Collected Ghost Stories
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372 Orlando Whistlecraft: 1810–93; meteorologist; author of The Climate of England (1840), The Magnificent and Notably Hot Summer of 1846 (1847), The Weather Record of 1856 (1857), and Whistlecraft’s Weather Almanac (annually, 1856–84). Like MRJ, a native of Suffolk.
Thetford Heath: Norfolk; ‘of Thetford I will not treat now, only pausing to note that not far from the Bury road, on the west side, you may catch sight of a block of stone on the heath which I have always taken to be a gibbet: certainly the locality would have suited highwaymen’ (S&N, 65–6).
AFTER DARK IN THE PLAYING FIELDS
First published in the Eton magazine College Days (28 June 1924), 311–12, 314; reprinted in CGS. MS not located.
377 Sheeps’ Bridge: the whole story is set in Eton, and relies heavily on a specific knowledge of the school’s geography. Sheep’s Bridge goes over the Jordan on the Playing Fields. There are a number of weirs nearby.
378 ‘The clamorous owl … spirits’ … ‘Come not near our fairy queen’: both quotations are from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: II.ii.6–7, 12.
Fellows’ Pond: on the Playing Fields, near Sheep’s Bridge.
379 Castle quadrangle … Lupton’s Tower … Curfew Tower: Lupton’s Tower is the central feature of Lupton’s Range in the Eton School Yard, built by Henry Redman in 1520, and named after Roger Lupton, provost of Eton from 1503 to 1535. The Quadrangle and the Curfew Tower are both features of nearby Windsor Castle.
Bad-calx: a reference to the Eton Wall Game, a ball game whose rules were drawn up in 1849. The game is traditionally played on College Field, between two goals known as ‘Good Calx’—a doorway at one end of the field—and ‘Bad Calx’—an ancient elm tree near Fellows’ Pond, whose stump was removed in 1994.
St. David’s tune: ‘St David’s’ is #140 in the Eton College Hymn Book (3rd edn., 1995), which notes ‘Present form of melody in T. Ravenscroft’s Psalter, 1621’. The hymn is sung to words by James Montgomery (1771–1854), which open ‘Lift up your heads, ye gates of brass’.
380 ‘restless changing weir’: William Morris, ‘The Earthly Paradise’:
The sheep-bells and the restless changing weir,
All little sounds made musical and clear
Beneath a sky that burning August gives;
While yet the thought of glorious summer lives.
before summer-time came in: before 1916, when daylight saving time was adopted: see note to p. 316.
Fourth of June fireworks: the ‘Fourth of June’ is Eton’s foremost celebration day, in honour of its greatest patron, King George III, who was born on this day in 1738 (actually 24 May according to the Julian Calendar still in operation in Britain until 1752). The celebration is no longer held on 4 June, but on the Wednesday before the first week in June.
WAILING WELL
First read at a camp of Eton Boy Scouts in Warbarrow Bay, Dorset, 27 July 1927. MRJ’s obituary in the Eton College Chronicle (18 June 1936) records that, after hearing the story, ‘several boys had a somewhat disturbed night, as the scene of the story was quite close to Camp’ (Cox I, 208). First published as a self-standing story (Mill House Press, 1928; a print run of 157 copies); reprinted in CGS. MS not located.
381 Bishop Ken: Thomas Ken (1637–1711), bishop of Bath and Wells; one of seven nonjuring bishops tried for seditious libel when they refused to take an oath of allegiance to William and Mary in 1688; removed from his bishopric in 1691.
Head Master … Provost … Vice-Provost: given that the story names actual members of the Eton staff of 1927, then the headmaster would be Cyril Alington, the provost MRJ himself, and the vice-provost Hugh Macnaghten. As Alington wrote, MRJ and Macnaghten did not get on: ‘Both wrote books about Eton, and neither could endure to read the other’s work, for Hugh thought Monty frivolous and Monty knew Hugh to be sentimental. The one [MRJ] went to bed very late and rose as late as decency permitted: the other retired soon after dusk, and was up with the lark, and I need hardly say that it was the early riser who was the most uncharitable in his judgement of his colleague’s idiosyncracies’ (Cox I, 214). This may account for the slightly cruel portrait of the vice-provost here.
Mr. Hope Jones: William Hope-Jones, housemaster at Eton, known as ‘Ho Jo’, and author of the scouting song ‘The Woad Ode’.
Judkins mi.: ‘Judkins minor’, Judkins the younger; as opposed to his older brother ‘Judkins ma.’: ‘Judkins major’.
