Collected Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  96 sad perplexity: the phrase is from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’:

  And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,

  With many recognitions dim and faint,

  And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

  The picture of the mind revives again.

  There may be a parallel suggested here, very faintly, between Tintern and Steinfeld abbeys.

  clerestory: ‘The upper part of the nave, choir, and transepts of any large church, containing a series of windows, clear to the roofs of the aisles, admitting light to the central parts of the building’ (SOED).

  Abbot Thomas von Eschenhausen: fictional, though perhaps based on Abbot Johannes Trithemius (see note to p. 103); the earliest stained glass from Steinfeld does date from around 1520.

  They have on their raiment a writing which no man knoweth: a conflation of parts of two verses: Revelation 19: 16 (‘And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh, a name written …’) and Revelation 19: 12 (‘and he had a name written, which no man knew, but he himself’).

  Upon one stone are seven eyes: Zechariah 3: 9: ‘For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.’

  97 Parsbury: fictional, but presumably intended to be in Hertfordshire.

  Cobblince: Koblenz, in the Rhineland, western Germany.

  98 I have never visited Steinfeld myself: MRJ’s Notes of Glass in Ashridge Chapel makes it clear that MRJ had never visited Steinfeld: ‘There is an account of Steinfeld in the Gallia Christiana, vol. III (Diocese of Cologne). I have not yet hit on any modern guide which will tell me whether there are any remains of it [the glass] at the present day’ (Cox II, 315).

  101 Turk’s head broom: a round-headed brush.

  103 “Steganographia” … “Cryptographia” … “de Augmentis Scientiarium”: the first two are landmark works in the history of cryptography and code. Johannes Trithemius (born Johann Heidenberg, 1462–1516), abbot of Sponheim (in the Rhineland, very near Koblenz), was reputed to be an occultist and black magician. His Steganographia (written 1499, published 1606), written in code, was long believed to be a work of black magic, though it is in fact a study of cryptography (‘steganography’ means ‘concealed writing’). ‘Cryptographia’ is the Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae (1624) by Gustavus Selenus, a pseudonym for Augustus the Younger (1579–1666), duke of Brunswick-Lüneberg in central Germany. Selenus also wrote an important study of chess, Chess, or the King’s Game (1616). De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) is the expanded Latin version of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning; volume vi contains a brief account of cryptography. Bacon devised a method of steganography which is still used, and still called the ‘Baconian cipher’.

  104 Gare à qui la touche: ‘Beware whoever touches it’. Originally part of the coronation ceremony of the Lombard kings: ‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche’ (‘God gives it [the Iron Crown of Lombardy] to me; beware whoever touches it’).

  105 of Eliezer and Rebekah, and of Jacob opening the well for Rachel: both stories featuring wells. In Genesis 24, Abraham sends Eliezer, his ‘eldest servant’, to find a wife for his son Isaac; Eliezer meets Rachel ‘by a well of water’ in the city of Nahor, Mesopotamia. In Genesis 29, Jacob meets Rachel at the well of Haran:

  And he looked, and behold a well in the field, and, lo, there were three flocks lying by it; for out of that well they watered the flocks: and a great stone was upon the well’s mouth.

  And thither were all the flocks gathered: and they rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the sheep, and put the stone again upon the well’s mouth in his place (Genesis 29: 2–3)

  A SCHOOL STORY

  First read 28 December 1906; written for the students of King’s College Choir School. First published in MGSA; reprinted in CGS. KCL MS MRJ:A/5.

  111 the Strand and Pearson’s: two magazines, both established in the 1890s, and both specializing in popular fiction. Abridged versions of some of MRJ’s stories were published without his knowledge in Pearson’s in the 1930s. MS version reads ‘Now a days the Strand would be a large contributor.’

  Berkeley Square: 50 Berkeley Square, Mayfair: ‘the most haunted house in London’, whose residents included former prime minister George Canning; now the home of Maggs Brothers antiquarian booksellers (who, interestingly, obtained the MRJ manuscripts for KCL). The house is the subject of a number of ghost stories, including Rhoda Broughton’s ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth’ (1868), where it appears as ‘32——Street, May Fair’. Caryl Brahms’s comic take on the legend, No Nightingales (1944), was filmed as The Ghosts of Berkeley Square (1947).

  112 The school I mean was near London: based on MRJ’s own preparatory school, Temple Grove, in East Sheen, Richmond, London, to which he went in 1873.

  His name was Sampson: this sentence not in MS, where his name is rendered variously as ‘Sampson’ and ‘Simpson’.

  113 meminiscimus patri meo: bad schoolboy Latin attempt at ‘I remember my father’.

  THE ROSE GARDEN

  First published in MGSA; reprinted in CGS. MS Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

  118 Westfield Hall, in the county of Essex: fictional, but obviously intended to lie somewhere between the Essex towns of Maldon and Chelmsford, which are about 5 miles apart.

