by M. R. James
14 Austin Warren, “The Marvels of M. R. James, Antiquary,” in Connections (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 98.
15 See S. G. Lubbock, A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 38.
CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK
Originally titled “A Curious Book,” first published as “The Scrap-book of Canon Alberic” in National Review (March 1895), and included in GSA and CGS, this story was the first of MRJ’s ghost stories to be written (sometime between the spring of 1892, when he first visited the town of St. Bertrand de Comminges, and October 1893, when he read the tale to the Chitchat Society) and the first to be published. It is a prototypical Jamesian ghost story in its depiction of an antiquarian who stumbles upon the supernatural in the course of his researches. It is also unusually autobiographical: its protagonist, Dennistoun, is clearly meant to be MRJ himself, as he bicycles through the French countryside with “two friends” (J. Armitage Robinson and Arthur Shipley) in search of cathedrals, takes photographs of them, and finds himself drawn to the cathedral’s manuscripts and other antiquities. MRJ has described some of the elements of these travels: “the sighting of the next cathedral tower above the poplars, and the subsequent deciphering and noting of all its sculpture and glass” (E&K 151-52). It is possible that the story was partly inspired by MRJ’s own discovery in 1890 of a biography of St. William of Norwich by Sir Thomas of Monmouth in a remote building in Suffolk (see Cox1, 103). Colin Pink (see Further Reading) suggests that the name of the protagonist is an allusion to a Scottish antiquarian, James Dennistoun (1803-1855), author of Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino (1851) and other scholarly works. Dennistoun figures again in “The Mezzotint” (page 25).
FURTHER READING
John Crook, “The Weighty and the Trivial: M. R. James and St. Bertrand de Comminges,” Country Life No. 4549 (25 October 1984): 1248-49.
Colin Pink, “The Real Dennistoun,” Ghosts & Scholars No. 19 (1995): 32.1 St. Bertrand de Comminges is a town in the province of Haute-Garonne in southwest France, about thirty miles southwest of Toulouse. It was the site of a Roman colony founded by Pompey (Cn. Pompeius) in 72 B.C.E. Bagnères-de-Luchon (or Luchon) is a town in the southernmost portion of Haute-Garonne near the Spanish border.
2 A cathedral at St. Bertrand was built around 1120 by Bishop Bertrand de l’Isle (later St. Bertrand). The cathedral was extensively altered in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. John Crook’s article (see Further Reading) contains a photograph of the cathedral.
3 The original meaning of verger was “An official who carries a rod or similar symbol of office before the dignitaries of a cathedral, church, or university”; it later came to mean “One whose duty it is to take care of the interior of a church, and to act as attendant” (OED). A sacristan is the sexton (“a church officer having the care of the fabric of a church and its contents, and the duties of ringing the bells and digging graves” [OED]) of a parish church.
4 Bishop Jean de Mauléon supervised the construction of the stalls of St. Bertrand; they were consecrated in 1535.
5 The Angelus (short for angelus-bell) is rung at morning, noon, and sunset in Catholic churches to commemorate the mystery of the Incarnation. Cf. J. F. Millet’s “The Angelus” (1857-59), one of the most celebrated and widely reproduced paintings of the nineteenth century.
6 “Lover of old books.”
7 A missal is a book containing the service of the Mass for the year. Shane Leslie wrote of MRJ: “Missals he could at first sight refer to their date and diocese and generally suggest their probable wanderings since their dislocation by Reformation and Revolution.” “Montague Rhodes James,” Quarterly Review 304 (January 1966): 46.
8 Christophe Plantin (1514-1589) was a French printer who settled in Antwerp in 1549. He became a leading European printer, his books being distinguished for their typography and engravings. He printed the Bible in Hebrew, Latin, and Dutch. He was a secret member of a heretical mystical sect, and along with many missals, breviaries, and other publications for the Roman Catholic church, he anonymously printed many books by the sect. He established a branch of his office in Paris in 1576.
9 Papias (60?-130) was the Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor. The treatise to which MRJ refers is Logiōn Kyriakōn Exegēseis (“Expositions of the Oracles of the Lord”), which currently survives only in quotations by Irenaeus and Eusebius. The work appears to have contained early information on St. Mark and St. Matthew. MRJ has made an error in translating “oracles” (logiōn [genitive plural of logion]) as “words” (logōn [genitive plural of logos]).
