The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  It is in three longer works that the romance element truly comes to the fore. The fetching Princess Prascovie Labinska is the focal point of the innovative “Avatar” (1856), where a hopeless lover, Octave de Saville, cajoles a physician to transfer his soul or personality into the body of Prascovie’s husband, Count Labinski. (The physician has picked up this neat trick from Brahmins in India.) But evidently the transference of the soul does not allow the soul to have access to the mind or intellect of the body it now occupies, for Octave is unable to reply in Polish when the countess speaks to him in that language; as a result, she instantly suspects that something is amiss and refuses his overtures. The novella takes a striking turn when Labinski (in Octave’s body) challenges Octave to a duel. Gautier relishes the thought of what one’s sensations would be in such a situation: could one have the fortitude to kill the body that one had previously occupied for decades? “Avatar” deftly treated the issue of personality exchange decades before Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (1911) or H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) did so.

  “Jettatura” (1856) also has a love story at its core; but here the focus is not on Paul d’Aspremont’s love for and pending marriage to the lovely young Englishwoman Alicia Ward, but on Paul’s increasing psychological disturbance over the possibility that he is a jettatore (a person with the evil eye). Throughout the course of the tale we are informed in no uncertain terms that Alicia herself regards the whole notion as superstitious nonsense; but the numerous instances where Paul is involved in peculiar and tragic events makes her, her father, and Paul’s rival, Count d’Altavilla, pause in uncertainty. Ultimately we are probably to interpret this tale as one of psychological terror—but the supernatural is never fully ruled out.

  Spirite (1865) is definitely supernatural, for the female ghost of the title—a young woman who wasted away and died in a convent out of a hopeless love for the protagonist, the dashing man-about-town Guy de Malivert—is seen by numerous persons aside from Guy himself. The delicacy of the supernatural manifestations in this short novel—as in the portrayal of Spirite herself—is a triumph of subtlety, and the work remains compelling in spite, or perhaps even because, of the paucity of overt weirdness.

  Théophile Gautier’s immense literary output—he himself estimated that his journalism, written over a period of four decades, would fill 300 volumes—is even today not appreciated as it deserves to it. Mademoiselle de Maupin remains a classic that can take its place with Hugo’s Les Misérables and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, but the great bulk of his other writing has fallen into obscurity. But, like so many other writers, his weird work continues to find new readers and helps to keep alive a writer whose melding of classic precision, Romantic sensibility, and diversity of setting derived from his wide-ranging travels renders his weird tales eternally compelling. His effective use of such motifs as the revivification of mummies, the endurance of love after death, and the transference of souls provided models that many later weird writers adapted for their own tales; but his own work remains unmatched for its uniquely French devotion to the religion of art and to the imperishable beauty of the human female.

  A Forgotten Weird Fictionist: Henry Ferris

  Those who have seen the Arkham House edition of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Purcell Papers (1975) will have noticed an item that does not appear in any other volume of the Irish supernaturalist’s work—a story called “A Night in the Bell Inn,” first published in the Dublin University Magazine for June 1850. August Derleth, founder of Arkham House and the editor of the Le Fanu volume, attributed the work to Le Fanu on internal evidence. But what Derleth did not know—although later bibliographers, including Gary William Crawford in J. Sheridan LeFanu: A Bio-Bibliogra­phy (Greenwood Press, 1995), should have—is that the story is not by Le Fanu at all, but by an otherwise unknown writer named Henry Ferris.

  Thanks to a massive scholarly compilation, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, published in five volumes between 1966 and 1989, it can now be ascertained that Ferris wrote more than a score of items in the Dublin University Magazine between 1839 and 1851, nearly all of them on subjects at least bordering on the weird. Many of these items appeared anonymously or under eccentric pseudonyms such as “Irys Herfner” or “George Hobdenthwaite Snogby”; but the compilers of the Wellesley Index, examining surviving records of the magazines they have catalogued, have made thorough attributions of authorship that have been widely accepted, and there is every reason to trust their attribution of twenty-four items in the Dublin University Magazine—a total of nearly 350,000 words—to Ferris.

