ma bouchal … gosther: my boy … my son … chatter.
Monos and Daimonos
Published in the May 1830 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (28/112, 387–92). This tale by Edward Bulwer was subtitled ‘A Legend’ and published over the signature ‘’, which appeared in ‘Old English’ font as here. ‘Monos’ means single and ‘Daimonos’ is taken from ‘daimon’, which in ancient Greek refers to a lesser divinity, not necessarily malevolent. In an 1835 letter to the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe listed ‘Monos and Daimonos’ as one of those tales that was ‘invariably’ popular with readers because it displayed ‘the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical’. A year later Poe cited ‘Monos and Daimonos’ to support his claim that, in Bulwer’s writings, ‘all is richly, and glowing intellectual—all is energetic, or astute, or brilliant, or profound’. Poe’s ‘Silence—A Fable’ (1838) is heavily indebted to ‘Monos and Daimonos’, to the point where, as Mabbott points out, some sentences are taken ‘almost verbatim’. Bulwer reprinted a slightly revised version of ‘Monos and Daimonos’ in The Student (1835), where he observed that the tales in this collection ‘belong rather to the poetical than the logical philosophy … they utter in prose, what are the ordinary didactics of poetry’ (The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (2 vols.; New York, 1966), i. 57–8; The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (17 vols.; New York, 1902), viii. 222; Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T. O. Mabbott (3 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1978), ii. 193; Edward Bulwer, The Student (2 vols.; London, 1835), i. pp. viii–ix).
Dædal: variously adorned.
The Master of Logan
Published in the April 1831 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (31/124, 321–36). This tale, like many of Cunningham’s finest, is set in Nithsdale and draws on his extensive knowledge of Scottish superstition and sectarian feeling. In 1840 Thomas De Quincey praised Cunningham for ‘those many excellent, sometimes brilliant, pages, by which he has delighted so many thousands of readers, and won for himself a lasting name in the fine literature of modern England’ (The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (14 vols.; London, 1897–8), iii. 159).
Gray: slightly misquoted from Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’, 92.
Nith: river in south-western Scotland.
last year … James Stuart: James VII of Scotland, James II of England (1633–1701); his three-year reign ended in late 1688.
thunder-plump: a sudden, heavy thundershower.
douce: sedate, respectable.
Montrose and David Lesley: James Graham, 5th Earl and 1st Marquis of Montrose (1612–50), was appointed King’s Lieutenant in Scotland in 1644, and won many victories in the following year. David Leslie, Lord Newark (?–1682), commander of the Covenanters’ army, defeated Montrose at Philiphaugh, near Selkirk, in 1645.
chambering: sexual indulgence or lewdness.
Turkey shoe: most probably a shoe made of ‘Turkey leather’; that is, ‘leather tawed with oil, the hair side not being removed until after the tawing’ (OED). Cf. Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, ch. 5: ‘a small dagger of exquisite workmanship … hung in his Turkey-leather sword-belt’.
Godly Covenant … southern crest: the National Covenant of 1638 was a public petition eventually signed by nearly 300,000. It asserted that the Scottish church had a direct relationship with God, without requiring the king’s interposition, and provided an excuse for condemning Charles I’s attempts to anglicize the Church of Scotland. Oliver Cromwell invaded Scotland and defeated Leslie at the battle of Dunbar in 1650.
unsonsie: luckless or unfortunate.
Proud Preston: town in Lancashire, ‘called, by way of distinction from other towns of that name, Proud Preston’ (Masson, De Quincey, xiii. 308). The Scots were soundly defeated by Cromwell at the battle of Preston in 1648.
fashed: vexed or disturbed.
chanting the Gallant Graemes: a traditional ballad included by Walter Scott in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3), and described by him as a ‘lamentation’ for the ‘final discomfiture and cruel death’ of James Graham, 5th Earl and 1st Marquis of Montrose (see note to p. 64 above).
coup: tumble or overturn.
gowans: wild flowers, usually daisies.
Queen of Sheba: see 1 Kings 10: 1–13 and 2 Chronicles 9: 1–12.
falderols … tires: falderols are vagaries; tires is an obsolete form of attires, and here refers most probably to a headdress.
gilpin: a sturdy young person.
wynted: spoiled or sour.
coost the cauld of: recovered from.
her favourite Church: Lady Anne is a member of the Scottish Episcopal Church, structurally similar to the established Church of England, and governed by bishops. The preacher is a member of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, founded on the model established by John Calvin in Geneva in the mid-sixteenth century, and governed without bishops.
In the blinded … native darkness: in 1560 the Scottish parliament abolished papal supremacy and adopted John Knox’s Confession of Faith.
