MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES was born in Goodnestone Parsonage in the village of Goodnestone, near Canterbury, Kent, on August 1, 1862, the fourth and youngest child of Mary Emily James (née Horton) and the Reverend Herbert James, a Church of England Perpetual Curate of an Evangelical persuasion.
At the age of three he moved with his family to the rectory in Great Livermere, Suffolk, a village just outside Bury St. Edmunds (which would later serve as the inspiration for his final short story, “A Vignette.” James’ childhood interest in both the Suffolk countryside and ecclesiastical architecture would significantly shape the direction of his writings in his adult life.
He was educated at home until the age of eleven, after which, in September 1873, he was sent to Temple Grove Preparatory School in East Sheen (the setting for “A School Story”). This is where he first met Arthur Christopher (A.C.) Benson; the two men were to remain lifelong friends as they followed almost identical academic paths.
In 1875, after having won a number of prizes for his Latin prose and verse, James was awarded a scholarship to Eton College, where he became one of the foremost scholars of his generation, distinguishing himself in Divinity, the Classics and French. After moving to King’s College, Cambridge, he decided not to follow the family tradition of joining either the clergy or military but to stay in academia, and his career progressed rapidly. “Monty,” as he was affectionately known to his many friends and admirers, served as Fellow, Dean and Tutor before, in May 1905, he became Provost of King’s.
In September 1918 he accepted the Provostship of Eton, where he remained until his death.
“It is truly a pleasure,” he told a friend, “the prospect of being knit up so closely with Eton, which of all places holds perhaps the first place in my affections.”
James was friendly and good-humored by nature, with a “genius for friendship” (according to the Cambridge Review), and in between his numerous commitments, he worked to remain in touch with old friends and former students alike. He also reportedly enjoyed such diversions as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (which toured Great Britain and Europe in the early 1890s), Christmas pantomimes, detective novels and the works of P.G. Wodehouse.
His “old and beloved” friend, the author and poet A.C. Benson, observed: “He is one of the few people to whom I can say, and do say, exactly what I think and as I think it. He never misunderstands, is always amused, always appreciative.”
James’ interest in the supernatural was evident while he was still a teenager. At the age of sixteen he was already entertaining fellow pupils with ghost stories (“in which capacity I am rather popular now,” he recorded in a letter), and a couple of years later he wrote in an 1880 issue of The Eton Rambler, edited by his friend Arthur Benson: “Everyone can remember a time when he has carefully searched his curtains—and poked in the dark corners of his room before retiring to rest—with a sort of pleasurable uncertainty as to whether there might not be a saucer-eyed skeleton or a skinny-sheeted ghost in hiding somewhere. I invariably go through this ceremony myself.”
(“I think it is rot,” is how James described this early article in a letter to his father, and he later dismissed his own work in the “ephemeral” when he admitted: “My own contributions to it I cannot now look at with patience.”)
M.R. James did not start writing fiction until he was in his early thirties, when he originally conceived the idea of his now-celebrated “antiquarian ghost stories” as Christmas entertainments, to be read aloud at gatherings of friends and fellow members of Cambridge’s select Chit-Chat Club—whose number included future ghost-story authors Edward Frederic (E.F.) Benson and Robert Hugh (R.H.) Benson (Arthur’s equally famous brothers), and Edmund Gill (E.G.) Swain.
“I have always thought that one very desirable quality in a ghost story is leisureliness,” wrote James. “The ghost story is essentially a somewhat old-fashioned thing; that is one of the reasons why Christmas time, which appeals to old association in so many ways, is considered the proper season for ghost stories. And in so far as the ghost story is old-fashioned, it ought to move at a pace suitable to its age.”
After having been invited to write a story to read to the gathered assembly, James in fact concocted two tales—“Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” (originally titled “A Curious Book”) and “Lost Hearts”—which he first presented to an appreciative audience at the weekly meeting on October 28, 1893. He was asked to repeat his performance each year, ideally on Christmas Eve.
In his A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James, with a List of His Writings (1939), one of the author’s closest friends, S.G. (Samuel Gurney “Jimbo”) Lubbock, gave a vivid description of these reading sessions:
“So the Ghost Stories began; and they were continued at the urgent request of a small party that was used to gather at King’s just before Christmas. Some pressure was needed; and on the appointed evening the party met and waited till at last, about 11 p.m. as a rule, Monty appeared with the ink still wet on the last page. All lights except one were turned out and the story was read. Afterward, when he was Provost, the same ritual was preserved; but by then the small party had grown …”
Oliffe Richmond, another listener at these gatherings, recalled: “Monty emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand, at last, and blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light.”
As horror writer Ramsey Campbell noted in the Introduction to his Jamesian-inspired anthology Meddling with Ghosts (2001), “In this James clearly meant to align himself with the tradition of the festive ghost story and indeed of oral storytelling … All this may suggest a certain coziness, which would be confirmed by the standard view that the most important Jamesian attribute is his antiquarianism. Of course that is crucial to the verisimilitude of many of the stories, and many of them deal with scholars whose comfortable world is invaded by the malign supernatural.”
In his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” originally published in the first and only edition of W. Paul Cook’s amateur publication The Recluse (1927), H.P. Lovecraft noted: “The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modern period, in order to approach closely the reader’s sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of ‘occultism’ or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.
“Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the close relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilize very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and coloring. A favorite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in that field.”
Following their reading to the Chit-Chat Club two years earlier, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” was first published under the title “The Scrap-book of Canon Alberic” in the March 1895 edition of the National Review. M.R. James’ second story, “Lost Hearts,” appeared in the December issue of Pall Mall Magazine that same year.
In some ways like their author, many of James’ protagonists are steeped in antiquarianism—scholarly men or studious clerics of limited worldly experience, absorbed in books and objects from the past.
“I attribute great importance to the setting of such a story,” wrote the author. “I like, as I do in a detective novel, to make some sort of acquaintance with the actors. And, I would add, the more ordinary and normal both setting and actors are, the more effective will be the entangling of them in a dreadful situation, and the more ready will he who follows their adventures be to shake the head and murmur those words which I have long since registered as the proper ones for the reader of ghost stories, to wit, ‘If I’m not very careful, something like this may happen to me.’”
“His main characters are almost always scholars, and almost always bachelors,” observed Geoff Ryman in Horror: 100 Best Books (1988). “The world is seen through their eyes … The narrators of James’ stories usually take no part in the action. They piece their stories together as historians would, through old documents or the evidence of friends.”
However, despite his somewhat pedantic approach to constructing a narrative, M.R. James is also justly credited as redefining the modern ghost story, throwing off the genre’s Gothic trappings and bringing its specters into the twentieth century.
While many of James’ apparitions are revealed as merely a glimpse from the corner of the eye, they are still presented in a grisly and gruesome fashion that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier.
“In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition,” continued Lovecraft, “for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the specter is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which molds itself in bedding and shews a face of crumpled linen.”
“I say you must have horror and also malevolence,” James himself stated in a 1931 article for The Evening News, written to coincide with the publication of The Collected Ghost Stories. “Not less necessary, however, is reticence.”