  The compilers of the Wellesley Index, however, could not come up with much biographical information on Ferris. They state merely that he was born in 1801 or 1802 (a date derived by inference from one of his essays) and was not living in January 1853. He was an Irish divine and a writer on “strange lore”—this last datum arrived at purely from an examination of his contributions. Ferris does not appear to have contributed to any magazine other than the Dublin University Magazine, nor did he publish any books, either under his own name or under his two pseudonyms. He is in every sense a mystery man in Anglo-Irish literature—perhaps appropriately so, given the nature of his work.

  The distinction between “fiction” and “essays” in Ferris’s work is frankly tentative, for a systematic examination of his various contributions suggests that all were in some fashion drawn from his own experience. Although his first work, “The High-Cross by Bonn” (May 1835), is a rather flaccid retelling of a mediaeval German legend with no weird elements, the lengthy “Driftings and Dreamings in Various Lands” (September 1841) seems a manifestly autobiographical account of travels in Italy during 1830. A later work, “A Pilgrimage to Caldaro” (March 1845), is perhaps another segment of Ferris’s travel diary, speaking of a visit he took to the Italian city of Caldaro to see an estatica or clairvoyant. “The Two Passports” (September 1842) also takes place in 1830; here Ferris hears the story that a German tells him at an inn. The story itself is not weird, but is the incident true, or at least based on the truth?

  Clearly Ferris, if he did take a trip to Germany at this time, was utterly changed by the event. As he himself says in the two-part article, “German Ghosts and Ghost-Seers” (January and February 1841): “between ghosts and Germans very peculiar relations . . . subsist.” Edgar Allan Poe had anticipated Ferris’s sentiments only a year earlier in his celebrated preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), where he huffily refuted the claim that his own sense of the weird was derived from Germany:

  I am led to think that it is this prevalence of the “Arabesque” in my serious tales, which has induced one or two critics to tax me, in all friendliness, with what they have been pleased to term “Germanism” and gloom . . . Let us admit, for the moment, that the “phantasy-pieces” now given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is “the vein” for the time being . . . If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.

  Whether it was in Germany or elsewhere, Ferris at this time found what he was looking for—an antidote to the oppressive rationalism already being exhibited by the nineteenth century. Like Arthur Machen fifty years later, Ferris chafed at what he perceived to be the decline of the sense of wonder as the sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics continued to make inroads into realms hitherto occupied only by religion, magic, and superstition. The long attack on the nineteenth century that opens “German Ghosts and Ghost-Seers” finds a counterpart in the story (if indeed it is fiction) “A Night in a Haunted House” (May 1848), where the protagonist “objected to ghost-stories, on the ground of their manifest antagonism to the spirit of an enlightened nineteenth century,” but later finds that ghosts have perhaps not abandoned the age as thoroughly as he had assumed. With a charming naïveté Ferris writes, “If we be better astronomers than they were under the old ptolemaic dispensation, we are out of all sight worse astrologers�
��—blissfully unaware that the advance of astronomy renders the “principles” of astrology even more absurd than they were before. Ferris, like Machen, needs the escape-hatch of the weird—the weird as manifested in actual life, not merely in the form of supernatural fiction—to maintain his psychological well-being; and, as his essays attest, he will accept with ingenuous credulity the most preposterous rumours, legends, and testimonies that support his presupposition that ghosts, spirits, revenants, and other will-o’-the-wisps can and do manifest themselves to a select band of “sensitives.” If hard-headed materialists are not granted such visions, then it is so much the worse for them.