382 Oppidans: non-scholarship pupils at Eton, who board in the town rather than in the school itself.
Lower Master: Sir Clarence Henry Kennett Marten (1872–1948), lower master, 1925; vice-provost, 1929; provost, 1945; knighted on the steps of the College Chapel, 1945.
Cuckoo Weir: Cuckoo Weir Stream, where Eton swimming tests took place until the 1950s. There are a number of weirs around Eton’s grounds: see note to p. 377.
383 Mr. Beasley Robinson: A. C. Beasley Robinson, Eton master.
Dr. Ley: Henry George Ley (1887–1962), organist and composer; precentor (music master) at Eton, 1926.
Mr. Lambart. Julian Lambart, Eton master. the beautiful district of W (or X) in the county of D (or Y): Worbarrow Bay, Dorset.
390 axe-helve: axe-handle.
THE EXPERIMENT
First published in the Morning Post, 31 December 1931. MS not located.
393 Raphael … Nares: ‘Raphael (Hebrew: “God heals”), noted in the apocryphal book of Tobit as God’s envoy, the healer of Tobit’s blindness, and conqueror of the demon Asmodeus, is called in the apocryphal First Book of Enoch (20:17) “the angel of the spirits of men”’ (EB). Nares is Latin for ‘nostrils’. Steve Duffy, ‘Nares’, Ghosts and Scholars, 31 (2000), 50, suggests that Nares is a demon who steals the breath (and thus the soul) from the dying body.
394 eftest: readiest, most convenient. The source is Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, IV.ii.38: ‘Yea, marry, that’s the eftest way.’
Bishop Moore: John Moore (1646–1714), bishop of Ely. Possessor of a vast library of some 30,000 books and manuscripts, donated in 1715 to Cambridge University Library by King George I, who had acquired it after Moore’s death for £6,450. This collection is now known as the Royal Library.
THE MALICE OF INANIMATE OBJECTS
First published in the Eton magazine The Masquerade (June 1932). MS in ‘private hands’ (Cox II, 335).
397 Squire Korbes: MRJ here recounts the Grimms’ fairytale, ‘Squire Korbes’.
400 GEO. W. FECI: ‘George Wilkins made this’.
A VIGNETTE
First published posthumously in the London Mercury, 35 (November 1936), 18–22. The story is prefaced by the following passage, by the editor, R. A. Scott James:
‘A Vignette’ is undoubtedly the last ghost story written by the late Dr. M. R. James, provost of Eton, and probably his last piece of continuous writing intended for the Press. It came into being in this way. Mr. Owen Hugh Smith was good enough to ask Dr. James to try to recapture the mood in which he wrote Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and to let me have something in a similar vein for the Christmas number of The London Mercury (1935). The answer was that he would do his best. On December 12th of that year he sent off to me the manuscript, written in pencil, from The Lodge, Eton College, with the following letter:
I am ill satisfied with what I enclose. It comes late and is short and ill written. There have been a good many events conspiring to keep it back, besides a growing inability. So pray don’t use it unless it has some quality I do not see in it.
I send it because I was enjoined to do something by Mr. Owen Hugh Smith.
It was then too late for our Christmas number, or, indeed, for the January number; so it was agreed that it should be held over till one of the closing months of this year.
At the moment of going to press, I see it announced that the original manuscripts of his Ghost Stories are to appear at a Sotheby’s sale on November 9th (written on foolscap paper). The original of ‘A Vignette,’ of course, is not among them. Like the others, i
t is written on lined foolscap.’
MS not located.
401 a country rectory: this is a depiction of Great Livermere rectory, Suffolk, where MRJ lived as a child.
the Hall: Livermere Hall, a seventeenth-century house, demolished in 1923: ‘Livermere Hall is gone, and many oaks in its park are cut down. “It must needs be that,” let us say, changes “come.” But village and park have some beauty left’ (S&N, 71).
402 what Hamlet calls a ‘gain-giving’: misgiving; Hamlet, v.ii.215–16: ‘It is but foolery, but it is such a gain-giving, as would perhaps trouble a woman.’
404 parts of a novel: J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard, serialized in the Dublin University Magazine, 1861–3: ‘As the aerial aspect of the house stood before her with its peculiar, malign, scared and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt under the melancholy old elms among the tall hemlock and nettles.’ There is some dispute as to whether the correct word here is ‘scared’ or ‘sacred’: MRJ clearly believed the latter, which he uses on both occasions that he quotes the passage, here and in his essay ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’.
APPENDIX: M. R. JAMES ON GHOST STORIES
408 ‘Schalken the Painter’: ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’, 1839 ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanu, inspired by the work of the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706).
