More Ghost Stories by M. R. James - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

By M R James

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘More Ghost Stories by M. R. James - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of M. R. James’.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of James includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788774574

M R James

Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, where his father was a curate, but the family moved soon afterwards to Great Livermere in Suffolk. James attended Eton College and later King's College Cambridge where he won many awards and scholarships. From 1894 to 1908 he was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and from 1905 to 1918 was Provost of King's College. In 1913, he became Vice-Chancellor of the University for two years. In 1918 he was installed as Provost of Eton. A distinguished medievalist and scholar of international status, James published many works on biblical and historical antiquarian subjects. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1930. His ghost story writing began almost as a divertissement from his academic work and as a form of entertainment for his colleagues. His first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published in 1904. He never married and died in 1936.

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The Complete Works of

M. R. JAMES

VOLUME 2 OF 19

More Ghost Stories

Parts Edition

By Delphi Classics, 2013

Version 1

COPYRIGHT

‘More Ghost Stories’

M. R. James: Parts Edition (in 19 parts)

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78877 457 4

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

Contact: [e-mail]

www.delphiclassics.com

M. R. James: Parts Edition

This eBook is Part 2 of the Delphi Classics edition of M. R. James in 19 Parts. It features the unabridged text of More Ghost Stories from the bestselling edition of the author’s Complete Works. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. Our Parts Editions feature original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of M. R. James, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

Visit here to buy the entire Parts Edition of M. R. James or the Complete Works of M. R. James in a single eBook.

Learn more about our Parts Edition, with free downloads, via this link or browse our most popular Parts here.

M. R. JAMES

IN 19 VOLUMES

Parts Edition Contents

The Short Story Collections

1, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

2, More Ghost Stories

3, A Thin Ghost and Others

4, A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories

5, The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James

6, Uncollected Stories

The Children’s Books

7, The Five Jars

8, Forty-Two Stories by Hans Christian Andersen

The Non-Fiction

9, Henry the Sixth: A Reprint of John Blacman’s Memoir

10, The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts Helps for Students of History

11, Old Testament Legends

12, Prologue to Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery

13, The Apocryphal New Testament

14, Introduction to ‘Ghosts and Marvels’

15, Some Remarks on Ghost Stories

16, Ghosts — Treat Them Gently!

The Guidebooks

17, Abbeys

18, Suffolk and Norfolk

The Memoir

19, Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial, 1875-1925

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More Ghost Stories

This short story collection followed up the success of James’ first series of tales with a new set of seven antiquarian ghost stories. It was first published by Edward Arnold in 1911. Thematically and stylistically, the tales continue according to the model established in James’ previous collection with which it is often grouped under the alternative title of More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The settings are, however, more varied than in the previous volume: as well as the usual haunted libraries and archives, for example, the stories feature, among others, a suburban garden, a school for boys and a country-house maze. All of these deceptively mundane locations are again used as an effective counterpoint to the supernatural terrors they conceal.

As with the tales in James’ previous collection, these stories were read aloud at Christmas gatherings in James’ rooms at King’s College, Cambridge of which he was Provost (effectively, Master) from 1905. The exception to this was ‘A School Story’, which was written for the King’s College Choir School and read aloud to its members in 1906. This was the first publication in book form of all of the stories in the volume, although ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ had appeared in the Contemporary Review in 1910. As with ‘The Treasure of Abbott Thomas’ in the previous volume, ‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance’ was written specifically to add length to the book.

