by The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories- From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (retail) (epub)
The copy-text of the story comes from its first book publication in Shadowings (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1900), pp. 235–46, where it is included in a section entitled ‘Fantasies’. There are a number of other uncanny tales in the book, including ‘The Corpse-Rider’.
1. Orfila’s Traité des Exhumés: a reference to Traité des Exhumations juridiques et considérations sur les changemens physiques que les cadavres éprouvent en se pourrisant (‘Treatise on Judicial Exhumations and Thoughts on the Physical Changes that Corpses Experience in Decomposing’; 1831) by Mathieu Orfila (1787–1853), a typically macabre choice of reading for Hearn. Born in Spain, Orfila was the founder of toxicology and a pioneer of forensic science.
2. anamorphosis: in art, a distorted or deformed image that is designed to become clear either when viewed from a particular angle or by using a mirror.
3. transom: in American English, a fanlight window above the lintel of a door.
W. W. JACOBS
The Monkey’s Paw
William Waymark Jacobs (1863–1943) was a Londoner, growing up by the docks in Wapping in a state of teetering respectability; his father was manager of the South Devon wharf, with a wavering income and a large family to support. Educated at private school and then at Birkbeck College, he became a clerk in the civil service – a position he retained until 1899, when he gave up his job to become a full-time writer. He began writing in the mid 1880s, and went on to achieve success and popularity, particularly in the period from the late 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War. He specialized in comic tales, stories of sailors, and supernatural fictions. ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ is by far the best known of all his tales, and has become the basis for a stage play (by L. N. (Louis Napoleon) Parker, Jacobs’s sometime collaborator), several films, radio plays, television adaptations and an opera.
The copy-text of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ derives from its first book publication in the short-story collection The Lady of the Barge (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1902), pp. 29–53. The book contains several other supernatural masterpieces, including ‘The Well’ and ‘In the Library’. ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ had first appeared earlier that year in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 105, no. 627 (September 1902), pp. 634–9. Both in the magazine version and book form, the story contains one illustration by Maurice William Greiffenhagen (1862–1931), with the caption ‘ “What’s that?” cried the woman’, and showing the startled old couple in their bedroom. The book features other illustrations by Greiffenhagen and also by J. F. Sullivan (1852–1936).
1. fakirs: a fakir is strictly a beggar, from the Arab word for a poor man, but the word was applied more specifically to, first, Muslim and then later also Hindu mendicants and ascetics.
2. the Arabian Nights: the collection of fables, folk tales, comic and fantastic stories also known as The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. As in other folk tales, the theme of wishing appears often in this collection. However, the choice of The Arabian Nights rather than the collections of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault alludes to the fact that the paw comes from the East, a mysterious place of magic, where desire turns out to be an entrapment.
3. bibulous: originally the word meant ‘absorbent of moisture’, then by extension came to mean ‘addicted to drink’, though without the harsher overtones of ‘alcoholic’.
MARY WILKINS FREEMAN
The Wind in the Rose-Bush
Mary Eleanor Wilkins (1852–1930) was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, the daughter of a carpenter and (later) a small shopkeeper in Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1883, following the death of her parents, she returned to Massachusetts. She lived there until her marriage to Dr Charles M. Freeman in 1902, when she moved to New Jersey. The marriage appears to have been an unhappy one. Her writings focus on New England rural life, its meanness, constrictions and repressions. Although she wrote several novels, her talent was for brevity. Her first two story collections were also perhaps her finest – A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891) – though there is much that is good in a late work such as Edgewater People (1918).
The copy-text of ‘The Wind in the Rose-Bush’ comes from its first publication in The Wind in the Rose-Bush, and Other Stories of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903), pp. 3–37. The volume contains eight illustrations by Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell (1862–1924), the celebrated turn-of-the-century children’s book illustrator. The illustration that accompanies ‘The Wind in the Rose-Bush’ has the caption ‘ “What makes that rose-bush blow so when there isn’t any wind?” ’ and forms the frontispiece to the volume. The book itself is a classic collection of ghost stories, including the notable vampire tale ‘Luella Miller’.
1. Porter’s Falls: despite Mary Wilkins Freeman’s reputation as a storyteller of New England, the only actual Porters Falls is in West Virginia; however, as there is no Ford Village in the vicinity, a fictional setting is equally likely. However, see note 7 below.
2. froward: perverse, unreasonable, hard to please.
3. dormer windows … piazzaless: a dormer window forms an extension from the sloping roof of a house, with the glass for the window set vertically within it; a piazza, in this context, is a veranda or porch, as so named in New England.
4. hydrangeas and cannas: respectively, a shrub native to America and a lily-like tropical American plant with large, attractive leaves and bright flowers.
5. Brussels carpets: carpets with a linen backing and a woollen upper surface.
6. duds: clothes.
7. Lincoln: there is indeed a town named Lincoln in West Virginia, at some distance from Porters Falls, being around 160 miles away.
8. ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’: a short piece for piano by Tekla Bdarzewska-Baranowska (1834–61), an appropriately short-lived Polish composer who wrote the piece when she was only twenty-two years old. ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ was one of the bestselling piano pieces of the nineteenth century.
9. cupola: picking up the Italianate resonances of ‘piazza’ (see note 3 above), a cupola is a domed roof.
M. R. JAMES
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’
Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a highly talented palaeographer, an important medievalist (or, as he put it, ‘Christian archaeologist’), a solid biblical scholar, a prodigious archivist and antiquarian, a prolific bibliographer, a capable editor, a distinguished Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and of Eton College, and, incidentally, the greatest of all ghost-story writers. He is unique in this volume in being the only writer represented who was not a professional author. As a result, perhaps, he published only thirty or so stories, elegant and endlessly intriguing tales. These were collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (see below), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Other Stories (1919), A Warning to the Curious (1925) and Collected Ghost Stories (1931). Three other stories were published in periodicals after 1931. Many of the stories in the first two collections (including ‘ “Oh, Whistle…” ’) were written for the yearly Christmas celebrations at King’s College, Cambridge, where James was a don; he was apparently a brilliant and theatrical reader of his own work. He also translated the fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen (1930) and wrote a fantasy children’s book, The Five Jars (1922).
The text of ‘ “Oh, Whistle…” ’ is based on its first publication, in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), pp. 183–225, where it is the seventh story out of the eight collected in the volume. The story was very likely first read out loud during the Christmas 1903 festivities at King’s. The published volume itself came out in time for Christmas 1904, priced at six shillings (the typical, and relatively expensive, price for a single volume in the Edwardian period). On the title page, the author’s name is given as ‘Montague Rhodes James, Litt.D., Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge’; like the title of the volume, this assertion of James’s official and academic life strikes the same erudite tone
as the stories themselves. The volume is illustrated by James McBryde (1874–1904), a close friend of the author who had recently and unexpectedly died. Two of his four illustrations belong to the present story: one shows the dream figure of the hunted man sprawling by a groyne, and is captioned ‘Looking up in an attitude of painful anxiety’; the other depicts the confrontation of the Professor with the figure of the bed-clothes, and carries the caption ‘He leapt towards him upon the instant’. The Professor in the latter illustration, at odds with the text, appears as an elderly man, though perhaps his terror has aged him. (The other two illustrations are for ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’.)
1. ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’: The title and refrain of a poem by Robert Burns (1759–96), in which a young woman sings of her fidelity to her secret lover. The poem was likewise quoted in Chapter 9 of Redgauntlet (1824), the novel by Sir Walter Scott (1771–32) and the source for one of the best and most influential nineteenth-century ghost stories, ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’.
2. Professor of Ontography … St James’s College: the word ‘ontography’ – literally, ‘writing about being’ or the description of things as they are – was coined in 1902 by the American geographer William Morris Davis (1850–1934) to refer to that part of geography which describes the human response to the natural environment. The Professor’s college is fictitious; however, given the author’s name the use of St James is intriguing.
3. East Coast – in point of fact to Burnstow: the East Coast might mean either Norfolk or Suffolk, the ‘East Anglian’ counties famous for the flatness of their landscape, and the width of their beaches at low tide. Although Burnstow is a fictional village, in his introduction to The Collected Ghost Stories (1931), M. R. James himself identified it with Felixstowe, Suffolk, a popular Victorian seaside resort that the author had visited in 1893 and 1897–8.
4. Templars’ preceptory: the Knights Templar (the ‘Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’) were a military and religious order founded in 1118 and suppressed by Pope Clement in 1312. They were particularly associated with the Crusades and with the protection of pilgrims to Jerusalem. Templar buildings and communities were spread all over Europe and the Middle East. Due to rumours of secret initation rites and to the blackening of their name at the time of the order’s dissolution, the Templars were sometimes seen as blasphemous or occultist. This reputation led to a prolonged interest in them that acquired new force with the foundation of freemasonry and, later, among turn-of-the-century occult writers. A preceptory was a name given to a subordinate Templar community, or otherwise to the buildings inhabited by the community.
5. the Long: the summer vacation traditionally taken by law-courts and Cambridge and Oxford universities.
6. a double-bedded one: now this would be a room with a single double-bed, but in the early 1900s the phrase could also mean, as here, a room with two single beds.
7. ‘Dombey and Son’: Dr Blimber is the headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, the Brighton school where young Paul Dombey is sent in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–8). Blimber’s academy is famous for forcing its pupils to take in what they are not yet able to learn. Parkins’s ignorance of Dickens might be taken as one of the indications that he is ‘destitute… of the sense of humour’. As Rogers misquotes Dr Blimber, it proves hard to locate the original quote. However, there is a scene in Chapter 12 of Dombey and Son in which Blimber grabs the attention of his pupils so peremptorily while they are eating that one of them nearly chokes on his drink.
8. apple-pie order: perfect neatness.
9. ancien militaire: old soldier (French).
