A.C. “Arthur” Benson E.F. “Fred” Benson R.H. “Robert” Benson

You cannot write about Archbishop E.W. Benson without writing about death. The premature passing of his wife, Mary, and the devastating loss of his talented and humane daughter, Nellie, cast long shadows over the family’s domestic and spiritual lives. Nellie’s death, in particular, struck M.R. James hard. Earlier that same year, he had performed a part in a Benson family play with her. The next he heard, she had contracted diphtheria whilst tending one of her father’s ill servants. Confined to a sealed room, she passed her final days in isolation, writing notes through the window to the family gathered outside. Her last words, scribbled with quiet composure—“I wonder what it will be like. Give them all my love”—are among the most heartbreakingly dignified in the annals of Victorian family tragedy.

The middle brother, E.F. (Fred) Benson, may be best remembered for the Mapp and Lucia novels (written once he took possession of Henry James’ Lamb House in Rye), but he also wrote ghost stories of merit. His tales are more theatrical than Monty’s, less archaeological and more febrile, but they emerge from a similar place: the English house as a site of spiritual rupture. His ghosts are vulgar, clawed, often demonic—but also curiously domestic. They scratch at windows and tiptoe through parlors. The haunted house is never far from the drawing room in an E.F. Benson tale, and some, such as his ‘Caterpillars,’ might be even more unsettling once you move past his literal images of terror and seek for what they mean metaphorically.

The eldest brother, A.C. (Arthur) Benson, too, who famously penned the lyric for the ‘British national anthem,’ ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ was touched by the uncanny. His diaries, often melancholic, confess a lifelong fascination with death, ritual, and mental illness. James admired him—enough to dedicate a story to him—and shared his understanding of grief as both a personal burden and a communal liturgy. The two had first met as children at school in Temple Grove, forming a friendship that would last the rest of their lives. Arthur was, in all likelihood, James’s oldest and most enduring friend (though not, in point of fact, his best friend). His ghost stories (Basil Netherby, ‘The Grey Cat,’ &c.) are rather dreamlike moral fantasies in which the symbolism of the ghost is more important than the fear. They explore spiritual peril, temptation, pilgrimage, guilt, and redemption revealing unseen consequences of moral choices and often feature a medieval or quasi-medieval setting.

And then there is the youngest brother, R.H. (Robert) Benson, who was perhaps the most spiritually tempestuous of the siblings. He began his clerical life as an Anglican priest but, in 1903, converted to Roman Catholicism and was ordained a Catholic priest the following year (the same year Monty’s first ghost book, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, appeared). The conversion was a deeply divisive move, one that strained familial expectations and public image alike. Yet Monty James held no animosity and counted R.H. Benson amongst his rarified circle of ghost story writers and close friends. R.H. Benson’s supernatural fiction is less well known today, but its moral clarity and eschatological imagination mark it out. Filtered through a Catholic lens, his stories are concerned less with fright than with judgment—less with the return of the dead than with the reckoning of the soul. In his tales, the invisible world is objectively real, morally charged, and actively engaged in the struggle for human reclamation. His ghosts are less likely to be malevolent while his threats arise from demonic intrusion, spiritual corruption, sin, and the consequences of moral failure. He prefers setting stories in twilit chapels, lonely presbyteries, ancient houses burdened by spiritual history, or ordinary locations suddenly illuminated by the realisation of eternity (which is simultaneously terrifying and consoling).

There is a hauntedness to the Benson family that James recognized, perhaps even envied. They lived amid books and bereavement, in rooms where laughter and scripture mingled uneasily. Their stories, like his, emerge from silence—but their silence is less orderly, more anguished. Where James catalogued the supernatural, the Bensons endured it.

Next month, I will take you along with M.R. James to Cyprus and introduce you to his frog.

Ever, your fellow spirit
Brian Jay Corrigan

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To celebrate Monty’s birthday (1 August), let us look at his family and, in particular, his siblings.

Although Montague Rhodes James is imagined today as a solitary figure—precise, donnish, tucked up alone in college cloisters—that image is an illusion born of our retrospective affection for those lone dons of his ghost stories. In truth, Monty was the youngest of four, the final child in a tightly knit, intellectually restless, and devotedly loving household. His siblings each helped shape him, and, in subtle ways, they shaped his stories too.

Let us meet them in turn.

“Ber”, Herbert (father), Emily (mother), Monty, Sydney, and Gracie; the Rectory, Gt. Livermere

Sydney Rhodes James (1853–1934)
Canon. Chaplain. Pedagogue. “The Brutalist.”

Sydney’s never-before-published Haileybury student portrait, c.1870

Sydney, eldest of the James children, was born eight years before Monty. By the time the family relocated to Great Livermere in 1865, Sydney was already preparing to leave for Haileybury College, having won a scholarship at the age of fourteen. In Monty’s memory, Sydney became less a brother and more a sort of favourite uncle: tall, athletic, commanding—a schoolmaster with a booming voice and a gift for wry discipline.

Sydney made an early career of Eton. He was appointed to teach the Third Form—a division, he claimed, filled with the cunning, the idle, and the hopeless—and described his own methods as "rather brutal" but effective. His classroom language became infamous: he often dismissed untidy lower-form boys as "mouldy toads" and "dingy owls" while he strode about dispensing judgment with theatrical disdain. Amongst the students, he was dubbed “Kidney Beans,” which gives us insight into how he himself might have pronounced his own name, “Sydney James.”

Though his severity and sarcasm were legendary, Sydney remained a devoted educator and stern brother. During Monty’s student years at Eton, Sydney offered both opportunity and obstacle. When a minor bullying complaint arose against Monty—perhaps no more than a boyish prank—Sydney did nothing to shield his brother. It was a defining moment. The bond between them was warm but never really close, and though they continued to share an enjoyment of societies and skating parties, and late in life they spent holidays together at Sydney’s home on the Isle of Wight, they were no more than warmly cordial and fraternally friendly rather than devoted brothers.

In later years, Sydney became Canon of York and a figure of public esteem. He was awarded the CBE for his service during the Great War. But for Monty, Sydney would always be the authoritative elder: admired, perhaps slightly feared, loved certainly, yet never quite close.

Herbert Ellison Rhodes James (1857–1939)
Doctor. Soldier. Scientist. “The Comrade.”

No Herbert Ellison Rhodes James portrait was known until I discovered this one (and another)

Named for his father (Hebert) and known in the family as "Ber," Monty’s second brother was five years older. He was scientifically minded, genial, and marked by a sense of quiet humour. Where Sydney stood tall and aloof, Ber was companionable. Monty called him “a chum”—a phrase that suggests genuine warmth without necessarily a deep intellectual affinity.

Ber entered the Army Medical Service in 1882, receiving his commission that same year. His early postings included Aldershot and Cyprus (1883–1888). From 1892 to 1897, he served in China, where he was appointed to the permanent sanitary committee for British troops. During the infamous 1894 bubonic plague outbreak in Hong Kong, Ber assisted in identifying the plague bacillus that had stumped medical science since the 14th century and was commended by the colonial government. He later accompanied Chinese forces during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), authoring reports on medical organization that influenced War Office policy. The Chinese government awarded him the Order of the Double Dragon for his service to the wounded.

After returning to Britain, Ber held roles as secretary to the Principal Medical Officer (Home District) and senior instructor at the Royal Army Medical Corps depot in Aldershot. During the Second Boer War, he served as commandant of the RAMC depot. Post-war, he contributed to reforms as secretary of a commission investigating medical shortcomings in South Africa, working alongside Secretary of State for War St John Broderick and Director-General Alfred Keogh.

Ber played a pivotal role in relocating the Army Medical School from Netley to London's Millbank site, establishing a modernized medical centre there. He became its first commandant and director of studies, overseeing the hospital and school until his initial retirement in 1908. He was later recalled to serve during the Great War.

During the First World War, Ber oversaw the establishment of British army hospitals for the Gallipoli campaign and commanded No. 11 General Hospital in Alexandria (1915). He was subsequently posted to Salonika, where he remained until 1918, supervising military medical operations under extreme conditions. His service earned him the Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB), Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), and Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), along with mentions in dispatches.

For all his accomplishments, Ber never overshadowed Monty. Instead, he provided steady fraternity and a welcome sense of normalcy. The two maintained a longstanding private joke—adopting the comic alter egos of “Barker” the grocer (Monty) and “Johnson” the butcher (Ber). Their absurd quarrels, carried out in Suffolk dialect, were legendary among family and friends, and lasted well into adulthood.

Ber, one suspects, was Monty’s link to the outer world: to medicine, to soldiering, to the grittier corners of experience. He was, in short, the older brother one might confide in without ceremony, and they shared a true closeness.

In an interesting coincidence, probably intentional, Ber rose to the rank of Colonel early in the same year that Monty wrote “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad” in which a Colonel is the hero.

Grace Caroline Rhodes James (1859–1952)
Painter. Humourist. Equestrienne. Keeper of Cats. “The Heart.”

Unhappily, no individual portrait of Gracie has yet to be identified. I’m still searching.

Gracie, the only sister, stood nearest in age to Monty and closest in sensibility. Their bond was intense, affectionate, and long-lived. She painted, she composed musical sketches, and she shared Monty’s oddest delights—including a macabre sense of humour that bordered, delightfully, on the grotesque.

At fifteen, she drew a picture of their dickie bird, which had been savaged by her cat—a gory wreck draped down the back of a chair—and posted the disturbing image to twelve-year-old Monty, who, of course, delighted in it. They shared a warped, but endearing, sense of fun. When Sydney beat her in a race up a tree, she exacted revenge by drawing a picture of his decapitated body tumbling earthward from that tree. Her letters were wicked, funny, and spiked with an ironic elegance that Monty enjoyed and emulated.

