Collected Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  John Hill: ‘John Ward’ in MS.

  quickset: a hedge of living plants, specifically hawthorn.

  180 Holy Innocents’ Day: 28 December, date of the commemoration of the massacre of the innocents, the children of Bethlehem killed by the order of King Herod: see Matthew 2: 16–18.

  Jeffreys: George Jeffreys, 1st Baron of Wem (1645–89), popularly known as ‘the Hanging Judge’. Lord Chief Justice from 1683; notorious for his conducting of the ‘Bloody assizes’ of 1685 following the Duke of Monmouth’s failed rebellion. Lord Chancellor from 1685. Arrested following the accession to the throne of William of Orange in 1688; died in the Tower of London, 1689.

  180 New Inn: an actual hotel in Sampford Courtenay, dating back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

  Interesting old MS. trial for murder: MRJ was himself a keen and knowledgeable reader of seventeenth-century court transcripts, and in 1929 he wrote the Preface to the Clarendon Press edition of Lady Ivie’s Trial. See also ‘The Ash-Tree’ and ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ for fictional reflections of this interest.

  181 Revd. Mr. Glanvil: Joseph Glanvill (1636–80—and thus dead some four years before the date of this story). English clergyman and intellectual, chaplain to Charles II from 1672. Most famous as a defender of the reality of witchcraft and the supernatural; attacked the experimental scientific method across a number of volumes.

  oyer and terminer: ‘legal term of Anglo-French origin, meaning “to hear and determine”, applied in England to one of the commissions by which a judge of assize sits’ (EB).

  182 upon the 15th day of May … King Charles the Second: 15 May 1684. Although Charles II did not ascend to the throne until 1660, the date here is counted from the execution of Charles I in 1649, and thus disregards the intervening period of Cromwell’s Republic.

  Robert Sawyer: 1633–92; Attorney General for England and Wales, and Speaker of the House of Commons.

  183 Cul-prit: according to legal tradition, ‘culprit’ is a compound of cul (short for culpable, guilty) and pri(s)t, ‘ready’: ‘it is supposed that when the prisoner had pleaded Not Guilty, the Clerk of the Court replied with ‘Culpable, prest daverrer notre bille’, i.e. ‘Guilty, ready to aver our indictment’ (SOED). One word, ‘culprit’, in MS.

  Mr. Dolben: William Dolben (c. 1627–94); judge, celebrated (or notorious) for presiding over the trials of many of those implicated in the Popish Plot, including Oliver Plunket.

  185 ‘Madam, will you walk, will you talk with me?’: the refrain of a popular English folk song, which closes with the lines: ‘Thou shalt give me the keys of my heart, | And we shall be married till death do us part.’ For the song, its history and melody, see Lucy Broadwood and J. A. Fuller Maitland, English County Songs (London: Leadenhall Press, 1893), who note that ‘In many [versions] the lady’s cupidity is at last excited by some especially magnificent offer, and, on her consenting, the man refuses to have anything to do with her.’ This is the conclusion which seems likely to underlie the events of ‘Martin’s Close’.

  Tyburn: near Marble Arch, London; a site of executions until the eighteenth century. The notorious ‘Tyburn Tree’ was a triple gallows for the execution of multiple felons.

  195 St. Augustine de cura pro mortuis gerenda: ‘On care to be had for the dead’, a treatise on funerary rites, written c. 421 by St Augustine of Hippo (354–430).

  Mr. Lang’s books: Andrew Lang (1844–1912), prolific Scottish folklorist and man of letters; one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research; author of numerous high-profile books on the supernatural, including Cock Lane and Common Sense (1894).

