by M. R. James
THE UNCOMMON PRAYER-BOOK
First published in the Atlantic Monthly, 127/6 (June 1921), 756–65. Reprinted in WTC and CGS. Eton College Library MS 367.
300 Gaulsford … Leventhorp House … Longbridge … the valley of the Tent … Stanford St. Thomas and Stanford Magdalene: these are fictitious places, though Cox II (p. 331) suggests that the story is set in the valley of the Teme, near the English–Welsh border in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The Teme flows through both Stanford Bridge and Stanford-on-Teme. MS has ‘the Leventhorp house’; Atlantic Monthly has ‘the Leventhorp House’.
302 Gregory singin’: Gregorian chanting, or plainsong. Associated with the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century, and thus a sign of High Church Anglicanism.
da capo: literally ‘from the top’, used in music to signify ‘repeat from the beginning’.
303 the plague-year: 1665–6, when bubonic plague may have killed as many as 100,000 Londoners. Daniel Defoe published a fictionalized record, The Journal of the Plague Year, in 1722.
Cromwell, Ireton, Bradshaw, Peters: all notable figures in the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War (1641–51), all condemned for regicide. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was leader of the Parliamentary army and Lord Protector of England, 1653–8. Henry Ireton (1611–51), Cromwell’s son-in-law, was a general in the Parliamentary army. John Bradshaw (1602–59) was the judge who presided over the trial of Charles I, and later Lord President of the Council of State of the English Republic. Hugh Peters (1598–1660) was a celebrated Cromwellite preacher.
Lady Sadleir: Lady Anne Sadleir (1585–1671/2). Literary patron and major donor to the library of Trinity College Cambridge, which MRJ had catalogued from 1897.
Rural Life: a disguised version of Country Life.
304 chancel: the eastern part of a church, where the priest officiates.
Abbey Dore, of Lord Scudamore’s work: Dore Abbey is a Cistercian abbey in Herefordshire, of which MRJ was particularly fond, calling it in his book Abbeys (London: Great Western Railway, 1925) ‘the most surprising and delightful of all the places I have to write about’ (p. 116). MRJ visited Dore on a number of occasions whilst staying with Gwendolen McBryde in nearby Woodford (LTF, 18). The Scudamores are an old Herefordshire family, closely connected with Dore Abbey. John Scudamore (1601–71), 1st Viscount Scudamore of Sligo, and ‘an enthusiastic churchman of the Laudian type’ (MRJ, Abbeys, 116), restored and reconsecrated Dore Abbey in 1633–4.
the Dallams: a dynasty of seventeenth-century organ builders. Thomas Dallam (c. 1575–1630) built the organ at King’s College Cambridge in 1605–6.
305 Psalm cix. … Deus laudum: Psalm 109 (‘Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise’) is indeed a ‘very savage psalm’, a curse, which MRJ also uses in ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’. The Latin translation of the beginning of Psalm 109 should read ‘Deus laudem’.
Book of Common Prayer: book containing the order of Anglican church services, first produced in the aftermath of the Reformation. Published in a number of different versions between 1549 and 1622. The Book of Common Prayer was suppressed between 1553 and 1558, in the reign of the Catholic Mary I, and it is from this period (1553) that the Uncommon Prayer-Book dates.
Anthony Cadman: fictitious.
307 Arlingworth: fictitious.
309 long explosion: long exposure; one of MRJ’s characteristic working-class malapropisms.
311 Norwood: a district of south London.
A NEIGHBOUR’S LANDMARK
First published in the Eton Chronic (17 March 1924), 4–10. Reprinted in WTC and CGS. The final paragraph was added for the CGS publication. MS not located. 315 A Neighbour’s Landmark: a commination (or recital of divine threats against sinners) from the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour’s land-mark.’ Derived from Deuteronomy 19: 14: ‘Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it.’
Betton Court: fictitious.
