The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories
Page 48
1. Professor Van Loo of Leyden: the professor is, of course, a fictional character; Leiden, or Leyden, is a town in the Netherlands, famous for its university (founded in 1575), which was, from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century the foremost institution in the world for the study of botany, theology, law, natural philosophy (see note 3 to ‘No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man’) and, more pertinently, medicine.
2. the funds: government bonds; a safe and secure investment.
3. Warwickshire: a county in the north-west Midlands.
4. Kenlis: there is no such village in Warwickshire; however, the name has Irish connections, being the old name for Kells in County Meath.
5. Dawlbridge: this appears to be a fictional place.
6. Swedenborg’s Arcana Cælestia … pure vellum … carmine edges: Emanuel Swedenborg (né Swedberg, 1688–1772) was a Swedish philosopher and mystic. He died in London, and is buried in Shadwell. Originally a natural philosopher (for natural philosophy, see note 3 to ‘No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man’), Swedenborg began writing his mystical works in the 1740s, after a period of hallucinatory or visionary experiences, in which he saw and conversed with God and angels. The meanings of these visions were promulgated in a number of books. After his death, his beliefs were fostered by the New Church and other Swedenborgian societies and communities; the poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827) was briefly an adherent of Swedenborgianism. Swedenborgian beliefs also feature strongly in Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas (1864). The Arcana Coelestia (‘Heavenly Secrets’ or ‘The Mysteries of Heaven’) was originally published in Latin in eight volumes (1749–56). It sets out Swedenborg’s version of Christianity through a series of numbered interpretations and responses to the biblical texts of Genesis and Exodus. The work was translated into English by clergyman John Clowes (1743–1831) in twelve volumes (1774 – 1806); a new translation appeared from 1857 to 1860. For vellum, see note 21 to ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’; carmine refers to the crimson colour derived from cochineal (made from crushed beetles).
7. ‘When man’s interior … bodily sight’: this quotation is a translation of Arcana, 1619.
8. ‘By the internal sight … and so on’: this quotes Arcana, 994.
9. ‘There are … evil spirits’: this passage does not seem to refer to any particular paragraph from the Arcana, but expresses an idea found often in Swedenborg’s writings.
10. ‘With wicked genii … within it’: a paraphrased translation of Arcana, 1760.
11. ‘The evil spirits … their former state’: a translation of Arcana, 5852. The quotation omits to translate the middle part of the paragraph, which asserts, among other things, that good spirits are also with man. In his book Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978), Jack Sullivan correctly points out that Le Fanu’s use of Swedenborg involves ‘a distortion, or at least a darkening of the original’ (p. 22).
12. ‘If evil spirits … good of faith’: these two paragraphs are from one paragraph in the Arcana – number 5863.
13. ‘Nothing is more … destroy him’: in his excellent notes to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of In a Glass Darkly (1993), Robert Tracy suggests that the source for this quotation may not derive directly from the Arcana, though he finds a similar statement in Arcana, 292.
14. ‘The delight of hell … eternal ruin’: from Arcana, 5864. The quotation omits the first half of the sentence, which proclaims that the delight and bliss of heaven is to do good to human beings.
15. ‘representatives’ and ‘correspondents’: in Swedenborg’s philosophy, spirits are manifested to sight by ‘representatives’ (representations) or ‘correspondents’ (correspondences) which embody them, taking the form of natural objects.
16. bestial forms: there does not seem to be precisely such a paragraph in the Arcana. Swedenborg talks about beasts in Arcana, 3646, but there merely intends to show the distinction between beasts and men, in so far as only human beings have spiritual loves and ends, whereas beasts are confined to the earthly.
17. Dr Harley … practised in England: possibly an allusion to Harley Street in London, the famous locale of the city’s physicians; some critics have suggested that this could be instead a reference to the prominent Victorian physician Dr George Hartley (1829–1896), though the story’s setting, around the year 1805, and the range of Hartley’s interests (jaundice, histology – the science of organic tissues – and poisons) make this somewhat unlikely.
18. hippish: hypochondriacal, low in spirits.
19. London season: coinciding with the sittings of the Houses of Parliament, and the terms of colleges and law-courts, the period from just after Christmas to mid-June when balls and dinners were held and there were trips to the opera. At the close of the season, aristocrats and the well-to-do would retreat to the sea or to country estates.
20. triste: sad (French).
21. portrait of Schalken’s … background of darkness: Godfried (or Gottfried) Schalken (1643–1706) was a Dutch painter, known in particular for his portraits of people set in shadow and candlelight. The reference also alludes to Le Fanu’s early story ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ (1839).
22. Paganism … nemesis sure: it is not clear why the study of paganism need be fatal; clearly it involves close acquaintance with the pre-Christian past and that may threaten the clergyman’s faith. Also possible is that the unity of religion, art and manners might refer to a freer attitude towards sex, perhaps including sex between men; A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) by John Addington Symonds (1840–93), an early advocate of male homosexuality, was only fifteen years away.
