AS THE AUTHOR OF a single book of ghost stories, the rare In Ghostly Company, Amyas Northcote (1864–1923) has been a sadly neglected writer considering the excellence of the thirteen tales. A somewhat ghostly entity himself, very little is known of him.
He was born near Exeter and went to Eton, as most of his very distinguished family had before him. His father was Sir Stafford Northcote, Chancellor of the Exchequer during Benjamin Disraeli’s six years as Prime Minister, later becoming the Leader of the House and the most important Tory in the House of Commons for ten years and serving as Foreign Secretary; after thirty years in Parliament, he stepped down and died on the same day. A statue was erected in his honor in 1887 in the vestibule of the House of Commons.
Amyas Northcote was at Eton at the same time that M. R. James was there, and they shared time at Oxford as well. Soon after his father died, Northcote moved to America to set up a business in Chicago and found time to write articles for various magazines. He returned to England about a decade later and moved into a house a mere few miles from M. R. James, where he commenced to write ghost stories in a style not unlike that of the master. The great scholar of supernatural fiction, Montague Summers, singled Northcote out for praise when he used “Brickett Bottom” in his landmark anthology, The Supernatural Omnibus (1931).
Whatever information about Amyas Northcote that has come to light is due to the remarkable scholarship of Richard Dalby, undertaken for his introduction to the 1997 Ash-Tree Press reprint of In Ghostly Company.
“Brickett Bottom” was originally published in In Ghostly Company (London, John Lane, 1922). Although 1922 was printed on the title page, the volume was actually released in November 1921 in time for the Christmas book-buying season. John Lane customarily added New York to its title pages but this volume was never distributed in the United States.