“The Stricken Years,” in the Times Literary Supplement: there is no such article, but this may be MRJ, himself ‘a Victorian by birth and education’, disparaging the revisionist biographical studies of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) as ‘clever and thoughtful Rubbish … written about the Victorian age’. Strachey was equally unimpressed by MRJ: see Introduction, p. xiv.
316 The Late Peace, The Late War … to his Clergy: some of these tracts and pamphlets are genuine. The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (1711) is a pamphlet by Jonathan Swift criticizing the Whig government for its involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). The Late Peace and The Late War, though impossible to identify precisely, are very likely pamphlets also referring to the War of the Spanish Succession. A Letter to a Convocation Man (1696) is a celebrated religious tract by Francis Atterbury (1663–1732), bishop of Rochester, calling for ecclesiastical reform of the Church of England. St Michael Queenhithe was a church in the City of London, rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire of 1666, but demolished in 1876. Sir Jonathan Trelawny (1650–1721), a patron of Francis Atterbury and the convocation movement, was bishop of Winchester from 1706 until his death.
no saving of daylight: daylight saving time was adopted in Britain in 1916, following the tireless advocacy of William Willett.
the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: SPCK; the oldest Anglican mission agency, founded in 1698 by Thomas Bray to ‘counteract the growth of vice and immorality’.
317 “That which walks … cries”: this couplet was praised by the distinguished Cambridge classicist and poet A. E. Housman as ‘good poetry’ (Cox I, 145).
318 Birket Foster: Myles Birket Foster (1825–99), illustrator most famous for depicting country scenes.
319 ‘With no language but a cry’: Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. (1849), 54:20.
324 Scott’s Glenfinlas: ‘Glenfinlas, or Lord Ronald’s Coronach’ is a supernatural ballad by Sir Walter Scott, first published in Matthew Lewis’s miscellany Tales of Wonder (1800):
O aid me, then, to seek the pair
Whom, loitering in the woods, I lost;
Alone, I dare not venture there,
Where walks, they say, the shrieking ghost.
MRJ wrote that Scott’s ‘Glenfinlas’ and ‘The Eve of St John’ ‘must always rank as fine ghost stories’ (‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’). East Anglian folklore makes reference to two ghosts of shrieking women, in Aylmerton and Sheringham (both in Norfolk): see J. Westwood and J. Simpson, The Lore of the Land (London: Penguin 2005), 489, 514.
325 Lady Ivy, formerly Theodosia Bryan: MRJ was particularly interested in seventeenth-century trials, and in 1929 wrote the Preface for Sir John Fox’s edition of The Lady Ivie’s Trial (Oxford, 1929).
Shadwell: in the East End of London.
A VIEW FROM A HILL
First published in the London Mercury, 12/67 (May 1925), 17–30; reprinted in WTC and CGS. MS not located.
326 in the south-western of them: all of the place names in the story are fictitious, but MRJ wrote in the Preface to CGS ‘that Herefordshire was the imagined scene of “A View from a Hill”’.
328 Borgia box: a reference to the notoriety of the Borgias as poisoners: see note to p. 39. This anticipates the observation that ‘it must have been poisonous stuff in the pot’ that is boiled down to make the glasses.
337 ‘He lived unknown, and few could know when Baxter ceased to be’: cf. Wordsworth, ‘She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways’: ‘She lived unknown, and few could know | When Lucy ceased to be’.
A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS
First published in the London Mercury, 12/70 (August 1925), 354–65; reprinted in WTC and CGS. MS in Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
343 Seaburgh: fictionalized version of Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, rendered here with meticulous accuracy.
MRJ spent part of his childhood here, visiting his paternal grandmother, and returned often throughout his life, and especially in later years. ‘Aldeburgh … has a special charm for those who, like myself, have known it from childhood; but I do not find it easy to put that charm into words’ (S&N, 102).
