “I don’t think I have ever done anything I liked better than illustrating your stories. To begin with I sat down and learned advanced perspective and the laws of shadows … I have finished the Whistle ghost … I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn …”

  Unfortunately, the artist never lived to see publication. James McBryde died at 9:30 a.m. on the morning of June 5th, a few days after undergoing an apparently routine operation to remove his appendix.

  Only four illustrations had been completed, along with two unfinished drawings for “Count Magnus” and a preliminary sketch for “Number 13.” Another illustration for “The Ash-tree” was planned but never started. However, when the publisher suggested that another artist should be brought in to finish the work, James firmly rejected the idea. Instead, he decided that the volume would stand as a tribute to its illustrator.

  “I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends,” James explained in his Preface to the book, “usually at the season of Christmas. One of these friends offered to illustrate them, and it was agreed that, if he would do that, I would consider the question of publishing them.

  “Four pictures he completed, which will be found in this volume, and then, very quickly and unexpectedly, he was taken away. This is the reason why the greater part of the stories are not provided with illustrations.

  “Those who knew the artist will understand how much I wished to give a permanent
form even to a fragment of his work; others will appreciate the fact that here a remembrance is made of one in whom many friendships centered.”

  That same year, James McBryde’s The Story of a Troll-Hunt was privately published—upon M.R. James’ inducement—in a very limited subscription edition by the University Press, Cambridge, as a memorial to the artist. The illustrated comic fantasy, about three young men setting out to capture a living troll, was based on the bicycle holidays that McBryde, James and another young Cambridge friend, Will (W.J.) Stone, took around Denmark in 1899 and 1900. (These trips also supplied the background material for James’ story “Number 13.”)

  McBryde and his wife Gwendolen had been married for just a year, and James agreed to become legal guardian to their daughter, Jane, who was born six months after her father’s premature death. For the rest of his life, the author maintained a kindly and supportive correspondence with both Jane and her mother.

  Jane McBryde was not the only child James wrote to; another of his young correspondents was Sibyl Cropper, whom he addressed as “Dear Fellow-Scientist” or “My Dear Apple Pie” in a series of fairy-tale epistles following a visit to her family’s home in 1902. Thirty-seven years later, Miss Cropper collected and edited these letters, and they were published in the November 1939 issue of Cornhill Magazine.

  Meanwhile, Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary went through eight printings that included McBryde’s interior illustrations, before the book reverted to a cheaper format in the 1920s and ’30s.

  In his “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay, H.P. Lovecraft wrote: “Gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on medieval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.”

  Unfortunately, after receiving a copy of the amateur magazine that Lovecraft’s piece originally appeared in, James declared himself not overly impressed with the American pulp author’s tribute. “In it is a disquisition of nearly 40 pages of double columns on Supernatural Horror in Literature by one H.P. Lovecraft,” he wrote to a correspondent, “whose style is of the most offensive. He uses the word cosmic about 24 times.”

  Some years later, Lovecraft’s friend and contemporary, Clark Ashton Smith, wrote: “James is perhaps unsurpassed in originality by any living writer: and he has made a salient contribution to the technique of the genre as well as to the enriching of its treasury of permanent masterpieces. His work is marked by rare intellectual skill and ingenuity, by power rising at times above the reaches of pure intellection, and by a sheer finesse of writing that will bear almost endless study.

  “The peculiar genius of M.R. James, and his greatest power, lies in the convincing evocation of weird, malignant and preternatural phenomena such as I have instanced. It is safe to say that few writers, dead or living, have equaled him in this formidable necromancy and perhaps no one has excelled him.”

  “The second volume, More Ghost Stories, appeared in 1911,” explained the author. “Some years ago I promised to publish a second volume of ghost stories when a sufficient number of them should have been accumulated. That time has arrived, and here is the volume. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to warn the critic that in evolving them I have not been possessed by that austere sense of the responsibility of authorship which is demanded of the writer of fiction in this generation; or that I have not sought to embody in them any well-considered scheme of ‘psychical’ theory.

  “The first six of the seven tales it contains were Christmas productions, the very first (‘A School Story’) having been made up for the benefit of the King’s College Choir School. ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was printed in the Contemporary Review; ‘Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance’ was written to fill up the volume.”