“M.R. James is thought of as a master of subtle suggestion,” explained Geoff Ryman. “He almost never describes physical injury. But his terrors are described in great and very physical detail, and are the focus of the tales. The writing grows more specific when they appear—and there would be no story without them.”
As former British Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman observed: “M.R. James thought that his ghosts should be evil and only glimpsed. He was a master of the unexpected”—although James himself criticized his friend and contemporary E.F. Benson for sometimes “stepping over the line of legitimate horridness” in his fiction.
In his Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, the author expanded upon his thoughts about what a ghost should be: “To be sure, I have my ideas as to how a ghost story ought to be laid out if it is to be effective. I think that, as a rule, the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet or hear any day. A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself, ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’
“Again, I feel that the technical terms of ‘occultism,’ if they are not very carefully handled, tend to put the mere ghost story (which is all that I am attempting) upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than the imaginative. I am well aware that mine is a nineteenth-(and not a twentieth-) century conception of this class of tale; but were not the prototypes of all the best ghost stories written in the sixties and seventies?
“However, I cannot claim to have been guided by any very strict rules. My stories have been produced (with one exception) at successive Christmas seasons. If they serve to amuse some readers at the Christmas-time that is coming—or at any time whatever—they will justify my action in publishing them.”
James’ ghosts can also be insubstantial revenants, evoked through atmosphere, suggestion and imagination, leaving his reader to conjure up their own interpretation.
“Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo,” he explained in his Introduction to the 1924 anthology Ghosts and Marvels. “Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.”
It also holds that most of the supernatural creatures that appear in his stories are inimical to those who come across them. “Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious,” he continued. “Amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”
But although his ghosts were threatening apparitions, James urged others to follow his lead and employ restraint in their depiction of the supernatural. “Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach,” he admitted in a 1929 article in The Bookman Christmas Issue, “yet from the artistic point of view, I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories … At the same time don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, ‘the stony grin of unearthly malice,’ pursuing forms in darkness, and ‘long-drawn, distant screams,’ are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M.G. Lewis.”
This advice is still as relevant to today’s horror writers as it was more than eighty years ago, when James first made his pronouncement.
In the same article, James also complained: “They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.”
It is certainly a fact that women rarely feature in any meaningful way in M.R. James’ stories and, as Nigel Kneale remarked in his Introduction to the Folio Society’s edition of Ghost Stories of M.R. James (1973): “In an age where every man is his own psychologist, M.R. James looks like rich and promising material.”
The American pulp writer and poet Clark Ashton Smith succinctly summed up the author’s approach to the supernatural in his article, “The Weird Works of M.R. James” in the February 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan: “Usually there is a more or less homely setting, often with a background of folklore and long-past happenings whose dim archaism provides a depth of shadow from which, as from a recessed cavern, the central horror emerges into the noontide of the present. Things and occurrences, sometimes with obvious off-hand relationship, are grouped cunningly, forcing the reader unaware to some frightful deduction; or there is an artful linkage of events seemingly harmless in themselves, that leave him confronted at a sudden turn with some ghoulish specter or night-demon.
“The minutiae of modern life, humor, character-drawing, scenic and archaeological description, are used as a foil to heighten the abnormal, but are never allowed to usurp a disproportionate interest. Always there is an element of supernatural menace, whose value is never impaired by scientific or spiritualistic explanation. Sometimes it is brought forth at the climax into full light; and sometimes, even then, it is merely half-revealed, is left undefined but perhaps all the more alarming. In any case, the presence of some unnatural but objective reality is assumed and established.”
James is also regarded as almost creating the “cursed reliquary” story, in which an antiquarian or ecclesiastical object exerts a malevolent influence over the individual who discovers it.
“Many common objects may be made the vehicles of retribution,” he wrote, “and where retribution is not called for, of malice. Be careful how you handle the packet you pick up in the carriage-drive, particularly if it contains nail-parings and hair. Do not, in any case, bring it into the house. It may not be alone …
“I am not conscious of other obligations to literature or local legend, written or oral, except in so far as I have tried to make my ghosts act in ways not inconsistent with the rules of folklore. As for the fragments of ostensible erudition which are scattered about my pages, hardly anything in them is not pure invention; there never was, naturally, any such book as that which I quote in ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.’”
As Clark Ashton Smith noted: “Reading and re-reading these tales, one notes a predilection for certain milieus and motifs. Backgrounds of scholastic or ecclesiastic life are frequent and some of the best tales are laid in cathedral towns. In many of the supernatural entities, there recurs insistently the character of extreme and repulsive hairiness. Often the apparition is connected with, or evoked by, some material object, such as the bronze whistle from the ruins of a Templars’ preceptory in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to You, My Lad”’; the old drawing of King Solomon and the night-demon in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’; the silver Anglo-Saxon crown from an immemorial barrow in ‘A Warning to the Curious’; and the strange curtain-pattern in ‘The Diary of Mr. Poynter’ which had ‘a subtlety in its drawing.’”
James also readily admitted that he was often inspired by real locations for the settings for his stories: “If anyone is curious about my local settings, let it be recorded that S. Bertrand de Comminges and Viborg are real places; that in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You,”’ I had Felixstowe in mind; in ‘A School Story,’ Temple Grove, East Sheen; in ‘The Tractate Middoth,’ Cambridge University Library; in ‘Martin’s Close,’ Sampford Courtenay in Devon; that the cathedrals of Barchester and Southminster were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury and Hereford; that Herefordshire was the imagined scene of ‘A View from a Hill,’ and Seaburgh in ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is Aldeburgh in Suffolk.”
During his research of old texts, he also uncovered and transcribed various tales of hauntings and folklore in the British Museum. These were eventually published in their original Latin as “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” with abundant footnotes by James, in the July 1922 edition of the English Historical Review, not receiving their first English-language publication until 1978, when they were presented in The Man-Wolf and Other Horrors, edited by Hugh Lamb.
The author’s own belief in the supernatural was, at best, ambivalent. “I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me,” he wrote. During a debate on the existence of ghosts during his early years at Eton, James admitted that he “could not but believe in anything and everything when in bed,” and some years later he remarked to the Irish baronet [Sir John Randolph] Shane Leslie (recounted in the latter’s 1955 Ghost Book), “Some of these things are so, but we do not know the rules!”
In his 1926 memoir, Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial 1875–1925, James also recalled: “Ghosts and ghostly phenomena are rare in colleges and highly suspect when they do occur. Yet, on the staircase next to mine was a ghostly cry in the bedroom. Other professors knew of it, and knew whose voice it was believed to be—a man who died in 1878.”
He also revealed that at least one of his tales—possibly “The Rose Garden,” according to a later reminiscence by Montague Summers—was suggested by a vivid dream.
“Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most shocking forms,” observed H.P. Lovecraft, whose own stories were also often inspired by dreams, “and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome province.”
“The goblins and phantoms devised by James are truly creative and are presented through images often so keen and vivid as to evoke an actual physical shock,” echoed Clark Ashton Smith. “Sight, smell, hearing, taction, all are played upon with well-nigh surgical sureness, by impressions calculated to touch the shuddering quick of horror.”