Great Expectations: the opening chapters of Dickens’s 1861 novel are memorably set on the Essex marshes, not far down the coast from Aldeburgh.
a spacious church of flint: ‘Characteristic of East Anglian churches is the use of flint: plain flint, knapped smooth, forms the beautiful surfaces of many towers and walls, and flint and stone panelling adorns the bases of towers and porches and runs along below the battlements of aisles’ (S&N, 7). The ‘dignified and spacious’ (S&N, 104) parish church of St Peter and St Paul at Aldeburgh is made of flint, and stands on a hill above the town. The poet George Crabbe was curate of this church from 1781, and set his classic work Peter Grimes (made into an opera by another Aldeburgh resident, Benjamin Britten) in Slaughden, a fishing village half a mile south of Aldeburgh, which was completely lost to the sea in 1936.
344 martello tower: Aldeburgh’s Martello tower began construction in 1806. It is the largest of many Martello towers on the East Anglian coast, and the only one in a clover-leaf shape.
the ‘Bear’: fictionalized version of the White Lion, Aldeburgh, where MRJ liked to stay.
345 Froston: a conjunction of Friston (which does not have crowns on the porch of its church) and Theberton (which does); both are a few miles from Aldeburgh.
three crowns: although depicted on churches and pub signs throughout the region, the Three Crowns are not ‘the old arms of the kingdom of East Anglia’, but ‘unauthorized arms unofficially identified with the region’ (Westwood and Simpson, The Lore of the Land, 683).
346 the crown of Redwald, King of the East Angles, was dug up at Rendlesham: Raedwald (d. 616–17) was the first king of the East Angles, believed by some to be buried at Sutton Hoo (Rendlesham), Suffolk, site of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon architectural finds, fully excavated by Basil Brown in 1939. John Kirby’s A Topographical and Historical Description of the County of Suffolk (Woodbridge, 1839) makes reference to the work of the historian William Camden (1551–1623): ‘The editor of Cambden [sic] adds, “It is said that in digging here about thirty years since, there was found an ancient silver crown, weighing about sixty ounces, which was thought to have belonged to Redwald; or some other king of the East Angles; but it was sold, and melted down’ (p. 123). Westwood and Simpson (The Lore of the Land, 682) place the date of this discovery as 1687.
a Saxon royal palace, which is now under the sea: Dunwich, Suffolk—the ancient capital of East Anglia, lost to the sea between 1286 and 1328.
347 the war of 1870: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. Britain was not a combatant, but it is relevant here given the crowns’ specific purpose of warding off German invasion.
South African War: the Boer War of 1899–1902.
348 barrows: burial mounds, as famously can be seen at Sutton Hoo.
349 Jewel House at the Tower: the British Crown Jewels are housed in the Tower of London.
intaglios and cameos: intaglios are engraved gems; cameos are the opposite, gems with relief carvings. Westwood and Simpson (The Lore of the Land 682) describe these details as ‘almost certainly anachronistic’.
352 Paschal moon: Easter moon.
as Christian did through that Valley: the Valley of Humiliation in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: see note to p. 81.
354 piano: ‘soft’; a musical notation.
356 spit of land: Orford Ness, a spit of land some 9 miles long, running south along the coast from Aldeburgh.
AN EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT
First published in WTC, reprinted in CGS. Composed to make up the final story in WTC; very likely it is to this story that MRJ refers when he writes to Gwendolen McBryde on 3 October 1925: ‘The ghost story book is finished. I had to write another one instead of the one I was at, which would not come out’ (LTF, 135).
358 ‘Rawhead and Bloody Bones’: OED defines ‘Raw-head’ as ‘A bugbear or bogeyman, typically imagined as having a head in the form of a skull, or one whose flesh has been stripped of its skin, invoked to frighten children. Also occas.: a skull. Freq. used in conjunction with bloody-bones’. ‘Bloody-bones’ appears to date from 1548, when it appeared in The Wyll of the deuyll, and last testament, an anti-Catholic tract published by Humfrey Powell (d. c.1566): ‘Our faythfull Secretaryes, Hobgoblyn and Blooddybone.’ As a conjunction, ‘Rawhead and Bloody Bones’ makes its first appearance in John Jeffere’s Buggbears (c.1564): ‘Hob Goblin, Rawhead, & bloudibone the ouglie hagges Bugbeares, & helhoundes, and hecate the nyght mare.’
