The Godfather of Dark Academia: The Ghost Stories of M.R. James
M.R. James, the writer of a highly cultivated series of ghost stories, including the once-famous Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), remains a lesser-known name in the pantheon of horror, overlooked by the roughly contemporary success of Stoker’s Dracula (1898). Nevertheless, he remains the true godfather of the English ghost story, consciously reinventing Victorian horrors for a 20th century audience. This might seem a curious occupation for the son born in 1862 to an Evangelical clergyman and his wife in the bucolic surroundings of Goodnestone, Kent. James’ early life was spent entirely ensconced by the world of the church: a daily regimen of prayers, hymns, and Bible study etched Christian beliefs deep in his psyche, where they would color even his most fantastic stories. Though his father intended him to take Holy Orders, James ultimately followed a different — but not so dissimilar — path.
Indeed, far from rebelling against his father, James’ career took root from his early indoctrination in the church. The apocalyptic imagery of the Old Testament, and in particular the Medieval penchant for depicting this imagery in the most grotesque and macabre fashion, became a lifelong obsession. After preparatory studies at Temple Grove, he earned a scholarship to Eton, firmly establishing his spiritual center. The rest of his life would be spent within the confines of university walls, poring through old manuscripts, giving lectures, or spinning out newly-invented tales of forgotten worlds for friends and students.
His early years at Eton brought numerous distinctions and honors: he won the Newcastle Scholarship (the highest academic award at Eton), as well as a scholarship to King’s in 1882. The student quickly became the master, as he took Firsts in both parts of the Classical Tripos, and was named Assistant Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1886. During this time he participated in excavations in Cyprus — archeology became yet another scholarly pursuit — and was named Dean of King’s in 1889. After receiving his D.Litt degree in 1895, he became first a Tutor at King’s, and then, remarkably, Provost in 1905. Here he remained until 1918, the period that encompasses the first two volumes of stories. Far from retiring, he then returned to Eton as Provost, where he remained until his death in 1936. These two institutions were the cornerstones of his intellectual and spiritual existence, as he makes clear in his 1926 book, Eton and King’s, one of his rare autobiographical publications.
Though to most readers James is familiar, if at all, through his ghost stories, academics remember him primarily for his voracious — and seemingly, limitless — knowledge of the ancient and medieval world. As a testament to his father’s influence, he made comprehensive studies of the apocrypha of the Old and New Testaments, publishing the Apocryphal New Testament in 1924. As James writes in Eton and Kings,
I had cherished for years, I still cherish, a quite peculiar interest in any document that has claimed to be a Book of the Bible, and is not. Nowadays I suppose it would be proper to say that I have a complex about it. A dream of my childhood is still vivid to me, in which I opened a folio Bible in a shiny black binding, and found in it a Book of about the length of Obadiah, occupying a single page, divided into verses and with a heading in italics, all quite ship-shape. It was called (I think) the Book of Maher-shalal-hash-baz…And for years after I hoped I might some day come on the real thing, and whenever a chance offered I read with avidity anything that was classed as apocryphal, and wrote down careful abstracts of it in note-books. (195–196)
Here we see his unique ability to blend fantasy and academia, as this dream sounds remarkably like one of his stories: an antiquary stumbling upon a lost book of the Bible — one with terrible portent to the hapless academic. Yet this “complex”, as he calls it, led him on the gargantuan task to catalogue the entire Cambridge manuscript collection — some twenty thousand manuscripts, some of which he brought to light for the first time in centuries.
According to E.F. Bleiler, in his Introduction to James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, “The bibliography of his learned publications, published in the necrology for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, covers some thirty pages, and his necrologist, Sir Stephen Gaselee, refers to James as the greatest scholar, in volume of knowledge, that he had ever known” (Dover, 4). These accomplishments place James, the ghost story writer, in striking relief. Far from being an isolated hobby, the stories are a natural extension of his scholarship, sharing the same subject, themes, and ideas. Indeed, we can see him working out the lacunae of medieval texts through the conventions of literary horror, since the manuscripts are “sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent” (Cox 298). Who better than an antiquary (to use his own term) to remind us that the ‘demons’ of the past continue to haunt us, despite civilization’s attempts to relegate them to the dustbin of superstition?
In this regard James bears a striking similarity to his contemporary and fellow academic, J.R.R. Tolkien. Interestingly, both writers were drawn to the forgotten byways of the medieval world, fashioning stories from fragmentary scraps of knowledge. What Tolkien found in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and other poems parallels the ‘horrors’ James discerned in the apocrypha and other moldering missals. As Tolkien remarks in his famous essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936), “A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers, a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God…” (Fry 27). Though Edwardian England seemed a relatively civilized place devoid of “monsters”, James possessed an almost Freudian ability to discern traces of the old gods.