General Assembly: ruling body of the Church of Scotland.
cittern: more commonly cithern, an instrument like a guitar, but strung with wire and played with a quill.
pellock: porpoise.
darg: day’s work.
slarg: dirty, besmirched.
Green Criffel: prominent hill near Dumfries.
lugs: ears.
streeket: stretched out or composed for burial.
the Witch of Endor: see 1 Samuel 28.
bonds of iniquity … the land: after the Restoration in 1660, Charles II reintroduced episcopacy, but the move was violently resisted by many of the people and the Church of Scotland was re-established in 1690.
accession of the Stuarts: the Stuarts acceded to the Scottish throne in 1371, and united the Scottish and English thrones in 1603.
Calvin: see note to p. 76 above.
glozing: specious.
The Victim
Published in the December 1831 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (32/132, 571–6). This anonymous tale appeared as ‘A TRUE STORY. BY A MEDICAL STUDENT’, and clearly exploits contemporary fear over the infamous murders committed by Burke and Hare, who in 1828 smothered sixteen people in Edinburgh and then delivered the corpses to the back door of the celebrated anatomist Robert Knox, where they received payment. At their trial in 1829, Hare turned King’s evidence, and Burke was hanged (and dissected). Copycat ‘burkings’ occurred in London throughout 1831. Bulwer’s editorial note to ‘The Victim’ emphasizes that the tale was inserted ‘in the hope that any little impression it may create, will serve to swell the general desire for immediate reform in a system which most urgently and fearfully demands it’. Less than a year later the first Anatomy Act was passed, which gave anatomists legal access to unclaimed pauper bodies from the workhouses. For the best discussion of ‘Burkophobia’, ‘the dead body business’, and ‘the doctor/scientist as a figure of threat’, see Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester, 1995).
Dawlish: a small town on the south Devonshire coast below the Exe estuary. It was fashionable in the nineteenth century, and appears in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), and in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839).
Abercrombie … diseases of the brain: John Abercrombie (1780–1844) was a graduate of Edinburgh and the author of books on pathology, morality, and the intellect. He made his name with Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord (1828), a detailed and influential compilation based on his own case studies.
Rembrandt … loved to paint: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), Dutch painter and etcher, and master of the chiaroscuro effect, a style which exploits strong contrasts between the light and dark areas of the composition.
‘Before
Decay’s … beauty lingers … wanting there’: slightly misquoted from Byron’s The Giaour (Byron, Complete Poetical Works, iii. 42).
‘if thy right hand … cut it off?’: Matthew 5: 30.
rhino: money.
suffocated … cutting up: the gang’s choice of suffocation to murder its victims, and the subsequent sale of those victims to doctors, would have been recognized by contemporary readers as a direct reference to the murderous practices of Burke and Hare (see headnote above).
Some Terrible Letters from Scotland
Published in the April 1832 issue of the Metropolitan Magazine (3/12, 422–31) as ‘COMMUNICATED BY THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD’, this tale by James Hogg both reflects and exploits the immense public anxiety over the cholera epidemic. Cholera killed over 32,000 people in Britain in 1831–2, including nearly 10,000 in Scotland. ‘Of external news’, wrote Thomas Carlyle from Craigenputtoch in October 1832, ‘greatly the most momentous is that Cholera has been at Dumfries for some three weeks; but seems now to be rapidly abating. It was rather beyond the average in violence, and the terror of the whole region has been immeasurable.’ The scourge received intense coverage in several magazines, including the Metropolitan, where the actions of the government were frequently defended, and where it was noted that ‘the small, close, damp, and confined habitations of the poor and destitute are the chief abodes of the cholera; and the drunken and the profligate, the weak and unhealthy, the ill-fed and ill-clothed, are the miserable victims of this malady, having not sufficient constitutional stamina to resist the invasion’. Such rhetoric did little to counteract the widespread conviction that the government was using the epidemic to reduce surplus populations, and that doctors approved because it provided them with a steady supply of corpses for the anatomy table (The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. C. R. Sanders (21 vols.: Durham, NC, 1970–), vi. 249; ‘Is the Epidemic Cholera in London?’ in the Metropolitan Magazine, 3 (1832), 319–26; R. J. Morris, ‘Class, Power and Cholera’ in Cholera 1832 (New York, 1976), 95–128).
summer that Burke was hanged: the summer of 1829. See head-note to ‘The Victim’ above.
Troughlin: an imaginary location; Dalkeith and Musselburgh are real towns to the east of Edinburgh.
shilpit: pale.
saur: odour.
the Lammermuirs: a range of hills lying between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Edinburgh.
Teviotdale: the valley of the River Teviot, lying to the south of Hogg’s native Ettrick Forest. The village of Roxburgh lies further north-east, towards Kelso.
Campbell or Galt: Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) and John Galt (1779–1839), noted Scottish writers both resident in London at this time.