Mrs. Marcet … Utility and Truth: these are all explanatory scientific works. Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769–1858) wrote a series of Conversations on science and political economy; given the context, MRJ would seem to be referring here to Conversations on Chemistry, Intended More Especially for the Female Sex (1805). The others are Dialogues in Chemistry, Intended for the Instruction and Entertainment of Young People (1809) by the Unitarian minister Jeremiah Joyce (1763–1816); and Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest: Being an Attempt to Illustrate the First Principles on Natural Philosophy by the Aid of Popular Toys and Sports (1827), by John Ayrton Paris (c.1785–1856).
359 woundy: extremely, excessively.
361 that old figure cut out in the hill-side: probably the Cerne Abbas Giant, an enormous, priapic figure cut into the chalk hillside at Cerne Abbas, Dorset, and generally taken to be a pagan fertility god. In Abbeys, MRJ wrote: ‘That [Cerne Abbey] is really old I have little doubt; I have always supposed that it was set up here as a counterblast to the worship of the wicked old giant who is portrayed on the side of Trendle Hill just beyond the Abbey. He is surely of very great antiquity, and is perhaps the most striking monument of the early paganism of the country. Whether he is British or Saxon, who shall say? Some have thought that he represents what Caesar describes—a wicker figure in which troops of victims were enclosed and then burnt to death. On this hypothesis the figure would have been marked out by a palisade of wattles on the ground, and the victims, bound, crowded into the enclosure. In any case, here must have been an important heathen sanctuary, and a fit place consequently for champions of the new religion to set their standard’ (p. 149).
363 a little ornament like a wheel: the pagan ‘sun wheel’, a symbol of the cycle of the year, and thus of fertility, invoked at the end of the story by the Wise Man of Bascombe: ‘When the sun’s gathering his strength … and when he’s in the height of it, and when he’s beginning to lose his hold, and when he’s in his weakness, them that haunts about that lane had best take heed to themselves.’
365 Bascombe and Wilcombe: both fictitious.
366 Lord of flies: Beelzebub (more properly Beelzebul), often taken as a translation from the Hebrew for ‘Lord of the Flies’, refers variously to the Devil himself, or to a prince of hell. ‘Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron’, a Philistine deity, appears in 2 Kings 1: 2–6. Beelzebub is ‘the prince of devils’ in Matthew 12: 24 and Mark 3: 22, and ‘the chief of the devils’ in Luke 11: 15.
THERE WAS A MAN DWELT BY A CHURCHYARD
First published in the Eton magazine Snapdragon (6 December 1924), 4–5; reprinted in CGS. MS not located.
368 Mamilius: The Winter’s Tale, II.i.25–31. Mamilius is the son of Leontes and Hermione, and starts a story which begins ‘There was a man dwelt by a churchyard’, only to be interrupted when Leontes breaks in with guards and imprisons Hermione on suspicion of infidelity. Mamilius dies shortly afterwards, of a broken heart. It is this passage which gives the play its title, when Mamilius says, ‘A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins.’ In his introduction to Ghosts and Marvels, ed. V. H. Collins (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), MRJ writes that this passage ‘justifies all ghost stories, and puts them in their proper place’.
Mi
dsummer Eve and All Hallows: Midsummer Eve (23 June) and All Hallows, or Halloween (31 October), are both amongst the dates associated with the Witches’ Sabbath.
RATS
First published in the Eton magazine At Random (23 March 1929), 12–14; reprinted in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s anthology Shudders (1929), and CGS. MS not located.
371 ‘And if … rats under’em’: from Charles Dickens, ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’, a Christmas story published in All the Year Round (1861).