Collected Ghost Stories (76 page)

corpora vilia
: plural of
corpus vile
, an expendable experimental subject.

The remains of the first two subjects, at least, it will be well to conceal
: this implies, rather strangely, that the mutilated bodies of Phoebe have remained
unconcealed
at Aswarby Hall for respectively twenty and seven years. Have they, as the allusion to St Michan’s vaults might imply, been preserved?

the psychic portion of the subjects … ghosts
: a belief common in spiritualist thinking, enormously influential in late Victorian England.

First published in
GSA
, reprinted in
CGS
. Eton College Library MS 368A.

24
Dennistoun
: the protagonist of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’. ‘Anderson’ in MS.

an art museum at another University
: MS reads ‘an art museum at a sister university’. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University—later in the story referred to as the Ashleian Museum at Bridgeford University. The MS has ‘Oxford’ instead of ‘Bridgeford’.

the Shelburnian Library
: the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

Mr. J. W. Britnell
: ‘Mr. E. V. Daniells’ (and sometimes ‘Daniell’) in the MS.

25
mezzotint
: ‘A method of engraving on copper or steel, in which the surface of the plate is first roughened uniformly, the lights and half-lights being then produced by scraping away the “nap” thus formed, and the untouched parts giving the deepest shadows’ (
SOED
).

26
‘
A. W. F. sculpsit’
: ‘A. W. F. he carved it’.

—ssex
: the MS tries both ‘—folk’ and ‘—shire’ before settling on ‘—ssex’.
Professor Binks
: MS adds ‘(it seems a good enough name for a man in his position)’.

28
sported the doors of both sets of rooms
: in university slang, ‘sporting the oak’ meant closing the door to one’s rooms (Cox II, 305).

29
Canterbury College
: there is no Canterbury College at Oxford, though both Christ Church and St John’s have Canterbury quadrangles.

30
Garwood
: ‘Gregory’ in MS.

31
skip
: a college servant. Technically, in Oxford, Robert Filcher would have been Mr Williams’s scout; in Cambridge, his gyp; and only in Trinity College Dublin, his skip.

Phasmatological Society
: that is, the Society for the Study of Ghosts (from the Greek
phasma
, ghost). This is MRJ’s own invention, though it is likely to be modelled on the high-profile Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882 to investigate the veracity of spiritual and paranormal phenomena. The SPR itself grew out of the Cambridge Ghost Society, which is very close to James’s Phasmatological Society.

32
Door Bible
: a Bible containing the celebrated illustrations of Gustave Doré (1832–83), a French artist renowned for his horrific and phantasmagoric images; first published in 1866.

33
Murray’s Guide to Essex
: Richard J. King,
Handbook for Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire
(London: John Murray, 1870). Anningley Hall is fictitious.

like the man in Tess of the D’Urbervilles
: in Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891), Tess’s father, Jack Durbeyfield, (correctly) believes himself to be a dispossessed member of the ancient D’Urberville family.

34
north side of the church
: see MRJ’s ‘Ghost Stories’, written whilst still at Eton: ‘A “belated wanderer” … pitched his camp in a churchyard. He laid himself down under a buttress on the north side of the building, and in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was surrounded by the graves of murderers and suicides (who were there, as is often the case, buried on the north side of the church), he fell asleep’ (Joshi I, 247). Mrs Mothersole, the witch from ‘The Ash-Tree’, is also buried on the north side of the church, as is Squire Bowles in ‘The Experiment’.

spes ultima gentis
: ‘last hope of his family’.

Sadducean Professor of Ophiology
: MRJ’s coinage, meaning ‘Professor of Serpents’. The Sadducees were a priestly Jewish caste ‘which say that there is no resurrection’ (Matthew 22: 23), and who believed in ‘neither angel nor spirit’ (Acts 23: 8); they were admonished by Christ for their denial of the supernatural (Matthew 22: 29–33). The connection with serpents is from Matthew 4: 7: ‘But when [John the Baptist] saw the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O
generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ MS has the more straightforward ‘Professor of Biology’, to which the word ‘Sadducean’ has been added.

First published in
GSA
, reprinted in
CGS
. MS not located, though included in a Sotheby’s sale, 9 November 1936 (
PT
, 50).

35
Castringham Hall
: fictitious, though its location has led to suggestions that it may have been modelled on Livermere Hall, a seventeenth-century house on whose lands James lived as a boy, in Livermere Rectory (
PT
, 39). MRJ’s last published story, ‘A Vignette’, opens with a description of Livermere Rectory.

36
auto-da-fé
: ‘act of the faith’: the public burning of a heretic by the Inquisition.

Mrs. Mothersole
: ‘Mothersole’ is a local Suffolk name. There are a number of Mothersoles buried in Great Livermere churchyard.

Sir Matthew Fell
: a fictional conflation of two figures notorious for their activities during the seventeenth-century witch trials, and with particular connections to Bury St Edmunds (see note below). The first is Matthew Hopkins (
c
. 1620–47), the infamous ‘Witchfinder General’ (a title he bestowed on himself), responsible for the execution of eighteen people in one day in the Bury witch trial of 1645. The second is Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76), an MP and judge who presided over witch trials in Bury in 1662, where two elderly widows, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, were found guilty of witchcraft and hanged. ‘Fell’ has numerous meanings relevant to the story: the past tense of the verb ‘to fall’; ‘a cutting down of timber’; ‘the line of termination of a web, formed by the last weft-thread’; ‘fierce, savage, cruel, ruthless’; ‘dire, intensely painful or destructive’; ‘full of spirit, doughty’; ‘shrewd, clever, cunning’ (
SOED
).

gathering sprigs ‘from the ash-tree near my house
’: the ash tree has numerous folkloric and mythological meanings. According to some traditions, the witch’s broomstick was made of ash.

