Collected Ghost Stories (5 page)

¹
This passage is a paraphrase, sometimes verbatim, of accounts given by a number of participants at MRJ’s ghost story evenings, including H. E. Luxmoore, Oliffe Richmond, S. G. Lubbock, and MRJ himself. For the original sources, see Michael Cox,
M. R. James: An Informal Portrait
(Oxford, 1986), 133–4; Lubbock,
M. R. James
(Cambridge, 1939), 38–9.

²
Cox,
M. R. James
, 9.

³
James,
The Apocalypse in Art
(London, 1931). This was a published version of the Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology, which MRJ delivered to the British Academy in 1927.

⁴
James,
Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial 1875–1925
(1926; Ashcroft, British Columbia, 2005), 8.

⁵
Cox, Introduction to M. R. James,
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories
(Oxford, 1987),
p. xii
.

⁶
Cox,
M. R. James
, 97.

⁷
Ibid. 174.

⁸
Ibid. 125.

⁹
Christopher Morris,
King’s College: A Short History
(Cambridge, 1989), 46.

¹⁰
Michael Holroyd,
Lytton Strachey: A Biography
(London, 1973), 920.

¹¹
Cox,
M. R. James
, 74–5.

¹²
R. W. Pfaff,
Montague Rhodes James
(London, 1980), 220. This forms part of a comic verse which Richmond sent from Galicia in 1905.

¹³
Ibid. 127. Collected amongst James’s papers at King’s is a photograph, presumably his own, of massed protestors against degrees for women outside Senate House in 1897, under a large banner with an adapted quotation from
Much Ado About Nothing
: ‘Get you to Girton, Beatrice, get you to Newnham. Here’s no place for you maids’: KCC MS MRJ:F/
I
. (Girton was the other 19th-cent. Cambridge women’s college.) Also amongst James’s papers at King’s is a flyer issued by his highly eccentric colleague J. H. Nixon, ostensibly opposing degrees for women from a position of reforming radicalism (KCC MS MRJ:D/Nixon).

¹⁴
Letter to Gordon Carey, 28 Jan. 1917: KCC MS MRJ:F/4.

¹⁵
James, ‘Some Remarks on “The Head of John the Baptist”’,
Classical Review
, 31/1 (Feb. 1917), 4.

¹⁶
Pfaff,
James
, 401.

¹⁷
Ibid.

¹⁸
Morris,
King’s College
, 63.

¹⁹
Cox,
M. R. James
, 174.

²⁰
James,
Eton and King’s
, 13.

²¹
Ibid. 58.

²²
M. R. James, ed. and trans.,
The Apocryphal New Testament
(Oxford, 1924),
pp. xi
–xii: ‘It will very quickly be seen that there is no question of any one’s having excluded [the Apocryphal Gospels] from the New Testament. They have done that for themselves.’

²³
Cox,
M. R. James
, 40, 111, 125.

²⁴
Janet Oppenheim,
The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914
(Cambridge, 1985).

²⁵
Jarlath Killeen,
Gothic Literature, 1914–1925
(Cardiff, 2009), 124, 129.

²⁶
Julia Briggs,
Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
(London, 1977), 124.

²⁷
Mary Butts, ‘The Art of Montagu James’,
London Mercury
, 29 (Feb. 1934). For James’s response, see Cox,
M. R. James
, 141.

²⁸
Michael Cox, for example, believes that ‘We can talk glibly about his being a “repressed homosexual”, but this seems a hopelessly inadequate summation of the complex cultural and personal factors behind his resistance to marriage’, and warns against ‘psycho-critical speculation’ (Cox,
M. R. James
, 165, 149). See also David G. Rowlands, ‘M. R. James’s Women’, in S. T. Joshi and Rosemary Pardoe (eds.),
Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James
(New York, 2007), 138.

²⁹
Cox, ‘Introduction’,
p. xxiv
.

³⁰
M. R. James, Introduction to James McBryde,
The Story of a Troll Hunt
(Cambridge, 1904).

³¹
Cox,
M. R. James
, 128.