10 Old Saint Paul’s (1841) is an historical novel by William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). Its action takes place during the London plague and fire of 1665-66. Thomas Quatremain is a “minor canon” who claims, by astrological calculations, to have ascertained the existence of treasure under St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (ch. 8).
11 MRJ may be alluding not to a Biblical text but to the Testament of Solomon, a part of the Old Testament pseudepigrapha probably dating to the third century C.E. In this work, Solomon has discourses with a succession of demons, some of whom are compelled to work in the construction of the Temple. See MRJ’s article “The Testament of Solomon,” Guardian Church Newspaper (15 March 1899): 367; rpt. Ghosts & Scholars No. 28 (1999): 54-57.
12 Gehazi was the servant of Elisha the prophet who, in his greed, sought to gain gifts from a man, Naaman, whom Elisha had cured of leprosy without seeking any recompense from him: “But Gehazi . . . said, Behold, my master hath spared Naaman this Syrian, in not receiving at his hands that which he brought: but, as the Lord liveth, I will run after him, and take somewhat of him” (2 Kings 5:20).
13 “Two times I have seen it; a thousand times I have felt it.”
14 Psalm 91 contains the celebrated lines: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness” (91:5-6).
15 The Gallia Christiana, an encyclopedia of French bishops and abbots, was first compiled by Claude Robert in 1626 and revised in 1656. It was exhaustively revised by Dionysius Sammarthanus (Denis de Sainte-Marthe, 1650-1725) and later scholars (1715- 1874; 16 vols.). MRJ errs in interpreting the genitive case of the Latinized name Sammarthanus as the nominative case.
16 Ecclesiasticus (also called the Book of Sirach) is one of the books of the Apocryphal Old Testament and one of the so-called Wisdom writings, probably written in the later first century C.E. The citation is from 39:28. A more accurate translation is: “There are (winds) which are formed (for punishment), / (And in their fury) they remove moun(tains).” See The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H. Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 1.459.
17 Cf. Isaiah 34:14: “The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.”
18 A soutane is “A long buttoned gown or frock, with sleeves, forming the ordinary outer garment of Roman Catholic ecclesiastics, and worn under the vestments in religious services; a cassock” (OED).
19 Fictitious, but probably based upon the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where MRJ long worked.
LOST HEARTS
“Lost Hearts” was written between July 1892 (when MRJ first visited Ireland and saw St. Michan’s Church [see n. 5]) and October 1893, when it was read to the Chitchat Society; it was published in Pall Mall Magazine (December 1895) and reprinted in GSA and CGS. MRJ was dissatisfied with the tale and only included it in GSA at the request of his publisher, who wished to make the book larger. It is the first of several stories to feature a Faustian protagonist who seeks unholy knowledge and will resort to the most evil means to obtain it. Jacqueline Simpson believes that the core idea of eating living hearts to gain immortality was derived from MRJ’s absorption of Danish folklore. See “‘The Rules of Folklore’ i
n the Ghost Stories of M. R. James,” Folklore 108 (1997): 12, 16-17.
FURTHER READING
Tina Rath, “‘Lost Hearts,’ ” Ghosts & Scholars No. 29 (1999): 43.
C. E. Ward, “A Haunting Presence,” in Formidable Visitants, ed. Roger Johnson (Chelmsford, UK: Pyewacket Press, 1999), pp. 27-30.1 Aswarby is a village four miles south of Sleaford in Lincolnshire, in east-central England. There is an Aswarby Hall in the vicinity, but it is now in ruins.
2 The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret rites celebrated at Eleusis, in Greece, in praise of Demeter and Persephone from remote antiquity up to the suppression of the pagan cults by Christianity in the fourth century C.E. The Orphic poems are a corpus of hymns attributed to Orpheus, dating as far back as the fifth century B.C.E. and chiefly spelling out theogonies of the pagan gods, especially Dionysus. Mithras was an Indo-Iranian god whose worship was introduced into the Roman Empire (chiefly by soldiers) in the second and third centuries C.E. Several features of its worship were adopted by the early Christians. The Neoplatonists were a school of philosophers headed by Plotnius (third century C.E.) who led a revival of the study of the metaphysics of Plato and other pagan philosophers, emphasizing the unity of all substance.