‘Look on (them) again I dare not’: not Scott, but Shakespeare’s Scottish play: Macbeth II.ii.49.
There was the story of a man travelling in a train in France: a fragment of this story survives in KCL: MS MRJ A/10.
Madame de Lichtenstein: Caroline de Lichtenfeld in the MS, that is, Caroline de Lichfield, ou Mémoires d’une famille prussienne (1786), by the Swiss novelist and translator Isabelle de Montolieu (1751–1832), one of the most important European novels of the late eighteenth century.
409 Marcilly-le-Hayer: small town in the Aube region of northern France. the story of two students of King’s College, Cambridge: a draft of this exists in manuscript form: Cambridge University Library MS Add.7484.l.27 & 28b; it was published as ‘The Fenstanton Witch’ in Ghosts and Scholars, 12 (1990).
Fenstanton … Lolworth … Huntingdon: Fenstanton and Lolworth are both villages just north of Cambridge; Huntingdon as a market town in Cambridgeshire, and formerly the county town of Huntingdonshire.
410 Wild Wales: 1862 work by the Norfolk novelist and travel writer George Borrow (1803–81).
Lope de Vega’s El Peregrino en su patria: ‘The Pilgrim in his own Country’, work of fiction by the Spanish dramatist and poet (1562–1635).
411 Glanville, Beaumont: for Joseph Glanvill, see note to p. 181. John Beaumont (c. 1636–1701), An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits (1705).
Lavater: Johann Kasper Lavater (1741–1801), Swiss poet.
The Castle of Otranto … Mrs. Radcliffe … Monk Lewis: the most influential examples of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction: The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97); Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and others; Matthew Lewis (1775–1819), author of The Monk (1796). Lewis’s influential compendium of ghost stories and folklore, Tales of Wonder, was published in 1801.
Maturin’s Melmoth: Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); influential Gothic novel written by a Dublin Anglican clergyman.
413 Bulwer Lytton: Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), politician and prolific novelist.
414 Rhoda Broughton, Mrs. Riddell, Mrs. Henry Wood, Mrs. Oliphant: Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920); Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906); Mrs Henry Wood (Ellen Price) (1814–87); Margaret Oliphant (1825–97). All Victorian novelists and ghost-story writers.
Marion Crawford: Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909), American novelist and writer of supernatural fiction.
Chambers’s Repository: Chambers’ Repository of Instructive and Amusing Papers: a popular compendium, published in numerous volumes from the 1850s.
Alice-for-Short: 1907 novel by the Arts and Crafts potter and designer William Frend de Morgan (1839–1917).
414 E. F. Benson: 1867–1914; ghost-story writer, and younger brother of MRJ’s friend A. C. Benson.
Not At Night: an anthology series published in twelve volumes from 1925 to 1937, with stories largely drawn from the pulp magazine Weird Tales. It was edited by the horror writer Christine Campbell Thompson (1897–1985).
Ambrose Bierce: 1842–c. 1913; American writer, author of The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).
415 A. M. Burrage: Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889–1956), ghost-story writer; Some Ghost Stories (1927).
H. R. Wakefield: H. Russell Wakefield (c. 1890–1964), ghost-story writer; They Return at Evening (1928).
Mrs. Everett’s The Death Mask: H. D. Everett (Mrs Theo Douglas), The Death Mask and other ghosts (1920).
K. and Hesketh Prichard’s ‘Flaxman Low’: Katherine O’Brien Ryall Prichard (1852–1935) and her son, Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876–1922); The Experiences of Flaxman Low (1899).
Algernon Blackwood: 1869–1951; John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908).
Elliott O’Donnell: 1872–1965; Irish ghost-story writer.
Erckmann–Chatrian: Émile Erckmann (1822–99) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–90), joint authors of many ghost stories.
416 The Turn of the Screw: classic 1898 ghost story by Henry James.
417 Harrison Ainsworth: William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82), Lancashire novelist; The Lancashire Witches (1848).
Hastings: Captain Arthur Hastings is Hercule Poirot’s sidekick in the long-running series of detective novels by Agatha Christie.
418 Lanoe Falconer’s: pseudonym of Mary Elizabeth Hawker (1892–1908); Cecilia de Noël (1891).
Mr. Wardle’s Fat Boy: the Fat Boy in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers says, ‘I wants to make your flesh creep.’
De la Mare: Walter De la Mare (1873–1956); writer and poet.
419 L’Araignée Crabe: ‘The Crab Spider’. For Erckmann–Chatrian, see note to p. 415.
420 Aander og Trolddom: Norwegian for ‘Spirits and Magic’.