Classics: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James

M. R. James is widely considered the father of the modern ghost story. He was a medievalist scholar and a provost at Cambridge and Eton College in the early twentieth century. He made a hobby out of writing Christmas ghost stories for his students and colleagues and eventually began to publish these stories in collections. Much of his short fiction reflects his academic background and his interest in archaeology and medieval art, architecture, and literature. A few weeks ago, Romancing the Gothic celebrated the hundredth anniversary of his final short story collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories with an online conference dedicated to M. R. James, his contemporaries, and the ghost story genre. Leading up to this conference, I decided to read as many of James’s ghost stories as I could. I made it through his first two collections: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911). If you love a good ghost story, you can’t go wrong with picking up some M. R. James. 

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary contain seven or eight stories each and are sometimes printed together in one volume. The stories are now in the public domain and are available for free from Project Gutenberg and WikiSource and in audio from LibriVox. Each volume begins with a brief prefatory note in which James explains the real-life places that inspired the settings of some of the stories. He also notes which of the stories were composed for his Christmas ghost story tradition and which tales were previously published in magazines. The stories contained in the first volume are “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” “Lost Hearts,” “The Mezzotint,” “The Ash-tree,” “Number 13,” “Count Magnus,” “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” and “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.” More Ghost Stories contains “A School Story,” “The Rose Garden,” “The Tractate Middoth,” “Casting the Runes,” “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” “Martin’s Close,” and “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance.”

M. R. James is a great fan of narrative framing devices, and almost all of his stories are told at some remove by a narrator who did not directly experience the supernatural happenings. “A School Story” uses a framing technique unique to this genre: it begins with a dialogue between characters who are trading ghost stories. This narrative trope is especially common with Christmas ghost stories, reinforcing the tradition to which they belong, as is the case of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (no relation) and “The Shadow” by E. Nesbit. In “A School Story,” one young man complains about the typical and formulaic tales that made up the local legends of his private school days. His nameless interlocutor responds by recounting his own unusual experience with the supernatural while at school. Meanwhile, several of James’s other tales make use of one of the oldest narrative techniques in the Gothic tradition: the “found document” framing device. “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” for example, begins with the narrator stumbling upon an obituary in a magazine, and he goes on to assemble the story of the mysterious events that led up to the archdeacon’s death by combining excerpts from architectural papers with the dead man’s diaries. “Martin’s Close” also makes use of device, consisting almost entirely of a court transcript interspersed with commentary from the casually interested narrator. Even stories without a straightforward framing device, such as “Casting the Runes,” betray a self-conscious sense of having been edited by an unmentioned narrator. This story is peppered with phrases like “It is not necessary to tell in further detail…” and “The next scene that does require to be narrated is…” This invisible presence of the narrator is well-suited to a story that is meant to be read aloud, as “Casting the Runes” would have first been experienced by James’s students.

The horror in M. R. James’s stories comes from a variety of sources—demonic, pagan, and human. But nearly all of the tales involve vengeance in some way, whether in the form one who has been wronged coming back to take revenge on their oppressor or in the form of guardians of magically powerful sites and objects frightening anyone who dares disturb them. “Lost Hearts” falls into the former category, with a young boy getting collaterally haunted by his black magic-using uncle’s previous victims. In “The Mezzotint,” the titular image reveals the story of a poacher who retaliates against the family of the man who had him hanged. But the most tragic example of a wronged ghost in these two collections is the spirit of a young, intellectually disabled woman in “Martin’s Close,” who haunts the man that toyed with her heart. 

In other stories, the supernatural forces are not after justice for an individual but rather serve to defend a particular place or object. In “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad,” perhaps the best known of James’s early stories, a vacationing academic is followed and tormented by an unseen spirit after he removes a bronze whistle from the site of some Templar ruins and blows into it. Only by getting rid of the whistle can he end the haunting. The role of a guardian spirit is even clearer in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.” Somerton, a man of leisure and amateur medieval scholar, embarks on a treasure hunt worthy of a Dan Brown book, deciphering clues within a stained-glass window to discover the location of gold hidden by Abbot Thomas in the sixteenth century. When he goes to take the treasure for himself, however, Somerton is frightened by some creature that seems to have been walled up with it. Somerton feels the dual presence of both the abbot’s ghost and this guardian spirit until he prevails upon a friend to help put the treasure back exactly as he found it. 

If you like your ghost stories filled with timid academics, medieval history, allusions to the occult, and moral lessons, pick up some M. R. James! As mentioned above, you can find all of his works free online, but you can also buy a print copy through Bookshop.org and support The Gothic Library in the process. Let me know what your favorite M. R. James story is in the comments!