23. skance: oblique, sidelong.
24. affections: physical afflictions, diseases.
25. the ‘paries’: the wall of a hollow organ or cavity within the body.
26. Shropshire … the country near the Dee: Shropshire is an English county on the border with Wales; the River Dee flows from Wales into England, and also forms part of that same border.
27. delirium tremens … cerebral heart: delirium tremens is an anachronistic term (within the context of the story) meaning that species of delirium produced by excessive alcohol consumption, and characterized by trembling and delusions. The phrase was coined in 1813 by Thomas Sutton (1767? – 1835); he had studied medicine, at London, Edinburgh and, in a link to Dr Van Loo, Hesselius’s correspondent, at Leiden. Sutton used the expression when describing how the condition is rendered worse by bleeding the patient, but improved by administering opium. Later writers limited the term to refer to the effects of alcohol. ‘Cerebral heart’ appears to refer back two paragraphs in the text to the idea that the brain is the heart of a system of circulation of spiritual fluid.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) was a bestselling novelist and a humanitarian campaigner against slavery. She grew up in Connecticut, and her New England background provides the setting for ‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was himself a committed opponent of slavery. He was also a Calvinist pastor while she herself was subject to religious doubts, though late in life she attended an Episcopalian church, and also became interested in spiritualism. In 1836, she married the biblical scholar Calvin Stowe. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–2) was a publishing phenomenon, and a work of vital importance in the fight for the abolition of slavery in the USA; Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have greeted her as the little lady who had begun this big war. The collection of tales in Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871) follows on from her novel Oldtown Folks (1869), apparently set in a fictional version of Natick, Massachusetts. The stories are supposed to be told by Sam Lawson to a listening audience of children. Stowe’s interest in spiritualism had its commercial aspects: while working on Oldtown Folks, she had contemplated writing an article on the planchette, a form of ouija board, and there is a suggestion that in
that novel (and perhaps in the stories that followed) she consciously targeted America’s ‘four & five million of spiritualists’ as a suitable market given the supernatural aspects of her book (see Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 346).
The text of ‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’ used here is from its first printed appearance, in Britain, in Oldtown Fireside Stories (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low&Searle, 1871), pp. 201–28. In 1872, the first American edition was published in Boston by J. R. Osgood. The contents page of the British edition gives the story’s title as ‘The Ghost in Capt’n Brown House’; the title page and heading of the story have ‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’; while the running heading of the story has ‘The Ghost in Cap’n Brown House’. The collection was also known and published as Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories.
1. Sam: this is Sam Lawson, the narrator of this and other tales in the collection (which was also published under the title Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories – see the biographical note above).
2. Cotton Mather’s ‘Magnalia’: Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was a New England Presbyterian divine, the author of Magnalia Christi Americana (‘The Great Works of Christ in America’; 1702), a first-hand history of religious life in New England. It includes an account of the Salem witch trials of 1692–3, in which details of supernatural happenings are given.
3. Charles River: named after England’s King Charles I, this river flows through eastern Massachusetts before entering the sea at Boston Harbor.
4. Oldtown: a fictional place, though partly derived from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband’s memories of Natick, Massachusetts. However, geographically, Oldtown does not fully resemble Natick, which is not built on the Charles River (see note 3 above), which in the story flows a little to the south of the town.
5. massy: mercy.
6. Guinea: a country in West Africa well known in the nineteenth century as a long-established centre for the slave trade. The story is set at some point before 1808, the year when Congress banned the importation of slaves to America (though the institution of slavery itself remained in force until 1865).
7. crookneck-squashes: an American variety of squash (gourd), the neck, or base, of which is bent backwards.
8. John Bull: the personification of Englishness, usually taken to mean someone hearty, stout, bluff, rough and no-nonsense.
9. Sherburne… manty-makin’: Like Natick, Sherburne is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, on the Charles and Sudbury rivers; ‘manty-making’ means ‘dressmaking’.
10. her goose and her press-board: a goose is an iron, named after the supposed resemblance of its handle to a goose’s neck, and a press-board is an ironing-board.
11. Ammonites, and Perresites, and Jebusites: Ammonites and Jebusites are tribes mentioned in the Bible. The former are referred to in Deuteronomy 23: 3, for instance: ‘An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord for ever’; while the Jebusites are a Canaanite people listed in the table of nations (Genesis 10: 16). ‘Ammonite’, which may also evoke the extinct group of sea-animals often found in fossilized form, could be a misremembered version of ‘Amorite’, another Semitic tribe. Similarly, ‘Perresites’ is very likely a mistake for another biblical tribe, the Perizzites (Genesis 13: 7), though perhaps Stowe also intends a malapropism for ‘Parisians’, ‘Persians’ or even ‘parasites’. In Exodus 3: 8, ‘Amorites’, ‘Perizzites’ and ‘Jebusites’ are mentioned together as possessors of Canaan, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’, in the context of the Israelites escaping from Egyptian bondage. In the USA, this text was often adapted to express the hopes for freedom among African-American slaves.