  122 a very odd disjointed sort of dream: in The Gothic Quest (1939), Montague Summers wrote that ‘the late Dr M. R. James told me that one of his Ghost Stories—I am not sure which, but I rather fancy it might be The Rose Garden—was suggested to him by his recollection of a peculiarly vivid dream’ (Cox II, 318).

  126 Roothing: the Rodings, or Roothings, are a group of eight villages in Essex, a number of which contain distinctive Norman churches. The name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Hroðingas, named for their founder, Hroða. There is no village of Priors Roothing, though there is an Abbess Roding. Fifth of November mask: the fifth of November is Guy Fawkes’s Night, in which an effigy of Guy Fawkes is traditionally burned on a bonfire to commemorate the unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.

  127 Sir————, Lord Chief Justice under Charles II: probably Sir William Scroggs (1623–83), the Lord Chief Justice notorious for his savage conducting of the ‘Popish Plot’ trials of 1679–81 (see also note to p. 40), culminating in the trial and execution of Oliver Plunket, archbishop of Armagh, in 1681.

  128 quieta non movere: do not disturb quiet things—or, let sleeping dogs lie.

  THE TRACTATE MIDDOTH

  First published in MGSA; reprinted in CGS. KCL MS MRJ:A/6.

  129 Piccadilly weepers: long side whiskers, fashionable in the 1860s.

  a certain famous library: Cambridge University Library.

  129 Talmud: Tractate Middoth … 1707: the Talmud (Hebrew for study or learning) is a collection of Jewish commentaries and interpretative writings on oral and scriptural laws, comprising the Mishna (laws) and Gemara (commentary). The Middot (‘measurement’) is the tenth Mishnahic tractate of the Order of Kodashim (‘Holy Things’), the Fifth Order of the Mishna, dealing with the religious ceremony of the Temple of Jerusalem. The Middot itself describes the measurements of the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Nachmanides, or Nahmanides, was the pseudonym of the Catalan rabbi and sage Moses Ben Nahman (1194–1270), a celebrated commentator on the Talmud—although the specific volume referred to here may be fictional.

  137 Dundreary: Lord Dundreary, a character in Tom Taylor’s hit play Our American Cousin (1858), sported a spectacular set of Piccadilly weepers.

  139 a track: that is, ‘Trac.’, the abbreviated form of Tractate.

  140 Bretfield Manor: Bredfield is a village in Suffolk; the Jacobean Bredfield House (destroyed in the Second World War) was the birthplace of Edward Fitzgerald (1809–83), translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

  CASTING THE RUNES

  Fir
st published in MGSA; reprinted in CGS. British Library MS Egerton 3141.

  145 ut supra: ‘as stated above’.

  Mr. Karswell: it is often assumed that Karswell is based on the notorious occultist, sex magician, and dissident member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast’. Although Crowley was a student at Trinity College Cambridge, in the 1890s, there is no evidence that MRJ knew anything about him, let alone based the character upon him.

  146 Lufford Abbey, Warwickshire: fictional.

  148 John’s: St John’s College, Cambridge.

  150 There is nothing to be added by way of description of him to what we have heard already: the MS follows this with an excised passage: ‘though he is a principal character in this tale it is enough to know that he was of middle age and size [height], bearded, of regular habits, with a turn for investigations genealogical, topographical, and antiquarian; a familiar figure in the Reading Room and the Select MSS Room of the Museum, and at the Record Office, by no means uninteresting or uninterested in life, but one who had never experienced any deep convulsion of his being.

  Pyretic Saline: Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline was a popular Victorian health tonic.

  John Harrington, F.S.A., of The Laurels, Ashbrooke: FSA is Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. There are Ashbrookes in Sunderland and Northern Ireland, but this particular Ashbrooke is fictional. Three months were allowed: MS has ‘after six months’, amended to ‘after three months’.

  153 Harley 3586: the Harley Collection is a major collection of early books and documents housed in the British Library, and gathered by Robert Harley (1661–1724) and his son Edward Harley (1689–1741). MS Harley 3586 is a collection of two monastic registers from the fourteenth century, and two letters in English, both written in 1676, one (11 December) by the antiquarian and lexicographer Thomas Blount (1618–79), and one (26 October) by Thomas Goad of Balliol College, Oxford. It may be a fortuitous accident that MRJ chose this MS, but he may also have conflated this Thomas Goad with his older namesake (1576–1638), a seventeenth-century theologian who was, like MRJ himself, a scholar of Eton and a scholar and Fellow of King’s (and the son of a provost of King’s). This conjunction of seventeenth-century antiquarians and theologians seems on balance, given MRJ’s interests in this area, to be suggestive.

  154 Dr. Watson, his medical man: perhaps a joking allusion to Sherlock Holmes’s famous associate.

  hors de combat: ‘out of the fight’; disabled from fighting.

  ptomaine poisoning: food poisoning, which was believed to be caused by ‘ptomaines’, alkaloids (chemical compounds) found in decaying food. The discovery of bacteria and the successive formulations of the germ theory of disease across the second half of the nineteenth century had made the theory of ptomaine poisoning obsolete by the time James was writing.