  Mesmerism manifestly fascinated Ferris, and he devoted considerable attention to the subject in a three-part article (January, March, and July 1844). Uncannily, Ferris’s essay concluded just one month before the first publication of Poe’s essay (or story) “Mesmeric Revelation.” The idea that an individual in a mesmeric trance may have some access to the mysteries of the universe—“the soul of the world,” as Ferris terms it—must certainly have been an enticing one. Like both Poe and Machen, Ferris was sufficiently imbued with nineteenth-century rationalism to know that he must present his “facts”—however bizarre or implausible—in the guise and language of modern science; and his essays are full of the “curious learning” and sober citation of learned authorities that are meant to inspire the reader with a sense of the author’s prodigious knowledge and, hence, his reliability. Ferris certainly has read deeply in occult lore, as his immense three-part essay “Miscellanea Mystica” (August 1845, February and June 1846) attests. In his three-part “Evenings with the Witch-Finders” (July and August 1847, April 1848) Ferris unites his various interests, probing the “reality” behind witches and witch-persecutions and attributing at least some phenomena associated with witches to mesmerism.

  Many of Ferris’s other essays are highly entertaining if one does not attempt to accept them as fact. The best of them perhaps is “Fireside Horrors for Christmas” (December 1847), which shows that the custom of telling ghost stories at Christmas was already well established. “Of the Nightmare” (January 1845) is a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of nightmares and their possible sources outside the minds or souls of those who exper­ience them. “Mares’ Nests” (February and May 1845) is a series of reflections on various topics, its second part containing a further discussion of mesmerism. “The Occult Sciences—Magic” (January 1847) is a review of a French work on magic, while “Horae Gregorianae” (August 1847) is perhaps another reminiscence of Ferris’s travels: set in Rome in 1831, it tells of the religious ecstasies of Roman Catholics and other incidents in the papacy of Pope Gregory XVI. The brief “Mademoiselle Lenormand” (Nov­ember 1847) is an account of a Frenchwoman who had practised chiromancy and astrology since 1789.

  But Ferris will live, if he lives at all, not by his essays, charmingly eccentric as they are, but by those works that might conceivably be termed fiction. “A Leaf from the Berlin Chron­icles” (November 1843) is evidently another retelling of a mediaeval German legend, but this tale of the burning of a witch and the sudden revelation that a man previously thought to be a suave and elegant gentleman is in fact the Devil is surprisingly potent in its histrionic climax. The Prince of Darkness also appears in “A Night with Mephistopheles” (November 1845) in the guise of a dusty old scholar, although the tale ends happily. But Ferris’s two best weird tales are “A Night in a Haunted House” and “A Night in the Bell Inn,” both of them certainly worthy of Le Fanu. “The Mysterious Compact” (July and August 1850) is perhaps a little long-winded in its account of a pact made by two young men who each vow to appear to the other after death, but it includes a sensitively handled romantic element otherwise rare in Ferris’s work. “Tobias Guarnerius” (February 1851) is subtitled “A Psychological Tale,” but one should not be deceived into thinking that this is an instance of the tale of “psychological horror” that Poe had introduced across the Atlantic in the previous decade; it is, instead, a haunting account of psychic transference in which a man confines the soul of his own dying mother into a violin. “The Devil’s Ladder” (June 1845) is a disappointingly verbose tale in which a nobleman insults an old man who proves, inevitably, to be the Devil, and who spirits away the nobleman’s daughter; she is later rescued by two horseman who magically ascend a cliff (the “Devil’s ladder”).

  How significant is the work of Henry Ferris? Certainly it is interesting to know of someone who was as keenly devoted to the weird as his contemporaries, Poe and Le Fanu. If in general he did not quite display the literary gifts of these titans, he nevertheless produced a substantial body of weird lore that is worth resurrection. The connexions with Le Fanu in particular are worth probing. Le Fanu had begun contributing to the Dublin University Magazine only two years earlier than Ferris (his first story, “The Ghost and the Bone-Setter,” appeared in the issue of January 1837); and, although he did not become the editor of the magazine until 1861, Le Fanu must surely have read the whole of Ferris’s work as it appeared throughout the 1840s. Hitherto unperceived literary influences upon Le Fanu’s tales and novels may be unearthed by someone well-versed in the work of these two Irish writers. Can we assume, for example, that Ferris’s brief disquisition on green tea in “German Ghosts and Ghost-Seers” had a small influence on the conception of Le Fanu’s great tale of 1869? Perhaps even this is going too far; but certainly Ferris’s devotion to the weird would have been appreciated by one who was himself so inclined toward the occult and the supernatural.