³²
Ibid. 55, 59, 132. For an account of James which in some ways parallels my own thinking here and in my reading of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, see Mike Pincombe, ‘Homosexual Panic and the English Ghost Story: M. R. James and Others’, in Joshi and Pardoe (eds.).
Warnings to the Curious
, 184–96.

³³
Pincombe, ‘Homosexual Panic’, 188–91.

³⁴
The analysis of these stories draws on important aspects of the feminist analysis of horror, in particular the ideas of Barbara Creed, and the hugely influential theories of Julia Kristeva. See e.g. Creed,
The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis
(London, 1993); Kristeva,
The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection
, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York, 1982).

³⁵
Cox,
M. R. James
, 109.

³⁶
James,
Eton and King’s
, 25.

³⁷
Briggs,
Night Visitors
, 14.

³⁸
George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, in
Essays
, ed. John Carey (London, 2002), 293.

T
HE
text for the majority of the stories here is based on the 1931
Collected Ghost Stories
, overseen by M. R. James for publication. Where there are obvious errors, I have silently corrected them. Where available, I have consulted original manuscript sources, and have discussed substantive differences between MS and published versions in the Explanatory Notes. For the last three stories, published after the appearance of the
Collected Ghost Stories
(‘The Experiment’, ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’, ‘A Vignette’), I have used the earliest printed versions of the stories.

Details of composition and first publication can be found in the Explanatory Notes to the individual stories at the back of the book. Asterisks in the text refer to these notes; all footnotes are by M. R. James.

Cox, Michael,
M. R. James: An Informal Portrait
(Oxford, 1986). The most invaluable work for any student of James.

Lubbock, S. G.,
M. R. James
(Cambridge, 1939). A personal memoir, written shortly after MRJ’s death.

Pfaff, Richard William,
Montague Rhodes James
(London, 1980). An exhaustive account of James’s scholarship.

Carroll, Jane Suzanne, ‘A “dramar in real life”: Freaky Dolls, M. R. James and Modern Children’s Ghost Stories’, in Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie-Anne Stevens (eds.),
The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre
(Dublin, 2010), 251–65.

Cowlinshaw, Brian, ‘“A Warning top the Curious”: Victorian Science and the Awful Unconscious in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories’,
Victorian Newsletter
, 94 (Fall 2000), 749–71.

Fielding, Penny, ‘Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernity’,
Modern Fiction Studies
, 46 (2000), 36–42.

James, M. R.,
A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings
, ed. Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden (Ashcroft, British Columbia, 2001), gathers together all of James’s stories and relevant writings, plus many very useful scholarly essays on aspects of his work.

Joshi, S. T., and Pardoe, Rosemary (eds.),
Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James
(New York, 2007), is a collection of essays on James.

Mason, Michael, ‘On Not Letting Them Lie: Moral Significance in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James’,
Studies in Short Fiction
, 19 (1982), 253–60.

Michalski, Robert, ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Exchange in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories’,
Extrapolation
, 37 (Spring 1996), 46–62.

O’Briain, Helen Conrad, ‘“The gates of hell shall not prevail against it”: Laudian Ecclesia and Victorian Culture Wars in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James’, in O’Briain and Stevens (eds.),
The Ghost Story
, 47–60.

Young, B. W.,
The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History
(Oxford, 2000), contains a chapter on James’s ‘Hanoverian Hauntings’.

No writer on James can ignore the indefatigable work of Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe, editors of the M. R. James newsletter and journal
Ghosts & Scholars
, a mine of notes, observations, and textual archaeology.

Briggs, Julia,
Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
(London, 1977).

O’Briain, Helen Conrad, and Stevens, Julie-Anne (eds.),
The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre
(Dublin, 2010).

Davies, Owen,
The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts
(London, 2007).

Killeen, Jarlath,
Gothic Literature 1825–1914
(Cardiff, 2009).

Oppenheim, Janet,
The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914
(Cambridge, 1985).

Russell, Jeffrey Burton,
The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity
(Ithaca, NY, 1977).

Smith, Andrew,
The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History
(Manchester, 2010).

Sullivan, Jack,
Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood
(Athens, Ohio, 1978).

Westwood, Jennifer, and Simpson, Jacqueline
The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys
(London, 2005).

Wolfreys, Julian,
Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, the Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature
(London, 2001).