I. Maynooth College in Ireland (established in 1795 as the Royal College of St. Patrick) is the “National Seminary of Ireland.” Prior to its establishment, priests-in-training had to study abroad; even after the college was opened, its library was largely composed of texts published in other countries.
II. Tipperary can refer to either a county or a town in the southern half of Ireland.
III. This practice was still popular by the end of the nineteenth century; it was described, for example, in an 1895 account of the folklore of County Cork.
IV. This may be a regional variant spelling of Dromcolliher, a medieval town located in County Limerick, Ireland, near the northern border of County Cork.
XVI. The name “Glenvarloch” may be an homage to a character from Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Fortunes of Nigel (Scott’s work had a great influence on Le Fanu’s historical novels). “Cover” refers to a wooded area.
M. Anastasius
I. Hispaniola is the second largest (after Cuba) island in the West Indies. It is now divided into two nations: Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
II. Hungarians fleeing revolution and the Crimean War were in fact largely welcomed in Britain in the 1850s, so the source for this reference is unknown.
III. The British began to move into the West Indies in the 17th century, originally to gain a foothold against the Spanish. By the time of this story, most of the islands were part of a federation controlled by a single British governor.
IV. The Biblical book 2 Kings 4:8-37 tells the story of Elisha, a holy man who is given food and shelter by a wealthy woman of Shunem. He prophesizes that she will soon give birth to a son; years later, the son dies abruptly, the woman throws herself at Elisha’s feet, and he restores the boy to life.
V. Also known as the Jesuits, the society was founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola, a military man who structured the society along military lines; Jesuits have been occasionally referred to as “God’s soldiers.”
VI. The game “battledore and shuttlecock” was an early version of badminton.
VII. The Tuileries was the imperial French palace in Paris, until it was burned down in 1871 by the democratic Paris Communes.
VIII. Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte—also known as Napoleon III—served as France’s president from 1848 to 1852, but when he was not reelected he seized power, declared himself emperor, and served in that capacity until 1870, when he lost a war to Prussia, fled to England, and died there in 1873.
IX. The twelve Apostles, four of whom were fishermen when called by Jesus, and who were sometimes called “fishers of men.”
XVI. Eugénie de Montijo (1826–1920) was fair enough that Napoleon III married her even though most did not consider her to have enough social standing to become his empress.
II. Alexandre Calame (1810–1864) was a prolific Swiss landscape painter whose works often featured a lone tree framed by a desolate wilderness; it’s unknown what specific work (if any) is described here.
III. In Greek mythology, Atropos is the oldest of the three Fates and the one who severs the thread of a mortal’s life.
IV. All noted operatic composers of the early Classical period.
VII. The correct term today is Metís. Canada’s treatment of people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry has a long and complex history, and while they were marginalized and disdained in the late 19th century, the Metís Nation is now recognized as an Aboriginal people with rights enshrined in the Constitution of Canada.
IX. Cape Clear Island is off the southwest coast of County Cork; Inniskeiran is fictional.
X. O’Brien is playing with his own family history here: Florence O’Driscoll was the name of O’Brien’s great-great-grandfather, who was shot as a rebel by the English. The real O’Driscoll resided in Cloghan Castle on an island of Lough (Lake) Hyne in Ireland.
XV. Also known as a mock-orange, a pipe tree, and sometimes a lilac, the syringa is a shrub bearing white, aromatic flowers.
XVI. Faublas is the protagonist of a trio of novels by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, all published about the time of the French Revolution and exploring the decadent notions of eighteenth-century “libertinage.”
XVII. Philibert de Gramont (1621–1707) was a French nobleman whose memoirs, apparently dictated to his brother-in-law Anthony Hamilton when he was eighty, painted an especially decadent portrait of the court of Charles II.
XVIII. This may be a reference to A. Foucques de Vagnonville, who was principally know for collecting the written works of sculptor Jean Bologne.
XIX. Benvenuto Cellini was both the author of a famous autobiography and a celebrated sixteenth-century goldsmith.
XX. Clos de Vougeot is the name of both a famous vineyard in Burgundy and the high-quality wines produced from there.
XXI. Lacryma Christi is a famous Italian wine produced in both white and red varieties from grapes grown on Mount Vesuvius. The name—meaning “tears of Christ”—stems from a legend that Christ cried when Satan fell from Heaven, and wherever his tears fell, grape vines sprang up.
I. This was a popular saying in the nineteenth century, appearing in both newspapers and novels such as Richard Hunne: A Story of Old London by George E. Sargent.
II. Brenzett is a real village located in Kent, approximately 8 miles from the coast.
III. A wooded area periodically cut back to produce new growth.
V. Richard Whately (1787–1863) was an English philosopher and economist known for the standard works Elements of Logic and Elements of Rhetoric.