  158 Runic letters: ancient alphabet, most commonly associated with Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon writing; often carrying or implying magical qualities.

  Golden Legend: influential collection of saints’ lives, compiled by Jacobus de Voragine around 1260.

  159 Golden Bough: monumental work of comparative anthropology and religion published between 1890 and 1915 by Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). One of the towering intellectual achievements of Edwardian Britain. MRJ was highly sceptical of the whole project of comparative mythography: see Introduction, p. xv.

  160 ‘black spot’: the symbol of a death sentence, delivered by pirates in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883).

  a woodcut of Bewick’s: Thomas Bewick (1753–1828): English wood engraver, best known for his illustrations of birds, and of Aesop’s Fables; the particular woodcut described here is fictional.

  ‘Ancient Mariner’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), ll. 448–51.

  162 Cook’s: Thomas Cook and Son was the pioneering nineteenth-century travel agency, specializing in package tours.

  163 ‘Lord Warden’: this was a real Dover hotel, in which MRJ stayed on his way to and from France (Cox II, 322).

  Joanne’s Guide: Hachette’s Guides Joannes were the forerunners to the famous Blue Guides, which began publication in 1918.

  164 St. Wulfram’s Church at Abbeville: a church which MRJ had visited on a number of occasions during his trips to France.

  THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER CATHEDRAL

  First published in the Contemporary Review, 97/35 (April 1910), 449–60; reprinted in MGSA and CGS. Location of MS unknown, though sold at Sotheby’s 9 November 1936 (PT, 178).

  165 Barchester: MRJ borrowed this fictional English city from the Barsetshire novels (1855–67) of Anthony Trollope. In the Preface to CGS, he writes that ‘the cathedrals of Barchester and Southminster [in “An Episode of Cathedral History”] were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford’.

  Ranxton-sub-Ashe … Lichfield: the former is fictional, the latter a city in Staffordshire in the English midlands, perhaps most famous as the birthplace of Samuel Johnson.

  Prebend … Precentor: a prebend or prebendiary is a stipendiary canon, paid out of cathedral revenues. A precentor directs the singing of a congregation.

  the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus … Life of Joshua: the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Flaccus’ unfinished Argonautica (c. CE 70) is a free Latin adaptation of Appolonius of Rhodes’s Greek epic of Jason and the Argonauts, composed in the third century BCE. Joshua was the leader of the tribes of Israel after the death of Moses (see the Old Testament books of Numbers and Joshua), who ordered the destruction of Jericho.

  167 Cyrus: probably an epic on the life of the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great (c. 600–530 BCE), who has a revered place in Old Testament history for his liberation of the Israelites from Babylon: on Cyrus’ edict, they were returned to the Holy Land, and commanded to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem (see Ezra 6: 3–5).

  Bell’s Cathedral Series: a celebrated multi-volume series of guides to English and Welsh cathedrals, published from the 1890s.

  Sir Gilbert Scott: Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), major Victorian architect, most closely associated with the Gothic revival.

  168 triforium … reredos … baldacchino: triforium: ‘a gallery or arcade in the wall over the arches at the sides of the nave and choir, and sometimes of the transepts, in some large churches’ (SOED). Reredos: decorated screen behind a church altar. Baldacchino: a structure in the form of a canopy, placed above an altar.

  169 Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: 2 Thessalonians 2: 7: ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.’

  170 join with the aged Israelite in the canticle: a reference to the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon in Luke 2: 29–31, which begins with the verse ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy will.’ This is the canticle prescribed for Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer.

  the genus Mus: a mouse.

  Tartarean: Tartarus was the hell of Greek mythology, an abyss of torment and punishment.

  171 “friar of orders gray”: a snatch of song sung by Petruchio in Shakespeare’ The Taming of the Shrew (iv. i. 145–6): ‘It was the friar of orders grey, | As he forth walked on his way.’ The grey friars are the Franciscans.

  172 Magnificat: Luke 1: 46–55. The song of Mary on her visitation to Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, sung when the baby leaps for joy in his mother’s womb, and beginning ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord.’ Like the Nunc Dimittis, it is sung at Evensong in the Anglican liturgy.

  175 Set thou an ungodly man … right hand: Psalm 109: 6: a curse.

  Set thou a wicked man over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand.

  When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his prayer become sin.

  Let his days be few, and let another take his office. (Psalm 109: 6–8)

  176 Mr. Shelley, Lord Byron, and M. Voltaire: all adduced here as anticlerical freethinkers and radicals, and from the s
tory’s 1818 perspective, all controversial or scandalous modern figures.

  MARTIN’S CLOSE

  First published in MGSA; reprinted in CGS. Eton College Library MS 368.

  179 a parish in the West: Sampford Courtenay in Devon, according to MRJ’s Preface to CGS. King’s College owned property in this village, which MRJ visited in 1893 (Cox I, 103).