Collected Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  248 catchit: cachet.

  cui bono: ‘to whose benefit?’ A legal term implying guilt on behalf of the person with most to gain from committing the crime. Given Mr Cattell’s propensity for malapropisms (which he shares with very many of MRJ’s working-class characters), it seems likely that he means to say something else.

  the feast of Simon and Jude: 28 October.

  252 Commoner of University College: University College is the oldest of the Oxford Colleges, founded 1249 (St Edmund Hall, founded 1226, gained full college status in 1957). A commoner is a student who pays for his own commons (dinner)—that is, one who does not hold a scholarship or exhibition.

  251 Absalom: son of King David, renowned for his beauty, who rebelled unsuccessfully against his father’s rule: see 2 Samuel 13–18. 2 Samuel 15: 25–6 makes specific reference to the beauty and lustre of Absalom’s hair:

  But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.

  And when he polled his head [i.e. cut his hair], (for it was at every year’s end that he polled it, because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king’s weight.

  Given the story’s background in seventeenth-century antiquarianism and monarchical controversies, this may carry a veiled allusion to John Dryden’s satirical allegory ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (1681), which uses the Absalom story to recount the history of the Popish Plot of 1678 (a favourite subject of MRJ’s—see ‘The Ash-Tree’ and ‘The Rose Garden’) and the ongoing events which were to culminate in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, in which the Protestant Duke of Monmouth attempted to overthrow the Catholic James II.

  Dr. Plot’s History of Staffordshire: Robert Plot (1640–96), The Natural History of Staffordshire (1686). Like Everard Charlett, Plot was a commoner at University College Oxford; he was also first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and first professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford.

  ‘There are more things’: Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v.166–7: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, | Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.

  AN EPISODE OF CATHEDRAL HISTORY

  First published in the Cambridge Review (10 June 1914); reprinted in TG and CGS. KCL MS MRJ:A/7. MS dated 1911, in MRJ’s hand. First read 18 May 1913, according to A. C. Benson: ‘Monty read us a very good ghost story, with an admirable verger very humorously portrayed—the ghost part weak’ (Cox II, 328).

  252 Southminster: fictitious, but in the Preface to CGS, MRJ notes that ‘the cathedrals of Barchester [in “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”] and Southminster were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford’.

  Mr. Worby: there are a number of Worbys buried in the churchyard at Great Livermere, including one in the grave next door to MRJ’s father. Mr. Datchery: Dick Datchery is the name adopted by a mysterious character in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, whose identity is not revealed in Dickens’s unfinished last work. MRJ was a great admirer of Dickens, and wrote an article on Drood, ‘The Edwin Drood Syndicate’, for the Cambridge Review (November–December 1905). MRJ believed that Datchery was actually Edwin Drood himself in disguise. Drood’s setting of a provincial English cathedral city, Cloisterham (Rochester), has clear resonances for this story. In E&K, MRJ recalls that ‘Six of us, calling ourselves the Edwin Drood Syndicate, went down early in July of 1909 to Rochester to examine the possibilities of various theories on the spot’ (p. 141). One of the six was Henry Jackson, who went on to write a study, About Edwin Drood (1911).

  253 Jasper and Durdles: more Droodiana. John Jasper is Edwin Drood’s uncle, precentor of Cloisterham cathedral, and prime candidate for the role of the novel’s villain; Durdles is a bibulous stonemason. In chapter 3 of Drood, Jasper and Durdles walk through the crypt of Cloisterham cathedral, discussing the provenance and manufacture of tombs.

  a Scotch Cathedral: Cox II (p. 329) identifies this as a reference to Scott’s The Lord of the Isles (1813):

  If thou would’st view fair Melrose aright,

  Go visit it by the pale moonlight;

  For the gay beams of lightsome day

  Gild, but to flount, the ruins of grey.