Gracie married late in life. On 29 March 1910, not quite ten months after the death of their father, she wed Reverend Edward John Woodhouse, newly appointed Rector of her father’s incumbency at Livermere. The ceremony was held by special license in London, at St. Andrew Undershaft. Sydney officiated; Monty stood as best man. For a brief time, Gracie returned to the rectory that had been their family home since childhood. The marriage, however, was not long—Woodhouse died four years later—but it was a union marked by affection and familial comfort.

Gracie continued her love of animals, horses & cats in particular, and support for her brother’s career. She was a comfort to Monty, a mirror to his imagination, and likely the first to laugh at the earliest drafts of his ghost stories (which are, make no mistake, intentionally amusing). She also possessed a peculiar talent for epistolary invective. When Monty’s schoolhouse penmanship declined (never to recover, alas; he has simply the worst handwriting!) she scolded him for it. Monty replied—via their father—that she ought first to consult a dictionary before attempting to spell "orthography."

In a family marked by intellect, humour, and achievement, Gracie stood for affection and home. Her presence shaped Monty’s imagination—those clever, odd, and supportive women who punctuate his ghost stories surely owe her a quiet debt.

Final Thoughts

Of Monty’s three siblings, each shaped a different portion of his emotional map: Sydney the athletic figure of austere command, Ber the heroic and worldly collaborator, Gracie the poet and secret accomplice. All three, in their own way, helped form the peculiar compound of erudition, mischief, and melancholy that marks James’s ghost stories.

He may have written of lonely men in empty rooms, but Monty’s own life was crowded with parlour games, clever teasing, and the long laughter of shared childhood that stretched well into old age.

Next month, we will visit three of Monty’s closest friends, who also (unsurprisingly) took up pens to write their own rather exquisite ghost stories.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

The evidence begins early in the tales. In “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book,” the haunting arises from a grotesque image of a demon, and when the spectral moment comes, it is the tactile detail that arrests: “a hand of dreadful strength"—hairy, clawed, repulsive—grips the protagonist. In “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” the horror takes on a more ambiguous but no less visceral form: “a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined, which moved with a fluttering sound.” The figure is wrapped in bedsheets—the ‘ghost in a bedsheet’ was likely a wink to his audience—and yet, within, something animates it that isn’t looking for trick-or-treat candy. The creature’s motion, texture, and presence suggest not only otherness but a specific kind of physical revulsion.

James abjures gory monsters. Rather, he gives us feelings of contact: breath on the cheek, dry hair on the pillow, a rustle in the wall. As I explore in my biography of James, The Chance of a Ghost, the recurring motif of hair appears across the corpus with increasing specificity. In “The Diary of Mr. Poynter,” a man decorates a room with a curtain fabric copied from an old diary. The fabric reproduces a design—“a mass of curling tendrils, hairy and animate"—which, it turns out, is not merely artistic. The room becomes haunted by a shape whose presence is signaled by masses of fine, dry, human hair. It is one of James’s most tactile hauntings, and its terror, far from symbolic, is sensuous. The hair is on the pillow, on the desk, rising from the floorboards, billowing from an open coffin—an invasive, pervasive haunt (yet, as a fellow cat lover, I do sometimes wonder whether MRJ is having a private laugh about how cat fur does seem to get into everything, but I digress . . .)

From there, the motif deepens in “The Ash-tree,” where the grotesque is depicted as not only animated, but venomous. Once again, hair appears. The tale closes with a powerful image: the mummified corpse of the witch, uncovered at the story's climax, is still draped in long black hair. It is the final detail that James gives us—a lingering visual echo that ties the supernatural to the bodily, the sensual, the uncanny. The spiders in this tale are themselves described as hairy, silent, and secretive. They crawl, nest, and descend from the ash tree in which the witch was concealed, and it is not too much to imagine that they may have been conjured from the very hair of the witch’s rotting cadaver. Their victims are found bloated, blackened, and hideously marked. When touched, the bodies have a caustic effect, burning the skin of those who come into contact. James does not dwell upon the physiology of the spiders—he lets their terror accrue through effect, through aftermath. They are things that move, and leave marks, not only on the flesh but also, importantly, on the imagination. (and, forgive me, but MRJ likens the spiders at one point to kittens! I suspect there is an article in all this for Cat Fancy magazine, but I’m off topic again . . .)

We see this image of movement-terror clearly again in “The Haunted Dolls’ House,” where the ghastly revelation is experienced indirectly through eerie simulation. A man purchases a model house, only to find that, at night, it reenacts a silent, ghostly tragedy visible only to him. The dolls are not frightening because they are alive but because they perform death—over and over—with mute inevitability. A child dies in the nursery. A hearse waits outside. The tiny world moves on a loop, indifferent to the viewer. The fear is not of animation but of repetition: of trauma preserved in miniature, mechanical and unalterable. It is the fear of witnessing a terrible incident that cannot be stopped, and the unease of seeing it play out again, regardless of intervention.

This fear of uncontrolled motion or what might be called animatic intrusion—of things moving that should not—is one of James’s signature dreads. In “A View from a Hill,” a man looks through cursed, enchanted binoculars and sees a ruined abbey that is no longer there. When he examines the glasses, he finds it filled with a distillation of bone, blood, and the boiled offal of criminals. It is an instrument steeped in filth dredged from a necromantic rite. Here again, the past moves through the present with silent force and unspoken resolve.

It is not only the stories that give us these insights. Biographical evidence confirms the presence of these fears in James’s own experience. In The Chance of a Ghost, I describe how James, at age seven, lay in bed poring happily over a seventeenth-century Dutch Bible while convalescing from bronchitis. The boy we see here is studious, curious, and calm, but, in his adult writings, the image of the sickbed often returns as a site of visitation. James’s own accounts, including “A Vignette,” suggest that the moments when he was most vulnerable, alone, at night, recovering, were also the moments when he first felt the presence of the uncanny.

In that story, James describes seeing a figure standing at a gate: “I do not know whether it was a man. I think it was not.” The figure does not move this time. It only stands, reversing the usual dread of inanimate things in motion. And its presence, like the figures in “The Mezzotint” or “Casting the Runes,” becomes an intolerable pressure. Rather than creatures of nightmare logic, they are the fulfillment of James’s own sense that something may be watching, and may, at any moment, move.

James was not a neurotic man. Those who knew him found him kind, composed, well-adjusted, and amusing. But, according to his Eton tutor and friend, H.E. Luxmoore, he lived a life of intense interiority. He was unmarried, close to his family, publicly reserved. He delighted in church music, Latin hagiography, and cataloguing manuscripts. He wrote letters filled with warmth and wit. Yet, as I note in the biography, he was haunted from an early age by images. As a child, he saw a Punch-and-Judy toy theatre with a figure labeled "The Ghost": a tall white shape with a long head and dismal expression. That, he later said, “permeated my dreams for years” and informed his picture of the supernatural.

It never quite left him, that Ghost.

The fears expressed in his fiction are not, as one would expect, the invented fears of a wild imagination. They are, instead, the distilled anxieties of a man who encountered the uncanny early, and who then built a life of control, intellect, and order around it. But fiction gave him another space, a place where what terrified him could emerge, safely, in the company of friends.

He read his ghost stories aloud at Christmas. He took pleasure in their effect. But that pleasure was never mean-spirited. He wanted to create not screams but shivers. And he knew how to conjure them.

It is tempting to read James’s stories as warnings against curiosity. But what they really warn against is the illusion of safety. We think hair is just hair. We think spiders are only spiders. We think a whistle is a toy, a bed a place of rest, a dollhouse a whimsey, and the search for a buried artifact is merely a quest. James knew better. These things, like our own creeping memories, may move when we least expect them.

And when they do, at least in Monty’s imaginings, they move towards us when we would prefer they not move at all.

Next month will be Monty’s birthday, and we will take a look at the important influence his family had upon his ghost stories.

And this month, after eighteen years of research and writing, I will be submitting that biography of MRJ for publication consideration. More on that to come.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

This is the month of MRJ’s death. He died 12 June 1936, exactly 25 years after his father’s death on 12 June 1909. To mark the occasion, let us consider Monty’s ‘personally impersonal’ narrative style wherein he inserts himself into his stories without actually inserting himself into his stories.

In the scope of the English ghost story, there are few voices so deceptively casual, so finely turned to concealment and evocation, as that of Montague Rhodes James. He does not shout “Boo!” He does not rattle chains. He seldom raises his voice above that of the good-natured scholar swirling a whiskey whilst offering a polite chortle. But driving that seemingly companionable narrative presence is a chilling technique that I call the moi-même voice, and it lurks: a dread far more intimate than any gothic shriek.

The term moi-même comes, of course, from the French for “myself,” and I invoke it deliberately. James’s narrators rarely name themselves, and when they do, it is only with the softest pressure (and, when analyzed, they often resolve themselves into the voice of Monty himself . . . though not quite). They are almost always bookish men: reticent, inclined toward antiquarianism, and possessed of an “I” so understated that it is easy to overlook. But this, I would argue, is precisely the point. In James’s fiction, the narrator is neither fully James nor wholly a constructed mask. It is moi-même, that hybrid self who gestures toward the author without collapsing into autobiography. And that subtle slipperiness allows James to perform what is perhaps the most unnerving of all ghost story maneuvers: the reader’s slow realization that they are hearing a recollection, not a tale; that they have been seated beside a man who is not so much telling a story as remembering something that he has tried very hard to forget.

