by M. R. James
Isaiah: see Isaiah 34: 13–14:
And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.
The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow, and the screech-owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.
Wentworth Collection at Cambridge: fictional version of the Fitzwilliam Museum, of which MRJ was curator.
Versicle: ‘One of a series of short sentences, said or sung antiphonically in divine service; spec. one said by the officiant and followed by the RESPONSE of the congregation or people’ (SOED). See also the notes to p. 7: Antiphoner and Psalter.
Psalm: Whoso dwelleth (xci.): Psalm 91: ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.’ See particularly verses 5–6:
Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
‘Gallia Christiana’: an encyclopedia of the bishops and abbots of France, first compiled by Claude Robert in 1626.
Sammarthani: Dionysius Sammarthanus, or Denys de Sainte-Marthe (1650–1725), a Benedictine monk who began the revision of the Gallia Christiana in the early eighteenth century.
LOST HEARTS
Composed between July 1892 (when MRJ visited St Michan’s church in Dublin) and October 1893, when it was read to the Chitchat Society along with ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’. First published in the Pall Mall Magazine, 7/32 (December 1895), 639–47. Reprinted in GSA: ‘Lost Hearts’ was not originally intended as part of the volume, but was added by MRJ specifically in response to publisher Edward Arnold’s request, ‘Are there any more ghost stories? Those sent would only make a slim volume, and if there was half as much or as much again it would be a great advantage’ (KCL MS MRJ:D/Arnold). Published again in CGS. Manuscript in KCL MS MRJ:A/2.
14 Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire: a real house, though not answering to MRJ’s description. Aswarby Hall, in the village of Aswarby, Lincolnshire, was originally a Tudor manor house, and was extensively modernized in 1836. It was demolished in 1951—only the entrance gates remain.
15 the Mysteries: the Eleusinian Mysteries. Secret Greek rites taught by the goddess Demeter, who had lived disguised as a nurse in the home of King Celeus of the city of Eleusis, as recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. As initiation ceremonies into the cult of Demeter and Persephone, the Mysteries were enacted every year, and were considered the most important of all Classical rites.
the Orphic poems: poems attributed to Orpheus, of which only two examples survive, the epic Argonautica Orphica (fifth–sixth century BCE) and a corpus of hymns (2–300 CE). These works were supposedly recited as part of the Eleusinian Mysteries. See M. L. West, The Orphic Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Recalling a period of illness as a schoolboy in 1879, MRJ wrote, ‘I think the last straw was reading a lot of the Orphic Hymns (fifty of them) at a sitting’—but, he noted, ‘they taught me a good many words so I will not repent of my evil ways’ (Cox I, 33).
Mithras: originally, an Iranian warrior deity, slayer of the sacred bull, from whose blood came all animals and plants useful to man. Mithraic religion, based like the Eleusinian Mysteries on initiation ceremonies, flourished particularly amongst the Roman legions, and was for a time the major rival to Christianity, which adopted a number of its beliefs and practices.
15 the Neo-Platonists: modification of Platonic philosophy for the Roman world, most notably in the work of Plotinus (205–70). Very influential for Christian and Islamic theology until the Renaissance. Roden and Roden have plausibly argued that Mr Abney may in part be based on the Neoplatonic intellectual Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), translator of the Orphic poems (The Mystical Initiations of Hymns of Orpheus, 1787), and author of A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (1791), and note that ‘a legend, surely apocryphal, persisted to the effect that Taylor had performed at his home a bloody sacrifice to the Ancient Gods’ (PT, 18).
Gentleman’s Magazine … Critical Museum: the Gentleman’s Magazine was the first general periodical in England, a compendium of comment, opinion, news, and scholarship for the educated general reader. First published in London in 1731 by Edward Cave (‘Sylvanus Urban’), it ran until 1907. The Critical Museum is fictitious.
17 ’urdy-gurdy: a hurdy-gurdy is a stringed musical instrument played by turning a handle, particularly associated with European folk music.
St. Michan’s Church in Dublin: seventeenth-century parish church in the Smithfield area of Dublin. The vaults contain the mummified remains of ‘four anonymous citizens of uncertain age—dried out, we are told, by the high tannic acid content of this once-forested marshy site’: Catherine Casey, The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 241. MRJ visited St Michan’s in 1892, and found the vaults ‘horrid’ and their inhabitants ‘a nightmare’ (Cox I, 107). The MS version glosses St Michan’s vaults as ‘[famous for their preservative properties]’.
18 Censorinus: Latin grammarian, third century; author of De Die Natali (The Birthday Book).
19 the rat that could speak: Charles Dickens was one of MRJ’s favourite novelists, and this is a reference to Dickens’s story of Mr Chips, a shipwright who sells his soul to the Devil ‘for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak’, which offers a comic parallel to the Faustian themes of ‘Lost Hearts’. The story first appeared as part of the ‘Nurse’s Stories’ in All the Year Round (8 September 1760), and was reprinted in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861).
