Collected Ghost Stories (85 page)

I send it because I was enjoined to do something by Mr. Owen Hugh Smith.

It was then too late for our Christmas number, or, indeed, for the January number; so it was agreed that it should be held over till one of the closing months of this year.

At the moment of going to press, I see it announced that the original manuscripts of his
Ghost Stories
are to appear at a Sotheby’s sale on November 9th (written on foolscap paper). The original of ‘A Vignette,’ of course, is not among them. Like the others, it is written on lined foolscap.’

MS not located.

401
a country rectory
: this is a depiction of Great Livermere rectory, Suffolk, where MRJ lived as a child.

the Hall
: Livermere Hall, a seventeenth-century house, demolished in 1923: ‘Livermere Hall is gone, and many oaks in its park are cut down. “It must needs be that,” let us say, changes “come.” But village and park have some beauty left’ (
S&N
, 71).

402
what Hamlet calls a ‘gain-giving’
: misgiving;
Hamlet
, v.ii.215–16: ‘It is but foolery, but it is such a gain-giving, as would perhaps trouble a woman.’

404
parts of a novel
: J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s
The House by the Churchyard
, serialized in the
Dublin University Magazine
, 1861–3: ‘As the aerial aspect of the house stood before her with its peculiar, malign, scared and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt under the melancholy old elms among the tall hemlock and nettles.’ There is some dispute as to whether the correct word here is ‘scared’ or ‘sacred’: MRJ clearly believed the latter, which he uses on both occasions that he quotes the passage, here and in his essay ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’.

408
‘Schalken the Painter’
: ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’, 1839 ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanu, inspired by the work of the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706).

‘Look on (them) again I dare not’
: not Scott, but Shakespeare’s Scottish play:
Macbeth
II.ii.49.

There was the story of a man travelling in a train in France
: a fragment of this story survives in KCL: MS MRJ A/10.

Madame de Lichtenstein: Caroline de Lichtenfeld
in the MS, that is,
Caroline de Lichfield, ou Mémoires d’une famille prussienne
(1786), by the Swiss novelist and translator Isabelle de Montolieu (1751–1832), one of the most important European novels of the late eighteenth century.

409
Marcilly-le-Hayer
: small town in the Aube region of northern France.
the story of two students of King’s College, Cambridge
: a draft of this exists in manuscript form: Cambridge University Library MS Add.7484.l.27 & 28b; it was published as ‘The Fenstanton Witch’ in
Ghosts and Scholars
, 12 (1990).

Fenstanton … Lolworth … Huntingdon
: Fenstanton and Lolworth are both villages just north of Cambridge; Huntingdon as a market town in Cambridgeshire, and formerly the county town of Huntingdonshire.

410
Wild Wales
: 1862 work by the Norfolk novelist and travel writer George Borrow (1803–81).

Lope de Vega’s El Peregrino en su patria: ‘The Pilgrim in his own Country’
, work of fiction by the Spanish dramatist and poet (1562–1635).

411
Glanville, Beaumont
: for Joseph Glanvill, see note to
p. 181
. John Beaumont (
c
. 1636–1701),
An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits
(1705).

Lavater
: Johann Kasper Lavater (1741–1801), Swiss poet.

The Castle of Otranto … Mrs. Radcliffe … Monk Lewis
: the most influential examples of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction:
The Castle of Otranto
(1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97); Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), author of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) and others; Matthew Lewis (1775–1819), author of
The Monk
(1796). Lewis’s influential compendium of ghost stories and folklore,
Tales of Wonder
, was published in 1801.

Maturin’s Melmoth
: Charles Maturin,
Melmoth the Wanderer
(1820); influential Gothic novel written by a Dublin Anglican clergyman.

413
Bulwer Lytton
: Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), politician and prolific novelist.

414
Rhoda Broughton, Mrs. Riddell, Mrs. Henry Wood, Mrs. Oliphant
: Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920); Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906); Mrs Henry Wood (Ellen Price) (1814–87); Margaret Oliphant (1825–97). All Victorian novelists and ghost-story writers.

Marion Crawford
: Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909), American novelist and writer of supernatural fiction.

Chambers’s Repository: Chambers’ Repository of Instructive and Amusing Papers
: a popular compendium, published in numerous volumes from the 1850s.

Alice-for-Short
: 1907 novel by the Arts and Crafts potter and designer William Frend de Morgan (1839–1917).

414
E. F. Benson
: 1867–1914; ghost-story writer, and younger brother of MRJ’s friend A. C. Benson.

Not At Night
: an anthology series published in twelve volumes from 1925 to 1937, with stories largely drawn from the pulp magazine
Weird Tales
. It was edited by the horror writer Christine Campbell Thompson (1897–1985).

Ambrose Bierce
: 1842–
c
. 1913; American writer, author of
The Devil’s Dictionary
(1911).

415
A. M. Burrage
: Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889–1956), ghost-story writer;
Some Ghost Stories
(1927).

H. R. Wakefield
: H. Russell Wakefield (
c
. 1890–1964), ghost-story writer;
They Return at Evening
(1928).

Mrs. Everett’s The Death Mask
: H. D. Everett (Mrs Theo Douglas),
The Death Mask and other ghosts
(1920).

K. and Hesketh Prichard’s ‘Flaxman Low’
: Katherine O’Brien Ryall Prichard (1852–1935) and her son, Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876–1922);
The Experiences of Flaxman Low
(1899).

Algernon Blackwood
: 1869–1951;
John Silence: Physician Extraordinary
(1908).

Elliott O’Donnell
: 1872–1965; Irish ghost-story writer.

Erckmann–Chatrian
: Émile Erckmann (1822–99) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–90), joint authors of many ghost stories.

416
The Turn of the Screw
: classic 1898 ghost story by Henry James.

417
Harrison Ainsworth
: William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82), Lancashire novelist;
The Lancashire Witches
(1848).

Hastings
: Captain Arthur Hastings is Hercule Poirot’s sidekick in the long-running series of detective novels by Agatha Christie.

418
Lanoe Falconer’s
: pseudonym of Mary Elizabeth Hawker (1892–1908);
Cecilia de Noël
(1891).

Mr. Wardle’s Fat Boy
: the Fat Boy in Dickens’s
Pickwick Papers
says, ‘I wants to make your flesh creep.’

De la Mare
: Walter De la Mare (1873–1956); writer and poet.

419
L’Araignée Crabe
: ‘The Crab Spider’. For Erckmann–Chatrian, see note to
p. 415
.

420
Aander og Trolddom
: Norwegian for ‘Spirits and Magic’.