3 The Gentleman’s Magazine was a celebrated quarterly journal of scholarship and opinion published in London from 1731 to 1907. The Critical Museum is fictitious.
4 This description of Abney suggests (see PT, 18) that he may have been based upon Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), friend of William Blake and Thomas Love Peacock. Taylor was a Neoplatonist and Neo-Pythagorean who translated the Orphic poems (The Mystical Initiations or Hymns of Orpheus, 1787) and wrote A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (1790).
5 St. Michan’s Church on Church Street in Dublin was built in 1685-86 on the site of an earlier structure founded by the Danes in 1095. It is celebrated for the mummified bodies stored in its vaults. MRJ had visited the church in 1892, describing its vaults as “horrid” and a “nightmare” (Cox1, 107).
6 Censorinus (third century C.E.) was a Roman grammarian whose only extant work is De Die Natali (“On the Birthday”). There is a brief discussion of the vernal equinox at 21.13.
7 Apparently an allusion to one of the “Nurse’s Stories” in chapter 15 of Dickens’s An Uncommercial Traveller (1860), which tells of a rat that speaks.
8 Simon Magus is a sorcerer mentioned in the New Testament (Acts 8:9-24) as one who bewitched the people of Samaria and led them to think him divine. Early ecclesiastical writers asserted that he could fly through the air, make himself invisible, put on the appearance of another person, make furniture move, and perform other feats of magic. The Clementine Recognitions (third century C.E.) is one of several works ascribed to St. Clement, Bishop of Rome (fl. 96 C.E.); it survives only in a translation of the original Greek into Latin by Rufinus. In it, Simon Magus is referred to as a disciple of John the Baptist. In one section of the work (2.15), Simon states: “Once on a time, I, by my power, turning air into water, and water again into blood and solidifying it into flesh, formed a new human creature—a boy—and produced a much nobler work than God the Creator. For He created a man from the earth, but I from the air—a far more difficult matter; and again I unmade him and restored him to air, but not until I had placed his picture and image in my bedchamber, as a proof and memorial of my work.” To which the author of the Clementine Recognitions adds: “Then we understood that he spake concerning that boy whose soul, after he had been slain by violence, he made use of for those services which he required.” See Philip Mason Palmer and Robert Pattison More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 18.
9 Hermes Trismegistos (“thrice-great Hermes”) was the name given by the Greeks to the Egyptian god Thoth. Numerous mystical works in post-Christian times were attributed to him, and they were later used by medieval astrologers and alchemists. For a translation of the surviving fragments, see G. R. S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906; 3 vols.). MRJ had read Hermes Trismegistos as early as 1878 (see Pfaff, 36).
10 “Cheap [i.e., worthless] bodies.”
THE MEZZOTINT
First published in GSA and reprinted in CGS, “The Mezzotint” is one of the most distinctive of MRJ’s tales. As Jack Sullivan (Elegant Nightmares [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978], p. 83) notes, “There are two levels of supernatural storytelling here: the transformation of the picture [i.e., the mezzotint] and the scene it recreates, itself a supernatural tale.” A mezzotint is “A method of engraving copper or steel plates for printing, in which the surface of the plate is first roughened uniformly, the ‘nap’ thus produced being afterwards completely or partially scraped away in order to produce the lights and half-lights of the picture, while the untouched parts of the plate give the deepest shadows” (OED). The character Dennistoun first appeared in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” (p. 2). MRJ consciously reworked the story as “The Haunted Dolls’ House” (in WC and CGS).1 See n. 15.
2 Fictitious, but probably an allusion to the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
3 University slang for “to keep one’s door shut” (see OED, def. 11a).
4 There is no such college at Cambridge.
5 In this sense, a skip is “A footman, lackey, or manservant” (OED).
6 Fictitious. “Phasmatological” is MRJ’s coinage, presumably meaning “the study of ghosts” (from the Greek phasma, ghost). Cox2 (305) conjectures that it is a parody of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in the United Kingdom in 1882; an American branch was founded in 1885.