This technique is probably best understood if we remember that James did not write to be published. He wrote to read his works aloud to a circle of close friends during his Christmas celebrations. It therefore makes sense that he should couch those stories in the suggested notion that ‘this really occurred—to me’ if only to add an extra, chilling touch of veracity to his uncanny tales. Because, after all, ghost stories are more frightening if true.

We are not, however, in the realm of the first-person, narrative-character confessional, à la Poe (“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could”). Nor are we in the omniscient detachment of the classic gothic mode. Instead, James crafts narrators who speak from the margins: scholarly, hesitant, often relaying events that happened to someone else (and thank God, they imply, not to them)—but nevertheless to someone whom the unobtrusive narrator knows and believes. This device permits James to maintain a calculated distance from the supernatural, one that protects plausibility even as it sharpens the sting. The narrator need not prove or even entirely believe the events; he need only remember and relate them.

Consider the moment after the opening dialogue of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” A narrative voice intrudes quite suddenly to say,

In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the impression which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman—rather henlike, perhaps, in his little ways.

Who is this ‘I’ who refers to himself as ‘me’? He never obtrudes into the tale, never makes another self-reference, but there he is, telling the tale, and he was apparently personally present at the little dust-up that began the adventure. Might it have been Monty himself? Could this have actually occurred? James offers nothing but this breezy aside and then utterly refuses to identify our narrative observer. The story is already underway, the narrator already seated amongst friends, and we, the readers, are included only as far as our eavesdropping narrator can carry us. This is the moi-même voice at work: embedded, indirect, concerned less with performance than observation and recollection.

The result is a disarming proximity. We trust this narrator not because he is necessarily reliable, but because he so clearly wishes to avoid drama. When he relays a “curious” incident, we lean forward. When he admits that the facts are “perhaps open to interpretation,” we understand instinctively that they are not. And when he pauses to express distaste, or caution, or befuddlement, we do not feel manipulated but rather warned.

This is a hallmark of James’s art, and it is difficult to identify more than one or two of his stories that do not employ the subtle device in one form or another. The moi-même voice functions not simply as a narrative filter but as a form of epistemic restraint. It allows the story to feel partial, recovered, and, most importantly, never wholly understood . . . and yet possible. These could be tales murmured in confidence around firesides, in clubs, at academic dinners. They are offered with the caveat of memory and the tacit understanding that belief is beside the point. “Take it as you will,” the narrator implies. “But I, for one, would rather not speak of it again.”

Why? Because it happened.

And, so, the moi-même voice becomes, paradoxically, a form of revelation: not in what it tells but rather in what it withholds. It gestures toward trauma without sensationalizing it, allows the ghost its ambiguity, and honours the unspoken contract between teller and listener: that this story, whatever it is, has marked the speaker in some irrevocable manner that must now be shared.

There is a dignity in that restraint. It is the opposite of the modern horror trope that demands escalation and spectacle. James understands that the most chilling ghost stories are not those in which the dead are rather like the living (distinguished only by decayed or absent flesh), but rather those in which the living speak too quietly, as though afraid what they fear might return . . . with unknowable intentions. James’ narrator, after all, is moi-même—myself—and he inhabits the margins of the story. But only just . . . or is he merely part of the overall fiction?

Such is the narrative crux, and subtle genius, of the M.R. James ghost story.

Next month, we will delve into those elements of the Jamesian canon that betray the writer’s own anxieties . . . it was not spiders alone!

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

Lovecraft adored him. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, H.P. Lovecraft calls M.R. James “a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank,” praising his economy, clarity, and eerie precision. And yet, when Monty James encountered Lovecraft’s work, he winced. He noted with a scholar’s despair that “cosmic” was used twenty-four times in a single story. The critique, offered to a friend in private correspondence, dismissed the work as “woolly or too nasty.”

The divergence is instructive. James, precise and understated, had no taste for grandiose, overdrawn, pan-galactic deities with tentacled faces. His own uncanny creations crept, waited, then revealed themselves only in glimpses that instilled a sense of dread transforming, ultimately, into terror. He believed in the suggestive power of language, the value of indirection. Lovecraft, by contrast, blew open the boundaries of horror, flinging his prose into realms of planetary madness and ancestral slime.

Their stylistic contrast is as stark as their metaphysics. James writes with restraint, music, and narrative cunning. Lovecraft’s imagination is vast, even as the emotional register remains oddly unseasoned, and his sentences are often slack, his paragraphs misshapen. There is a fever in Lovecraft's tone that blurs rather than sharpens, and where James refines towards implication, Lovecraft expands towards operatic accumulation. Whatever one makes of the mythos, it is difficult to argue that Lovecraft approached prose with anything like James’s discipline or grace.

Both men were writing about intrusion, things from outside breaking into the known world, but they differed on scale. James was local: his ghosts lived in country churches, tucked among Latin inscriptions and forgotten shelves. Lovecraft was galactic. Where James whispered of the liminal, Lovecraft screamed of the infinite.

There’s a temptation to frame their relationship as antagonistic, but that would miss the deeper point: they share an impulse, even if it forks. Both wrote to unsettle. Both distrusted the surface of things. Lovecraft’s pantheon may seem cartoonish to a Jamesian reader, but his reverence for James was real. “In inventiveness and atmosphere,” he wrote, James was unsurpassed.

One imagines James, perhaps over sherry at Eton, setting Lovecraft’s prose down with a shudder (not of fear but of stylistic dismay). Still, the lineage is there. The cold corridor that originated at the altar of a Suffolk church eventually opened onto a chaotic vision of the disarticulated cosmos.

Next month, I will discuss a peculiar narrative trick that M.R. James could well have picked up from his love of reading Dickens.

Ever, your fellow spirit
Brian Jay Corrigan

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

Montague Rhodes James was a man of manuscripts. He catalogued, edited, translated, and resurrected medieval and biblical documents with a discipline that earned him the admiration of Cambridge, Eton, and scholarly communities beyond. Yet, it is for his ghost stories that he remains widely remembered. Stories where uncovering a scrap of parchment, deciphering a Latin phrase, or taking home an antique whistle might lead to dread, mutilation, or death.

In "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book," James's first tale, a scholar acquires an old volume in a dusty French cathedral town. The book is real, ancient, and filled with curious drawings. One image, however, is a grotesque thing: a demon whose appearance coincides with a terrifying manifestation. The story draws on James’s own antiquarian interests, as does "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," where hidden Latin clues and ecclesiastical riddles lead a smug scholar into a subterranean chamber—and into the arms of an embracing, slimy guardian.

These are not tales of adventure. They are cautionary fables. They suggest that some knowledge—especially when pursued for ego, curiosity, or idle sport—is best left undisturbed. In story after story, James positions his protagonists as learned men, even clergymen, who find in the past not serenity, but disruption. In "The Mezzotint," a curator receives a print that changes each time he looks at it, slowly revealing the abduction of a child by a creeping, grotesque figure. The haunting emerges not through bombast, but through the precise, scholarly observation of a single, inexplicable object.

That these terrors are often awakened by books, manuscripts, or relics is no accident. James understood the seductive allure of antiquity. As I note in The Chance of a Ghost, James's ghost stories are not about punishing the pursuit of knowledge, but about confronting its cost. The rationalist scholar of "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" finds an ancient whistle among Templar ruins. When he blows it, a creature of terrifying ambiguity is summoned—"a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined" that advances upon him with a tactile dread. The terror lies not only in the ghost, but in the realization that blowing the whistle—an innocent act—acted as a kind of invitation.

James is careful not to over-describe his entities. He knew instinctively that the half-glimpsed is more dreadful than the fully seen. In "The Diary of Mr. Poynter," a man decorates his room with a fabric design copied from an old diary—only to find that the pattern brings forth a monstrous thing, hairy and silent, that seems drawn toward him. These ghosts are not transparent wraiths. They are often tactile, corporeal, disturbingly present. James gives us hands, hair, fingernails, breath. The body haunts.

And yet, these are not Gothic excesses. James does not give us ruins and thunderstorms. Instead, he often places his terrors in bright, ordinary settings—a seaside town, a quiet college, a country house. In "A View from a Hill," a young man borrows a pair of binoculars and sees an old abbey that no longer exists. The glasses, charmed by a necromancer, let him see into a past that should have stayed buried. This, too, is typical. James's ghosts are not content to remain in the past. They return, they encroach, and they make the present uncanny.

Thematically, James’s fiction centers on disturbance: of the dead, of the past, of moral boundaries. His protagonists often lack self-awareness. They are unmarried men, intellectually accomplished but socially aloof or maladroit, whose desire to know overtakes their sense of proportion. In "An Episode of Cathedral History," a relic is moved, and a monstrous presence emerges from the crypt. The clergymen cannot comprehend it any better than the boys, and the story ends not with resolution, but with the lingering sense that something old and malevolent has merely withdrawn, not been vanquished.

This motif—the return of the repressed—pervades James’s fiction. He lived in an era when Protestant rationalism had diminished the imaginative scope of the supernatural, and yet he populated his stories with the very things that Protestant theology had once tried to abolish: revenants, tomb-walkers, necromancers, and vengeful spirits. In "The Ash-tree," a woman condemned as a witch leaves behind a brood of monstrous spiders that exact vengeance generations later. Her death did not end her power. The past is not safely dead.

Nor is it always comprehensible. The ghost in "A Warning to the Curious" is not merely a guardian of an Anglo-Saxon crown; it is a symbol of persistence, of something ancient and animate that refuses to be erased—or denied. The tale is one of James’s most mournful. The protagonist dies not because he desecrated out of malice, but because he failed to understand the gravity of his act. In James, ignorance and innocence are no shield. The dead judge by their own laws, not evanescent, but ephemeral yet everlasting.

