Collected Ghost Stories (79 page)
Read Collected Ghost Stories Online
Authors: M. R. James,Darryl Jones
140
Bretfield Manor
: Bredfield is a village in Suffolk; the Jacobean Bredfield House (destroyed in the Second World War) was the birthplace of Edward Fitzgerald (1809–83), translator of
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
.
First published in
MGSA
; reprinted in
CGS
. British Library MS Egerton 3141.
Mr. Karswell
: it is often assumed that Karswell is based on the notorious occultist, sex magician, and dissident member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast’. Although Crowley was a student at Trinity College Cambridge, in the 1890s, there is no evidence that MRJ knew anything about him, let alone based the character upon him.
146
Lufford Abbey, Warwickshire
: fictional.
150
There is nothing to be added by way of description of him to what we have heard already
: the MS follows this with an excised passage: ‘though he is a principal character in this tale it is enough to know that he was of middle age and size [height], bearded, of regular habits, with a turn for investigations genealogical, topographical, and antiquarian; a familiar figure in the Reading Room and the Select MSS Room of the Museum, and at the Record Office, by no means uninteresting or uninterested in life, but one who had never experienced any deep convulsion of his being.
Pyretic Saline
: Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline was a popular Victorian health tonic.
John Harrington, F.S.A., of The Laurels, Ashbrooke
: FSA is Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. There are Ashbrookes in Sunderland and Northern Ireland, but this particular Ashbrooke is fictional.
Three months were allowed
: MS has ‘after six months’, amended to ‘after three months’.
153
Harley 3586
: the Harley Collection is a major collection of early books and documents housed in the British Library, and gathered by Robert Harley (1661–1724) and his son Edward Harley (1689–1741). MS Harley 3586 is a collection of two monastic registers from the fourteenth century, and two letters in English, both written in 1676, one (11 December) by the antiquarian and lexicographer Thomas Blount (1618–79), and one (26 October) by Thomas Goad of Balliol College, Oxford. It may be a fortuitous accident that MRJ chose this MS, but he may also have conflated this Thomas Goad with his older namesake (1576–1638), a seventeenth-century theologian who was, like MRJ himself, a scholar of Eton and a scholar and Fellow of King’s (and the son of a provost of King’s). This conjunction of seventeenth-century antiquarians and theologians seems on balance, given MRJ’s interests in this area, to be suggestive.
154
Dr. Watson, his medical man
: perhaps a joking allusion to Sherlock Holmes’s famous associate.
hors de combat
: ‘out of the fight’; disabled from fighting.
ptomaine poisoning
: food poisoning, which was believed to be caused by ‘ptomaines’, alkaloids (chemical compounds) found in decaying food. The discovery of bacteria and the successive formulations of the germ theory of disease across the second half of the nineteenth century had made the theory of ptomaine poisoning obsolete by the time James was writing.
158
Runic letters
: ancient alphabet, most commonly associated with Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon writing; often carrying or implying magical qualities.
Golden Legend
: influential collection of saints’ lives, compiled by Jacobus de Voragine around 1260.
159
Golden Bough
: monumental work of comparative anthropology and religion published between 1890 and 1915 by Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). One of the towering intellectual achievements of Edwardian Britain. MRJ was highly sceptical of the whole project of comparative mythography: see Introduction,
p. xv
.
160
‘black spot’
: the symbol of a death sentence, delivered by pirates in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
(1883).
a woodcut of Bewick’s
: Thomas Bewick (1753–1828): English wood engraver, best known for his illustrations of birds, and of Aesop’s
Fables
; the particular woodcut described here is fictional.
‘Ancient Mariner’
: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), ll. 448–51.
162
Cook’s
: Thomas Cook and Son was the pioneering nineteenth-century travel agency, specializing in package tours.
163
‘Lord Warden’
: this was a real Dover hotel, in which MRJ stayed on his way to and from France (Cox II, 322).
Joanne’s Guide
: Hachette’s
Guides Joannes
were the forerunners to the famous
Blue Guides
, which began publication in 1918.
164
St. Wulfram’s Church at Abbeville
: a church which MRJ had visited on a number of occasions during his trips to France.
First published in the
Contemporary Review
, 97/35 (April 1910), 449–60; reprinted in
MGSA
and
CGS
. Location of MS unknown, though sold at Sotheby’s 9 November 1936 (
PT
, 178).
165
Barchester
: MRJ borrowed this fictional English city from the Barsetshire novels (1855–67) of Anthony Trollope. In the Preface to
CGS
, he writes that ‘the cathedrals of Barchester and Southminster [in “An Episode of Cathedral History”] were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford’.
Ranxton-sub-Ashe … Lichfield
: the former is fictional, the latter a city in Staffordshire in the English midlands, perhaps most famous as the birthplace of Samuel Johnson.
Prebend … Precentor
: a prebend or prebendiary is a stipendiary canon, paid out of cathedral revenues. A precentor directs the singing of a congregation.
the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus … Life of Joshua
: the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Flaccus’ unfinished
Argonautica
(
c
.