  James’ early title for “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” had been “The Cat of Death,” while the other tales collected in the volume were “The Rose Garden,” “The Tractate Middoth,” “Casting the Runes” and “Martin’s Close.”

  Although the book’s cover simply read More Ghost Stories, the title page carried the full designation of More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

  This second collection did much to enhance James’ reputation as a writer of supernatural fiction, and his celebrity admirers included Arthur Machen, Montague Summers, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Theodore Roosevelt and even the Prince of Wales.

  “A Thin Ghost and Others was the third collection, containing five stories and published in 1919,” recalled James. “In it, ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’ and ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’ were contributed to the Cambridge Review.”

  The book also featured “The Residence at Whitminster,” “The Diary of Mr. Poynter” and “Two Doctors.”

  “I have had my doubts about the wisdom of publishing a third set of tales,” admitted the author in his Preface. “Sequels are, not only proverbially but actually, very hazardous things.

  “However, the tales make no pretense but to amuse, and my friends have not seldom asked for the publication. So not a great deal is risked, perhaps, and perhaps also some one’s Christmas may be the cheerfuller for a story-book which, I think, only once mentions the war.”

  Despite the author’s apparent reticence to see yet another collection of his works published, this third volume was issued by Longmans Green in America the same year.

  James’ single attempt at a longer work, the almost 25,000-word The Five Jars, was published by Edward Arnold in 1922, and has rarely been reprinted since then. Subtitled “Being More or Less of a Fairy Tale Contained in a Letter to a Young Person,” the story is about the discovery of a series of jars containing magic ointments that open up the senses to the hidden realms of animals and fairy-folk.

  In a letter dated 1916, James first talked about his plans to write a story for Gwendolen McBryde’s then eleven-year-old daughter, “to explain to Jane what I have heard from the owls and other neighbors, and how it came about that I was able to do so.”

  In the war between the powers of good and evil, the author was careful to include his beloved cats on the side of the “Right People” while spiders—of which he had an almost pathological loathing—were one of the creatures aligned with the forces of darkness.

  The Five Jars also shares certain characteristics with James’ 1924 story “After Dark in the Playing Fields,” and some scholars have speculated that the shorter work may have had its origins in an abandoned attempt by the author to write a sequel to the novella.

  When The Five Jars finally appeared in print, Jane McBryde was seventeen, and although her mother was inspired enough after reading the final draft to produce a series of illustrations for the book, the publisher decided to go with an artist named Gilbert James (no relation) instead. The author was reportedly not impressed with the other James’ depictions, but that could have been because his friend had lost out on the commission.

  Although the book never became an established children’s classic—possibly because parents may have thought it was too dark for younger readers at the time —The Five Jars did have its supporters, including Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie.

  The novel was reprinted just a couple of times over a period of more than seventy years before Ash-Tree Press issued a hardcover printing with a new Introduction by Rosemary Pardoe in 1995. This edition was limited to around 300 numbered copies and two lettered copies in a deluxe binding.

  James’ fourth collection, A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories, was published in 1925 and went through four impressions between October and February the following year. As the author revealed, of the six stories contained in the book, “The first, ‘The Haunted Dolls’ House,’
was specially written for the library of Her Majesty the Queen’s Dolls’ House, and subsequently appeared in the Empire Review. ‘The Uncommon Prayer-book’ saw the light in the Atlantic Monthly, the title-story in the London Mercury, and another, I think ‘A Neighbor’s Landmark,’ in an ephemeral called The Eton Chronic.”

  Also in the book were “A View from a Hill,” “A Warning to the Curious” and “An Evening’s Entertainment.”

  Seven years later, James revealed to Gwendolen McBryde that he was “startled” to see “A View from a Hill” reprinted in the February 1932 issue of Pearson’s Magazine, apparently without his permission. “The publisher ‘thought I wouldn’t mind’ and no more I do, particularly as they pay,” continued James, who revealed that he received half of the ten guineas fee. “But I also noticed that they left out a number of sentences: and this I protest against. The publisher palliates his crime by saying he has sold about 3,000 copies of the number—which is doubtless a good result.”

  In fact, once the matter was settled, Pearson’s Magazine went on to also reprint James’ stories “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “Number 13” later that same year, after the author received a promise from the editor “to leave out as little as he can in the future.”