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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, Fall 1945
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on the great Romantic poets and story writers of their time and on the weird fiction that followed them, some of their themes and devices surviving in diluted form even down to the twentieth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was an access of interest in Rosicurcianism, cabalism, and other occult mysteries, which was expressed notably in the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and a few lesser writers. But most Victorian supernatural fiction, as might be expected, consisted of ghost stories of an attenuated, sentimental variety frequently written by women, who were gaining an increasing hold on popular fiction while masculine authors busied themselves with social and historical themes. Charles Dickens, in "A Christmas Tree," spends several pages summarizing some typical plots of the period. "There is no end," he says, "to the old house, with resounding galleries, and dismal state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut for many years, through which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and encounter any number of ghosts but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to a very few general types and classes; for ghosts have little originality, and 'walk' in a beaten track." (5) Then, as Dr. James says, "He gives us at some length the experience of the nobleman and the ghost of the beautiful young housekeeper who drowned herself in the park two hundred years before; and, more cursorily, the indelible bloodstain, the door that will not shut, the clock that strikes thirteen, the phantom coach, the compact to appear after death, the girl who meets her double, the cousin who is seen at the moment of his death far away in India, the maiden lady who 'really did see the Orphan Boy.'" (6) After three-quarters of a century of these feeble, sentimental maunderings, the straightforward, ironic, grisly tales of M. R. James came as a refreshing shock. To be sure, James had his antecendents, but their influence in his writings is not very marked. He was particularly fond of Dickens and Thackeray, but the paucity of their ghost stories gave them little opportunity to influence James. From Dickens he may have received some encouragement in the depiction of his amusing "low characters", but the great novelist's two serious ghost stories, "To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt" and "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man," bear little resemblance to James's work, except that they have modern everyday settings and the former story contains some business about someone's counting a group of men and arriving at an uncertain total because of the half-perceived presence of a ghost in the assembly---a device which James employed in "Count Magnus" and "Casting the Runes". As for Thackeray, who wrote no supernatural fiction (except "The Notch in the Axe," a burlesque on Bulwer-Lytton), it is doubtful whether he contributed more than perhaps some elements of his detached, paternalistic style. A much more powerful influence, and one which James openly acknowledged, was that of the Irish weirdist, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose leisurely, atmospheric, oft-repeated stories and novels were the prototypes of the "old English manor house" type of ghost story. Through out his life Japes was a fervent champion of Le Fanu's work and was one of those chiefly responsible for rescuing it from obscurity. He lectured on Le Fanu before the Royal Institution of Great Britain and edited a collection of his lesser-known stories, Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, in which he asserted unequivocally, "He stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories. That is my deliberate verdict after reading all the supernatural tales I have been able to get hold of. Nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly." (7) And again: If Dicken's ghost stories are good and of the right complexion, they are not the best that were written in his -- 6 --
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on the great Romantic poets and story writers of their time and on the weird fiction that followed them, some of their themes and devices surviving in diluted form even down to the twentieth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was an access of interest in Rosicurcianism, cabalism, and other occult mysteries, which was expressed notably in the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and a few lesser writers. But most Victorian supernatural fiction, as might be expected, consisted of ghost stories of an attenuated, sentimental variety frequently written by women, who were gaining an increasing hold on popular fiction while masculine authors busied themselves with social and historical themes. Charles Dickens, in "A Christmas Tree," spends several pages summarizing some typical plots of the period. "There is no end," he says, "to the old house, with resounding galleries, and dismal state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut for many years, through which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and encounter any number of ghosts but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to a very few general types and classes; for ghosts have little originality, and 'walk' in a beaten track." (5) Then, as Dr. James says, "He gives us at some length the experience of the nobleman and the ghost of the beautiful young housekeeper who drowned herself in the park two hundred years before; and, more cursorily, the indelible bloodstain, the door that will not shut, the clock that strikes thirteen, the phantom coach, the compact to appear after death, the girl who meets her double, the cousin who is seen at the moment of his death far away in India, the maiden lady who 'really did see the Orphan Boy.'" (6) After three-quarters of a century of these feeble, sentimental maunderings, the straightforward, ironic, grisly tales of M. R. James came as a refreshing shock. To be sure, James had his antecendents, but their influence in his writings is not very marked. He was particularly fond of Dickens and Thackeray, but the paucity of their ghost stories gave them little opportunity to influence James. From Dickens he may have received some encouragement in the depiction of his amusing "low characters", but the great novelist's two serious ghost stories, "To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt" and "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man," bear little resemblance to James's work, except that they have modern everyday settings and the former story contains some business about someone's counting a group of men and arriving at an uncertain total because of the half-perceived presence of a ghost in the assembly---a device which James employed in "Count Magnus" and "Casting the Runes". As for Thackeray, who wrote no supernatural fiction (except "The Notch in the Axe," a burlesque on Bulwer-Lytton), it is doubtful whether he contributed more than perhaps some elements of his detached, paternalistic style. A much more powerful influence, and one which James openly acknowledged, was that of the Irish weirdist, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose leisurely, atmospheric, oft-repeated stories and novels were the prototypes of the "old English manor house" type of ghost story. Through out his life Japes was a fervent champion of Le Fanu's work and was one of those chiefly responsible for rescuing it from obscurity. He lectured on Le Fanu before the Royal Institution of Great Britain and edited a collection of his lesser-known stories, Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, in which he asserted unequivocally, "He stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories. That is my deliberate verdict after reading all the supernatural tales I have been able to get hold of. Nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly." (7) And again: If Dicken's ghost stories are good and of the right complexion, they are not the best that were written in his -- 6 --
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