As Freud would explain in his essay, “The Uncanny” (1919), much of what we experience as “uncanny” (disturbing, monstrous, or bizarrely coincidental) are fragments of our ancestral past, pagan beliefs and rituals which are anathema to our civilized mores. As the Medieval church erected cathedrals over pagan shrines, so, too, have we ‘cast out’ our old religions and fashioned them into ghosts, vampires, and devils. Tolkien caught something of this in the Christian vs. Pagan tension in Beowulf (as well as in his own Middle Earth), and James does the same in a modern context.
When his academics uncover an ancient manuscript, dreaming of future publications, they find instead hints of a forgotten narrative: of pacts made with the Devil, of strange creatures brought back from a “Black Pilgrimage” to the Crusades, or simply proof of the “malice of inanimate objects” (to quote the title of one of his unpublished stories). James, the scholar, realized how easily stories passed out of tradition, particularly when they were consciously suppressed. His stories thus seem a response to a question posed long ago, in a language as obscure as the Exeter Riddle Book, which speak to the unconscious fears and longings of the modern world.
Naturally, there was another side to James besides the antiquary. To his friends and students he was known affectionately as “Monty”, a jovial man who loved cats, played the piano, and devoured detective novels and ghost stories, particularly those of Sheridan Le Fanu. Indeed, his scholarship often mingled with these interests, prompting him to edit editions of Le Fanu’s novels Uncle Silas and Madame Crowl’s Ghost, as well as translate the complete fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. In short, James was no intellectual snob; he found amusement and edification almost anywhere, and no field escaped his scrutiny once it crossed his path. The ghost stories, themselves, initially emerged from the “Monty” side of his personality. At King’s James presided over the Chitchat Club, where he would entertain members with seemingly impromptu yarns of ghosts, curses, and ancient riddles.
The first official “story” that became part of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was read on October 28, 1893, which is the first story in the volume, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” The success of this story established it as a yearly tradition, though the readings shifted to Christmas Eve, where he dutifully produced story after story, year after year. Present at these early meetings was a young man named James McBryde, who would become not only his dearest friend, but one of the chief catalysts of his creative life.
Clearly, his relationship with McBryde allowed him to see the stories as more than occasional pieces and to consider publication. While “Canon Alberic” and “Lost Hearts” had already been published in National Review, offering an entire volume of such stories was another matter entirely. The tide turned in 1904, when McBryde fell ill with appendicitis and faced a lengthy recovery. To amuse himself, he asked James if he might illustrate a few of the stories with an eye toward publication. James agreed, perhaps inspired by the idea of collaboration, and offered him six possibilities: “Canon Alberic”, “The Mezzotint”, “The Ash-Tree”, “Number 13”, “Count Magnus”, and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. McBryde set to work producing a number of drawings in an accomplished, macabre style.
The most famous of these images accompanies the story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, depicting the climax of the tale. In this illustration, the professor’s bed sheets lurch into the form of a monster, its face a crumpled-up, indistinct menace. The professor has collapsed in terror against a dresser, warding off the spirit with a face that looks distressingly skeletal. Following James’ lead, McBryde avoids the most obvious pitfall — the ‘walking sheet’ ghost. Instead, the phantasm that emerges is human, but only just. The illustration reflects James’ favorite description of the supernatural: “There was intelligence of a kind in [it], intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man” (Cox 11).
Tragically, these images of death and horror were McBryde’s last creations; following his operation, he unexpectedly passed away, leaving only four illustrations complete with many more unfinished or roughly planned out. James’ shock must have been extraordinary, yet it convinced him to push ahead with the planned volume. Adding two additional stories, the previously published “Lost Hearts”, and a new creation, “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, he offered the book as a memorial to his late friend and collaborator. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published by Edward Arnold in November of 1904, only a few months after McBryde’s death.
The volume proved a modest success, though its limited run made even his friends scramble to find it. Reprinted in 1905, it eventually went through nine editions until it was collected with his subsequent stories in 1931. Though many critics ignored the works (or dismissed them, perhaps, as trifles), they soon caught on as a distinct voice in the genre. Steeped in ancient and medieval lore as James was, he had an almost mythic perspective on the supernatural; not simply what terrified Englishmen and women, but the very essence of what civilization deems ‘supernatural’.