The cover of the first edition

Temple Grove in East Sheen – the setting for ‘A School Story’

Cambridge University Library – the model for the library that houses ‘The Tractate Middoth’

Countryside around Stampford Courtenay in Devon, the setting that James envisaged for ‘Martin’s Close’

CONTENTS

A SCHOOL STORY

THE ROSE GARDEN

THE TRACTATE MIDDOTH

CASTING THE RUNES

THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER CATHEDRAL

MARTIN’S CLOSE

MR HUMPHREYS AND HIS INHERITANCE

James in 1910, close to the time of publication

A poster for Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 film, ‘Night of the Demon’, the classic cinematic adaptation of ‘Casting the Runes’. So far, this remains the only film adaptation of an M. R. James story

A 1979 television adaptation of ‘Casting the Runes’ starring Edward Petherbridge and Jan Francis remained faithful to James’ plot, but utilised a modern setting, casingt a woman in the central role of Dunning

A scene from the 1971 television adaptation of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, the first of the BBC’s acclaimed Ghost Story for Christmas strand

A scene from a short 1976 television adaptation of ‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance’, broadcasted as part of a BBC schools programme illustrating the use of music in television drama

PREFACE

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 the stories 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. 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!’ Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: 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. 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.

The first six of the seven tales were Christmas productions, the very first (‘A School Story’) having been made up for the benefit of King’s College Choir School. ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was printed in Contemporary Review; ‘Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance’ was written to fill up the volume. In ‘A School Story’ I had Temple Grove, East Sheen in mind; in ‘The Tractate Middoth’, Cambridge University Library; in ‘Martin’s Close’, Sampford Courtenay in Devon. The Cathedral of Barchester is a blend of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford.

M.R. JAMES

A SCHOOL STORY

Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. ‘At our school,’ said A., ‘we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase. What was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?’

‘You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own. There’s a subject for you, by the way— The Folklore of Private Schools.’

‘Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.’

‘Nowadays the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.’

‘No doubt: they weren’t born or thought of in my time. Let’s see. I wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, I’ve seen it, and died.’

‘Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?’

‘I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me think — Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice among the bed-curtains say, Now we’re shut in for the night. None of those had any explanation or sequel. I wonder if they go on still, those stories.’

‘Oh, likely enough — with additions from the magazines, as I said. You never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not; nobody has that ever I came across.’

‘From the way in which you said that, I gather that you have.’

‘I really don’t know; but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven’t any explanation of it.

‘The school I mean was near London. It was established in a large and fairly old house — a great white building with very fine grounds about it; there were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the older gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields which we used for our games. I think probably it was quite an attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess any tolerable features.

‘I came to the school in a September, soon after the year 1870; and among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to: a Highland boy, whom I will call McLeod. I needn’t spend time in describing him: the main thing is that I got to know him very well. He was not an exceptional boy in any way — not particularly good at books or games — but he suited me.

‘The school was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130 boys there as a rule, and so a considerable staff of masters was required, and there were rather frequent changes among them.

‘One term — perhaps it was my third or fourth — a new master made his appearance. His name was Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale, black-bearded man. I think we liked him: he had travelled a good deal, and had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was some competition among us to get within earshot of him. I remember too — dear me, I have hardly thought of it since then! — that he had a charm on his watch-chain that attracted my attention one day, and he let me examine it. It was, I now suppose, a gold Byzantine coin; there was an effigy of some absurd emperor on one side; the other side had been worn practically smooth, and he had had cut on it — rather barbarously — his own initials, G.W.S., and a date, 24 July, 1865. Yes, I can see it now: he told me he had picked it up in Constantinople: it was about the size of a florin, perhaps rather smaller.

‘Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing Latin grammar with us. One of his favourite methods — perhaps it is rather a good one — was to make us construct sentences out of our own heads to illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn. Of course that is a thing which gives a silly boy a chance of being impertinent: there are lots of school stories in which that happens — or anyhow there might be. But Sampson was too good a disciplinarian for us to think of trying that on with him. Now, on this occasion he was telling us how to express remembering in Latin: and he ordered us each to make a sentence bringing in the verb memini, I remember. Well, most of us made up some ordinary sentence such as I remember my father, or He remembers his book, or something equally uninteresting: and I dare say a good many put down memino librum meum, and so forth: but the boy I mentioned — McLeod — was evidently thinking of something more elaborate than that. The rest of us wanted to have our sentences passed, and get on to something else, so some kicked him under the desk, and I, who