20 March 24, 1812: MS has ‘the 24th of March 1811’—an obvious mistake as this is six months before Stephen arrives at Aswarby, though the MS repeats this date later in the story, and so it may be that the date in the opening sentence is the erroneous one.
22 Simon Magus … Clementine Recognitions: another Faustian allusion. Simon Magus first appears in Acts 8: 9–24, as a Samaritan sorcerer who converts to Christianity, but then attempts to bribe the Apostles in exchange for being given the power of the Holy Ghost (hence ‘simony’, the traffic in sacred objects). Simon’s mythological afterlife, as a false messiah and as the founder of post-Christian Gnosticism, is very rich. A number of Church Fathers identified him as the archetypal heretic, or even as the source of all heresies. The Clementine Recognitions, a narrative of the life of St Clement, bishop of Rome (first century), contains an account of Simon as a rogue disciple John the Baptist, who claimed to have been able to create life. This was a major source for the development of the Faust myth.
Hermes Trismegistus: ‘Thrice Great Hermes’, a conflation of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, both gods of writing and magic, and thus believed to be the source of Hermetic philosophy and religion, which emphasizes arcane or secret textual knowledge (of the kind possessed here by Mr Abney). According to some traditions, Hermes Trismegistus was a human mage.
twelve years: CGS and Joshi I (p. 23) both read ‘twenty-one years’. This is a transcription of a mistake in the original MS, which reads ‘below the age of 21 years’, when it should obviously read ‘below the age of 12 years’, as Mr Abney’s insistence on knowing the precise date of Stephen’s twelfth birthday makes plain.
corpora vilia: plural of corpus vile, an expendable experimental subject.
The remains of the first two subjects, at least, it will be well to conceal: this implies, rather strangely, that the mutilated bodies of Phoebe have remained unconcealed at Aswarby Hall for respectively twenty and seven years. Have they, as the allusion to St Michan’s vaults might imply, been preserved?
the psychic portion of the subjects … ghosts: a belief common in spiritualist thinking, enormously influential in late Victorian England.
THE ME
ZZOTINT
First published in GSA, reprinted in CGS. Eton College Library MS 368A.
24 Dennistoun: the protagonist of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’. ‘Anderson’ in MS.
an art museum at another University: MS reads ‘an art museum at a sister university’. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University—later in the story referred to as the Ashleian Museum at Bridgeford University. The MS has ‘Oxford’ instead of ‘Bridgeford’.
the Shelburnian Library: the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
Mr. J. W. Britnell: ‘Mr. E. V. Daniells’ (and sometimes ‘Daniell’) in the MS.
25 mezzotint: ‘A method of engraving on copper or steel, in which the surface of the plate is first roughened uniformly, the lights and half-lights being then produced by scraping away the “nap” thus formed, and the untouched parts giving the deepest shadows’ (SOED).
26 ‘A. W. F. sculpsit’: ‘A. W. F. he carved it’.
—ssex: the MS tries both ‘—folk’ and ‘—shire’ before settling on ‘—ssex’. Professor Binks: MS adds ‘(it seems a good enough name for a man in his position)’.
28 sported the doors of both sets of rooms: in university slang, ‘sporting the oak’ meant closing the door to one’s rooms (Cox II, 305).
29 Canterbury College: there is no Canterbury College at Oxford, though both Christ Church and St John’s have Canterbury quadrangles.
30 Garwood: ‘Gregory’ in MS.
31 skip: a college servant. Technically, in Oxford, Robert Filcher would have been Mr Williams’s scout; in Cambridge, his gyp; and only in Trinity College Dublin, his skip.
Phasmatological Society: that is, the Society for the Study of Ghosts (from the Greek phasma, ghost). This is MRJ’s own invention, though it is likely to be modelled on the high-profile Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882 to investigate the veracity of spiritual and paranormal phenomena. The SPR itself grew out of the Cambridge Ghost Society, which is very close to James’s Phasmatological Society.
32 Door Bible: a Bible containing the celebrated illustrations of Gustave Doré (1832–83), a French artist renowned for his horrific and phantasmagoric images; first published in 1866.
33 Murray’s Guide to Essex: Richard J. King, Handbook for Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire (London: John Murray, 1870). Anningley Hall is fictitious.
like the man in Tess of the D’Urbervilles: in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Tess’s father, Jack Durbeyfield, (correctly) believes himself to be a dispossessed member of the ancient D’Urberville family.
34 north side of the church: see MRJ’s ‘Ghost Stories’, written whilst still at Eton: ‘A “belated wanderer” … pitched his camp in a churchyard. He laid himself down under a buttress on the north side of the building, and in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was surrounded by the graves of murderers and suicides (who were there, as is often the case, buried on the north side of the church), he fell asleep’ (Joshi I, 247). Mrs Mothersole, the witch from ‘The Ash-Tree’, is also buried on the north side of the church, as is Squire Bowles in ‘The Experiment’.
spes ultima gentis: ‘last hope of his family’.