M.R. James continued his Yuletide readings for many years, as his friend S.G. Lubbock recalled in his memoir: “His reading of them aloud was—like his reading of the Bible—entirely untheatrical and immensely effective. In his later years, when the supply of new stories had ceased, he could generally be persuaded to read one of the old ones on Christmas night at King’s, especially as it was youth, in the shape of some choral scholar, that would thrust a volume of them into his hand. He dined at King’s on the Christmas night of 1934 and read us the Punch and Judy story [‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’]; and that was the last.”
M.R. James’ friends had been urging him for years to publish his ghost stories in book form and, although initially disinclined to the idea, he did eventually agree to have them collected in four hardcover editions, published by Edward Arnold of London.
The first, Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (the title is hyphenated on the book’s title-page but not the cover), contained eight stories and was published in November 1904 to some somewhat lukewarm reviews, although the reviewer for The Guardian was full in his praise: “In this book are no ordinary hauntings or common-place apparitions, but real, inexplicable, horrid Things belonging to another world, such as might have been summoned by medieval wizards to their own lasting undoing. We do not hesitate to say that these are among the best ghost stories we have ever read.”
“In this volume,” James later explained, “‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ was written in 1894 [actually, more likely 1893] and printed soon after in the National Review; ‘Lost Hearts’ appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of the next five stories, most of which were read to friends at Christmas-time at King’s College, Cambridge, I only recollect that I wrote ‘Number 13’ in 1899, while ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ was composed in summer 1904.”
The collection, which also included “The Mezzotint,” “The Ash-tree,” “Count Magnus” and “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” was reprinted the following year by Longmans Green in America.
“The stories themselves do not make any very exalted claim,” James wrote in his Preface. “If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.”
About one of the stories included in the book, H.P. Lovecraft wrote: “‘Count Magnus’ is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion.”
James’ friend, Eustace Talbot, told the author: “You have succeeded in giving me two bad nights and one jumpy walk on a dark foggy evening in the country when every tree became possessed of horrible long arms and every step was dogged by hideous echoes about ten yards behind.”
Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary also featured four atmospheric illustrations by a close friend of the author, James McBryde. Ten years James’ junior, McBryde had arrived in Cambridge from Shrewsbury in 1893 to read Natural Sciences and the already distinguished academic soon encouraged his new friend’s habit of “dropping in uninvited at a late hour of the evening, and joining a congregation which was usually to be found in the inner room.”
By 1904, McBryde had enrolled at the University’s Slade, and was studying to become an artist. When it was suggested that he might illustrate James’ first collection of ghost stories, even the author’s interest in the project was rekindled, and he wrote to his young friend: “They are at present in a very rough manuscript. Shall I have them typewritten or bring or send them as they are? Or do you remember any of them well enough to sketch out any ideas?”
McBryde’s contributions to the book were his first professional commission, and he undertook it with gusto. In May 1904, he wrote to the author: “I don’t think I have ever done anything I liked better than illustrating your stories. To begin with I sat down and learned advanced perspective and the laws of shadows … I have finished the Whistle ghost … I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn …”
Unfortunately, the artist never lived to see publication. James McBryde died at 9:30 a.m. on the morning of June 5th, a few days after undergoing an apparently routine operation to remove his appendix.
Only four illustrations had been completed, along with two unfinished drawings for “Count Magnus” and a preliminary sketch for “Number 13.” Another illustration for “The Ash-tree” was planned but never started. However, when the publisher suggested that another artist should be brought in to finish the work, James firmly rejected the idea. Instead, he decided that the volume would stand as a tribute to its illustrator.
“I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends,” James explained in his Preface to the book, “usually at the season of Christmas. One of these friends offered to illustrate them, and it was agreed that, if he would do that, I would consider the question of publishing them.
“Four pictures he completed, which will be found in this volume, and then, very quickly and unexpectedly, he was taken away. This is the reason why the greater part of the stories are not provided with illustrations.
“Those who knew the artist will understand how much I wished to give a permanent form even to a fragment of his work; others will appreciate the fact that here a remembrance is made of one in whom many friendships centered.”
That same year, James McBryde’s The Story of a Troll-Hunt was privately published—upon M.R. James’ inducement—in a very limited subscription edition by the University Press, Cambridge, as a memorial to the artist. The illustrated comic fantasy, about three young men setting out to capture a living troll, was based on the bicycle holidays that McBryde, James and another young Cambridge friend, Will (W.J.) Stone, took around Denmark in 1899 and 1900. (These trips also supplied the background material for James’ story “Number 13.”)
McBryde and his wife Gwendolen had been married for just a year, and James agreed to become legal guardian to their daughter, Jane, who was born six months after her father’s premature death. For the rest of his life, the author maintained a kindly and supportive correspondence with both Jane and her mother.
Jane McBryde was not the only child James wrote to; another of his young correspondents was Sibyl Cropper, whom he addressed as “Dear Fellow-Scientist” or “My Dear Apple Pie” in a series of fairy-tale epistles following a visit to her family’s home in 1902. Thirty-seven years later, Miss Cropper collected and edited these letters, and they were published in the November 1939 issue of Cornhill Magazine.
Meanwhile, Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary went through eight printings that included McBryde’s interior illustrations, before the book reverted to a cheaper format in the 1920s and ’30s.
In his “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay, H.P. Lovecraft wrote: “Gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on medieval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.”
Unfortunately, after receiving a copy of the amateur magazine that Lovecraft’s piece originally appeared in, James declared himself not overly impressed with the American pulp author’s tribute. “In it is a disquisition of nearly 40 pages of double columns on Supernatural Horror in Literature by one H.P. Lovecraft,” he wrote to a correspondent, “whose style is of the most offensive. He uses the word cosmic about 24 times.”
Some years later, Lovecraft’s friend and contemporary, Clark Ashton Smith, wrote: “James is perhaps unsurpassed in originality by any living writer: and he has made a salient contribution to the technique of the genre as well as to the enriching of its treasury of permanent masterpieces. His work is marked by rare intellectual skill and ingenuity, by power rising at times above the reaches of pure intellection, and by a sheer finesse of writing that will bear almost endless study.
“The peculiar genius of M.R. James, and his greatest power, lies in the convincing evocation of weird, malignant and preternatural phenomena such as I have instanced. It is safe to say that few writers, dead or living, have equaled him in this formidable necromancy and perhaps no one has excelled him.”
“The second volume, More Ghost Stories, appeared in 1911,” explained the author. “Some years ago I promised to publish a second volume of ghost stories when a sufficient number of them should have been accumulated. That time has arrived, and here is the volume. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to warn the critic that in evolving them I have not been possessed by that austere sense of the responsibility of authorship which is demanded of the writer of fiction in this generation; or that I have not sought to embody in them any well-considered scheme of ‘psychical’ theory.
“The first six of the seven tales it contains were Christmas productions, the very first (‘A School Story’) having been made up for the benefit of the King’s College Choir School. ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was printed in the Contemporary Review; ‘Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance’ was written to fill up the volume.”
James’ early title for “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” had been “The Cat of Death,” while the other tales collected in the volume were “The Rose Garden,” “The Tractate Middoth,” “Casting the Runes” and “Martin’s Close.”
Although the book’s cover simply read More Ghost Stories, the title page carried the full designation of More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.