Bury St. Edmunds
: town in Suffolk, 5 miles from MRJ’s childhood home in Livermere.
S&N
has a lengthy description of Bury (and particularly its celebrated Abbey), which is described as ‘the most attractive town in Suffolk’ (
p. 42
). As the location of the Suffolk county assizes, witch trials did take place in Bury in the seventeenth century.

39
ring of Pope Borgia
: Rodrigo Borgia (1431–1503), patriarch of the notorious Renaissance family; made Pope Alexander VI in 1492, reputedly through bribery and murder—also the means by which he maintained his power. Allegedly murdered rivals and enemies, including numerous cardinals, by means of a ring and a chalice, both containing arsenic.

drawing the Sortes
: the
Sortes Sanctorum
, or ‘lots of the saints’; bibliomancy. Divination by means of consulting a book, usually the Bible, at
random, and interpreting the messages of the scripture. The instance here refers to Charles I’s alleged divination by means of a copy of Virgil’s
Aeneid
(the
sortes Vergilianae
, common in early modern England; in the medieval period, Virgil had acquired a considerable reputation as a necromancer) in the Bodleian Library in 1642, on the eve of the English Civil War, a story which survives in a number of different forms. The passage consulted was:

And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease,
On hard conditions may he buy his peace:
Nor let him, then, enjoy supreme command;
But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand,
And lie unburied on the barren sand!

Charles’s forces lost the war to Cromwell’s republican army, and he was executed in 1649.

40
Luke … Isaiah … Job … blood
: respectively, excerpts from the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree; a prophecy of the destruction of Babylon; and an account of the eagle’s diet of human carrion (‘Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are, there is she’).

Popish Plot
: alleged Catholic plot to assassinate Charles II, fabricated by the Anglican clergyman Titus Oates in 1678, in an attempt to inflame anti-Catholic hysteria.

41
Sibyl’s temple at Tivoli
: Tivoli (Roman Tibur) is in Lazio, just east of Rome. Amongst its many architectural monuments is the Temple of the Tiburtine Sybil.

42
Bishop of Kilmore
: the diocese of Kilmore is in County Cavan. Kilmore survives as a Catholic bishopric; the Anglican Church of Ireland amalgamated the diocese in 1841 to form the bishopric of Kilmore, Elphin, and Ardagh. Kilmore (from the Irish Cill Mhór) is a very common Irish place name, though it is possible that MRJ chose it here as a pun, ‘kill more’.

43
Clare Hall in Cambridge
: Cambridge college founded in 1326; changed its name to Clare College in 1856.

Polyænus
: second-century Macedonian writer; author of the eight-volume
Stratagems of War
.

44
“Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be”
: not from Chronicles, but from Job 7: 21: ‘And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away mine iniquity? for now I shall sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.’

First published in
GSA
, reprinted in
CGS
. Manuscript (incomplete) in KCL MS MRJ:A/3. In the Preface to
CGS
, MRJ claimed ‘I only recollect that I wrote “Number 13” in 1899’, which was the date of his first visit to
Denmark. It seems more likely that the story was written in 1900, after the second visit, when MRJ stayed in Viborg. May have been read for the first time at Christmas 1903 (Cox I, 133). The MS version contains the following rejected opening, in faint, pencilled handwriting which is often near-indecipherable:

Too few Englishmen travel in Jutland. Too few that is if we are taking the unselfish view that the pleasantest part of the [earth] would right [
sic
] be visited by the largest possible number of people: not one too few, on the other hand if we are explaining what are most likely our genuine feeling [
sic
] that there ought to be certain parts of this earth kept sacred from the mass of tourists. Still I am not really apprehensive that Jutland will ever become a crowded tourist resort. Its beauties are of a tranquil, a tame, a melancholy kind. Its literature is luckily not popularized by translations, and its sights in the way of [smudged word], galleries and museums are few. I am therefore the less afraid that I shall do it the disservice of bringing the curse of trippers and hotel coupons [?] upon it by singing its praises. Perhaps the story that I am about to tell may even have the opposite effect.

48
Viborg
: ‘Sacred Hill’. Early capital of Jutland, Denmark, and originally a centre of pagan worship; largely rebuilt after a fire of 27 June 1726. MRJ first visited Denmark in 1899 on a cycling holiday with his friends James McBryde and Will Stone. The three did not stay in Viborg that year, but did when they returned to Denmark in 1900. ‘Perhaps’, MRJ wrote in
E&K
, ‘the expeditions I made in [McBryde’s] company to Denmark and Sweden … were the most blissful that I ever had’ (
p. 144
). The idea for ‘Number 13’ ‘was suggested by Will Stone’ (Lubbock, 32).

Hald
: south-west of Viborg; Bishop Jörgen Friis was imprisoned in Hald Castle (see note to
p. 51
).

Finderup
: King Erik Glipping (Erik V of Denmark) was mysteriously murdered in Finderup in 1286; Marsk Stig Andersen was amongst those convicted of the murder, though the details remain unclear.

Preisler’s … the Phœnix … the Golden Lion
: the first two are, or were, genuine Viborg hotels: MRJ stayed in Preisler’s in August 1900. The Golden Lion is fictitious.