A Century of Madam Crowl’s Ghost -- by Jim Rockhill

 LeFanu, portrait by his son

Although most of his novels were properly attributed upon publication between hardcovers[i] within a year of their serialization, only a few of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s many short stories and novellas were credited to him upon his death on 7 February 1873,  leaving the majority languishing anonymously in a variety of magazines. 

Until his friend Arthur Perceval Graves (1846-1933) gathered thirteen pieces from the Dublin University Magazine [D.U.M.] as The Purcell Papers (London: Richard Bentley) in 1880, and followed that up with The Poems of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (London: Downey & Co.) in 1896, the only works of less than novel length by Le Fanu known to the public were “The Haunted Baronet” and two other Chronicles of Golden Friars (London: Richard Bentley, 1871), “The Dead Sexton” in Across the Bridge (the Christmas Number of Once a Week, December 1871), the five longish tales of In a Glass Darkly (London: Richard Bentley, 1872), and “Dickon the Devil” (London Society, Christmas 1872).

George Brinsley Le Fanu (1855-1935) sent the story fragment “Hyacinth O’Toole” to Temple Bar in 1884, and illustrated a few editions of his father’s work during his association with the London publisher Edmund Downey (1856-1937), but his reprinting of previously unattributed works is limited to “The Watcher” in (The Watcher and Other Weird Stories, 1894),[ii] The Cock and Anchor and The Evil Guest (both 1895).

This situation began to change in 1916 when S[tewart] M[arsh] Ellis (1845-1933) published the first bibliography of Le Fanu’s work in The Irish Book Lover (Vol. VIII, Nos. 3-4, October-November 1916, pp. 30-33) to complement his illustrated essay “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu” in The Bookman (Volume 51, No. 301, October 1916,  pp. 15-21), an essay he later reworked for inclusion in Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1931). Ellis lists not only the novels, stories, and verse previously known, citing both serialization and book publication, but also journalism, and—mirabile dictu—the first acknowledgement of the author’s first collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1851), “Some Account of the Latter Days of Sir Richard Marston, of Dunoran” D.U.M., April-June 1848), “The Mysterious Lodger” (D.U.M.,. January-February 1850), and “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod” (D.U.M., January 1851).

This laid the groundwork for M[ontague] R[hodes] James (1862-1936) to search the wide field of Victorian publications in full antiquarian mode for further specimens of Le Fanu’s work:  

stories which have not been reprinted or collected up to the present time . . . are only discoverable by research, and research of this particular kind into the files of more or less forgotten periodicals of the sixties and early seventies is not very easily carried out. I am convinced that I have missed some stories; yet I have done a good deal of ransacking, as occasion offered

This worthy endeavour yielded Madam Crowl’s Ghost, and Other Tales of Mystery (London: G. Bell), published one hundred years ago this month: November 1923. Here at last was not only a fuller and more detailed list of the author’s works gleaned through careful reading and comparison of who knows how many hundred pages of Victorian magazines and other ephemera, and an assessment of Le Fanu as novelist and story-teller. From the D.U.M. he identifies four hitherto unattributed stories, one more from Temple Bar, and six from All the Year Round. 

Dust-wrapper to the Oct 1925 Cheap Ed.

Better still, he offers a generous sampling of the stories he and Ellis had recovered. And what stories they are! In addition to rescuing the title story embedded in the short novel “A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay” in Chronicles of Golden Friars, James reprints the known but difficult to obtain “Dickon the Devil”, and ten other stories fully exploring Le Fanu’s range from the grotesquely comical—“Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House in Aungier Street” (D.U.M., December 1853) and “Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling” (D.U.M., April 1864), to tragedy focusing on the dynamics in folkloric—“The Child that Went with the Fairies” (All the Year Round, 5 February 1870) —historical “Ultor de Lacy” (D.U.M., December 1861)  and  family settings—“Squire Toby’s Will” (Temple Bar, January 1868).

James concludes the note that precedes the list of stories he has discovered with the statement, “Some one will, I hope, supplement my list. It is offered here, with all faults.” Further discoveries have been made since the publication of Madam Crowl’s Ghost, and Other Tales of Mystery, up to W. J. Mc Cormack’s (1947- ) uncovering of “Spalatro” and “Borrhomeo the Astrologer” in “Sheridan Le Fanu and the Authorship of Anonymous Fiction in The Dublin University Magazine” (Long Room 14-15, 1976-1977, pp. 32-36). Some of these finds have stood the test of time, others have proven doubtful[iii], and at least one[iv] was an outright fabrication; but one hundred years later this volume’s evidence of James’s devotion to the man he deemed “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories” remains exemplary in its combination of scholarship, taste, and sheer diligence. 