VI. This is quite different from the monument to John Fagge and his son found in St. Eanswith’s Church: In the real circumstance, both figures share the top of the monument; one, who is dressed in armor, is sculpted resting on an elbow; the other, who is fully reclining, is depicted in regular clothing.
VII. The real John Fagge was a seventeenth-century bailiff.
I. See first footnote on the following page. This is likely a disguise for Edward John Phelps, who became the American ambassador (called minister at that time) in 1885 and served until 1889, when he was succeeded by Robert Todd Lincoln, the deceased President’s son. Phelps, a lawyer from Vermont, founded the American Bar Association in 1878 and served as its president from 1880–81. Phelps’s predecessor in the post was the poet James Russell Lowell, who served as minister from 1880 to 1885.
II. The Jersey-born actress Lillie Langtry, a close friend of Wilde’s and a paramour of the Prince of Wales, must be counted among them; she made frequent triumphant tours of the United States and lived in California for a while.
III. The London “season” was a whirl of social affairs, parties, and balls that occupied the upper classes of England in the spring.
IV. Mary Haight Phelps married Edward Phelps in 1845, when she was eighteen.
V. The remark “England and America are two countries divided by a common language” is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but it does not appear in any of his published work. By 1887, when this story appeared, none of Shaw’s plays had been produced, and his literary output consisted of a few novels serialized between 1885 and 1887. Therefore, it is more likely that Wilde coined the phrase.
VI. Charles Pierpont Phelps, Edward Phelps’s youngest son, was born in 1861. His only daughter Mary was born in 1855.
XIV. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1883 and boasted many important members. Among the founders was Frederic W. H. Myers, who, along with Edwin Gurney and Frank Podmore, coauthored the two-volume Phantasms of the Living (1886), a detailed report of alleged sightings of ghosts and spirits. This reference confirms that the events took place after 1885, during Phelps’s term as minister.
XV. A celebrated actress of the day (1850–1898), born in England but raised in the United States; her greatest successes were roles in the plays of the French playwright Victorien Sardou, in many cases first performed in Europe by Sarah Bernhardt.
XVI. The legendary French actress (1824–1923) who captivated European audiences, often in male roles. Bernhardt’s name became synonymous with melodramatic acting. In her long career, she even appeared in films, beginning in 1898.
XVIII. Four-dimensional space was hypothesized as early as 1754, by French mathematician Jean le Rond D’Alembert.
XIX. One of the Court physicians (1816–1890) and, some have suggested, “Jack the Ripper”!
XX. The nickname of William Crockford’s St. James’s Club, a gentlemen’s club that flourished from 1823 to 1845 and was a gambling den. Today, Crockfords is a casino.
XXI. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote several famous poems about ghosts, especially “Haunted Houses.”
XXII. Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire was a popular site for medieval jousting tournaments.
XXIII. Unfortunately for our dating of the events of this story, August 17 was not a Friday until 1888.
XXIV. The ghost’s roles parody titles of shilling shockers (penny dreadfuls), popular pulp novels of the day.
XXV. A bay window projecting from an upper story. One is prominently mentioned in Horace Walpole’s gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764).
XXVI. A proud rooster depicted in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400).
XXVIII. Napoleon Sarony was a famous American photographer of the day, especially known for portraits. In the late nineteenth century, photographers usually paid the subject for the right to take the subject’s photograph and then sold copies for a profit. Oscar Wilde was one of Sarony’s subjects before this story was first published. When an American publisher copied one of Sarony’s photographs of Wilde in an advertisement, Sarony sued. The case went to the US Supreme Court (Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony) and, ruling for Sarony, the court established the principle that copyright protection extended to photographs.
XLIII. She is joking: There was a heavy duty on alcoholic spirits.
XLIV. This is not an accurate use of the term, but figuratively, mortmain means post-mortem control over property by a testator.
The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith
I. The author refers to Spiritualism, the great religious movement that gained popularity in Europe and America and espoused the beliefs that the afterlife existed and that it was possible to communicate with those who had passed over. By 1897, it was said to have over eight million followers.
II. At the time this story was written, psychology was a very different field of study, focusing more on human consciousness than behavior. William James, often considered “the father of modern psychology,” was also an ardent Spiritualist and sought early on to integrate the two systems.
III. The HMS Sphinx was a real ship, launched in 1882 and classified as a composite paddle vehicle.
IV. The West Coast of Africa Station, the base for the British Navy’s squadron charged with capturing slave ships and freeing the captive slaves, was merged in 1867 with the Cape of Good Hope Station.
X. This does not imply criminal conduct; opium, cocaine, heroin, and other narcotics were freely available at this time for pain relief and sleep aid. Their addictive nature was little understood.