CE
70) is a free Latin adaptation of Appolonius of Rhodes’s Greek epic of Jason and the Argonauts, composed in the third century
BCE
. Joshua was the leader of the tribes of Israel after the death of Moses (see the Old Testament books of Numbers and Joshua), who ordered the destruction of Jericho.
167
Cyrus
: probably an epic on the life of the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great (
c
. 600–530
BCE
), who has a revered place in Old Testament history for his liberation of the Israelites from Babylon: on Cyrus’ edict, they were returned to the Holy Land, and commanded to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem (see Ezra 6: 3–5).
Bell’s Cathedral Series
: a celebrated multi-volume series of guides to English and Welsh cathedrals, published from the 1890s.
Sir Gilbert Scott
: Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), major Victorian architect, most closely associated with the Gothic revival.
168
triforium … reredos … baldacchino
: triforium: ‘a gallery or arcade in the wall over the arches at the sides of the nave and choir, and sometimes of the transepts, in some large churches’ (
SOED
). Reredos: decorated screen behind a church altar. Baldacchino: a structure in the form of a canopy, placed above an altar.
169
Second Epistle to the Thessalonians
: 2 Thessalonians 2: 7: ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.’
170
join with the aged Israelite in the canticle
: a reference to the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon in Luke 2: 29–31, which begins with the verse ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy will.’ This is the canticle prescribed for Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer.
the genus Mus
: a mouse.
Tartarean
: Tartarus was the hell of Greek mythology, an abyss of torment and punishment.
171
“friar of orders gray”
: a snatch of song sung by Petruchio in Shakespeare’
The Taming of the Shrew
(iv. i. 145–6): ‘It was the friar of orders grey, | As he forth walked on his way.’ The grey friars are the Franciscans.
172
Magnificat
: Luke 1: 46–55. The song of Mary on her visitation to Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, sung when the baby leaps for joy in his mother’s womb, and beginning ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord.’ Like the Nunc Dimittis, it is sung at Evensong in the Anglican liturgy.
175
Set thou an ungodly man … right hand
: Psalm 109: 6: a curse.
Set thou a wicked man over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand.
When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his prayer become sin.
Let his days be few, and let another take his office. (Psalm 109: 6–8)
176
Mr. Shelley, Lord Byron, and M. Voltaire
: all adduced here as anticlerical freethinkers and radicals, and from the story’s 1818 perspective, all controversial or scandalous modern figures.
First published in
MGSA
; reprinted in
CGS
. Eton College Library MS 368.
179
a parish in the West
: Sampford Courtenay in Devon, according to MRJ’s Preface to
CGS
. King’s College owned property in this village, which MRJ visited in 1893 (Cox I, 103).
John Hill
: ‘John Ward’ in MS.
quickset
: a hedge of living plants, specifically hawthorn.
180
Holy Innocents’ Day
: 28 December, date of the commemoration of the massacre of the innocents, the children of Bethlehem killed by the order of King Herod: see Matthew 2: 16–18.
Jeffreys
: George Jeffreys, 1st Baron of Wem (1645–89), popularly known as ‘the Hanging Judge’. Lord Chief Justice from 1683; notorious for his conducting of the ‘Bloody assizes’ of 1685 following the Duke of
Monmouth’s failed rebellion. Lord Chancellor from 1685. Arrested following the accession to the throne of William of Orange in 1688; died in the Tower of London, 1689.
180
New Inn
: an actual hotel in Sampford Courtenay, dating back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
Interesting old MS. trial for murder
: MRJ was himself a keen and knowledgeable reader of seventeenth-century court transcripts, and in 1929 he wrote the Preface to the Clarendon Press edition of
Lady Ivie’s Trial
. See also ‘The Ash-Tree’ and ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ for fictional reflections of this interest.
181
Revd. Mr. Glanvil
: Joseph Glanvill (1636–80—and thus dead some four years before the date of this story). English clergyman and intellectual, chaplain to Charles II from 1672. Most famous as a defender of the reality of witchcraft and the supernatural; attacked the experimental scientific method across a number of volumes.
oyer and terminer
: ‘legal term of Anglo-French origin, meaning “to hear and determine”, applied in England to one of the commissions by which a judge of assize sits’ (
EB
).
182
upon the 15th day of May … King Charles the Second
: 15 May 1684. Although Charles II did not ascend to the throne until 1660, the date here is counted from the execution of Charles I in 1649, and thus disregards the intervening period of Cromwell’s Republic.
Robert Sawyer
: 1633–92; Attorney General for England and Wales, and Speaker of the House of Commons.
183
Cul-prit
: according to legal tradition, ‘culprit’ is a compound of
cul
(short for
culpable
, guilty) and
pri(s)t
, ‘ready’: ‘it is supposed that when the prisoner had pleaded Not Guilty, the Clerk of the Court replied with
‘Culpable, prest daverrer notre bille’
, i.e. ‘Guilty, ready to aver our indictment’ (
SOED
). One word, ‘culprit’, in MS.