This second collection did much to enhance James’ reputation as a writer of supernatural fiction, and his celebrity admirers included Arthur Machen, Montague Summers, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Theodore Roosevelt and even the Prince of Wales.
“A Thin Ghost and Others was the third collection, containing five stories and published in 1919,” recalled James. “In it, ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’ and ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’ were contributed to the Cambridge Review.”
The book also featured “The Residence at Whitminster,” “The Diary of Mr. Poynter” and “Two Doctors.”
“I have had my doubts about the wisdom of publishing a third set of tales,” admitted the author in his Preface. “Sequels are, not only proverbially but actually, very hazardous things.
“However, the tales make no pretense but to amuse, and my friends have not seldom asked for the publication. So not a great deal is risked, perhaps, and perhaps also some one’s Christmas may be the cheerfuller for a story-book which, I think, only once mentions the war.”
Despite the author’s apparent reticence to see yet another collection of his works published, this third volume was issued by Longmans Green in America the same year.
James’ single attempt at a longer work, the almost 25,000-word The Five Jars, was published by Edward Arnold in 1922, and has rarely been reprinted since then. Subtitled “Being More or Less of a Fairy Tale Contained in a Letter to a Young Person,” the story is about the discovery of a series of jars containing magic ointments that open up the senses to the hidden realms of animals and fairy-folk.
In a letter dated 1916, James first talked about his plans to write a story for Gwendolen McBryde’s then eleven-year-old daughter, “to explain to Jane what I have heard from the owls and other neighbors, and how it came about that I was able to do so.”
In the war between the powers of good and evil, the author was careful to include his beloved cats on the side of the “Right People” while spiders—of which he had an almost pathological loathing—were one of the creatures aligned with the forces of darkness.
The Five Jars also shares certain characteristics with James’ 1924 story “After Dark in the Playing Fields,” and some scholars have speculated that the shorter work may have had its origins in an abandoned attempt by the author to write a sequel to the novella.
When The Five Jars finally appeared in print, Jane McBryde was seventeen, and although her mother was inspired enough after reading the final draft to produce a series of illustrations for the book, the publisher decided to go with an artist named Gilbert James (no relation) instead. The author was reportedly not impressed with the other James’ depictions, but that could have been because his friend had lost out on the commission.
Although the book never became an established children’s classic—possibly because parents may have thought it was too dark for younger readers at the time —The Five Jars did have its supporters, including Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie.
The novel was reprinted just a couple of times over a period of more than seventy years before Ash-Tree Press issued a hardcover printing with a new Introduction by Rosemary Pardoe in 1995. This edition was limited to around 300 numbered copies and two lettered copies in a deluxe binding.
James’ fourth collection, A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories, was published in 1925 and went through four impressions between October and February the following year. As the author revealed, of the six stories contained in the book, “The first, ‘The Haunted Dolls’ House,’ was specially written for the library of Her Majesty the Queen’s Dolls’ House, and subsequently appeared in the Empire Review. ‘The Uncommon Prayer-book’ saw the light in the Atlantic Monthly, the title-story in the London Mercury, and another, I think ‘A Neighbor’s Landmark,’ in an ephemeral called The Eton Chronic.”
Also in the book were “A View from a Hill,” “A Warning to the Curious” and “An Evening’s Entertainment.”
Seven years later, James revealed to Gwendolen McBryde that he was “startled” to see “A View from a Hill” reprinted in the February 1932 issue of Pearson’s Magazine, apparently without his permission. “The publisher ‘thought I wouldn’t mind’ and no more I do, particularly as they pay,” continued James, who revealed that he received half of the ten guineas fee. “But I also noticed that they left out a number of sentences: and this I protest against. The publisher palliates his crime by saying he has sold about 3,000 copies of the number—which is doubtless a good result.”
In fact, once the matter was settled, Pearson’s Magazine went on to also reprint James’ stories “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “Number 13” later that same year, after the author received a promise from the editor “to leave out as little as he can in the future.”
Another story, the grimly humorous “Wailing Well,” which James described as “a story of a terrible nature,” was written especially for the Eton College troop of Boy Scouts, and the author read it aloud around a campfire at Worbarrow Bay in Dorset, on July 27, 1927. It apparently led to several of the boys having “a somewhat disturbed night.”
The story was privately published the following year by Robert Gathorne-Hardy and Kyrle Leng under the Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley imprint in a hardcover edition limited to just 157 copies, of which seven were signed by James that had the title page printed in blue and black.
The first omnibus edition of the author’s short stories, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, appeared in both Britain and America 1931. As the author explained in his Preface: “In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover, and appending to them some matter of the same kind.
“I am told they have given pleasure of a certain sort to my readers: if so, my whole object in writing them has been attained.”
The volume contained all the stories in James’ first four collections (written, he later claimed, “at fever heat” in his notoriously illegible hand-writing), and also added a number of other pieces: “Not all of them strictly stories,” as the author helpfully pointed out. This additional material included “There Was a Man Dwelled by a Churchyard,” “Rats,” “After Dark in the Playing Fields,” “Wailing Well” and the essay “Stories I Have Tried to Write.” Except for “Wailing Well” all of these had previously been first published in Eton “ephemerals.”
However, although “Rats” had originally been written for At Random (“Edited by present Etonians”) in 1929, James was obviously so proud that the story had also appeared the same year in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s anthology Shudders: A Collection of New Nightmare Tales that he couldn’t help boasting about it to his readers.
He additionally revealed in the same piece that “a Norse version of four from my first volume, by Ragnhild Undset, was issued in 1919 under the title Aander og Trolddom.” He was perhaps unaware that a companion volume, Abbedens skat, published the same year by Cammermeyers Forlag, contained Undset’s translations of the remaining four stories from Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary.
While reviewing the Collected Ghost Stories in 1934, Clark Ashton Smith summed up the author’s oeuvre: “The personnel of James’ Pandemonium is far from monotonous; one finds a satyr dwelling in a cathedral tomb; a carven cat-like monster that comes to life when touched by a murderer’s hand; a moldy smelling sack-like object in an unlit well, which suddenly puts its arms around the neck of a treasure-seeker; a cloaked and hooded shape with a tentacle in lieu of arms; a lean, hideously taloned terror, with a jaw ‘shallow as that of a beast’; dolls that repeat crime and tragedy; creatures that are dog-like but are not dogs; a saw fly tall as a man, met in a dim room full of rustling insects; and even a weak, ancient thing, which being wholly bodiless and insubstantial, makes for itself a body out of crumpled bed-linen.”
In a review of the book in the April 1931 Spectator, Peter Fleming described James as “an acknowledged master of his craft: unrivaled at his best, for consistent merit never approached.”
James himself contributed an insightful Introduction to the 1924 anthology Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, edited by V.H. (Vere Henry Gratz) Collins for the Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milford.
“Often have I been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvelous, the mysterious, the supernatural,” he wrote. “Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre is too small and special to bear the imposition of far reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them. Those rules, I imagine, no writer ever consciously follows. In fact, it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success.”
The author then went on to once again expound upon his ideas that the basis of a good ghost story relied on “the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo,” as well as the reader being “introduced to the actors in a placid way.” He also reiterated his belief that, “For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable.”
However, he did qualify this latter comment: “If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it; or (as in ‘Schalken the Painter’) you may set the scene directly in the desired epoch, which I think is hardest to do with success. On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.”