What, then, are we to make of the fact that James—a genial, pious, humorous man—should write these stories? The tone of many of them is comic, at least in the beginning. James enjoyed reading them aloud to friends. But the laughter dims. His humour is the dry wit of someone who knows that terror is best delivered by degrees.

Still, there is something deeper. These tales are not merely entertainments. They are literary exorcisms. James spent his life ordering the past—editing Apocrypha, cataloguing manuscripts, translating saints’ lives. But fiction allowed him to give voice to what cannot be ordered. As I explore in The Chance of a Ghost, James’s stories often expose a worldview in which knowledge is partial, where the sacred is shadowed by the uncanny, and where truth lies not in clarity but in dread.

Consider the ghost of "A Vignette," James’s final story, where a boy sees a silent figure standing at a gate. It is neither explained nor defeated. James ends the tale not with exorcism, but with the admission that it has haunted him since youth. "I do not know," he writes, "whether it was a man. I think it was not."

This is James at his most confessional. The story is—or pretends to be—autobiographical, but more importantly, it is metaphysical. The world, in James’s fiction, is not a rational place. It is a place where secrets lie just beneath the visible, where curiosity is a kind of moral risk, and where some doors—once opened—cannot be shut again.

In the end, the ghost stories of M.R. James do not mock his scholarly life. They complete it. They are the shadows cast by a man who knew that even the most disciplined intellect has limits, and that the past, when summoned, may not come alone.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Newsletters arrive the first of every month at 08:30 Eastern.

Last known photo of Monty (centre) c.1936

There are facts. James never married. He had no known romantic relationships with women, nor, it must be said, with men. He lived closely with his parents and remained intimately tied to his siblings and childhood home, where he returned regularly even during his long tenure at Cambridge. He was beloved by his male students, particularly at Eton, where his kindness, wit, and intellect left an enduring impression. His letters are full of warmth, affection, and gentle teasing, especially toward younger men and boys whose minds and promise he cherished.

But they are not erotic.

There are no known love letters even amongst the unpublished, secreted letters that I have uncovered in my researches. No confessions. No scandals. What we find instead is a pattern of deep and affectionate companionship—familial, collegial, and pedagogical. One might be tempted to call him celibate, though that too would be an impermissible guess. What can be said with some confidence is that James lived a life of emotional intensity and physical reserve, a life that privileged intimacy of the mind over expression of the body.

And what of the fiction? The ghost stories are almost entirely devoid of women. There are no courtships, no flirtations, no domestic partnerships beyond the incidental marriage in “The Rose Garden” and the traditionally happy ending of “The Tractate Middoth.” Protagonists are nearly always men—unmarried, scholarly, inward. These characters live alone or in male institutions: colleges, rectories, parsonages. Women, when they appear, are most often peripheral: a landlady, a witch, a figure in the past. The emotional landscape is male and reserved, shot through with curiosity and fear but not with love or desire.

This absence has prompted speculation. But absence is not evidence. What we have instead is a psychological landscape in which solitude, secrecy, and repressed forces dominate. In story after story, something hidden is unearthed. A whistle is blown, a room is opened, a document is read—and a thing appears. That thing is usually terrifying, but it is also animated by the energy of what has long been buried. The metaphor, if one seeks it, is not sexual so much as existential. James was interested not in what draws people together, but in what presses on them from beyond.

There are moments, of course, where interpretation might lean. The figures that terrify James's protagonists are often tactile. The ghost in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” climbs into the bed. In “The Diary of Mr. Poynter,” hair appears on the pillow, and the mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it appears beneath Dunning’s pillow in “Casting the Runes” (though this was surely inspired by Le Fanu’s “Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand”). There is a pronounced intimacy in the way these creatures approach. They breach the personal space of the protagonist with a kind of dreadful familiarity. But if this suggests anything about sexuality, it is indirect and more likely connected to James’s fear of proximity itself—the loss of physical autonomy, the violation of intellectual distance.

James’s fiction may not be coded expressions of sexuality, but rather expressions of its suppression—of the dread and mystery that gather around physical and emotional closeness when one is trained, by belief or temperament, to avoid them. And here, one might tentatively extend the question back toward the man himself. The possibility that James was asexual has real merit: not as a label imposed retroactively, but as a description of someone who seems to have lived a rich emotional life with little need—or perhaps little capacity—for erotic fulfillment.

At the same time, one can reasonably imagine that he may have experienced latent or unexpressed homosexual desire, what Mark Gatiss has termed his “nonpracticing homosexuality“ and what Michael Cox vehemently rejects in his Intimate Portrait on the grounds of, one suspects, personal aversion. If such feelings existed, James may well have found them theologically troubling. A devout Anglican, steeped in a moral world that prized restraint, he would likely have seen such impulses as incompatible with the virtuous life as it was then conceived. It is equally possible, of course, that he experienced moments of heterosexual attraction, especially given the few faint indications I have discovered—incidents involving Grace’s friends and the reference in Grace’s will to a “future wife.” But these are so mild, so socially inflected, and so unpursued as to feel more speculative than indicative.

If anything is revealed by this inquiry, it is not James’s orientation towards a particular desire but rather his orientation toward restraint. He was not, in any sense accessible to us now, a man at war with his desires. Rather, he seems to have constructed a life in which desire—whatever its shape—was subordinated to structure, affection, intellect, and faith. He lived in a way that allowed for warmth without confession, closeness without contact.

So what, finally, can be said? Only this: that M.R. James guarded his interior life with the same care he brought to his ghost stories. He disclosed much, but never everything. He let his characters encounter what he himself never named. And in doing so, he left us with stories that shiver—not because they scream of longing, but because they murmur of what might have been touched, and was not.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Newsletters arrive on the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

Though the young James expressed skepticism, he recorded the event. It remains the only ghostly incident he ever acknowledged in his own life. And yet, the moment is telling. Monty neither confirms nor dismisses the ghost: he folds it into a larger ambiguity, one that characterized both his scholarship and his fiction.

Cambridge, it seems, was already haunted.

Ghosts and the Rational Mind

In an age dominated by the tension between science and faith, Victorian universities stood at a strange crossroads. Cambridge, in particular, became an unlikely crucible for supernatural inquiry. The question of ghosts—once a matter of folklore or faith—had become a matter for scholarly investigation. Could ghost stories survive modern scrutiny? Could belief in phantoms coexist with rigorous, rational thought?

Two Trinity men believed so. A decade before Monty’s birth, in 1851, they founded the Cambridge Association for Spiritual Inquiry—also known as the Ghostlie Guild. Its membership included some of the most respected minds of the era: the Regius Professor of Divinity, Brooke Foss Westcott; Alfred Barry, Chaplain to Queen Victoria; Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy; and a young Arthur Balfour, future Prime Minister. Their goal? To investigate ghost sightings and haunted places, not to debunk them but to gather proof of life after death.

This was no occult circle. It was a serious academic society, the first of its kind in England. It predated the better-known Ghost Club of 1862 and the Society for Psychical Research of 1882. These men were believers in search of empirical confirmation.

The Chitchat Society and Holy Apparitions

By the time Monty entered King’s, the ghost-glamour of Cambridge had settled into the old stones. He moved among men who had been raised in this culture of inquiry. In 1884, one of his closest friends, H.F.W. Tatham, presented a paper on “Ghosts” to the Chitchat Society. The discussion that followed embraced the theological, the psychological, and the literary potential of spectral visitants.

Tatham, who later published Footprints in the Snow for his Eton boys, held to a Protestant vision of the supernatural: his ghosts were instructive rather than terrifying. Holy footprints led boys home. Haunted phonographs played moral lessons. Dreams intervened for the good of the soul. Yet his 1884 lecture—heard by Monty—clearly influenced what would become a new kind of ghost story: empirical in tone, archaeological in setting, and suggestive in moral force.

The Cambridge Style: Uncovering the Uncanny

Monty’s Cambridge was a place where antiquarian scholarship met speculative thought. Archaeology, philology, medieval studies—all these lent the ghost story a newfound weight. One need only look at the pseudoscientific language of the Phantasms of the Living (1886), produced by Edward Gurney, F.W.H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. The two-volume work, written by Trinity men, sought to demonstrate the reality of apparitions as more than chance. They coined terms like “phantasmogenetic centre,” proposing points in space where apparitions might be generated and perceived.

By modern standards, their methodology was badly flawed—largely anecdotal, deeply subjective—but it showed the shape of the age. Ghosts were no longer quaint tales of yore. They were phenomena to be mapped and measured.

Ghost Stories with a Scholar’s Touch

M.R. James would become the most celebrated literary result of this Cambridge convergence. Drawing upon antiquarian detail, scriptural ambiguity, and the dry wit of a rational mind confronted with the irrational, he forged a new kind of ghost story—one that felt disturbingly possible.

He was first but not alone. Cambridge soon gave us a coterie of supernatural writers: A.C. Benson, E.F. Benson, R.H. Benson, Arthur Gray, E.G. Swain, and Arthur Reed Ropes (writing as Adrian Ross). Together, they produced nearly two hundred stories. Their ghosts do not rant, rattle, or rave; they wait, or whisper, or reach out with a clawed hand from the folds of antiquity.

These authors balanced belief and disbelief with perfect poise. As Monty once remarked, “ghostly phenomena are rare in Colleges, and highly suspect”—only to follow that with: “yet there was a ghostly cry in the bedroom.” This tension—between the credible and the uncanny—is the mark of the Jamesian style.