10. inclinations towards a picturesque ritual … deference to East Anglian tradition: the Vicar would appear to have Anglo-Catholic or ‘High Church’ leanings: that is, he conducts services that retain some of the rituals and doctrines associated with Roman Catholicism. Traditionally, East Anglia was a stronghold of Dissenting and ‘Low Church’ beliefs; these are clearly shared by the Colonel. They were also, in a modified and more urbane form, shared by M. R. James himself; his father had been an Evangelical clergyman with a living in Great Livermere, Suffolk.
11. incarnadined: reddened.
12. Disney: the Disney Professorship of Archaeology was established by John Disney, an English barrister and antiquarian, in 1851.
13. circular form: the Templars (see note 4 above) used round buildings in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, said to be built on the site of both the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ.
14. ferae naturae: wild in nature (Latin).
15. martello tower … black wooden groynings: a Martello tower is a circular tower first established in the Napoleonic Wars for use in coastal defence and named after a tower of this construction at Mortella Point in Corsica. There are several Martello towers at Felixstowe, as elsewhere along the East Anglian coast. A groyning, or ‘groyne’, is a wall that extends from the beach into the water and acts as a barrier against the sea, controlling erosion.
16. ‘Now I saw in my dream … to meet him’: a reference to the Puritan classic The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) by John Bunyan (1628–88). In the scene referred to, the Pilgrim confronts Apollyon, the Destroyer, angel of the bottomless pit. M. R. James misquotes the passage, which should read: ‘But now, in this Valley of Humiliation, poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul Fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon.’
17. boots: a servant employed in hotels to clean the guests’ shoes.
18. the writing on the wall to Belshazzar: Daniel 5: 1–4 describes the feast held by Belshazzar, King of Babylon, who sees a hand writing a message on the wall in front of him. Only Daniel can interpret the message, which prophesies the destruction of Belshazzar’s kingdom.
19. fur… venit: this is a much-disputed message. The opening words might be read as ‘furbis, flabis, flebis’, though opinions differ on the order in which they should be set. ‘Furbis’ is either cod Latin for ‘you will steal’ (from ‘fur’ for furis, meaning ‘thief’) or proper Latin for ‘you will be mad’ (from furere); ‘flabis’ means ‘you will blow’ (as in flatus, ‘blowing’, ‘breathing’, flabellum,‘a small fan’, or flabilis, ‘airy’); and ‘flebis’ means ‘you will be sorry’ (as in flere, to ‘weep for’, ‘bewail’, ‘lament’). These words could also be read as ‘fur, flabis, flebis’. In his annotations to M. R. James’s Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Michael Cox remarks: ‘H. E. Luxmore, MRJ’s former Eton tutor, recorded hearing [M. R. James saying] what he called “Fur Flebis” (i.e. “‘Oh, Whistle’”)… That would strongly suggest this second reading of the phrase is the correct one. That would render the phrase as “Thief, you’ll blow, you’ll be sorry”.’ The second Latin phrase Parkins translates for himself. The swastikas on either side of the words bear, of course, no direct relationship to their subsequent use by the German Nazi Party. In the later nineteenth century in Britain, there was renewed interest in the symbol. This was partly as a result of finding swastikas during archaeological excavation of early human settlements in Europe, and partly owing to imperial contact with Indian cultures, where the swastika remained a religious symbol for Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. It therefore represented a point of cultural connection between pre-Christian Europe and modern India. At its simplest, its use in India designated good luck, and it was in this spirit that in the early twentieth century Rudyard Kipling used the symbol to adorn his books.
20. Experto crede: I have experienced this, so believe me, I know (Latin).
21. like some great bourdon in a minster tower: in this context, a bourdon is the lowest bell in a peal of bells, here heard ringing from the tower of a collegiate or cathedral church. I have been unable to find any English poem that contains this or a strikingly similar phrase.
22. little better than a Sadducee: see note 14 to ‘The Ghost in the Cap’n
Brown House’. The inclusion of this reference in more than one tale suggests the importance, in some ghost stories of the period, placed upon embarrassment of the religious sceptic.
23. Sadducees … Old Testament: there is indeed no mention of the Sadducees (see note 22 above) in the Old Testament.
24. cleek: an iron-headed golf club.
25. enormities of the Vicar … Feast of St Thomas the Apostle: this saint’s day now takes place on 3 July; however, in the early twentieth century it was celebrated, as here, on 21 December (often the shortest day of the year). (The Episcopalian Church still marks the saint’s day on that date.) It clearly fits Parkins’s scepticism that St Thomas should be the doubting disciple. Celebrating this day is an ‘enormity’, in the view of the Colonel, as Low Church Christians or Evangelicals would have regarded the recognition of saints’ days as Papist, that is, Roman Catholic.
26. wive: i.e. wave; the boy’s accent would seem more cockney than East Anglian. For those who see the story as exploring Parkins’s repressed sexuality, this error of pronunciation is clearly a significant one. James often uses a Suffolk or cockney accent in his tales; he was a talented mimic – his friend Gwendolyn McBryde remarked that he would ‘sometimes personate some countryman or cockney’ (quoted in Julia Briggs, Night Visitors (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 127).