James also championed the work of Irish writer J. (Joseph) Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), author of the above-mentioned story “Schalken the Painter” and the classic vampire novella “Carmilla,” whom he described as standing “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.”
He edited and provided the Introduction to Le Fanu’s collection Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923): “Nobody sets the scene better than he,” enthused James, “nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly.” Three years later he contributed an Introduction to a new edition of Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas, in which he somewhat unconvincingly claimed to have exposed “Conan Doyle’s cribbing of the plot.”
James not only contributed an Introduction to Faber & Faber’s Hans Andersen: Forty Stories in 1930, but he also supplied a new translation of the Danish writer’s work because he was not happy with the previous attempts. The new edition featured twenty-four color plates by Christine Jackson, and the New Statesman reviewer approved of the whole package, saying, “We get possibly for the first time, a glimpse of the originals as they really are.”
Five years later, James’ translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid was issued in a separate edition by New York publisher Holiday House with illustrations by Pamela Bianco.
Not every story James set out to write reached completion, as the author explained in his essay “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” which was originally published in the November 30, 1929, edition of the small Eton magazine The Touchstone.
“It has amused me sometimes to think of the stories which have crossed my mind from time to time and never materialized properly,” he wrote. “They are not good enough. Yet some of them had ideas in them which refused to blossom in the surroundings I had devised for them, but perhaps came up in other forms in stories that did get as far as print.”
The piece was subsequently reprinted in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James and it has inspired numerous writers down the decades—including Sir Andrew Caldecott, Sheila Hodgson, David G. Rowlands, A.F. Kidd, C.E. Ward, Stephen Gresham, Rhys Hughes and Reggie Oliver, to name but a few—to try their own hand at completing these unfinished plot ideas.
Many more authors have been inspired to create their own ghost stories in the “Jamesian tradition.” This has led to Ramsey Campbell—whose own 1989 story “The Guide” was a tribute to the Jamesian method—to state that “M.R. James is the most influential British writer of supernatural fiction,” while author and editor Michael Cox speculated that “it is probable that M.R. James has generated more imitators than any other English ghost story writer.”
James’ own ghost stories were often rooted in his background as a scholar, and his lifelong work was cataloging the medieval manuscript libraries of the colleges in Cambridge. The first catalog was published in 1895 and the last—more than 1,100 manuscripts later—in 1925.
He was also the author of such scholarly works as The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919) and The Apocalypse in Art (1931), and the guidebooks Abbeys (1925) and Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of Their History and Their Ancient Buildings (1930). He translated New Testament Apocrypha and also contributed to the Encyclopædia Biblica: A Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religion History, the Archaeology, Geography and Natural History of the Bible (1899–1903), edited by Thomas Kelly Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black.
James also took on the post of Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge between 1893–1908, and was responsible for acquiring many important antique manuscripts and works of art, including some notable portraits by the 16th-century Italian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). In 1902 the abbey ruins at Bury St. Edmunds in West Suffolk were excavated after he found a fragment of ancient manuscript, which in turn led to the rediscovery of the graves of several 12th-century abbots.
Montague Rhodes James was awarded the British Commonwealth’s prestigious Order of Merit in June 1930. He was a confirmed bachelor and never married, preferring his life of academia, and he died peacefully in his lodge on Friday, June 12th, 1936, at the age of 73. He was buried in Eton town cemetery three days later.
That same year, his final story appeared posthumously in the November issue of The London Mercury and Bookman, which had previously published “A View from a Hill” (May, 1925) and “A Warning to the Curious” (August, 1925). Although the author had indicated in his Preface to The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James that, when asked if he was going to write any more ghost stories, “I fear I must answer, Probably not,” editor R.A. ScottJames explained to his readers how it had come about:
“A Vignette” is undoubtedly the last ghost story written by the late Dr. M.R. James, Provost of Eton, and probably his last piece of continuous writing intended for the press. It came into being in this way. Mr. Owen Hugh Smith was good enough to ask Dr. James to try to recapture the mood in which he wrote Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, and to let me have something in similar vein for the Christmas number of The London Mercury (1935). The answer was that he would do his best. On December 12th of that year he sent off to me the MS, written in pencil, from The Lodge, Eton College, with the following letter:
I am ill satisfied with what I enclose. It comes late and is short and ill written. There have been a good many events conspiring to keep it back, besides a growing inability. So pray don’t use it unless it has some quality I do not see in it.
I send it because I was enjoined to do something by Mr. Owen 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 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.
Five months after M.R. James’ death, his library was sold through Sotheby’s, the famous auction house in London. The sale included the original holographic manuscripts of fourteen of the author’s stories, including “The Ash-tree,” “Count Magnus,” “A Warning to the Curious” and “Casting the Runes.”
According to a report in the Daily Telegraph the following morning, the sale of the manuscripts raised £140, with prices ranging from £5 10s for “The Mezzotint” to £15 10s for “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’” The total sale of the entire library—which included several rare volumes dating back to the 13th century—amounted to £794. The current whereabouts of several of James’ original ghost story manuscripts, including some of those sold at auction in November 1936, is now a mystery.
A collection of the author’s papers and surviving manuscripts are held at King’s College Library in Cambridge. Much of this material was selected in November 1947 by the distinguished librarian A.N.L. Munby (author of the 1949 ghost story collection The Alabaster Hand, which was dedicated—in Latin—to M.R. James). Other material was added from the Sotheby’s auction and as a gift from Jane McBryde, presented by Sir Shane Leslie.
Although he left behind a relatively small body of work, M.R. James’ ghost stories have never been out of print, and many of his best-known tales have been adapted for television, the movies and radio.
The first televised version of James’ work was Laurence Schwab’s “The Lost Will of Dr. Rant” (1951), an adaptation of “The Tractate Middoth” by Doris Halman, which was part of the American NBC series Lights Out.
Leslie Nielsen played a Boston librarian who was asked to get an “old and strangely curious book” by the querulous John Eldred (Russell Collins). Helped to recuperate by the owner (Pat Englund) of a failing boarding house after a terrifying encounter with a peculiarly dusty old man (Fred Ardath) amongst the stacks, he eventually discovered the secret of a long-lost inheritance written in Hebrew.
Now thought lost, the BBC’s Two Ghost Stories by M.R. James (1954) featured “The Mezzotint” and “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book,” both adapted and directed by Tony Richardson, and performed by Robert Farquharson and George Rose, respectively.
Broadcast in August 1961, Lewis Freedman directed “Room 13,” a version of James’ “Number 13” for the NBC series Great Ghost Tales. It starred William Redfield and Diana Van der Vlis.
Between 1966 and 1968, the Associated British Corporation series Mystery and Imagination aired four episodes based on the author’s work. The first of these was “The Tractate Middoth” (1966), directed by Kim Mills. Freddie Jones and Megs Jenkins appeared in Robert Tronson’s memorable version of “Lost Hearts” (1966), while another “Room 13” (1966), directed by Patrick Dromgoole, featured Joss Ackland, David Battley, George Woodbridge and Tessa Wyatt. Finally, Robert Eddison portrayed Karswell in Alan Cooke’s version of “Casting the Runes” (1968), which also featured John Fraser and Gordon Jackson.