A Legacy Far Beyond the Fens

The ghost story, once a relic of folklore, had found its most refined expression in the lecture halls and libraries of Cambridge. What began as spiritual inquiry became literature of the highest order. It influenced writers far beyond the university: D.K. Broster, H. Russell Wakefield, Amyas Northcote, A.N.L. Munby, Eleanor Scott—and even American pulp visionaries like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith—owed a debt to that Jamesian moment. Lovecraft, in fact, sent fan mail to Monty, who did not quite know what to make of the American’s pseudoscientific pretentions, neo-logoisms, and idiosyncratic literary-critical apparatus.

But none of them, however skilled, could recapture the magic of the original convergence: late-Victorian rationalism, deep classical knowledge, reformist religious ambivalence, and the cheerful fellowship of young men testing the line between learning and fear.

And so it was that the ghost, once banished by reason, found its most elegant resurrection in the very halls that had sought to explain it.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

It’s no accident that the modern ghost story and the detective story emerged together—sharing a birth-century, a fireside, a readership—and an undeniable link to Edgar Allan Poe! But it’s also no accident that Montague Rhodes James, antiquary and master of the supernatural tale, never turned his pen to a Sherlock Holmes-style investigation. That absence tells us as much about James as any specter in his fiction.

Both the ghost story and the detective story are tales of interruption—a sudden break in the pattern of the world. In the Holmes canon, that interruption must be resolved. A mystery arises, and a man in a greatcoat follows a thread until the world knits itself back together. Justice is served (usually); the order is restored (mostly). M.R. James followed the same pattern only to the moment of confrontation—and then stopped. The thread does not lead to comfort but to contact, and once touched, the world is never the same.

This is one of the crucial differences: where the detective story restores equilibrium, the ghost story shifts it. And James knew it. In fact, he said so more than once.

The biography I’m writing, M.R. James: The Chance of a Ghost, outlines James’s own understanding of genre. He dismissed his stories, rather famously, as “light fare for a winter’s evening”—a sincere modesty as distinct from Doyle’s rather grumpy dismissal of Holmes—but James was clear-eyed about structure. He understood that the ghost story, like the detective tale, had to be constructed with precision. He prized the slow revelation, the epistolary fragment, the letter half-burned. Yet unlike the detectives, James’s protagonists are rarely prepared to interpret what they find. They are antiquarians, scholars, wanderers—and often in immediate fear of their lives. Furthermore, the clues are not logical—they are numinous.

The structure resembles detection, but it undermines the very premise. In “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” the protagonist uncovers a strange manuscript. He reads, senses something lurking, tries to decipher its meaning—and then nearly dies of fright. There is no resolution. The uncanny persists. The mystery, once opened, cannot be shut. Even when a Jamesian hero manages an act of successful ratiocination, as occurs in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” the cleverness of the solution is sicklied over with the pale cast of something with legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body.

And yet, for all this divergence, James was a devoted admirer of Sherlock Holmes.

In 1902, as The Hound of the Baskervilles reached its final serialized installment, James—invigilating the Classical Exam at Caius College—wrote to his father with gleeful prediction:

Only one more number of the Hound. You will see that Stapleton will end his days in the Grimpen mire & Sir Henry will marry the widow.

This letter, unpublished until my discovery of it, reveals a Holmes reader not merely entertained but engaged—and almost correct (Sir Henry does not marry the widow).

Eleven days later, with the last chapter still pending, Monty bought the volume edition of The Hound (pictured) and, decades later, remembered with clarity the naughty-guilty moment of playing hooky: slipping away from the university procession on Lady Day (25 March) with a colleague to hide out in his rooms in order to read the conclusion. The episode remained vivid a quarter century on when he delighted in recollecting it in his autobiographical Eton and Kings.

James would, six years later, nod to Conan Doyle in a subtler but unmistakable way. In “Casting the Runes,” written in 1908, he names the servants’ attending physician “Dr. Watson, a rather recent settler” to the area. The name stands unadorned, but its resonance is hard to miss. That same autumn, Doyle had published “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” in The Strand—in two parts, during September and October—just when Monty would have been composing his own tale. The overlap is too alluring to ignore. (We can dream, can’t we, that the redoubtable John H. Watson made a cameo appearance in one of Monty’s most celebrated ghost stories?)

This admiration was not ironic. James delighted in the economy of the Holmes tales, their elegance of construction. He shared Conan Doyle’s distaste for excessive sentimentalism and his preference for the clipped phrase, the dry detail, the quiet man stepping forward with a problem no one else can solve.

But James refused the finality of solution. That was the point.

In a Holmes story, the supernatural is always a red herring. The glowing hound, the vampire of Sussex, the spectral, yellow face at the window, Bartholomew Sholto’s uncanny rictus and fixed, unnatural grin—these dissolve under Holmes’s lens. There is always a trick. Always a man behind the curtain (except when it is a creeping man, but we’ll not go there).

James reverses this. In his stories, it is the rational explanation that is false, and the supernatural that endures. Holmes reveals the order behind the illusion; James reveals the illusion behind the order. And there is no summing up as found in Baker Street—only the chilling realisation at a seaside inn or lamp-dark chamber.

The scholar in the James tale is not a logician. He is not master of events. He is more often a reader—sometimes literally—who turns a page and finds that the ink has bled into something living. He is as the hapless wanderer who, innocently turning a stone, finds a coiled serpent wagging a threatening tail.

It is not, as some critics suggest, that James lacked interest in detection. He simply recognized that detection closes a door, while haunting leaves it uncomfortably ajar.

In this way, James’s stories are no less constructed than Doyle’s—quite the contrary—but they are constructed to unnerve, not to resolve. Consider, for example, his “Rats” wherein the only gesture towards resolution is reclosing the door—but too late. Both authors wrote tales best read aloud. Both men built narrative devices around quiet rooms and long shadows. But, where Doyle seeks justice, James seeks judgment. That is not the same thing.

So if the detective story is about what happened, the ghost story, in James’s hands, is about what cannot be undone. He leaves us there, just beyond the glow of the lamplight, where something rustles softly that ought not to be moving at all.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

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M.R. James was attentive to Dickens. Though their sensibilities diverged, Monty had a distinct appreciation for A Christmas Carol, admiring what he called its "earnest intention and happy ending"—a rare mark of approbation from a man not usually sentimental about the afterlife. To be fair, however, beyond the appearance of Jacob Marley, James was not convinced that it really was a ghost story. More pertinent, though, is James’s attention to narrative structure, particularly the way Dickens uses the first-person-submerged or what I term the moi-même narrator to destabilize the story’s boundaries. Consider the opening moments of A Christmas Carol:

Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

The reader can only wonder whether this ‘I’ is meant to be Charles Dickens, in his own person, stepping from behind the narrative curtain to speak momentarily in that first-person-submerged, moi même, mode of narration. This anonymous storyteller technique, which M.R. James would favour throughout his ghost-story career, may have been gleaned from Dickens, whom he admired, but it is more likely that Le Fanu provided the model in stories such as “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh,” “Schalken the Painter,” and “Squire Toby’s Will.”

In his own tales, James adopts and then adapts this technique. As he once explained to a friend, he borrowed the tendency to employ the personal, unidentified narrator who gradually, and often unknowingly, uncovers the horror. In this way, Dickens may have helped Monty find a narrative mask—an indirect form of self-presentation. What in Dickens might be exuberant performance, however, becomes, in James, a kind of misdirection: a scholar recounting an anecdote, unaware of the spiritual horror accruing just offstage.

“The Signalman,” perhaps Dickens’s most fully realized ghost story, is deeply Jamesian in mood—or I should say, more accurately, that James is—in a significant way—Signalmannered. The story presents a narrator who, while not “submerged” nevertheless tries, earnestly and impotently, to make sense of a haunting. The story unfolds with a quiet inevitability, and its climactic horror is delivered not through violence but through implication. James took note.

What Dickens discovered is that a ghost is most disturbing when related by an unimpeachable—because unreachable—source. James refined that insight to its coldest edge: a narrator, practically wraith-like himself because invisible, who speaks our own language of doubt and unease whilst telling us something we desire but should never know.

Ever, your fellow spirit
Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: Kissing cousins: The detective story and the ghost story

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It remains a truth universally overlooked that James McBryde—artist, medical student, friend—is the unspoken catalyst behind the ghost stories of M.R. James. Without McBryde’s ink, we may never have had Monty’s dread. Without his death, we might not have had the book.

McBryde, Monty, and Jimbo

James McBryde (or McB, as he was invariably called) came up to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1899 and quickly drew Monty’s attention—not only for his lively presence and humorous sketching, but for his deep fondness for the older scholar. Though nearly twenty years Monty's junior, McB entered James's life as more than an admiring student. He became, as Maisie Fletcher would later write, “almost like an adopted son.”

Born into a family of means, McBryde was initially pushed toward a medical career, earning his LRCP and MRCS, though they signaled only his passing qualifications rather than an ambition to practice. Medicine never suited him. Art called instead. When his father died—leaving him a substantial estate—McBryde saw an opportunity to realign his future. He enrolled at the Slade School of Art and proposed to Monty an audacious idea: to illustrate his mentor’s ghost stories. He hoped the quality of James’s tales, married to his own illustrations, might create a book of some value, a book that might open doors to his book illustration ambitions.

Monty, ever cautious, agreed to a trial sketch.

The drawing, full of affection and sly humour and done on the same Bristol board stock as he would later render the four printed illustrations, was enough to win Monty over. McBryde would go on to create only four of the planned illustrations for Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, including the rendering of Dennistoun in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book—a figure modeled, in part, on Monty himself.