  196 North Tawton: Devon, very near to Sampford Courtenay.

  MR. HUMPHREYS AND HIS INHERITANCE

  First published in MGSA: in the Preface to CGS, MRJ claims that the story ‘was written to fill up the volume’. Reprinted in CGS. Eton College Library MS 366. In a letter of 3 January 1912 to his friend Arthur Hort, MRJ explained his conception of the story:

  As far as I can give it the explanation is this. That old Mr Wilson who made the maze had remained in the globe with his ashes, quiescent as long as the gate was not opened. When they opened it and laid out the clue, and left the gate open, he woke up and came out. It was he who was mistaken on two successive nights for an Irish yew and a growth against the house wall, and on the last evening he made himself visible to his descendant creeping up as it were out of unknown depths and emerging at the appropriate spot—the centre of the plan of the maze. (Cox II, 324)

  KCL MS MRJ A/11 is a draft of a story that features a protagonist called ‘John Humphreys’ who inherits a property; it has a few small, circumstantial parallels with ‘Mr Humphreys’ (most notably its reference to an Irish yew, which recurs here), though it is essentially a different story. The fragment is reproduced in PT, 429–39, under the title ‘John Humphreys’.

  197 Wilsthorpe: a village in the southern part of Lincolnshire, very near the Norfolk border. Its branch-line railway station was built in 1860.

  change of propriety: the first of Mr Cooper’s many malapropisms; he means ‘change of proprietorship’.

  201 valentudinarian: valetudinarian; hypochondriac.

  ‘the golden bowl gradually ceasing to vibrate’: Ecclesiastes 12: 6–7:

  Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel be broken at the cistern.

  Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

  202 dolebat se dolere non posse: ‘grieved that he could not grieve’.

  203 meatear … signosier: métier (calling); cynosure (centre of attention, guiding star).

  203 horse doover: a conflation of hors de combat (out of action) with an over-literal translation of hors d’œuvre (out of work).

  Handel’s ‘Susanna’: oratorio by George Frideric Handel (catalogue no. HWV 66), composed 1748. The libretto is probably by the Irish librettist Newburgh Hamilton. The quotation slightly misremembers the Second Elder’s lines in 111.i.61: ‘Far to the west direct your straining eyes, | Where yon tall holm tree darts into the skies.’

  204 ‘Secretum meum mihi et filiis domus meae’: ‘My secret is for me and the sons of my house’. Martin Hughes suggests that this may be ‘A paraphrase of Isaiah 24: 16 (Vulgate): secretum meum mihi secretum mihi vae mihi (“I have my secret, I have my secret, woe is me”)’: ‘A Maze of Secrets in a Story by M. R. James’, Durham University Journal, 85:54/1 (January 1993), 81–93.

  205 A stone column about four feet high, and on the top of it a metal globe: Pardoe and Nicholls suggest that ‘MRJ may have got the idea of a globe in a maze from the ancient turf maze at Hilton, near Cambridge, which has a stone globe on a pedestal in the middle’ (PT, 596).

  unannealed: ‘unaneled’ means ‘Not having received extreme unction [ie, the Last Rites]’ (SOED). Whilst this cannot be what Mr Cooper intends, it is nevertheless relevant to the story’s concerns with mortality and funeral rites.

  angels fearing to tread: ‘For fools rush in where angels fear to tread’: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), l. 625.

  208 catalogue raisonné: descriptive catalogue.

  Picart’s Religious Ceremonies … the Harleian Miscellany … Tostatus Abulensis … Pineda on Job: Bernard Picart (1673–1733) was a French engraver best known for his Cérémonies et costumes de tous les peoples du monde (10 vols., 1723–43). The Harleian Miscellany (1744–6) contained selections from the library of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689–1741). Tostatus Abulensis: Alonso Fernandez de Madrigal (c. 1400–55), known as Alonso Tostado. Bishop of Avila and prolific biblical exegete. John de Pineda (1558–1637), Spanish Jesuit theologian and exegete; Commentariorum in Job Libri Tredecim (1597–1601).

  like Theseus, in the Attick Tale: the tale of Theseus, who slew the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Knossos, and thus helped free Attica (that part of Greece containing Athens) from the bondage of King Mino
s.

  209 Quid multa?: ‘What more?’, or ‘Need I say more?’

  210 a Hound at Fault: a hound which has lost the scent of its prey.

  211 tentacles: tenterhooks.