Although all these episodes are now considered lost, a short extract from the trailer for “Casting the Runes” was recently rediscovered and issued as a DVD extra.
Perhaps the most famous television adaptation of James’ work is Whistle and I’ll Come to You, Jonathan Miller’s somewhat idiosyncratic reinterpretation of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” first broadcast in June 1968 as part of the BBC’s Omnibus series. Michael Hordern starred as a neurotic Professor Parkins, pursued down a wind-swept beach by a billowing white sheet.
Although not credited as such, “The Cemetery”—the first segment of the Rod Serling-scripted pilot movie Night Gallery (1969)—was very obviously a direct steal of James’ “The Mezzotint.” Directed by Boris Sagal for NBC, a victim of Roddy McDowall’s murderous black sheep of the family reached out from the grave to take his supernatural revenge through a painting that changed from moment to moment.
For fans of the author’s work, however, the most definitive dramatizations of M.R. James’ fiction continue to be the BBC’s series of annual adaptations produced in the early 1970s under the umbrella title A Ghost Story for Christmas. Adapted and directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, these hour-long dramas comprised “Stalls of Barchester” (1971), “A Warning to the Curious” (1972), “Lost Hearts” (1973), “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1974) and “The Ash-tree” (1975).
Each of these finely crafted shows featured a cast of solid character actors that included Robert Hardy, Clive Swift, Peter Vaughn, Michael Bryant, Edward Petherbridge and Barbara Ewing.
In 1976 Yorkshire Television broadcast a seventeen-minute adaptation of “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance” for an episode of the schools’ program Music Scene, about the use of mood music in film. Scripted, produced and directed by Tony Scull, it was filmed on location in the maze at Roundhay Park, Leeds, which was demolished later that same year.
Even this short film for children was better than the updated adaptation of “Casting the Runes” for a 1979 episode of ITV Playhouse, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and featuring Jan Francis, Edward Petherbridge and Iain Cuthbertson as Julian Karswell.
Actor Michael Bryant (who had starred in the 1974 television production of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”) read “The Mezzotint,” “A School Story” and “The Diary of Mr. Poynter” for the BBC children’s series Spine Chillers in 1980.
Also presented as mostly readings, this time for adults, actor Robert Powell narrated partially dramatized versions of “The Mezzotint,” “The Ash-tree,” “Wailing Well,” “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “The Rose Garden” for the BBC 2 series Classic Ghost Stories, broadcast in December 1986.
El Grabado (2000) was another version of “The Mezzotint,” made in 2000 by director Jorge Repolles for Spanish television. It featured Martín García and Alex Hernández.
Iconic horror actor Christopher Lee portrayed James himself in half-hour re-creations of the original Christmas readings of “The Stalls of Barchester,” “The Ash-tree,” “Number 13” and “A Warning to the Curious” for the BBC Scotland series M.R. James’ Ghost Stories for Christmas (2000).
“Unfortunately they were not his best stories, such as ‘Count Magnus,’” explained the actor, “because the best are too long for TV. Nevertheless, the shorter ones are well worth listening to.”
Lee himself had actually met the author in 1935, while he was a schoolboy at Eton during James’ last years as Provost. As he later recalled: “The first thing I saw was a mummy in a glass case. The second was a little old man in glasses with a skin like parchment. This was the Provost, M.R. James. I knew that he was a master of the macabre, and I knew Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary very well. And so did all my form mates.
“Of course, I heard all about the fact that he used to recite his ghost stories to groups of colleagues and occasionally boys on winter evenings, but I am afraid I was never lucky enough to be among those fortunate people—although apparently they were almost scared out of their wits by his masterful storytelling!”
In 2005, BBC Four briefly revived A Ghost Story for Christmas with a version of “A View from a Hill” directed by Luke Watson and starring Mark Letheren as the owner of a pair of cursed binoculars. It was followed the next year by Pier Wilkie’s forty-minute version of “Number 13,” in which Greg Wise’s Professor Anderson discovered that his lodging house contained a ghostly room next to his own.
Originally broadcast by BBC 2 on Christmas Eve 2010, Andy de Emmony’s misguided Whistle and I’ll Come to You starred John Hurt and was billed as a “modern reworking” of M.R. James’ classic story. Unfortunately, scriptwriter Neil Cross seemed to mistakenly believe that he could improve upon the original, while the author’s name was banished to the end credits.
Made by Anglia Television, Clive Dunn’s documentary A Pleasant Terror: The Life and Ghosts of M.R. James (1995), co-written by the director and Michael Cox, featured dramatized extracts in which Michael Elwyn portrayed the author. Despite some unnecessary speculations about James’ sexuality, the excellent hour-long documentary featured contributions from Christopher Lee, Ruth Rendell, Jonathan Miller, Daniel Easterman and Laurence Staig.
Peter Lawrence’s M.R. James: Supernatural Storyteller (aka M.R. James: The Corner of the Retina, 2004) was a half-hour documentary produced by the BBC to introduce a series of repeats of the author’s work. It featured numerous clips from the broadcaster’s various adaptations of the author’s stories, and Sir Christopher Frayling, Muriel Gray, Michael Cox, Ruth Rendell, Kim Newman and Lawrence Gordon Clark were amongst those who were interviewed.
The most memorable—and only credited—feature film adaptation of M.R. James’ work is Night of the Demon (USA: The Curse of the Demon, 1957), directed by Jacques Tourneur. Based on “Casting the Runes,” Niall MacGinnis played the deceptively evil warlock Dr. Julian Karswell, who met his end at the claws of a fire-breathing demon (reportedly depicted on screen against the director’s wishes).
Ramsey Campbell has described it as “one of the most accomplished examples of British horror cinema.”
Campbell has also speculated that the scene in Hammer’s The Brides of Dracula (1960), in which the padlocks drop one by one off a coffin before Andree Melly’s fledgling vampire rises from it, were possibly inspired by a similar occurrence in “Count Magnus.”
Michele Soavi’s La Chiesa (The Church, 1989), co-scripted by Dario Argento, included several uncredited ideas from James’ story “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” while Hideo Nakata’s Ring (Ringu, 1997) also contained a number of Jamesian elements.
Sam Raimi’s disappointing Drag Me to Hell (2009) reportedly started out as a remake of Night of the Demon, and a few elements of the original story were retained in the screenplay.
Co-writer and director Nick Murphy acknowledged that his 1920s-set supernatural drama The Awakening (2011) took its cues from some of the literature of that time, including the work of M.R. James.
There have also been a number of short films based on James’ stories, including Patrick Amery’s Lost Hearts (2007) and Stephen Gray’s Rats (2010).
Given the author’s propensity for reticence in his stories, it is no wonder that they have perhaps best been served by radio, where it is left up to the listener’s imagination to conjure up the horrors only hinted at on the printed page.
The first known radio adaptation of James’ work was Madam, Will You Walk?, a forty-minute version of “Martin’s Close,” broadcast by the BBC on the Home Service in March 1938. Adapted by C. Whitaker-Wilson and produced by John Cheatle, the cast included A. Bromley-Davenport, Franklyn Bellamy, Gladys Young and the scriptwriter himself. Under its original title, “Martin’s Close” was also presented as an abridged reading by John Gloag on the same wireless service in April 1940.