Sadducean Professor of Ophiology: MRJ’s coinage, meaning ‘Professor of Serpents’. The Sadducees were a priestly Jewish caste ‘which say that there is no resurrection’ (Matthew 22: 23), and who believed in ‘neither angel nor spirit’ (Acts 23: 8); they were admonished by Christ for their denial of the supernatural (Matthew 22: 29–33). The connection with serpents is from Matthew 4: 7: ‘But when [John the Baptist] saw the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ MS has the more straightforward ‘Professor of Biology’, to which the word ‘Sadducean’ has been added.
THE ASH-TREE
First published in GSA, reprinted in CGS. MS not located, though included in a Sotheby’s sale, 9 November 1936 (PT, 50).
35 Castringham Hall: fictitious, though its location has led to suggestions that it may have been modelled on Livermere Hall, a seventeenth-century house on whose lands James lived as a boy, in Livermere Rectory (PT, 39). MRJ’s last published story, ‘A Vignette’, opens with a description of Livermere Rectory.
36 auto-da-fé: ‘act of the faith’: the public burning of a heretic by the Inquisition.
Mrs. Mothersole: ‘Mothersole’ is a local Suffolk name. There are a number of Mothersoles buried in Great Livermere churchyard.
Sir Matthew Fell: a fictional conflation of two figures notorious for their activities during the seventeenth-century witch trials, and with particular connections to Bury St Edmunds (see note below). The first is Matthew Hopkins (c. 1620–47), the infamous ‘Witchfinder General’ (a title he bestowed on himself), responsible for the execution of eighteen people in one day in the Bury witch trial of 1645. The second is Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76), an MP and judge who presided over witch trials in Bury in 1662, where two elderly widows, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, were found guilty of witchcraft and hanged. ‘Fell’ has numerous meanings relevant to the story: the past tense of the verb ‘to fall’; ‘a cutting down of timber’; ‘the line of termination of a web, formed by the last weft-thread’; ‘fierce, savage, cruel, ruthless’; ‘dire, intensely painful or destructive’; ‘full of spirit, doughty’; ‘shrewd, clever, cunning’ (SOED).
gathering sprigs ‘from the ash-tree near my house’: the ash tree has numerous folkloric and mythological meanings. According to some traditions, the witch’s broomstick was made of ash.
Bury St. Edmunds: town in Suffolk, 5 miles from MRJ’s childhood home in Livermere. S&N has a lengthy description of Bury (and particularly its celebrated Abbey), which is described as ‘the most attractive town in Suffolk’ (p. 42). As the location of the Suffolk county assizes, witch trials did take place in Bury in the seventeenth century.
39 ring of Pope Borgia: Rodrigo Borgia (1431–1503), patriarch of the notorious Renaissance family; made Pope Alexander VI in 1492, reputedly through bribery and murder—also the means by which he maintained his power. Allegedly murdered rivals and enemies, including numerous cardinals, by means of a ring and a chalice, both containing arsenic.
drawing the Sortes: the Sortes Sanctorum, or ‘lots of the saints’; bibliomancy. Divination by means of consulting a book, usually the Bible, at random, and interpreting the messages of the scripture. The instance here refers to Charles I’s alleged divination by means of a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid (the sortes Vergilianae, common in early modern England; in the medieval period, Virgil had acquired a considerable reputation as a necromancer) in the Bodleian Library in 1642, on the eve of the English Civil War, a story which survives in a number of different forms. The passage consulted was:
And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease,
On hard conditions may he buy his peace:
Nor let him, then, enjoy supreme command;
But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand,
And lie unburied on the barren sand!
Charles’s forces lost the war to Cromwell’s republican army, and he was executed in 1649.
40 Luke … Isaiah … Job … blood: respectively, excerpts from the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree; a prophecy of the destruction of Babylon; and an account of the eagle’s diet of human carrion (‘Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are, there is she’).
Popish Plot: alleged Catholic plot to assassinate Charles II, fabricated by the Anglican clergyman Titus Oates in 1678, in an attempt to inflame anti-Catholic hysteria.
41 Sibyl’s temple at Tivoli: Tivoli (Roman Tibur) is in Lazio, just east of Rome. Amongst its many architectural monuments is the Temple of the Tiburtine Sybil.
42 Bishop of Kilmore: the diocese of Kilmore is in County Cavan. Kilmore survives as a Catholic bishopric; the Anglican Church of Ireland amalgamated the diocese in 1841 to form the bishopric of Kilmore, Elphin, and Ardagh. Kilmore (from the Irish Cill Mhór) is a very
common Irish place name, though it is possible that MRJ chose it here as a pun, ‘kill more’.
43 Clare Hall in Cambridge: Cambridge college founded in 1326; changed its name to Clare College in 1856.
Polyænus: second-century Macedonian writer; author of the eight-volume Stratagems of War.
44 “Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be”: not from Chronicles, but from Job 7: 21: ‘And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away mine iniquity? for now I shall sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.’
NUMBER 13