(Jim Rockhill) 

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[i] His first two novels between hardcovers, The Cock and Anchor – Being a Chronicle of Old Dublin (Dublin: William Curry, 1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien – A Tale of the Wars of King James (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1847) also premiered anonymously, though they were later published as Le Fanu’s works by Downey & Co. in 1895 and 1896 respectively. I have addressed the complicated story behind the suspected Le Fanu novel first identified by W. J. Mc Cormack, Loved and Lost (D.U.M., September 1868 – May 1869), and the Anonymous The Story of My Love (London: Richard Bentley, 1869) in my introduction to S. T. Joshi’s reprint edition of Loved and Lost for Sarnath Press (2021).

[ii] First published in the D.U.M. (November 1847), but by this time many readers would have been familiar with the later version published in In a Glass Darkly. Cock and Anchor and The Evil Guest would also have been somewhat familiar, since Le Fanu had revised the first novel as Morley Court (London: Chapman & Hall, 1873) and the second as A Lost Name (London: Richard Bentley, 1868). 

[iii] The most frustrating and seemingly inextinguishable of these relates to the American edition of A Stable for Nightmares (New York: New Amsterdam Book Co, 1896), which emblazons Le Fanu’s name on the cover, even though it contains only one story by Le Fanu, and attempts to clarify that on the title page by stating it also contains stories by Sir Charles Young, Bart., and (in much smaller print) others. None of the stories are identified by author, though the book begins with Le Fanu’s “Dickon the Devil” and ends with Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?”. All the stories but one, which must be the work of Sir Charles Young, traveled overseas from the first British edition from Tinsley Brothers in 1868, which also fails to identify its authors.

[iv] “The Churchyard Yew” appeared in the July 1947 issue of Weird Tales as the work of “J. SHERIDAN LeFANU” was a pastiche by August Derleth (1909-1971), a hoax he perpetuated in Night’s Yawning Peal (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House-Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952) and the Arkham House edition of The Purcell Papers (1975), though a posthumous note on the first page of the story in the latter volume admits the deception.

new issue of Fastitocalon

I'm somewhat late on reporting this, but the second issue (concluding the"Immortals and the Undead" theme of volume one) of Fastitocalon appeared around the end of last year.  I'll copy the table of contents below.  I contributed a couple of "Notes on Neglected Fantasists", and an article on M.R. James and Dracula, which identifies for the first time in English the author of the pre-Dracula vampire story "The Mysterious Stranger", revived by Montague Summers in the 1930s from an old translation from the German, published without attribution.  The story is by the completely forgotten C. von Wachsmann (1787-1862); it appeared under the title "Der Fremde" in the 1844 volume of his Erzählungen und Novellen. 

Another article in the new issue of Fastitocalon worth noting here is Robert Eighteen-Bisang's "Arthur Conan Doyle's Dracula" which presents a fascinating thesis about Doyle's "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client". Order via the publisher's website, or for more information see the journal's website.

Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern [v 1 #2, 2010] (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, ISBN 978-86821-274-7 ISSN 1869-960X, Euros 15.00, tp) "Immortals and the Undead"
91 · Introduction · Fanfan Chen & Thomas Honegger · in
93 · Consuming Life: Narcissism, Liminality, and the Posthuman Condition in Bulwer-Lytton's "A Strange Story"· Bruce Wyse · ar 
113 · The Evolution of the Quest for Immortality in Science Fiction and the Fantastic: Spirituality, Corporeality, Virtuality · Roger Bozzetto and Fanfan Chen · ar
127 · Some Notes on the Depictions of Immortals in Medieval Oriental Manuscripts · Anna Caiozzo· ar
141 · The Making of a Hilarious Undead: Bisociation in teh Novels of Terry Pratchett · Thomas Scholz · ar  153 · Reporting the Stubborn Undead: Revenants and Vampires in Twelfth Century English Literature (II) · Eugenio M. Olivares Merino · ar
179 · Arthur Conan Doyle's "Dracula" · Robert Eighteen-Bisang · ar
189 · A Note on M.R. James and Dracula · Douglas A. Anderson · ar
195 · Notes on Neglected Fantasists · Douglas A. Anderson · ar; James Dickie (1934- ), C. Bryson Taylor (1880-?).
199 · About the Authors · [Misc.] · bg

 

Emily Plenderleath Harrison (1843-1933)

In issue no. 15 (May 2009) of The Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter, Richard Dalby announced his discovery of a children’s book with a previously-unknown short introduction by M.R. James, the noted ghost story writer. The book is The Lion’s Birthday (Eton, London, and Colchester: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co., [1920]), by Emily Plenderleath Harrison, with illustrations by Dora Barks. Dalby was not at that time able to trace any information about the author.