  W. W. Jacobs: A Pessimistic Humourist

  When H. P. Lovecraft, in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), noted the tendency of “writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at [weird fiction] in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them,” he pointed out the fact that “the humourist W. W. Jacobs produced that able melodramatic bit called ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’”[20]

  Jacobs (1863–1943) is one of numerous mainstream authors who, over the centuries, have “tried their hands” at weird fiction—a tendency that may perhaps be slightly more prevalent in British than American literature, given such examples (ranging all the way back to the era of the Gothic novels) as Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Oscar Wilde, Walter de la Mare, Elizabeth Bowen, and so many others. Jacobs, however, is unusual in that he did not address the weird only in “The Monkey’s Paw” (which may well be the most anthologised tale in all weird literature, if not in the entire realm of Anglophone literature), but in a brace of stories that easily fill a volume. Perhaps he does not deserve to be ranked with the titans of weird fiction—those who, like Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and others, focused obsessively and almost exclusively on terror and strangeness—but he wrote a number of piquant and satisfying tales that incorporate those very features that made him so successful in his own day as a mainstream writer and humourist.

  William Wymark Jacobs (in spite of his last name, he was not of Jewish ancestry) was born on September 8, 1863, in Wapping, in the docks area of London. This area in particular, and London in particular, remained the focus of his life and work, for all the frequent moves he and his family subsequently undertook. Jacobs’s father was a wharf manager, and William grew up around docks and ships, gaining an intimate familiarity with both the lingo and the temperaments of the English sailors who frequented the area. William’s mother died in childbirth in 1870, and his father quickly remarried a much younger women—the eighteen-year-old Ellen Flory, who was already pregnant. She would bear six children to William’s father, making a total of ten children in the family. Jacobs attested to difficulties in getting along with his stepmother and step-sublings. Moreover, money was in short supply, and for that reason William, after attending a private school for several years, enrolled in the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institute (later Birkbeck College, now a division of the University of London), at that time
a kind of vocational school. At the age of sixteen William got a job at the Post Office Savings Bank, initially as a clerk and later as a second division clerk. Tedious and enervating as this job was, it did provide income that William could use to support himself and his family; he remained in it for a full twenty years, even after his first literary successes.

  It was, indeed, boredom at his job—Jacobs was, throughout his life, plagued with depression, anxiety, and other nervous ailments—that led him to try writing in his spare time. He began publishing in 1885 with some humorous sketches in newspapers and magazines, and from an early period he developed a series of recurring characters—the night-watchman, Ginger Dick, and so on—who could engender reader identification and serve as the focus of his acute but comic treatments of the lives of sailors and their families.

  Jacobs quickly became associated with the New Humourists—a group whose other chief members were Barry Pain and Jerome K. Jerome (by an odd circumstance, both of these writers also devoted a fair proportion of their time and energy to weird fiction[21]), and whose work reflected their own middle- or lower-class upbringing and sympathetically portrayed the lives and tribulations of such characters. Severely criticised by highbrow writers for even writing about these lower-class characters, who were considered unworthy of literary treatment, the New Humourists represented a kind of comic version of the grim realism of such contemporary writers as George Gissing, whose searing treatments of the lives of the poor and dispossessed would transform English literature in the new century.

  Jacobs and others also benefited from the proliferation of popular magazines that catered to the vastly wider reading public that the advance of public education in England and America had engendered. Such readers were generally not interested in consuming the elevated work of Oscar Wilde or George Meredith, but wished to read accounts of people like themselves. Jacobs’s early work was extensively published in such venues as the Idler and To-day, edited by Jerome K. Jerome; strangely enough, however, he was alone among the New Humourists in not appearing in the highly popular comic weekly Punch.