  254 Perpendicular period: late medieval Gothic architecture, flourishing from c.1350 to 1500, characterized by vertical lines and large, elaborate stained glass. Canterbury Cathedral, one of the models for Southminster, is partly Perpendicular, as is King’s College Chapel, and parts of Hereford Cathedral.

  the series: Bell’s Cathedral Series: influential guidebooks to English and Welsh Cathedrals, published 1836–1932.

  255 Gothic revival: rediscovery of medieval architectural forms, particularly popular across the nineteenth century, hence ‘Victorian Gothic’. MRJ was strongly opposed to Victorian restoration of ecclesiastical architecture to its ‘original’ forms.

  255 Lady Chapel … overmantel: ‘Lady Chapel’: typically the largest and most important chapel within a church; dedicated to the Virgin Mary. ‘Overmantel’: ‘A piece of ornamental cabinet work, often including a mirror, placed over a mantelpiece’ (SOED); a characteristically Victorian design.

  256 Hereford Cathedral: a major example of Victorian Gothic restoration. Following the collapse of the Western Tower in 1786, Hereford Cathedral was restored in three phases across the nineteenth century, by James Wyatt, Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, and George Gilbert Scott.

  258 F.S.A.: see note to p. 242.

  259 diaper-ornament: diamond-patterned textile work.

  260 Isaiah xxxiv. 14: see note to p. 13. The demons of these two stories are virtually identical (one has yellow eyes, the other red), and are both imprisoned within cathedrals. Could ‘Canon Alberic’’s demon be the fellow to whom this satyr cries, ‘as if it were calling after someone that wouldn’t come’?

  Simeon’s lot … the Evangelical party: Charles Simeon (1759–1836), leading Evangelical preacher in the Church of England, and like MRJ both an Old Etonian and a Fellow of King’s. From the mid-eighteenth century, the Evangelical movement was influential within Anglicanism, calling for social and clerical reform, and for a greater sacralization of the Church of England; in part, it was a response to the rise of Methodism and other Dissenting Protestant faiths in the eighteenth century. MRJ’s father, an Anglican clergyman, was an Evangelical strongly influenced by Simeon.

  264 Venite: a canticle sung in the Anglican liturgy of Morning Prayer, consisting of Psalm 95, which opens, ‘O come, let us sing unto the Lord’ (‘Venite, exultemus domino’). It is one of the Psalms ordered for Morning Prayer on the nineteenth day of the month, according to the Book of Common Prayer. The Decani boys are the choristers on the Dean’s (south) side of the choir; opposite them, on the Precentor’s (north) side are the Cantoris.

  267 IBI CUBAVIT LAMIA: ‘The screech owl also shall rest there’ (KJV), or perhaps more appropriately ‘there shall the night hag alight’ (RSV); from the Vulgate of Isaiah 34: 14 (see note to p. 13 for the King James translation): ‘et occurrent daemonia onocentauris et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum ibi cubavit lamia et invenit sibi requiem’. The lamia was a Greek succubus or night demon who devoured children, and gained particular cultural currency in the nineteenth century as a vampiric femme fatale. Thus, importantly, ‘Cathedral History’’s demon is female (as opposed to its male counterpart in ‘Canon Alberic’).

  THE STORY OF A DISAPPEARANCE AND AN APPEARANCE

  First published in the Cambridge Review (4 June 1913); reprinted in TG and CGS. KCL MS MRJ:A/8. S. G. Lubbock, present at the first reading, records that ‘the silence which fell when the grim story ended was broken by the voice of Luxmoore: “Were there envelopes in those days?”’ (Lubbock, 39).

  268 GREAT CHRISHALL: the villages of Great Chishill and Chrishall, which share a common etymology, are a mile or so apart, one either side of the Cambridgeshire–Essex border.

  B——: ‘Bicester’ in
the MS; a town north of Oxford.

  269 W. R.: MS follows this with a deleted sentence: ‘P. S. Perhaps I ought not to joke about what may turn out a tragedy: but I can’t help thinking that Uncle H’s figure is not very well adapted to the vanishing trick.’