Emily Plenderleath Harrison was born in late 1843 in Hart, County Durham, the fourth of eleven daughters of William Gorst Harrison (1803-1891), the oldest of five sons of shipbroker William Harrison of Thornhill, Sunderland. In a brief forward to The Lion’s Birthday, Harrison notes that the book was written by her sister and herself more than sixty years ago (i.e., before 1860), and though she  admitted to collaboration, she did not name any one of her ten sisters on the title page as co-author.  Dora Barks, who illustrated a few other books in the nineteen-twenties, was not her sister.  Emily Plenderleath Harrison worked at Eton from around 1890, and from that work came her association with M.R. James.  She died in in late 1933, aged 89.

The Lion’s Birthday is a story told in forty verses, each containing four lines.  The story tells of the Lion, who in order to celebrate the ten years he has been monarch of the wood and plain, sends out invitations to the various animals to join him for a party. Not all the animals are eager:

The Elephant, in private, thought / That it would be an awful bore; / But yet he thought he ought to go / As he had never been before.

The Tigers, Wolves and Panthers said / “Pray tell the Lion we’ll be charmed.” / The Stags (poor things!) replied the same, / But inwardly they felt alarmed.

The monkeys are excited, the sheep are shy (fearing that the Wolves surely would be there), the Bears and Leopards were delighted.  Alas, the party does not work out so well, for the Tiger is tempted by the Deer and kills her, breaking everything up, and some animals giving chase to the murderer.

James ironically calls the story a “pleasant ballad” in his short “Foreword”.

Montague Rhodes James as reviewed in America, 1920

One of the masters of the British supernatural tradition, Montague Rhodes James, needs no further introduction. I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled across the following review of 'a new set of ghost stories' in a 1920 American newspaper when searching for some local ghost stories.

So, here's the review and in true Jamesion vein, the reviewer has done his (or her) best to suggest rather than to fully expose, some of the most horrible scenes in James's oeuvre.

The review appeared in the May 30, 1920 edition of the Kansas City Star, published in Kansas City, Missouri. It was a reprint of a review that had been published in the Living Age, as the review indicates.

"Late Reviews"

Dupont, Inge, and Hope Mayo (eds). Morgan Library Ghost Stories (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990). Wood engravings by John De Pol. Reprinted from the limited edition published in the same year by The Stone House Press of Roslyn, New York.

A collection of seven original tales, plus an introduction by Hope Mayo—the results of a ghost-story writing competition, the conditions for which being that the stories be in the style of M.R. James, and that they be in some way related to the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. The connection with M.R. James is facilitated by the fact that James (from Cambridge) worked on the cataloguing of the large number of medieval manuscripts and early printed books from the years 1902-1907, before the collection made its way across the Atlantic.

The seven stories, one of which is in verse, were all written by people associated at some time with the Morgan Library, or who were then professional librarians at other institutions. As a result, it is not surprising that the stories, while mostly competent and amusing, are not particularly original or in any way outstanding. The most interesting item in the volume (outside of the excellent illustrations) is the “Introduction”, which tells the story of the beginnings of Morgan’s Library, and of M.R. James’s connection with it. We learn that Belle de la Costa Greene, who was for many years in charge of Morgan’s library, exchanged letters with James (some of which are quoted in the book). She was also a fan of James’s ghost stories, and even requested new ghost stories from his pen. In 1933, James wrote her that “I am afraid that the vein of ghost stories has run rather dry.” After James’s death, the manuscript of “A Warning to the Curious” was purchased and presented as a gift to the Morgan Library in 1942, where it remains to this day.

Wuorio, Eva-Lis. Escape If You Can: 13 Tales of the Preternatural (New York: Viking Press, 1977)

Wuorio (1918- ), at the time of publication of this book, is described as a Canadian citizen of Finnish descent who has been living and writing in Finland for the last several years. Most of her novels are for young adults.

This short story collection, also marketed for children, has a deftness to the writing and a cosmopolitan feel overall. There is little questioning of the supernatural, or shock at the experience of it: it merely is. Some of the stories are from a child’s perspective, while others are more adult. All are somewhat unconventional, and even when using familiar tropes (like werewolfery) Wuorio creates a story that is uniquely her own, moody and introspective, with a distinct sense of place and setting. I wouldn’t expect these stories to be popular with many children, but some will like them. More adults should read them, despite their being packaged as for children.