The men bicycled together in Denmark and Sweden, which inspired McBryde’s Troll-Hunt. When James spoke of McBryde to others, there was a warm protectiveness in his tone. Their correspondence, as preserved by McBryde’s widow, Gwendolen, is equally affectionate and ever-polite—witty, tender, and emotionally tuned without being sentimental.

McBryde married Gwendolen Grotrian in July 1903. She was clever, talented, musical, and affectionate—and she came to admire Monty and idly wish she had been a boy if only to remain in his presence at university. The McBrydes seemed genuinely happy. For his best man, he named his old friend Raymond Foster—his roommate from medical school. Monty was unable to attend the wedding.

Tragically, within a year, McBryde fell ill with appendicitis and died 5 June 1904. Gwendolen, four months pregnant, gave birth to their daughter on 27 November—just three days after Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was released. She named the child Jane McBryde McBryde. Monty became her guardian.

The book, so long in gestation, now bore a dedication that rang with grief: “To the memory of James McBryde.” McB’s trial etching—long thought lost—had indeed inspired the publication. His vision, quite literally, gave Monty the impetus to publish. The image itself, the so-called “holy grail” of Jamesian ghost illustration, had long been thought lost or else misidentified as other drawings. During my researches for the biography, however, tucked away within the McBryde family and unregarded, I happily discovered—and purchased—the long-lost illustration, which has since been authenticated by King’s College, Cambridge (where I have left it on permanent loan to reside with the four published illustrations that are also held there). It illustrates McBryde's reconstruction of the tone of an M.R. James tale, for no such scene appears in any surviving M.R. James story. The vision was in all likelihood entirely of McBryde’s own invention unless it is, tantalizingly, an illustration of a heretofore undiscovered story—which, alas, is most doubtful.

After McB’s death, Gwendolen remained in familial contact with Monty. He praised her drawings for his children's book, The Five Jars, which he had written to and for McBryde's daughter, and Monty's goddaughter, Jane, and though the drawings were not ultimately selected for publication due to technical limitations, Monty could not resist keeping them “for a bit” out of sheer fondness. [On a personal side note, I own the copy of Monty’s The Five Jars that once belonged to Christopher Robin Milne, yes, that Christopher Robin Milne. It is inscribed to him by his father, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. The notion of my book having once been propped up beside the original Eeyore brings me no end of wholly un-professorial delight.]

Perhaps the most whimsical of Monty’s memorial gestures came in the form of a privately printed fantasy entitled The Story of a Troll Hunt. Following their 1899 trip through Denmark and Sweden—part sightseeing, part scholarly vagabonding—McBryde created an illustrated letter in homage to their adventures. The tale, smartly drawn and absurdly delightful, today strikes the reader as an early draft of King Kong as reimagined by Dr. Seuss. In it, Monty, McBryde, and their mutual friend W.J. Stone suffer seasickness en route to Denmark (with McBryde humorously untouched by the ordeal); they cross at Esbjerg—rendered “Ebsjaerg” in McBryde’s playful orthography—before heading inland to Kolding, where the “Troll-Hunt” proper begins and the travelogue dissolves into a wildly fantastic adventure.

Monty later arranged for the piece to be printed and distributed to a small circle of friends. In the introduction, he inscribed it jointly to McBryde and Stone, citing Ephesians 2:19: “now no longer sojourners, but citizens.” Thirty-two years later, he would choose that very phrase for his own gravestone. [And, in another idiosyncratic, weirdly personal flight, I note that 2:19 is also the date of my own birth. Sorry. We antiquarians are an odd lot.]

And so the relationship between M.R. James and James McBryde must be understood not as one of equals, nor merely as collaborators, but in the mould of the time honoured and most intimate of human configurations: that of mentor and protégé. Monty, the careful, reticent, rule-bound man of letters, found in McB someone to guide, someone to admire him openly, someone to laugh with him when others merely deferred. McBryde, for his part, gained not just artistic support but intellectual affection, the kind that shields and sharpens a young talent.

It was not a romance. But it was love. Love, in that other and more potent sense, where admiration runs downstream into friendship and pools there—still, deep, and enduring.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: The Legacy of Charles Dickens’ ghosts

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James understood this. If Montague Rhodes James was the twentieth century’s master of the antiquarian ghost story, then Shakespeare was his theatrical progenitor. James quoted Shakespeare more than any other author, including Le Fanu. The influence is persistent, structural, and thematic. Banquo’s ghost, for instance—bleeding, mute, unrelenting—stalks Macbeth’s banquet with precisely the atmospheric grammar that James later used in “Martin’s Close” and “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance.” These are not sentimental phantoms. They are agents of judgment, figures who upend the natural order, then vanish.

The Weird Sisters of Macbeth, meanwhile, with their bubbling cauldron and incantatory speech, give us the image of the witch we still retain. When children dress in black robes and pointy hats on Hallowe’en night, they do so under the long shadow of Shakespeare’s moor. The witches do not merely plot—they prophesy, manipulate, and tease fate into action. That dramaturgical energy, that ritualistic invocation, undergirds the entire supernatural tradition James inherited that finds resonance in stories such as his “The Ash-Tree",” the unpublished “Fenstanton Witch,” and even “Lost Hearts.”

In Hamlet, we find the ghost as tempter and test. Hamlet’s father appears with mission and mystery, urging revenge but offering no proof. Is he a tormented soul or a devil in disguise? James returns to this ambiguity in “Casting the Runes” and “Number 13,” where the ghost may be spectral or infernal—but never, quite, resolved. The power of the ghost, for both Shakespeare and James, lies in its capacity to destabilize. It forces the protagonist not just into action, but into doubt.

Even Richard III, with its chain of vengeful spirits who visit the usurper before Bosworth Field, casts its long spell. Those ghosts are not horror figures, but moral visitants—spectral reckonings in the night. James captures the same mood in “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” where the haunting is not just spectral, but judicial.

In the very title of one of his own ghost stories, James lifted a fragment from The Winter’s Tale—Mamilius’s “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard”—and turned it into a tale of quiet, ritualistic dread. It was not plagiarism. It was homage. James knew, as we should know, that Shakespeare’s ghosts are not merely dramatic—they are cultural. They give form to our fears.

So now that the Hallowe’en season has returned, with its fog machines and paper cauldrons and rattling chains, let us recall that it is not the Celts or the Druids or even the Victorians who gave us our received stage dressing. It is Shakespeare. His ghosts are not simply for fright—they are for memory. And at Hallowe’en, above all, we remember.

Ever, your fellow spirit
Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: James McBryde and M.R. James

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The Impetus: A Grave Blooms Flowers

The immediate catalyst for publication was loss. On Sunday, 5 June 1904, James McBryde—Monty’s dear friend and intended illustrator—died following surgery for appendicitis. He was only twenty-eight. Monty, who had deferred his friend’s enthusiastic ghost story illustrations for nearly a year, was shaken. The project, which Monty had previously delayed by inertia, disinterest, and distraction, now became urgent.

McBryde’s widow, Gwendolen, sent Monty four completed drawings just two days after the funeral. By Friday of the same week, 10 June, Monty had approached publisher Edward Arnold with the manuscript. The publisher responded with unusual speed and enthusiasm. Within twelve days, Arnold was already requesting additional stories to fill out the volume. The tone of the publisher’s letter is unambiguous: "we have greatly enjoyed the stories and must manage to make a book of them somehow, whatever happens." A thin book would fetch 4s.6d.; a full-sized one could command 6s. Commercial viability depended on volume, so Monty was requested to put up additional material.

Monty supplied two more stories: one of them he had originally decided was not of sufficient quality to be included, "Lost Hearts," but it had the advantage of being already written, having first been read to the Chitchat Society in 1893 alongside "Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book." The other, "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," was written afresh in the summer of 1904. “Treasure,” inspired by stained glass at Ashridge and built on punning onomastic games, was crafted specifically for quiet reading rather than spoken performance and allowed Monty to indulge in visual puzzles best suited to the page. With those, the collection was complete.

Yet it was not McBryde alone who had originally championed publication. At Christmastime 1903, Monty hosted a gathering in his rooms at King’s—a tradition marked by ghost stories and dry witticisms. In attendance was Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin, a rugby “blue” and former chorister who had once played Monty's housekeeper in a college farce. Giblin had returned from a spell of gold prospecting in British Columbia and joined the gathering that year. During one of the readings, Monty shared McBryde’s trial illustration for the book that Monty was not at that time seriously planning to pursue. The idea of publication was raised, and it was Giblin’s strong encouragement that helped tip the balance. He believed the ghost stories were of unusually fine quality and that a book collecting them together would be well received, and his practical advocacy, grounded in affection and robust common sense, played no small part in moving Monty from private readings to public print, but it was the untimely death of McBryde that finally set Monty onto publishing them.

The Book as Object: A Volume for the Season

Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary appeared in Britain on Thursday, 24 November 1904—Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Edward Arnold packaged the book not as ephemeral entertainment but as a “Special Christmas Book.” Instead of a paper dust jacket, it featured two-color embossing on art canvas and boasted yapp binding, a presentation style more commonly reserved for Bibles. A.C. Benson dismissed it as “bound in sackcloth,” but the design was intentional: austere, handsome, tactile.

Its release was followed, three days later, by the posthumous birth of McBryde’s daughter—Jane McBryde McBryde—whom Monty would soon after agree to serve as guardian. He received the news of her arrival while at Eton, observing Founder’s Day, and remarked, with a mix of gallows humor and Edwardian prejudice, “I rather regret its sex, but it must be as it may.” The regret was that McBryde’s child would not be able to enter the all-boy institution of Eton that Monty loved so well. She would, however, grow to be very close to Monty, and he would write his only children’s book, The Five Jars, in the form of a letter to her and would also dedicate it to her.