Glauber’s salts: sulphate of sodium, used as a purgative.
Oh, she pe tat tam bhaist te Collara Mòr: ‘Oh, it be that damn beast the Great Cholera.’
peen raiter … pot-hato: ‘been rather too heavy on the herring and potato’.
Fisherrow: a small port just to the east of Edinburgh.
crap: crept.
gars a’ ane’s heart grue: makes all one’s heart shudder.
burked: suffocated. See headnote to ‘The Victim’ above.
The Curse
Published anonymously in the November 1832 issue of Fraser’s Magazine (6/34, 559–66). Though Fraser’s published a good deal of sensation fiction in its early years, little of it reached the extremes of madness and remorse found in ‘The Curse’. The epigraph to the tale has not been identified. Astolpho is a paladin in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, but the quotation does not appear in any of the standard translations.
‘even from my boyish days’: Othello, I. iii. 132.
‘were still in the flesh’: Romans 7: 5: ‘For when we were in the flesh.’
‘For never having dream’d … of constancy’: slightly misquoted from Byron’s Don Juan, Canto II (Byron, Complete Poetical Works, v. 148).
‘dry bones’: Ezekiel 37: 4: ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’
‘Blessed are the dead … Lord’: Revelations 14: 13.
‘he may flourish … for ever’: adapted from Psalm 37: 35–6.
‘For why?…be overthrown’: Psalm 1: 6 of the metrical version of the Scottish Psalter.
They who sleep … hand of God: this sentence combines parts of, respectively, Hebrews 11: 38, Matthew 5: 13, Hebrews 11: 37, Revelations 7: 14, and Acts 7: 55.
It was in those days …might devour: in 1650 Charles II signed the National Covenant of Scotland (see note to p. 66 above), but after the Restoration in 1660 he reneged and reintroduced episcopacy. It then became a criminal offence to attend a presbyterian sermon.
James Sharp: Sharp (1613–79), one of the negotiators sent by the Scottish presbyterians to legitimate their Church, changed sides, and was rewarded by Charles II with the Archbishopric of St Andrews. He became a ruthless supporter of imposed episcopacy, and was murdered by Fife Covenanters in 1679.
Scots Worthies: a book by John Howie (1735–93) first published in 1774. It contains biographical sketches of Scottish reformers and martyrs from the Reformation to the English Revolution.
the holy Stephen … an angel: Acts 6: 15: ‘And all … looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an Angel.’ St Stephen was the first Christian martyr.
Life in Death
Published anonymously in the March 1833 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (37/147, 302–7). A parenthetical statement inserted immediately below the title states that ‘the ground-work of this tale will be recognized by the reader’, a reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), another tale in which an obsessive scientist pursues the secrets of life with disastrous consequences. The epigraph to the tale has not been identified.
‘They may rail at this earth …’: misquoted from the song ‘They may rail at this life’ by Thomas Moore (1779–1852).
My Hobby,—Rather
Published in the October 1834 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (42/166, 203–4), this tale by N. P. Willis appeared over the initial ‘H’, and is one of three tales that made up the ‘My Hobby,—Rather’ series. The tale was given the title ‘The Disturbed Vigil’ when it was reprinted as part of the ‘Scenes of Fear’ chapter in Willis’s Inklings of Adventure (1836). Poe wrote of Willis: ‘If called on to designate him by any general literary title, I might term him a magazinist—for his compositions have invariably the species of effect, with the brevity which the magazine demands’ (Harrison, Complete Works, xv. 11).
Old Play: Charles Villier’s version of The Chances, A Comedy (1682), III. v. 15–16.
festival of Dian: the Roman goddess Diana, here aptly introduced for her associations with the moon and the hunt.
famed university of Connecticut: Yale, founded in New Haven in 1701.
horrible appetite … incredulously: a domestic cat preying on a corpse is a part of folklore and fact. See George L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), 178–9; and M. L. Rossi, A. W. Shahrom, R. C. Chapman, and P. Vanezis, ‘Postmortem Injuries by Indoor Pets’ in The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 15 (1994), 105–9.
The Red Man
Published in the June 1835 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (44/174, 194–207). Catherine Gore had taken up residence in Paris in 1832, and this tale shows her exploiting local materials to powerful effect, drawing both on recent incidents of crime and punishment in that city, and on the older lore of pre-Revolutionary cruelties.
Béranger: Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857), popular French poet, strongly associated with the republicanism of 1830. The lines quoted here, slightly adapted from his poem ‘Le petit homme rouge’ (1826), translate as: ‘A devil dressed in scarlet, hunchbacked, cross-eyed, and red-haired, a snake serves as his tie; he has a hooked nose, he has a cloven hoof.’
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre Page 32