XI. Turned outward or inside-out. It’s hard to understand what “everted lids” means.
XII. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 in England and was devoted to the study of parapsychology; when the American branch was formed, William James became its first president. Although many of its members were Spiritualists, when the society exposed William Hope and others as fraudulent mediums, Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of Spiritualists in protest of what they perceived to be an anti-Spiritualist bias.
I. This locational clue points to Washington, a small town near Newcastle-upon-Tyne near the northeast coast of England, but this is belied by the subsequent reference to the Downs (located in southeast England).
II. A tithe-barn is a structure used for storing tithes received in the form of produce.
III. Though the language may be deplorable, this is a rare glimpse of the humanity that occasionally appears in Kipling’s much-maligned stories of the empire.
IV. The narrator refers here to auras, often described as an egg-shaped oval of color around the human body. The concept of auras was first popularized by Charles Webster Leadbeater, a member of the Theosophical Society founded by Madame Blavatsky. Kipling, a lifelong student of the Orient, may have come across the concept of auras in India.
V. An inflammatory disease that is frequently identified by a specific cough and often proves fatal.
VI. A spring cart, formerly subject to a low tax in England.
VII. Also known as the Hippocratic Oath, a historic oath made by doctors to act ethically. It’s sometimes called the Oath of Æsculapius because Asclepius was a Greek god of medicine.
VIII. Meningitis is an inflammation of the fluid and membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord; in modern times it can be treated with antibiotics, but in the time of this story it often proved fatal.
IX. The tonneau is the part of a car open at the top.
XII. Tallies, used in olden England, were marked with notches to keep records of debt.
XIII. This is a woman who has intentionally turned her back on “new-fangled” notions, for Braille was in widespread use in England by the 1880s.
XIV. A fibrous substance formed out of pressed seeds, nuts, or beans to feed livestock, used to produce manure.
XV. Iron has traditionally been used to repel fairies and ghosts.
The Screaming Skull
I. Almost surely in the Boer War, as the English styled it, fought from October 11, 1899, to May 31, 1902, between the United Kingdom and two Afrikaner republics.
II. The Clontarf was a real ship that ran into trouble, but it didn’t sink: it was a clipper carrying immigrants from England to New Zealand, and on its second run in 1859–1860 it lost forty-one passengers to a variety of diseases. It was dismissed from service after that.
IV. There was a famous ship called the Olympia that launched in November 1892, but it was a US Navy cruiser that remains the oldest steel warship still afloat.
VI. This story was something of an urban legend, despite being reported in British newspapers circa 1847. That story—which claimed the lady in question had actually murdered six husbands before the seventh caught her—was based on the French legend of “La Corriveau.”
VII. Although there’s no record of a ship by this name, Leofric was a real historical person: he was the Earl of Mercia in the 11th century and is now best known as the husband of Lady Godiva.
VIII. A Rotterdam distillery, subsequently taken over by Bols.
IX. Also known as ethyl morphine or codethyline, an opioid anesthetic.
X. Squire Thornton Stratford (“S.T.S.”) Lecky’s Wrinkles in Practical Navigation (1884) does indeed recount such an instance, though he doesn’t say whether it was his own inkstand. Lecky renames tidal waves as “Great Sea Waves,” pointing out that earthquakes, not tides, are the cause of such waves.
XI. Luke must have talked the doctor out of an autopsy or even a cursory examination of the body; lead poured into her ear would have left obvious traces.
XIII. It’s unknown why Crawford has capitalized this phrase, although there are many sailing legends of ghosts in the rigging and masts of ships.
XIV. “West Coast fever” may be African trypanosomiasis, also known as African sleeping sickness, which is carried by tsetse flies in wet areas and resulted in an epidemic that ravaged Uganda in 1901.
XVI. Typically English hawthorn, planted as a boundary marker.
XVII. A portion of land assigned by the church to a clergyman, as part of the clergy’s benefice.
XVIII. The location of the village in Cornwall is confirmed in the newspaper account at the end of the tale.
XIX. A county in Scotland, now known as Angus. “The Boy in Gray” is apparently a local legend.
XX. A published notice of an upcoming wedding that provides an opportunity for any objections to be made.
XXI. A twisted or folded piece of paper used for lighting a pipe.
XXII. The first stanza of the poem “Sweet and Low” by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850) is as follows: Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea. Over the rolling waters go; Come from the dying moon, and blow; Blow him again to me, While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps.
XXIII. The town is fictitious, as is the newspaper in which the article appears.
XXIV. Bettiscombe Manor, in west Dorset, is indeed known as “The House of the Screaming Skull”; this legend dates back to the nineteenth century, and the skull is said to have been that of a Jamaican slave who was brought to England, but asked for his body to be returned to his homeland burial. When his owner, Azariah Pinney, refused, the village was beset by bad fortune and screams were heard for some time. An examination in 1963 determined that the skull was actually several thousand years old and belonged to a woman. The skull remains in Bettiscombe Manor to this day.