  213 princeps tenebrarum: ‘the Prince of Darkness’; the Devil.

  umbra mortis: the shadow of death.

  vallis filiorum Hinnom: ‘the valley of the sons of Hinnom’, or Gehenna. A valley near Jerusalem, the site of the altar of Tophet at which children were burned in sacrifice to the fire-god Moloch (2 Kings 23: 10). Gehenna became synonymous with hell, a place of fiery torment.

  Cain … Chore … Ophiuchus … Absolon: Cain slew his brother Abel and was exiled, anathematized, to the Land of Nod to the East of Eden (Genesis 4: 1–17). Chore, or Core, is a variant spelling of Korah, the son of Izhar, who led a rebellion against Moses. The rebels were punished by being swallowed by the earth (Numbers 16: 1–35), in a manner clearly resonant for the thematic concerns of ‘Mr Humphreys’. Ophiuchus, ‘The Snake Holder’, is a constellation of stars. Absalom (Absolon) was the favourite son of King David, who led a rebellion against his father, and is slain by Joab at the battle of the Woods of Ephraim, after getting tangled ‘in the thick boughs of a great oak’ (2 Samuel 13–19). Cain, Korah, and Absalom are linked here as doomed rebels, or as those who set themselves against the word of God.

  Hostanes magus: Hostanes was the legendary mage of the Persian emperor Xerxes I (486–465 BCE). According to the Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix (second–third century), Hostanes was ‘The foremost of these Magi both in eloquence and art…. The same Hostanes also has told us of earthly demons, wandering spirits, the enemies of mankind.’ The Fathers of the Church: Tertullian, Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edward A. Quain (New York: Catholic University of America, 1950), 379.

  214 in statu quo: Mr Cooper means that he sleeps practically naked. This is probably a malapropic rendering of in flagrante delicto—literally ‘in a blazing wrong’, and usually translated idiomatically as ‘caught red-handed’; it is likely that Cooper is alluding to its connection with sexual impropriety, ‘to be caught in the act’, ‘in a compromising position’.

  220 ‘PENETRANS AD INTERIORA MORTIS’: ‘Penetrating to the inner places of death’; from Proverbs 7: 27 (Vulgate): ‘viae inferi domus eius penetrantes interiora mortis’; ‘Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death’.

  Covent Gardens … Hampton Court: In his first example, Mr Calton is mistaken: there is no maze at Covent Garden (in central London), though Inigo Jones’s great piazza is at the centre of a warren of streets. Hampton Court has the most famous of all English mazes, constructed between 1689 and 1695 for William I by George London and Henry Wise.

  THE RESIDENCE AT WHITMINSTER

  First published in TG; reprinted in CGS. MS not located.

  221 Whitminster: fictitious, though there is coincidentally a village with this name in Gloucestershire. Cathedral staff who live in the cathedral close are referred to as being ‘in residence’.

  223 Earl of Kildonan: fictitious Irish title.

  223 raths: a rath is an Irish term, originally meaning a hill fort, and common as a prefix to place names.

  224 Æsculapius: Roman god of medicine (deriving from his Greek counterpart Asclepius).

  225 Radamistus: Rhadamistus, an Iberian prince, ruler of Armenia (CE 51–5). An episode in Tacitus’ Annals (12.51) in which Rhadamistus stabs his pregnant wife Zenobia and commits her body to the river Araxes rather than surrender her to enemy forces (an event which she miraculously survives) provided a popular basis for operas. Handel was a particular favourite of MRJ, and it seems likely that his Radamisto (1720, with a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym) is being alluded to here, though Pietro Metastasio’s libretto Zenobia was twice set to music (by Giovanni Bononcini in 1737 and J. A. Hasse in 1761). Fittingly, given this story’s Irish resonances, the Irish dramatist Arthur Murphy’s Zenobia: A Tragedy was performed in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1796.

