Read Collected Ghost Stories Online
Authors: M. R. James,Darryl Jones
Collected Ghost Stories (81 page)
230
sawflies … daddy-long-legs
: the sawfly is a very common insect of the family Tenthredinoidea. The daddy-long-legs is an English colloquial term for the crane fly. Fittingly given the story’s theme, the
ichneumon
of MRJ’s note is a notorious parasite wasp, which injects its young into the body of a host, from where it eats its way out.
Anna Seward … the Swan of Lichfield
: 1747–1809; popular English poet. Sir Walter Scott was her literary executor.
235
I nearly got my quietus
: I nearly died.
236
Miss Bates
: a voluble spinster from Jane Austen’s
Emma
(1815).
238
S.T.P
.
…
Præb. Junr: S.T.P
. = Sacrosanctae Theologiae Professor (Professor of Sacred Theology).
S.T.B
. = Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus (Bachelor of Sacred Theology).
Prœb. senr
. = Praebenda senior (Senior Prebendary).
Prœb. junr
. = Praebenda junior (Junior Prebendary).
Decanus
= Dean.
239
Debrett
: John Debrett (1753–1822),
Debrett’s Baronetage of England
(first published 1803), a guide to the British and Irish peerage.
240
a withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost
: source of the collection’s title,
A Thin Ghost and Others
.
King Saul that we read of raising up the dead ghost
: in 1 Samuel 28: 7–20 the Witch of Endor raises Samuel’s ghost at Saul’s behest.
241
Bluebeard’s chamber
: in Perrault’s fairy tale, the serial murderer Bluebeard keeps the corpses of his wives in a forbidden chamber in his castle.
First published in
TG
; reprinted in
CGS
. MS not located.
242
Mr. James Denton … in the county of Warwick
: F.S.A. = Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (of which MRJ became a member in the mid-1890s). Trinity Hall is a Cambridge college, founded 1350. Rendcomb Manor is fictitious.
Thomas collection of MSS
.
: fictitious.
Thomas Hearne
: 1678–1735; English antiquarian noted for his editions of medieval chronicles; assistant librarian, Bodleian Library, Oxford University (1699–1715). The quarrels to which MRJ refers here probably allude to his opposition to George I, to whom he refused to take the oath of allegiance—for which reason he lost his position in the Bodleian.
anti-Vivisection League
: opposition to vivisection (animal experimentation) was a prominent radical cause in the late Victorian period. The high-profile Anti-Vivisection Society was founded by Frances Power Cobbe in 1875.
247
Bermondsey
: a district of Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, London. In the nineteenth century, Bermondsey was a notoriously rough area of docks, warehouses, and slums.
unconsidered trifles
: ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’: Shakespeare,
The Winter’s Tale
, iv.ii.26.
’Ercules and the painted cloth
: this reference remains slightly cryptic, though it seems to be part of an allusion by Mr Cattell to the ongoing debate as to the real authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Cox II (
p. 327
) believes it to be a misquotation of
Henry IV, Part 1
, iv.ii.25: ‘slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth’. Rosemary Pardoe, perhaps more plausibly, identifies the reference as the pageant scene from
Love’s
Labour’s Lost
, v.ii.575–6: ‘You will be scrap’d out of the painted cloth for this’, after which the Boy (Moth) enters dressed as Hercules. See Pardoe, ‘Hercules and the Painted Cloth’,
Ghosts and Scholars
, 31 (2000), 49–50.
cui bono
: ‘to whose benefit?’ A legal term implying guilt on behalf of the person with most to gain from committing the crime. Given Mr Cattell’s propensity for malapropisms (which he shares with very many of MRJ’s working-class characters), it seems likely that he means to say something else.
the feast of Simon and Jude
: 28 October.
252
Commoner of University College
: University College is the oldest of the Oxford Colleges, founded 1249 (St Edmund Hall, founded 1226, gained full college status in 1957). A commoner is a student who pays for his own commons (dinner)—that is, one who does not hold a scholarship or exhibition.
251
Absalom
: son of King David, renowned for his beauty, who rebelled unsuccessfully against his father’s rule: see 2 Samuel 13–18. 2 Samuel 15: 25–6 makes specific reference to the beauty and lustre of Absalom’s hair:
But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.
And when he polled his head [i.e. cut his hair], (for it was at every year’s end that he polled it, because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king’s weight.
Given the story’s background in seventeenth-century antiquarianism and monarchical controversies, this may carry a veiled allusion to John Dryden’s satirical allegory ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (1681), which uses the Absalom story to recount the history of the Popish Plot of 1678 (a favourite subject of MRJ’s—see ‘The Ash-Tree’ and ‘The Rose Garden’) and the ongoing events which were to culminate in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, in which the Protestant Duke of Monmouth attempted to overthrow the Catholic James II.
Dr. Plot’s History of Staffordshire
: Robert Plot (1640–96),
The Natural History of Staffordshire
(1686). Like Everard Charlett, Plot was a commoner at University College Oxford; he was also first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and first professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford.
AN EPISODE OF CATHEDRAL HISTORY‘There are more things’
: Shakespeare,
Hamlet
, I.v.166–7: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, | Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.