Reactions: Private, Public, and Transatlantic

Reactions from Monty’s circle were brisk and predictable. Gwen McBryde called the book “beautifully got up.” The Cropper sisters reportedly fought over it, then read it in horrified delight. It gave Eustace Talbot “two bad nights and a jumpy walk on a dark foggy evening.” A.C. Benson liked what he peeped at but, in classic Bensonian fashion, never quite got around to reading the whole.

The first public review appeared in The Daily News on Tuesday, 27 December. The reviewer, a connoisseur of the genre, insisted that “no ghost story should be merely a ghost story.” There must be characters “to sympathise with . . . to fear for . . . to make us shudder when the moment comes.” James’s stories fulfilled the critic’s trinity: serious ghosts, compelling characters, and terror that arrives “straight, hideous, awful . . . alive, clammy, essentially evil.” The verdict was clear: “first-rate ghost stories.”

American response was slower and cooler. The New York Times, upon receipt of the volume, doubted “if antiquaries are the fittest men to tell ghost stories.” While acknowledging a “pretty well-defined creepy feeling,” the reviewer declared that James’s efforts were “not quite the real thing.” The implication, of course, was that antiquarians should stick to their catalogues.

Still, the book sold briskly and went into a second British printing before May 1905. By then, Monty’s own title had changed—from Fellow of King’s College to Provost of the same—and the ghosts, having been released from manuscript, had begun to linger in parlours, libraries, and bedrooms across Britain.

A Literary Contrapasso

It is tempting to read Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary as merely a pastiche of Le Fanu, a nod to the winter tale, or a private amusement made public. But it is also, at its core, a memorial. James McBryde’s name is not on the title page, but his spirit haunts the volume more vividly than any of Monty’s revenants. The illustrations—“the best thing I have ever drawn,” McB said of his “Whistle” sketch—are acts of loving precision. Their creator, who taught himself advanced perspective to satisfy Monty’s spatial demands, never lived to see them in print.

Monty’s response was primarily sentimental with a touch of the practical. He published McBryde’s Troll-Hunt privately, became godfather to his infant daughter, and arranged for a book that, until his friend’s death, was little better than speculative. The stories, composed over a decade of Christmases and read aloud in the Chitchat rooms at Cambridge and around Christmas firesides for his friends, now found permanence in cloth binding, fixed type, and yapp-edged solidity.

In later years, Monty would reflect that a ghost story should be “short, read aloud, and offer a pleasing terror.” But Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary does more. It transforms a private grief into a public genre. It gives form to scholarly unease. It commits to paper the suggestion that affection—like knowledge—once unearthed, cannot be returned.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: How Shakespeare ‘invented’ Hallowe’en

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

But the day carries older resonances as well. In the Christian calendar, August 1st is Lammas Day—Loaf Mass Day—when the first bread baked from the new wheat crop was brought to church in thanks. In the Celtic calendar, particularly among the Irish, it is Lughnasadh, a festival dedicated to the god Lugh, marking the onset of the harvest season. While Lammas leans toward sacramental gratitude, Lughnasadh revels in communal rites—games, feasting, courting—and both are steeped in a reverence for cycles, thresholds, and transformations.

James, though no folklorist in the academic sense, was exquisitely attuned to these rhythms. His stories turn not on grand battles between good and evil, but on the subtle violations of boundary: a curtain lifted, a name spoken, a line crossed. There is in his work a constant awareness of liminal space—the narrow season between light and dark, between grain and chaff, between the remembered and the forgotten. Lammas and Lughnasadh, with their mingling of reverence and unease, might well have appealed to his narrative instincts.

He was born the youngest of four children—Sydney, Herbert (called Ber), Grace, and Monty—to Herbert James, a clergyman of Evangelical conviction, and Mary Emily James, whose firm affection helped shape Monty’s quietly affectionate disposition. His earliest years were spent at Goodnestone, where his father served as perpetual curate.

In 1865, five weeks before Monty turned three, the family relocated to Great Livermere in Suffolk. The move was prompted by his father’s appointment to the rectory of St. Peter’s, a living which offered not only a more stable income but also proximity to the broader intellectual and ecclesiastical life of the region. If Goodnestone offered a childhood cribbed within the vicarage walls, Livermere expanded the world.

The landscape of Great Livermere made a profound and permanent impression on him. Tales of spectral monks, a headless ghost rising from the mere, and an 18th-century murderer buried half beneath the churchyard wall all swirled through the village’s lore. One grim account tells of Arundell Coke, hanged for attempted murder in 1722, whose corpse, denied burial in consecrated ground, was interred by his faithful butler half under the wall of Little Livermere’s abandoned churchyard. (When bones were unearthed in 1966 beside the wall, villagers whispered it was Coke at last!) Another tale told of a Mothersole grave—empty when opened during vestry renovations—prompting whispered charges of witchcraft. And always there were the tales: a man beheaded in the bell tower, his ghost wandering with head tucked beneath his arm; the graveyard’s north side said to be reserved for the ‘ungodly,’ for it was closest to the pulpit where salvation’s instruction might reach the unsaved soul. For young Monty, who wandered the grave mounds and watched the oak branches rake the dusk, this was not just village chatter. It was foundational.

The church, the darkened lanes, the wide mere, and the whispering woods formed a living backdrop to his imagination. The rectory’s library, filled with theological texts and antiquarian volumes, became his sanctuary. It was here that he first encountered the medieval manuscripts and ecclesiastical histories that would later inform his scholarly pursuits and literary creations. The Livermere years formed the bedrock of his spiritual and imaginative compass.

At eleven, he left the familiar fogs of Suffolk for Temple Grove School, an austere institution in East Sheen, where his brilliance and reticence set him apart. He went armed not with bravado, but with memory—the sense of an English village haunted not only by spirits, but by time itself.

Ever, your fellow spirit
Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: How Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary almost never was

Newsletters arrive the first of every month at 08:30 Eastern.

The story had been written nearly two years before the now-famous public reading of 1893 occurred; it was most likely begun during the Christmas of 1891 in his family home at the Rectory of Great Livermere, Suffolk, and read then in private for his family circle, “Scrap-book” was inspired by a convergence of scholarship and travel. Monty had lately read a supposedly true-life ghost account, Augustus Jessopp’s “An Antiquary’s Ghost Story,” in which a ghostly hand appeared on the desk beside Jessopp while he was poring over a book—exactly the phenomenon that befalls Dennistoun in “Scrap-book.” The tale was sharpened further by Monty’s 1892 visit to Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, a snowbound excursion from Loures-Barousse to the great Romanesque cathedral that inspired the story’s setting. There, he sketched floorplans, took notes, and fell ill—an event which did nothing to blunt the sweetness of the place in his estimation.

But the tale remained unread in public until the Chitchat Society meeting of 28 October 1893.

The Chitchat Society: Context and Company

The Chitchat was no mere supper club. It was a crucible for the intellectual elite of Cambridge, a gathering of dons, fellows, and promising undergraduates who met regularly to present papers on literature, science, theology, and—when Monty’s influence waxed—supernatural phenomena. Thirteen men were present that evening. Among them were Fred (E.F.) Benson, Dr. Charles Waldstein, and Eustace Talbot. Two newly elected members, Simey and Watkins, attended as well.

Monty had guided the Society’s timbre for years. It was he who had spoken on the grotesque. It was he who had invited Tatham to present his Protestant vision of ghosts. And it was he who—through soft charisma and precise taste—had made it possible to read a ghost story aloud and receive not just indulgence but admiration.

On this night, Monty offered two stories: the elder “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book,” and a new creation, “Lost Hearts.” These were not casual entertainments. They were carefully structured, movingly performed, and meant to be heard rather than read. In the case of “Lost Hearts,” Monty’s soft reading voice conferred narrative authority where the text offered little—bridging the implausibility of a seemingly omniscient narrator with the gravitas of oral tradition.

Canon Alberic: The Mechanism of Terror

Monty understood that terror must descend in increments. In “Scrap-book,” we see the classic Jamesian progression from the rational to the irrational. At first, Dennistoun mistakes the demonic presence at his elbow for a penwiper. Then perhaps a rat. Then—a giant spider. Only after these reasonable misapprehensions does he glimpse the true horror: the demon’s hand. It is not described at first; it is guessed at, sensed, and then, just as it appears, it retreats.

This is the M.R. James moment—the flash of the supernatural followed by its withdrawal, like a sea-creature breaking the surface and slipping back into the deep. The effect is not shrieking fear but predatory watchfulness. The dread is not extinguished; it is deferred. It remains, circling the edges of the reader’s consciousness like the creature beneath the water, never fully seen again.

Monty knew better than to allow his creatures to overstay their welcome. A lesser writer might have left Dennistoun disemboweled on the flagstones. Monty gives us something far more unnerving: the suggestion that the thing might still be watching, that the danger has not been resolved but merely passed along to the next reader, the next unwary antiquary.

And Monty, ever the antiquary himself, knew what he was doing.

Narrative Irony and Ghostly Economy

The structure of “Scrap-book” introduces several patterns Monty would use repeatedly: a haunted object, a spectral guardian, and a naive interloper whose curiosity invites terror. The object here—a sacrilegious scrapbook compiled by a possibly damned cleric—represents the Jamesian inclination that textual corruption begets spiritual peril. What has been bound within this book is not merely demonic imagery but a spiritual contagion, a residue of Alberic’s own transgression.