12. flip: a hot drink consisting of beer and spirits and sweetened with sugar, sometimes also mixed with beaten egg.
13. Needham and Sherburne: Needham is another Massachusetts town, to the east of Natick, significantly closer to Boston. For Sherburne, see note 9 above.
14. Sadducees: members of a Jewish religious sect that flourished between the second century BC and the first century AD, who stressed the centrality of the written Law, and denied the supernatural elements of Judaism, such as the reality of angels, the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead.
15. Jamaiky: Jamaican rum.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Thrawn Janet
Robert Louis Stevenson (né Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, 1850–94) passed a childhood in Edinburgh, the town of his birth, confined by sickness and terrified by the hellfire imagination of his devoted nurse. He avoided following his father’s profession of engineer (his father was famously responsible for great improvements in lighthouse building), and instead embarked, after a detour into the law, on a career as writer. He also rejected the harsher implications of his father’s Protestant faith, though imaginatively he remained engaged with a vision of sin and moral duplicity. He was a regular contributor to the Cornhill (see below) and London magazines, as well as to Temple Bar, Longman’s Magazine and Unwin’s Annual. It was in these periodicals, and others, that his essays and short stories first appeared. Afflicted with tuberculosis, Stevenson was obliged to travel to warmer climates for his health; characteristically, this medical necessity was interwoven with his own taste for adventure. His short life came to an end in Valima, Samoa. Stevenson was an inspiring figure, the centre of a personality cult among writers of the 1880s and 1890s; an extravagant dandy and a celebrator of heroic exploits; a Romantic dreamer and psychological explorer; a dynamic fellow and a vulnerable invalid. The contradictions of his personality are mirrored in the themes of duality and ethical complexity that run through his fiction. His great works of the supernatural and fantastic include: ‘The Body Snatcher’ (1884); ‘Olalla’ (1885); ‘Markheim’ (1886); The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); and ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893).
The copy-text of ‘Thrawn Janet’ comes from its first book publication in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887), pp. 137–51. The volume contains a number of other supernatural fictions, including ‘Will o’ the Mill’, ‘Markheim’ and ‘Olalla’. The story originally appeared, under the signature ‘R.L.S.’, in Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine, vol. 44 (October 1881), pp. 436–43. Stevenson wrote often for the Cornhill; many of his early essays for the magazine were collected in Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882) and his early supernatural story ‘Will o’ the Mill’ had appeared there in January 1878. For explanations of the dialect words that abound in ‘Thrawn Janet’, please see the Glossary of Scots Words.
1. Balweary… Dule: Balweary is a fictional place, which Stevenson was to refer to again in his unfinished novel The Weir of Hermiston (1894). ‘Dule’ is a Scottish word meaning sorrow, grief; the ‘weary’ in ‘Balweary’ does similar work of setting a disconsolate mood.
2. 1st Peter, v and 8th… seventeenth of August: a reference to the biblical text 1 Peter 5: 8: ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ The date of the Reverend Soulis’s darkest sermons, on the Sunday following 17 August, commemorates the date of the crisis of Stevenson’s tale. It also possesses other significances. Regarding the liturgical calendar, 15 August is the date of the Assumption of Mary, though this is a date unlikely to be celebrated by the Scottish Protestants of the tale; nonetheless it is distinctly possible that there may be some parodic reference to the raising (by hanging) of Janet, or to her ultimate disappearance by an act of God. However, more likely, Stevenson refers to the date’s commemoration of 17 August 1560, when, led by the example of John Knox (1514–72), the Scottish parliament ratified the Scots Confession, a markedly Calvinist document, symbolizing the official break with the Roman Catholic Church.
Less likely is that the date also commemorates 17 August 1643, when Scotland officially joined the Parliamentary side against Charles I, on condition that the English should effectively accept Presbyterianism.
3. those hints that Hamlet deprecated: a reference to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I. v. 172–80:
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumbered thus, or this head-shake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As ‘Well, well, we know’, or ‘We could, an if we would’,
Or ‘If we list to speak’, or ‘There be, an if they might’,
Or such an ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me – this do swear,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you.
Probably not coincidentally, these lines occur at the end of the scene where Hamlet has encountered his father’s ghost, and in the same speech, where Hamlet tells his friend: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (ll. 166–7).
4. moderates: Presbyterian clergymen who, in opposition to the more traditionalist Evangelicals, held liberal views on doctrine and church discipline; the Moderates gained power in the Church of Scotland in 1712, when congregations lost the right to elect their pastors. The name continued to be applied until the mid nineteenth century.
5. witch of Endor: a seer consulted in secret by King Saul, who had fallen out of favour with God; at Saul’s command, the woman calls up the ghost of the prophet Samuel so that the king can ask his advice, but the ghost merely predicts Saul’s downfall (1 Samuel 28: 3–25).