First published in the
Cambridge Review
(10 June 1914); reprinted in
TG
and
CGS
. KCL MS MRJ:A/7. MS dated 1911, in MRJ’s hand. First read 18 May 1913, according to A. C. Benson: ‘Monty read us a very good ghost story, with an admirable verger very humorously portrayed—the ghost part weak’ (Cox II, 328).
252
Southminster
: fictitious, but in the Preface to
CGS
, MRJ notes that ‘the cathedrals of Barchester [in “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”] and Southminster were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford’.
Mr. Worby
: there are a number of Worbys buried in the churchyard at Great Livermere, including one in the grave next door to MRJ’s father.
Mr. Datchery
: Dick Datchery is the name adopted by a mysterious character in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, whose identity is not revealed in Dickens’s unfinished last work. MRJ was a great admirer of Dickens, and wrote an article on
Drood
, ‘The Edwin Drood Syndicate’, for the
Cambridge Review
(November–December 1905). MRJ believed that Datchery was actually Edwin Drood himself in disguise.
Drood
’s setting of a provincial English cathedral city, Cloisterham (Rochester), has clear resonances for this story. In
E&K
, MRJ recalls that ‘Six of us, calling ourselves the
Edwin Drood Syndicate
, went down early in July of 1909 to Rochester to examine the possibilities of various theories on the spot’ (
p. 141
). One of the six was Henry Jackson, who went on to write a study,
About Edwin Drood
(1911).
253
Jasper and Durdles
: more Droodiana. John Jasper is Edwin Drood’s uncle, precentor of Cloisterham cathedral, and prime candidate for the role of the novel’s villain; Durdles is a bibulous stonemason. In
chapter 3
of
Drood
, Jasper and Durdles walk through the crypt of Cloisterham cathedral, discussing the provenance and manufacture of tombs.
a Scotch Cathedral
: Cox II (
p. 329
) identifies this as a reference to Scott’s
The Lord of the Isles
(1813):
If thou would’st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flount, the ruins of grey.
254
Perpendicular period
: late medieval Gothic architecture, flourishing from
c
.1350 to 1500, characterized by vertical lines and large, elaborate stained glass. Canterbury Cathedral, one of the models for Southminster, is partly Perpendicular, as is King’s College Chapel, and parts of Hereford Cathedral.
the series
: Bell’s Cathedral Series: influential guidebooks to English and Welsh Cathedrals, published 1836–1932.
255
Gothic revival
: rediscovery of medieval architectural forms, particularly popular across the nineteenth century, hence ‘Victorian Gothic’. MRJ
was strongly opposed to Victorian restoration of ecclesiastical architecture to its ‘original’ forms.
255
Lady Chapel … overmantel
: ‘Lady Chapel’: typically the largest and most important chapel within a church; dedicated to the Virgin Mary. ‘Overmantel’: ‘A piece of ornamental cabinet work, often including a mirror, placed over a mantelpiece’ (
SOED
); a characteristically Victorian design.
256
Hereford Cathedral
: a major example of Victorian Gothic restoration. Following the collapse of the Western Tower in 1786, Hereford Cathedral was restored in three phases across the nineteenth century, by James Wyatt, Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, and George Gilbert Scott.
259
diaper-ornament
: diamond-patterned textile work.
260
Isaiah xxxiv. 14
: see note to
p. 13
. The demons of these two stories are virtually identical (one has yellow eyes, the other red), and are both imprisoned within cathedrals. Could ‘Canon Alberic’’s demon be the fellow to whom this satyr cries, ‘as if it were calling after someone that wouldn’t come’?
Simeon’s lot … the Evangelical party
: Charles Simeon (1759–1836), leading Evangelical preacher in the Church of England, and like MRJ both an Old Etonian and a Fellow of King’s. From the mid-eighteenth century, the Evangelical movement was influential within Anglicanism, calling for social and clerical reform, and for a greater sacralization of the Church of England; in part, it was a response to the rise of Methodism and other Dissenting Protestant faiths in the eighteenth century. MRJ’s father, an Anglican clergyman, was an Evangelical strongly influenced by Simeon.
264
Venite
: a canticle sung in the Anglican liturgy of Morning Prayer, consisting of Psalm 95, which opens, ‘O come, let us sing unto the Lord’ (‘Venite, exultemus domino’). It is one of the Psalms ordered for Morning Prayer on the nineteenth day of the month, according to the Book of Common Prayer. The
Decani boys
are the choristers on the Dean’s (south) side of the choir; opposite them, on the Precentor’s (north) side are the
Cantoris
.
267
IBI CUBAVIT LAMIA
: ‘The screech owl also shall rest there’ (KJV), or perhaps more appropriately ‘there shall the night hag alight’ (RSV); from the Vulgate of Isaiah 34: 14 (see note to
p. 13
for the King James translation): ‘et occurrent daemonia onocentauris et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum ibi cubavit lamia et invenit sibi requiem’. The lamia was a Greek succubus or night demon who devoured children, and gained particular cultural currency in the nineteenth century as a vampiric femme fatale. Thus, importantly, ‘Cathedral History’’s demon is
female
(as opposed to its male counterpart in ‘Canon Alberic’).
First published in the
Cambridge Review
(4 June 1913); reprinted in
TG
and
CGS
. KCL MS MRJ:A/8. S. G. Lubbock, present at the first reading, records that ‘the silence which fell when the grim story ended was broken by the voice of Luxmoore: “Were there envelopes in those days?”’ (Lubbock, 39).