The first American radio adaptation of M.R. James was William N. Robson’s “Casting the Runes,” broadcast as the thirteenth episode of the CBS series Escape in November 1947. The show featured John MacIntyre as Edward Dunning and Bill Conrad as Karswell.
In February 1949, the BBC broadcast a dramatization of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” as part of its Man in Black series on the Light Program, and there were reportedly dramatizations of both “Casting the Runes” and “The Uncommon Prayer-book” on the Home Service in the early 1950s.
Around 1956, “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” was produced for, of all things, Children’s Hour, and radio’s Man in Black himself, Valentine Dyall, read an adaptation of “A Neighbor’s Landmark” a year or two later on air.
“The Tractate Middoth” was atmospherically re-titled A Mass of Cobwebs when it was adapted by Brian Batchelor for an April 1959 broadcast on the BBC’s Light Program.
In the early 1960s, Erik Bauersfeld’s Black Mass series, which ran on stations KPFK/KPFA in Berkeley, California, broadcast adaptations of both “The Ash-tree” and “An Evening’s Entertainment.”
The well-known English stage actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit appeared in a Home Service dramatization of “Martin’s Close” in August 1963. Four months later, the same station broadcast a half-hour version of Michael and Mollie Hardwick’s adaptation of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” which featured Michael Hordern as Perkins, a role he would recreate in Jonathan Miller’s controversial television production five years later.
Between 1982 and 1988, Hordern also narrated a series of audio cassettes released by Decca Records under the Argo label that featured unabridged versions of James’ stories.
“Count Magnus” was dramatized by the New York City Board of Education’s radio station WNYE-FM in the mid-1960s as part of its Tales of Mystery and Imagination series, and Bernard Cribbins read “Lost Hearts” on BBC Radio 3 in December 1971.
An updated version of “Casting the Runes” formed the basis of “This Will Kill You,” originally broadcast in 1974 as part of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, hosted by actor E.G. Marshall. “The Mezzotint” was re-titled “The Figure in the Moonlight” for the same show four years later.
In December 1975, Peter Barkworth read an abridgement of “Number 13” on BBC Radio 4’s Story Time: Ghost Trilogy, and The Ghosts of M.R. James, broadcast on Boxing Day 1977, featured a talk on the author by Michell Raper along with readings from “Wailing Well,” “Lost Hearts,” “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “Rats” by Gerald Cross, Norman Shelley and Kenneth Fortescue.
Robert Trotter read “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” on the same station in December 1980, while readings of “Rats” by Richard Hurndal and “The Haunted Dolls’ House” by David Ashford were featured on Radio 4’s Morning Story slot in the early 1980s.
Conrad Phillips, Peter Copley and Kim Hartman starred in yet another version of “Casting the Runes,” written by Gregory Evans and re-titled “The Hex,” which was broadcast in January 1981 as an episode of Radio 4’s Afternoon Play.
James Aubrey read “Rats” on the same station in June 1986, while The Late Book: Ghost Stories was a series of fifteen-minute readings of M.R. James stories that ran on Radio 4 between 1997 and 1998. Abridged and produced by Paul Kent and narrated by Benjamin Whitrow, the titles adapted were “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” [sic], “Lost Hearts,” “A School Story,” “The Haunted Dolls’ House” and the ever-popular “Rats.”
BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour featured nine classic ghost stories dramatized by Robin Brooks in fifteen-minute slots and broadcast in December 2000. The two M.R. James stories included were “Casting the Runes” and “Count Magnus.”
Derek Jacobi took the role of James himself as he introduced Chris Harrald’s fifteen-minute adaptations of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” “The Tractate Middoth,” “Lost Hearts,” “The Rose Garden” and “Number 13” on Radio 4’s M.R. James at Christmas in 2007.
In October 2009, the BBC’s digital station Radio 7 featured Robin Bailey reading “The Mezzotint” as part of its Classic Tales of Horror series, originally released on audio CD, while Alex Jennings read an abridged version of “A Warning to the Curious” on BBC Radio 3’s Twenty Minutes in June 2011.
Between 1976 and 1992, BBC Radio 4 broadcast seven plays written by Sheila Hodgson which featured M.R. James as a character. David March portrayed the author in the first six, while Michael Williams took over the role for the final one. An eighth play was broadcast by Ireland’s Raidió Telefis Éireann in 1994, with Aiden Grennell playing the part of James. Several of the plays were based on plots described in “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” and the prose versions were collected in Hodgson’s The Fellow Travelers and Other Ghost Stories, published by Ash-Tree Press in 1998.
Over 2006 and 2007, the Cambridge-based Nunkie Theater Company’s one-man show, A Pleasing Terror: Two Ghost Stories by M.R. James, toured the UK and Ireland and featured Robert Lloyd Parry’s acclaimed portrayal of M.R. James. The initial stage play adapted “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “The Mezzotint,” and was followed in 2007 by Oh, Whistle … (“‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “The Ash-tree”) and in 2009 by A Warning to the Curious (the title story and “Lost Hearts”).
Parry recreated his award-winning role for special performances at the 2007 World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York; the 2009 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, and the 2010 World Horror Convention in Brighton, England, as well as for various audio books and DVD recordings.
Although James McBryde remains perhaps the best-known artist to have illustrated James’ stories, he is far from the only one. There have been many interpretations over the years in books and magazines, and some of the most memorable depictions of the author’s work include Clive Upton’s illustration accompanying “The Mezzotint” in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries (1936) and Ernest Wallcousins’ scene from “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” which was used as the frontispiece for the 1947 edition of The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James.
Charles Keeping produced nine lithographs for the Folio Society’s 1973 collection Ghost Stories of M.R. James, selected by Nigel Kneale.
M.R. James’ amusing autobiography, Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial 1875–1925 was published by Williams & Norgate in 1926, but there was more to be found in American history professor Richard William Pfaff’s privately-funded biography Montague Rhodes James (1980) and Michael Cox’s complimentary study, M.R. James: An Informal Portrait (1983).
In 1956, Gwendolen McBryde—the widow of the illustrator of Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary—edited Montague Rhodes James: Letters to a Friend, in which she collected approximately 300 letters that she and her daughter had received from the author between December 1904 and December 1935.
As unlikely as it may seem today, James’ final story, “A Vignette,” from the November 1936 issue of The London Mercury and Bookman, had languished in obscurity until editor Richard Dalby rediscovered it for his 1971 anthology The Sorceress in Stained Glass and Other Ghost Stories. Even more remarkably, there were more rediscoveries to come.
“The Experiment: A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story” was originally published in the December 31, 1931, edition of the Morning Post. Once again, probably because it was published too late to be included in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, it remained mostly forgotten until anthologist Hugh Lamb reprinted it in The Thrill of Horror (1975).
“And to close this anthology of rare tales,” wrote Lamb in his introduction to the tale, “I am extremely proud to present a story by the great M.R. James, not included in his collected volume, as far as I can ascertain never before published in book form and certainly forgotten for over forty years … Though I would be the first to acknowledge that it is by no means the best story James ever wrote, it still makes an important addition to the available works of the undisputed master of the ghost story.”