7 Robert is referring to the Bible as illustrated by French artist Gustave Doré (1832-1883), first published in 1866. Many of the illustrations are noted for their horrific qualities.
8 Handbook for Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire (London: John Murray, 1870; frequently reprinted).
9 Anningley is fictitious.
10 In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Jack Durbeyfield is a carter who learns of his descent from distinguished forbears. Green’s inability to read the book reflects contemporary disapproval of its frank exhibition of seduction, betrayal, and other features deemed offensive.
11 For MRJ’s familiarity with the tradition that unconsecrated bodies must be buried on the north side of a church, see “Ghost Stories” (p. 247).
12 “The last hope of the family [or clan].”
13 James’s whimsical coinage would mean “Professor of Serpents.” The professor is a Sadducean because he, like the Sadducees (an ancient Jewish politico-religious sect), disbelieves in the supernatural. The specific reference, as Pfaff (152n) has noted, is to Matthew 3:7, in which John the Baptist refers to the Pharisees and Sadducees as a “generation of vipers.” See also the “Professor of Ontography” in “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (page 81 and n. 1).
14 A play on Oxbridge, a shorthand reference to the intellectual culture of Oxford and Cambridge, although here it refers to the non-university inhabitants of the cities who, as MRJ’s character suggests, are given to superstition.
15 An allusion to the Ashmolean Museum, the chief art museum at Oxford University and a rival of MRJ’s Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.
THE ASH-TREE
First published in GSA and reprinted in CGS, this story is perhaps the most explicitly grisly of MRJ’s tales; it also most powerfully reflects his near-pathological fear of spiders (he may have originally titled it “The Spiders”; see Cox1, 137). The ash tree does have occult significance, but in British folklore it is generally positive: the Christmas log was of ash and was thought to bring prosperity to the family that burned it; tools made of ash were thought to allow the persons using them to do more and better work. Conversely, witches were believed to ride through the air on ash branches—a point of relevance in that witchcraft plays a critical role in the story.
FURTHER READING
Rosemary Pardoe, “‘A Wonderful Book’: George MacDonald and ‘The Ash-Tree,’ ” Ghos
ts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter No. 3 (January 2003): 18-21. 1 Fictitious, but in PT, 39 it is suggested that MRJ was thinking of his early residence, Livermere Hall in Suffolk. The name may be an adaptation of Sandringham in Norfolk, the site of a large royal estate. Some of MRJ’s Eton schoolmates visited Prince Albert Victor there in 1883 (Cox1, 59).
2 The name Mothersole is found on headstones in the churchyard near Livermere Rectory, where MRJ grew up. See Norman Scarfe, “The Strangeness Present: M. R. James’s Suffolk,” Country Life No. 4655 (6 November 1986): 1418.
3 Fictitious, although in PT, 40 it is suggested that MRJ is alluding to Sir Matthew Hale (1609-1676), a member of Parliament and a judge who presided over the witchcraft trials of two witches at the assizes at Bury St. Edmunds in 1662; Hale appears to have given credence to the testimony against the witches, and they were convicted and executed. He was later made chief justice of the King’s bench (1671-76).
4 Bury St. Edmunds is the municipal borough of West Suffolk, hence the logical place to hold witch trials; numerous trials were actually held there in the seventeenth century.
5 Rodrigo Borgia (1431-1503), who became Pope Alexander VI in 1492. He was the father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia and secured his pontificate largely by bribery. His possession of a ring containing poison is a legend of long standing.
6 The sortes (lots) was the practice of predicting a person’s future by opening the Bible at a random passage. In this case, it was alleged that, during the winter of 1642-43, King Charles I, accompanied by Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland (1610- 1643), went to the Bodleian Library at Oxford and performed the sortes Vergilianae, in which a random passage in the works of Virgil was selected. Charles I reputedly chose the passage (Aeneid 4.619f.) in which Dido condemns Aeneas for betraying her: “let him not / His kingdom or the pleasant light enjoy, / But in the bare mid-plain, before his hour, / Fall and unburied lie” (trans. James Rhoades). Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649 by Parliament.