Monty concludes the story with a curious blend of relief and irreverence. Dennistoun, recovering, arranges a Mass for the soul of Canon Alberic—only to protest, in fine Presbyterian fashion, at the expense. The scrapbook is burned. But not before it is photographed, raising new questions. Has the terror been expunged? Or simply translated into a new medium?

A Ghost Story Read by Candlelight

The Chitchat reading of 1893 is not just the first performance of Monty’s ghost stories; it is the birth of the Jamesian mode itself. The audience was composed of those who shared his intellectual frame, his ironic reserve, his delight in the grotesque when rendered with classical precision. That one member, Simey, resigned the following week may say more about personal taste than literary quality. But the event itself became lore.

What makes this moment so singular is not simply that a ghost story was read aloud—it is that it was this ghost story, by this man, in that room, at that time. The dry voice. The precise diction. The implication that ghosts are real, but their true nature is unknowable. It was a performance and a proposition, a new way of making the supernatural credible.

A Scholar’s Ghost

By the time Monty became Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum weeks later, he had not only published serious biblical scholarship, catalogued medieval glass, and assisted Jessopp in writing St. William of Norwich—he had also, with the barest hint of mischief, inaugurated a literary tradition. “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” was not simply a ghost story. It was the prototype of a modern form, one born of antiquarianism, irony, moral dread, and academic rigor.

He would refine the pattern. He would complicate it. But never again would he write a story as foundational, as quietly revolutionary, or as self-revealing.

In that first Chitchat reading, Monty presented not merely a tale, but a thesis: that the past is never still, and those who disturb it do so at their peril.

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: M.R. James’ birthday & the unknown

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

My dear literary spirit,
Those of us who traffic in ghost stories tend to share a private admiration for those few who turned the form into something deeper than anecdote. Among these, M.R. James remains unsurpassed. But Monty—no less than any of us—had his influences, and chief among them was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

It is pronounced similarly to laugh anew.

It was Le Fanu who first prized what I’ve elsewhere called mythic distance: the measured placement of the tale in a comfortably bygone age. In “Madam Crowl’s Ghost,” a seventy-year-old narrator recalls the events of her thirteenth year. In “The Dead Sexton,” the tale is still told “by winter firesides,” handed down with the “mellowing influence of years.” This antiquarian approach—where narrators are often grandsons of eyewitnesses or anonymous inheritors of old stories—allowed Le Fanu to pair gothic atmosphere with the subtle claim of veracity. That sense of removed-yet-authentic testimony was not lost on James.

Monty famously observed that we “listen more readily” to ghost stories “if the narrator poses as elderly, or throws back his experience to ‘some thirty years ago.’” In both writers, time is not simply backdrop; it is the mechanism by which belief is made possible.

Le Fanu also experimented—sometimes clumsily, often brilliantly—with narrative structure. In “Squire Toby’s Will,” the opening paragraphs offer us a seemingly random wayfarer atop the York-to-London coach. This unnamed narrator recounts, in detail, the dreams, visions, and inner thoughts of characters who lived in a manor he passes on the trip, people with whom he never came or comes into contact. It’s illogical. It violates narrative sense. And yet, Le Fanu preferred this bizarre first-person narrative to a far more logical third-person omniscience. Why? Because the personal voice, even a baffling one, conveys immediacy. It feels closer to truth.

James understood this. He admired “Squire Toby,” editing it into his 1923 collection, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, and praised its “excellent qualities.” And he restructured it into his own tale, “The Tractate Middoth.” That same insistence on the obscure narrator—awkwardly inserted (sometimes), casually anonymous (always)—reappears in James’s own works, where a lightly sketched antiquarian or unnamed “I” provides just enough authority to deliver the tale, but never enough to clarify it.

Le Fanu, as suggested, had a distinct flair for the improbable and even attempted to create medical explanations for supernatural events in his tales. In a Glass Darkly (1872) introduces Dr. Martin Hessalius, a Swedenborgian physician who classifies hauntings as psychological ailments. In “Green Tea,” the Revd Mr. Jennings is tormented by a red-eyed demon-monkey. Hessalius blames the clergyman’s diet. In “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” he declares an entire household to have fallen victim to “clairvoyant contagion,” the result of their inner eyes briefly opening in unison. The diagnoses are absurd—but intentionally so. By the time of In a Glass Darkly, Le Fanu seems to mock the very rationalism he once upheld. Science becomes patter. Spectres remain unclassified, and perhaps that is the point. Le Fanu could be satirizing science rather than spiritual belief, and he remains coy about revealing which is his intended target.

James, though circumspect in questions of the occult, was not blind to its fictional necessity. He admired “Green Tea” and even borrowed from it in his “Casting the Runes,” though he noted the Le Fanu tale was “not quite” a ghost story, neither is “Runes.” He regarded Le Fanu’s “The Familiar” the best ghost story ever written and, again, borrowed from it in his final-and-posthumously published tale, “A Vignette.” These tales haunted him not because they resolved, but because they refused to.

Where Le Fanu’s spirits are agents of moral retribution—Furies in spectral dress—James’s hauntings unfold from the merely unfortunate: a man opens a manuscript, disturbs a whistle, glimpses an engraving. Le Fanu’s ghosts pursue. James’s ghosts emerge.

This contrast is not accidental. Le Fanu writes of guilt. James writes of transgression. One is Catholic at its root (although Le Fanu was not). The other, Anglican. One punishes sin. The other warns the curious.

And yet both, in their way, trust in the effect of reticence. As James put it: “The object is to mystify and alarm,” nothing more. But the reader, suspicious of simplicity, looks again . . . curiously!

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: The first ghost story

Newsletters arrive the first of each month at 08:30 Eastern.

For many years, I have studied the genre of the classic ghost story in its richest and most resonant forms. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching university courses devoted entirely to the British ghost story, with a particular focus on the elegant terror crafted by M.R. James and his literary descendants. My work in this field led to membership in Eton College’s Henry VI Society, a distinction awarded in recognition of my contributions to the study of James’s legacy—and my devotion to the upkeep of his nearly forgotten grave (hence my rather sour expression, circa 2011, below).

M.R. James remains the central-most figure in what I consider the literary ghost story—an art form that differs sharply from the American horror tale, with its frequent reliance on gore, shocks, wobbly pan-galactics, and psychological breakdowns. James, by contrast, practiced reticence. He believed in suggestion. He developed ghosts as ruptures in the natural order—intrusions that should remain unknowable.

In that spirit, this newsletter will follow what is often called the Jamesian tradition, a lineage that includes A.C. Benson, E.F. Benson, R.H. Benson, and H.F.W. Tatham—writers who absorbed James’s principles and shaped their own quiet terrors. Others in this direct Jamesian line of descent include Arthur Gray, Arthur Reed Ropes (writing as Adrian Ross), and E.G. Swain, who would collectively create nearly two hundred stories in the so-called Jamesian pattern.

Others, too, would follow shortly after—writers such as D.K. Broster, H. Russell Wakefield, Amyas Northcote, Walter de la Mare, R.H. Malden, Marjorie Bowen, A.N.L. Munby, Eleanor Scott—and the James spark would ignite interest in the divergent literary ghost manifestations of W.H. Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood. But we will also pay our respects to those who came before, including Margaret Oliphant, whose tales of the supernatural James admired for their intelligence and depth of feeling—and, of course, Sheridan Le Fanu.

And, for those only recently entered into this world, M.R. James did not write The Turn of the Screw. That was Henry James (no relation, though they did meet once at Lamb House, with E.F. Benson, for tea—where Henry left Monty with the impression of having spent the afternoon with a rather stuffy butler).

This newsletter will seek to trace the aforementioned Jamesian lineages. It will peer into dusty corners of forgotten libraries. It will raise the curtains on candlelit rooms. And yes, it will sometimes step deeper into darkness than is quite comfortable.

But always—always—with a scholar’s eye.

Here you will find:

• Reflections on M.R. James and the British ghost story tradition

• Analyses of narrative craft and the art of subtle terror

• Thematic threads across supernatural literature and folklore

• Antecedents to and near cousins of the ghost story genre

I won’t clutter your inbox. You’ll receive one newsletter per month—on the first at 08:30 Eastern time: newsletters drawn from the quiet but never still regions. These will be essays that respect your time, challenge your imagination, and keep company with the best ghosts that literature has to offer: the elite of the ghost class, if you will.

And how fitting that we begin today, on May 1st—Beltane, the old Gaelic festival that marked the threshold of summer. Once celebrated with bonfires and floral garlands, Beltane was a liminal moment, a turning of the year when the veil between worlds was thought to thin. Light and dark, life and death, spring and fire.

In that spirit of passage and presence, this newsletter steps forward—rooted in the ghostly past, lit by the brief flare of insight, and moving always toward what might be waiting just out of sight.

As to my newsletter title, From the Unquiet Silence, I plead guilty to a certain melodramatic impulse. With apologies. But there is motive here as well. While it suggests the spectral world that we will investigate, it is also, and foremost, an apt description of the act of reading wherein words speak silently.

If you’re a reader who prefers a spectral chill over a slimy gross out, if you believe that the supernatural is most powerful when it intrudes stealthily, and if you delight in stories that leave a faint echo after the last word, then I suspect you’ll feel at home here.

Next month, we will explore the influence of Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu. In the meantime . . .

Welcome to From the Unquiet Silence—we’ve been waiting for you!

Ever, your fellow spirit,
Brian Jay Corrigan, JD PhD DLitt(h.c.)

New posts arrive the first of every month at 08:30 Eastern