  226 Cleodora and Antigenes: Cleodora may refer to the nymph Kleodora, who saw the future by means of throwing pebbles (which would link with the story’s theme of supernatural divination), or to one of the Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaüs, betrothed to the fifty sons of Aegyptus, who, on the command of their father, each (except for one, Hypermnestra) beheaded their husbands on their wedding nights. William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) lists numerous Antigenes, including four separate doctors, which might be intended as an allusive echo of Aesculapius (see note to p. 224), though given the reference in the sentence to ‘battles’, this Antigenes seems most likely to be Alexander the Great’s general, burned alive by his enemy Antigonus in 316 BCE. The reference in both cases seems to be to shockingly violent murders.

  229 Monte Cristo’s mansion at Auteuil: in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), the hero Edmond Dantès resides in Auteuil, now in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris.

  The Talisman: 1825 novel by Sir Walter Scott, the second of his ‘Tales of the Crusaders’. The talisman of the title has miraculous curative powers, which Saladin, disguised as a physician, uses to cure the ailing Richard the Lionheart.

  230 sawflies … daddy-long-legs: the sawfly is a very common insect of the family Tenthredinoidea. The daddy-long-legs is an English colloquial term for the crane fly. Fittingly given the story’s theme, the ichneumon of MRJ’s note is a notorious parasite wasp, which injects its young into the body of a host, from where it eats its way out.

  Anna Seward … the Swan of Lichfield: 1747–1809; popular English poet. Sir Walter Scott was her literary executor.

  235 I nearly got my quietus: I nearly died.

  236 Miss Bates: a voluble spinster from Jane Austen’s Emma (1815).

  238 S.T.P. … Præb. Junr: S.T.P. = Sacrosanctae Theologiae Professor (Professor of Sacred Theology). S.T.B. = Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus (Bachelor of Sacred Theology). Prœb. senr. = Praebenda senior (Senior Prebendary). Prœb. junr. = Praebenda junior (Junior Prebendary). Decanus = Dean.

  239 Debrett: John Debrett (1753–1822), Debrett’s Baronetage of England (first published 1803), a guide to the British and Irish peerage.

  240 a withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost: source of the collection’s title, A Thin Ghost and Others.

  King Saul that we read of raising up the dead ghost: in 1 Samuel 28: 7–20 the Witch of Endor raises Samuel’s ghost at Saul’s behest.

  241 Bluebeard’s chamber: in Perrault’s fairy tale, the serial murderer Bluebeard keeps the corpses of his wives in a forbidden chamber in his castle.

  THE DIARY OF MR. POYNTER

  First published in TG; reprinted in CGS. MS not located.

  242 Mr. James Denton … in the county of Warwick: F.S.A. = Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (of which MRJ became a member in the mid-1890s). Trinity Hall is a Cambridge college, founded 1350. Rendcomb Manor is fictitious.

  Thomas collection of MSS.: fictitious.

  245 Acrington: fictitious.

  Thomas Hearne: 1678–1735; English antiquarian noted for his editions of medieval chronicles; assistant librarian, Bodleian Library, Oxford University (1699–1715). The quarrels to which MRJ refers here probably allude to his opposition to George I, to whom he refused to take the oath of allegiance—for which reason he lost his position in the Bodleian.

  anti-Vivisection League: opposition to vivisection (animal experimentation) was a prominent radical cause in the late Victorian period. The high-profile Anti-Vivisection Society was founded by Frances Power Cobbe in 1875.

  247 Bermondsey: a district of Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, London. In the nineteenth century, Bermondsey was a notoriously rough area of docks, warehouses, and slums.

  unconsidered trifles: ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’: Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, iv.ii.26.

  ’Ercules and the painted cloth: this reference
remains slightly cryptic, though it seems to be part of an allusion by Mr Cattell to the ongoing debate as to the real authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Cox II (p. 327) believes it to be a misquotation of Henry IV, Part 1, iv.ii.25: ‘slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth’. Rosemary Pardoe, perhaps more plausibly, identifies the reference as the pageant scene from Love’s Labour’s Lost, v.ii.575–6: ‘You will be scrap’d out of the painted cloth for this’, after which the Boy (Moth) enters dressed as Hercules. See Pardoe, ‘Hercules and the Painted Cloth’, Ghosts and Scholars, 31 (2000), 49–50.