James’ stories can be reduced to a very simple formula with slight variations: a gentleman (typically a scholar) stumbles upon an ancient manuscript or object; probing into this mystery in his possession invokes a presence that quickly shadows his footsteps. As the story reaches its climax, the gentleman is forced to come face-to-face with the presence, which either destroys him or from which he escapes at the last moment. The reality of the encounter is never conclusively explained and rests entirely on the word of the narrator. Yet James takes such pains to establish the narrative voice and an almost documentary sense of place that few readers can question his reliability. Unlike Poe’s narrator-madmen, we can never accuse James’ antiquarians of embellishment or monomania; they seem far too self-aware and rational for that. What we are left with is a disturbingly “true” story where even the most fantastic elements seem to echo with uncanny familiarity.
The book that immediately followed Ghost Stories of an Antiquary departed little from his general format, yet expanded its scope and narrative voice. If the first stories were based in New Year’s Eve amusements, the later stories seem more consciously ‘literary’, particularly since his audience had grown. No longer writing solely for the Chitchat Club, James could experiment with the conventions of the ghost story as well as pay more conscious homage to his literary idol, Sheridan Le Fanu. Though his famous stories appear in the first volume, two of his greatest masterpieces appear in the second: “The Tracdate Middoth” and “Casting the Runes”.
Each story, though as horrifying as anything found in Ghost Stories from an Antiquary, add a unique touch of humor to counterbalance the supernatural. Indeed, in many of the later stories, there is a slight tongue-in-cheek element which becomes James’ unmistakable thumbprint. James clearly enjoyed writing these stories, as they allowed him to be occasionally arch and satiric — not qualities typically associated with a diplomatic Provost of King and Eton’s. Autobiographical elements creep up more and more frequently in the later stories, as well as James’ invectives against modern society and its faddish tastes.
The war briefly interrupted his literary efforts, though James continued pretty much where he left off with the publication of A Thin Ghost and Others in 1919. However, to say that the walls of King’s shielded him from the terrors of WWI — as some of his contemporaries did — would be to mistake the man for the antiquaries of his stories. Like many artists, James cared little for political reality, preferring the eternal truths found in history and literature. Yet he realized the terrible cost of the war, all the more so as many of his students never returned from the trenches. Rupert Brooke was the most notable loss, though many other students, friends, and colleagues perished or were declared missing.
Writing to a friend in France in 1918, James admitted, “when I don’t plunge myself into some subject quite unconnected with the present I am for ever thinking of what is going on with you, and that dries my pen and incapacitates” (Cox, 194). The retreat into ghost stories and scholarship warded off more desperate feelings, much as Tolkien diverted himself with creating the languages of Middle Earth while on the front.
The years after World War I saw the publication of several more volumes: following A Thin Ghost, he released the children’s book, The Five Jars (1922, channeling Kipling and George MacDonald), A Warning to the Curious (1925), and finally in 1935, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James. His later stories lacked something of the inspiration and immediacy of the first two volumes, possibly because of how drastically the world had changed. James had no sympathy with modernism and may have felt his audience had moved on. He spent his final years editing volumes of his favorite authors, notably Hans Christian Andersen and Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as reflecting on his academic upbringing in Eton and Kings (1926).
This interesting volume is less an autobiography than a string of colorful — if faded — anecdotes, perhaps appreciated best by a schoolmate of James’ generation. Many contemporaries had little sympathy with this brand of nostalgia, notably Lytton Stratchey (author of Emiment Victorians), who dismissed it as “vapid little anecdotes and nothing more. Only remarkable as showing the extraordinary impress an institution can make on an adolescent mind. It’s odd that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt” (Cox, 220).
However unfair this assessment, it does contain a grain of truth: James held firm to the principles of his youth, and lived his entire life as a “child” of Eton and King’s. That he never left testifies less to a “life without a jolt”, but a life dedicated to the very ideals of academia; not isolation, but introspection and intellectual discovery. James died in 1936 after a lingering illness, yet, in his mind, remained the same antiquary of his youth. His final story, “A Vignette” (1935, published posthumously in 1936), is a graceful summing up of his eternal theme: that the past remains buried in the forgotten byways of modern life, merely awaiting re-discovery by curious eyes. A single bed sheet or faded manuscript can obliterate time itself and remind us of our collective past: spellbound by the mysteries of the universe, and still frightened of the dark.
Works Cited
Bleiler, E.F. “Introduction to the Dover Edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.” Mineola: Dover Publications, 1971.
Cox, Michael. M.R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1986.
James, M.R. Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories. ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
James, M.R. Eton and King’s: Reflections, Mostly Trivial: 1875–1925. London: Williams & Norgate, Ltd., 1926.
Tolkein, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Donald K. Fry. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1968.