  KING’S HEAD, Dec. 23,’37: MS reads ‘King’s Head, Bicester Dec. 23.’37’. There is still a King’s Head in Bicester.

  Woodley: a town in Berkshire, about 30 miles from Bicester.

  270 bands: ‘A pair of strips … hanging down in front, as part of clerical, legal or academic dress’ (SOED).

  Bow Street: the Bow Street Runners, the first organized, professional London police force, was established by Henry Fielding in 1749.

  on the qui vive: on the lookout (from a French sentinel’s call, ‘Long live who?’).

  271 Boniface: the landlord in George Farquhar’s play The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707).

  Boz: the pen name of Charles Dickens in his early years as a writer; Sketches by Boz was a collection of short pieces published to great success in 1836, the year before this story is set.

  what the Scripture terms a hairy man: Genesis 27: 11, from the story of Jacob and Esau: ‘And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.’

  273 bagman: a commercial traveller. This may be another allusion to early Dickens: ‘The Story of the Bagman’s Uncle’ is a ghost story which comprises chapter 49 of The Pickwick Papers (1837). On 26 December, the narrator reads ‘the last number of Pickwick’.

  Punch and Judy Show: the specifics of the Punch and Judy show are important to this story. Punch and Judy is an English puppet show derived from the Italian commedia dell’arte, and featuring the violent, anarchic, stick-wielding Mr Punch (shortened from Punchinello), who bests a series of stock characters, traditionally including his wife Judy, a policeman, a crocodile, various foreigners, a baby, Toby the Dog (often, as here, a real dog, dressed in a ruff), Jack Ketch the Hangman, and even the Devil himself. The first reference to Punchinello in England is by Samuel Pepys, whose diary records seeing a show on 9 May 1662.

  273 W——: MS reads ‘Brackley’, a town in Northamptonshire, a few miles up the road from Bicester.

  274 I believe someone once tried to re-write Punch as a serious tragedy: John Payne Collier (1789–1883), The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy (1828). This was published as part of Collier’s critical study Punch and Judy: A Short History with the Original Dialogue, with illustrations by the Dickensian illustrator George Cruickshank.

  the Vampyre in Fuseli’s foul sketch: a reference to The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825), one of the iconic paintings of Romanticism, depicting a goblin or incubus squatting on the chest of a sleeping woman.

  Shallabalah: another Dickensian allusion, from The Old Curiosity Shop, chapter 16: ‘the foreign gentleman who not being familiar with the language is unable in the representation to express his ideas other than by the utterance of the word “Shallabalah” three distinct times’.

  278 vail: gratuity or tip.

  The organ wolved: ‘Wolve: Of an organ: To give forth a hollow wailing sound like the howl of a wolf, from deficient wind-supply’ (SOED).

  our friend Smith: possibly a personal reference, to MRJ’s Old Etonian friend (and former member of the Chitchat Society), Henry Babington Smith.

  Turncock … beadle: a turncock is ‘A waterworks official who turns on the water from the mains to the supply-pipes’ (SOED). Not a stock Punch and Judy character, but MRJ perhaps meant to write ‘turnkey’ (jailer), a character who does feature in Punch and Judy. A beadle is a minor official of the court or church, charged with keeping order.

  279 Mr. Ketch: Jack Ketch (d. 1686), executioner in the reign of Charles II; afterwards a proverbial name for all executioners.

  TWO DOCTORS

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

  281 Gray’s Inn: Holborn, London; one of the four Inns of Court, the centres of London’s legal profession.

  Islington: a suburb of north London; certainly no longer ‘a countrified place’.

  282 bedstaff: ‘A stick used in some way about a bed, formerly handy as a weapon’ (SOED). The ‘matter of the bedstaff’, repeated on three occasions in the story, presumably refers to Dr Abell’s ‘power of communicating motion and energy into inanimate objects’, such as the poker on p. 284.