The tale was apparently written under some editorial constraints: “The limits of space are tiresome,” complained James, “and I don’t know if they will take it—I’m not sure I would in their place.”
Even more obscure was “The Malice of Inanimate Objects,” which appeared in the first edition of a little Etonian magazine and then promptly disappeared for almost fifty years.
“In 1932 James compiled an incomplete list of his published writings on the back of an annotated Greek Testament whose interleaves served him as a rudimentary diary,” explained Michael Cox. “During the preparation of my biography of James, I consulted the ‘diary’ on several occasions and was puzzled by an item that seemed to indicate a connection with the ghost stories.
“The entry in question was ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’; there was a date—1933—and there were references to ‘Masquerade’ and ‘Eton.’ Investigation revealed the existence of an Etonian ephemeral magazine called The Masquerade, the first number of which appeared in June 1933. There were two copies extant in the college library. On pages 29 through 32 was a short ghost story, ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’ by M.R. James, who was then Provost of Eton.”
The story was finally reprinted in Ghosts & Scholars No.6 (1984) and received its first American publication the following year in the August edition of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine.
“It is, to be sure,” continued Cox, “far from being one of James’ best stories, and shows every indication of having been written hastily, perhaps in response to a request for a tale from the editors of The Masquerade. But it is nonetheless an interesting addition to the corpus of perhaps the greatest modern ghost writer.”
Ghosts & Scholars was a small magazine that Rosemary Pardoe began publishing in 1979. Dedicated to M.R. James and stories in the Jamesian tradition, the irregular publication included nonfiction contributions from, amongst others, Mike Ashley, Hugh Lamb, Richard Dalby, A.F. Kidd, Christopher and Barbara Roden, and James himself.
In 1987, Dalby edited Masters of Fantasy 3: M.R. James for a series of booklets produced by The British Fantasy Society. It not only included a biographical essay and a checklist of first editions by the editor, but Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe contributed a guide to hotels the author stayed at, and there were reprints of James’ “A School Story” and his Evening News article “Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!”—the first time that the latter had seen publication in fifty-six years!
That same year, Dalby and Rosemary Pardoe coedited the illustrated hardcover anthology Ghosts and Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M.R. James. Along with an Introduction by Michael Cox, the book also included “Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!,” twenty-three short stories, plus two of the better entries in a Christmas ghost story competition selected and judged by James himself on behalf of The Spectator magazine (December 27, 1930).
However, perhaps Rosemary Pardoe’s most important contribution to the Jamesian canon was The Fenstanton Witch and Others, a fifty-three-page booklet of M.R. James material issued under her own Haunted Library imprint in 1999.
It contained revised versions of the titular short story draft (originally published in Ghosts & Scholars No.12 [1990]), “Marcillyle-Hayer” (Ghosts & Scholars No.22 [1996]), “John Humphreys” (Ghosts & Scholars No.16 [1993]) and “A Night in King’s College Chapel,” which was possibly written as early as 1892 and received its first publication in Ghosts & Scholars No.7 (1985).
The booklet also featured the first publication of the incomplete story drafts “The Game of Bear,” “Speaker Lenthall’s Tomb” (in a severely truncated version) and “Merfield House,” along with a reprint of “The Malice of Inanimate Objects,” the revised transcript of the original notes for a lecture James gave on “The Novels and Stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu” at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on March 16, 1923 (first published in Ghosts & Scholars No.7), a selection of letters written by the author to Sibyl Cropper and another, written in 1928, to Nicholas Llewelyn Davies (with notes by Jack Adrian).
After twenty-one years and thirty-three issues, Pardoe’s Ghosts & Scholars changed its name to The Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter in 2002, ceased publishing fiction and started producing both electronic and paper editions, but soon dropped the electronic version. A twice-yearly hard-copy edition continues to be published today, and the magazine has recently started including fiction again.
Issue No.20 (October 2011) included a previously unpublished supernatural poem by James, contained in a letter written to his family from Cyprus in January 1888. It was titled “Living Night” for its appearance in the twice-yearly periodical.
In 1979, respected British anthologist Peter Haining compiled M.R. James—Book of the Supernatural, which brought together various obscure pieces by and about the author (including the stories originally unearthed by Richard Dalby and Hugh Lamb), along with contributions by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Erckmann-Chatrian. Sir John Betjeman supplied a brief Foreword, while Christopher Lee was represented by “A Tribute to M.R.J.” The book was reprinted in America three years later under the title M.R. James—The Book of Ghost Stories.
The Ghost Story Press issued Two Ghost Stories: A Centenary in 1993, which included facsimile reproductions of the original manuscripts of “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “Lost Hearts.” Limited to 200 numbered copies, the book was edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden, with an Introduction by Michael Cox and an Afterword by Rosemary Pardoe.
Selected by Ramsey Campbell and published by The British Library in 2001, Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M.R. James was a tribute anthology containing stories by the author’s precursors, contemporaries and successors, along with a useful Bibliography of “The James Gang” by Rosemary Pardoe.
By far the most impressive volume ever produced of the author’s work was A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M.R. James, published by Canada’s Ash-Tree Press the same year. Edited once again by the Rodens, this hefty (more than 650 pages) compilation contained annotated versions of all James’ stories and fragments, plus various prefaces and articles. Steve Duffy contributed an Introduction, there was a memoir by S.G. Lubbock, along with a Select Bibliography and a checklist of James on film, radio and television. Boasting thirty-three illustrations and cover art by Paul Lowe, the book was limited to just 1,000 copies and sold for $75.00. It quickly went out of print, and copies nowadays command £300 upward.
In 2004, Rosemary Pardoe published Occult Sciences, which featured the first-ever publication of the text of a long talk given by James on February 5, 1881. Tales from Lectoure (2006), also from Pardoe, contained the first publication of an even longer talk given by the author on a strange series of 19th-century folk and supernatural tales from south-west France, and included James’ translations of six of the stories.
Available as a print-on-demand volume from Hippocampus Press in 2007, Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James collected twenty-eight essays on the ghost story author, coedited by S.T. Joshi and Rosemary Pardoe.
In 2012—coincidentally the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth—Britain’s Royal Mail issued a commemorative M.R. James stamp as part of its “Britons of Distinction” set, which also featured architects Sir Basil Spence and Augustus Pugin, composer Frederick Delius, textile designer Mary (May) Morris, inventor Thomas Newcomen, opera singer Kathleen Ferrier, mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, social reformer Joan Mary Fry, and World War II secret agent Odette Sansom Hallowes.
The First Class stamp featured a photo of the “Cambridge academic and author of chilling ghost stories” from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
M.R. James’ antiquarian ghost stories—despite their somewhat archaic language and dry protagonists—are as popular today as when they were first published, more than eighty years ago.
When asked about his approach to writing this kind of fiction, the author self-deprecatorily replied: “There is no receipt for success in this form of fiction more than in any other. The public, as Dr. Johnson said, are the ultimate judges: if they are pleased, it is well; if not, it is no use to tell them why they ought to have been pleased.”
Given the enduring popularity of Dr. James’ ghostly tales, I think that we can safely assume that the public is still very pleased indeed.
Stephen Jones
London, England
September, 2011