  Battle Bridge: Battle Bridge Field is west of Gray’s Inn Road, London. distinguo: ‘I differentiate’; a term used to draw distinctions in argument in medieval scholasticism. See Ignacio Angelleli, ‘The Techniques of Disputation in the History of Logic’, Journal of Philosophy, 67/20 (October 1970), 800–15.

  283 the satyr which Jerome tells us conversed with Antony: St Jerome (c. 347–420), Church Father, translator of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate). In his Life of St Paul the Hermit, Jerome records how St Antony discourses with a satyr and a centaur, whose language he finds himself miraculously able to speak. The satyr asks Antony for his blessing.

  John Milton’s: the quotation is from Paradise Lost, iv.677–8.

  Royal Society: the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, learned scientific society, founded 1662.

  284 bolus: a large, round pill or tablet.

  Mysore: city in Karnataka, southern India. According to Hindu legend, Mysore was once ruled by the demon Mahishasura.

  286 a coronet and a bird: presumably the heraldic symbols of the ‘noble family’ of Middlesex from whose mausoleum the bedsheets (or shroud) were stolen.

  287 tickleminded: this might simply mean sensitive or easily upset, though the SOED defines ‘tickle-brain’ as ‘potent liquor’, and so this might imply alcoholism.

  THE HAUNTED DOLLS’ HOUSE

  Written for the library of Queen Mary’s Doll’s House in Windsor, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1920. Other tiny works in the library were by Arthur Conan Doyle, Hilaire Belloc, Thomas Hardy, and others. See Mary Stewart-Wilson and David Cripps, Queen Mary’s Doll’s House (London: Ebury Press, 1996). First published in the Empire Review (February 1923), reprinted in WTC and CGS. MS not located.

  291 Strawberry Hill Gothic: Horace Walpole (1717–97), author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), generally reckoned to be the first Gothic novel in English, acquired Strawberry Hill, near Richmond, west London, in 1748, and renovated it in spectacular neo-Gothic style. ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ became an influential architectural mode for the nineteenth-century Gothic revival in architecture.

  ogival hoods … crockets … finials: ogival hoods: ‘Having the form or outline of an ogive or pointed (“Gothic”) arch’ (SOED); crockets: ‘small ornaments, usually in the form of buds or curled leaves, placed on the the insides of pinnacles, canopies, etc., in Gothic architecture’ (SOED); a finial is ‘An ornament placed upon the apex of a roof, pediment, or gable, or upon each corner of a tower’ (SOED).

  294 perron: ‘A platform, ascended by steps, in front of a church, mansion, etc., and upon which the door or doors open’ (SOED).

  294 posset: a drink made of hot milk, alcohol, and spices, used as a cold remedy.

  295 truckle-beds: beds on castors or tracks, for storage underneath another bed when not in use.

  297 physicks me: ‘To physic’ means ‘To dose with … a purgative’, or ‘To treat with remedies’ (SOED); but here in its colloquial usage, meaning something like ‘to puzzle’ or ‘to confound’.

  298 Canterbury and York Society’s: society for the publication of episcopal and archepiscopal records, founded 1904.

  Coxham … Ilbridge House: both fictitious.

  Vitruvius: Marcus Vitruvius Pollo (first century BCE), Roman architect and engineer. His De Architectura was rediscovered in the Renaissance, and became the most important sourcebook for neoclassical architecture. Thus, Roger Merewether’s interest in Gothic runs totally counter to his training as a neoclassical architect, and can be said here to represent
his unconscious, unofficial, or murderous self.

  299 quoins and dressings: quoins are the stoneworkings at the external angles of a building; dressings are ‘projecting mouldings on a surface’ (SOED). This new building is neither neo-Classical nor neo-Gothic, but ‘an Elizabethan erection of the [eighteen-] forties’.