It has been well over a year since I made my last post here, and for that I must apologise to regular readers. As I mentioned in my most recent update back in September 2021, I had at that time begun a programme of postgraduate study, and it transpires that such an undertaking leaves little time for extracurricular pursuits when combined with a full-time job and family life. This situation is likely to continue into the latter parts of 2023, but following that I hope to return to a schedule of more regular updates on various Jamesian topics as I have many ideas in mind to pursue.
Nevertheless, for now I would like to share a ghostly (although admittedly non-Jamesian) tale with you all for the “dark season”. I have for some time now volunteered with Cambridgeshire Archives, the local authority archive for the county, in support of my studies. Each April, ARA Scotland, part of the wider Archives & Records Association, conducts a social media outreach campaign titled #Archive30 in which archives nationwide are encouraged to select and publicise thirty items from their collections related to a particular daily theme. One such theme of the 2022 campaign was “something scary”, and given my own interests I was tasked with creating a reading of a series four of ghostly 18th century letters.
The letters in question were penned in 1717 by the British Orientalist Simon Ockley, who at the time was imprisoned in Cambridge Castle as a debtor, and addressed to an acquaintance named as “Dr. Keith” (presumably James Keith, M.D., as indicated by the catalogue entry for three further letters held in the British Museum’s archive). In his correspondence Ockley recounts a series of supposed encounters with a malevolent spirit inhabiting the castle during his incarceration. Unfortunately due to their nature as real letters rather than a transcribed story, the final entry brings little resolution to the matter. The originals can be found within the Cambridgeshire Archives collections in a large volume of compiled original documents and transcripts titled Miscellanea Book ‘C’ (ref. no. City/PB Volume 31), within the wider Cambridge Borough: Palmer Barnard Volumes series.
My readings were originally uploaded to the Cambridgeshire Archives social media accounts episodically in four parts, but below I present the full recording. I must warn you that I am certainly no actor, but I hope you enjoy my own attempt at a ghost story for Christmas.
Time once again today for another general site update. My apologies for the somewhat sparse recent posting – alongside my regular day job I have embarked upon a programme of volunteer work and postgraduate study, and as a result additional space left for Jamesian pursuits has been somewhat lacking. Nevertheless, I have added a few new pages to the collection area detailing some of my newest acquisitions. The first of these I’d actually been sitting on since toward the start of the year and realised I’d somehow neglected to add it to the site. The book in question is a beautifully rebound copy of A Supplement to Blomefield’s Norfolk – an impressive tome published as a limited run in 1929 to provide additional supporting material to Francis Blomefield’s expansive 18th century work, and containing two contributions from M. R. James on church wall paintings in the county.
A holiday to Cromer, Norfolk earlier in the summer led to the discovery of the second gem in a rather eccentrically maintained bookshop (as we all know, the best kind) – a first edition copy of MRJ’s Old Testament Legends; a 1913 volume of biblical apocrypha aimed at a younger audience and featuring some wonderful illustrations by H. J. Ford.
The final two books were purchased on the doorstep of King’s College, Cambridge right after my recent chat with Mr. Robert Lloyd Parry of the Nunkie Theatre Company. Following the conclusion of our conversation we each headed over to St. Edward’s Passage, located just off King’s Parade, to visit the Cambridge bookselling institutions The Haunted Bookshop and G. David Bookseller. In the former I happened upon a copy of The Aldine Bible New Testament, Vol. 3, edited by James in the last year of his life, while in the latter I was lucky enough to acquire the elusive Magdalene College manuscript catalogue. My sincere thanks must go to Robert for spotting the catalogue hiding on a shelf I’d unsuccessfully scanned several minutes prior!
Aside from these acquisitions, for those interested I have a couple of very exciting M. R. James items in the pipeline which I hope to be able to share with you in the coming months. In addition, I am planning a number of new pieces of MRJ-related content, at least one of which I expect to publish before the end of the year, and have also recently obtained permission to include several more of James’ unfinished ghost stories on the site. Expect these to be added shortly.
In other Jamesian news Stephen Gray, proprietor of thin-ghost.org, has recently launched a new site, The Ghostly Fu Emporium, to showcase and offer for sale his fantastic spectral artworks and replicas. Anyone with an interest in M. R. James’ stories will love Stephen’s “Jamesabilia”, and I would advise you all to pay a visit and marvel at his creations.
For many M. R. James aficionados, the name Robert Lloyd Parry will require no introduction. Since 2005, Robert has been touring his one-man M. R. James show, terrifying and enthralling audiences with an experience as close as possible to actually sitting down in front of James himself at one of the legendary Chit-Chat Club ghost story readings. In addition to his role as the world’s pre-eminent Jamesian storyteller, he has released a number of DVDs of his performances, edited several collections of ghostly tales, and co-authored and presented two documentaries on James’ life and works. I recently had the chance to sit down with Robert a stone’s throw from M. R. James’ beloved King’s College, Cambridge, to discuss his career, performances, and tracking down obscure publications by MRJ and his contemporaries.
Now based in the North West of England, I met up with Robert at the tail end of a week he’d been spending in Cambridge, undertaking research for a yet-to-be-titled follow-up to his recently compiled and edited short story collection Ghosts of the Chit-Chat, published last Christmas.
“Last year I compiled an anthology of stories written by people who were in the Chit-Chat Club with M. R. James, so this new book is kind of a sequel to that. It’s stories by people who weren’t in The Chit-Chat, but who were contemporary of M. R. James at Cambridge, or friends of his and so on, so it’s another anthology with very much a Cambridge slant to it. Where possible, I’m doing stories set in Cambridge or about Cambridge.”
The collection will feature a wealth of different ghost story authors, such as Richard Malden, F. Anstey, Shane Leslie, Barry Pain, E. G. Swain, Arthur Gray, as well as the mysterious ‘DNJ’, who published two stories in the Cambridge Review either side of the Great War, and whose true identity Robert hopes to finally reveal in the book.
The new collection will once again be published through Irish imprint Swan River Press, with whom Robert had also previously worked on his 2011 collection of Lucy M. Boston stories Curfew & Other Eerie Tales. The original Ghosts of the Chit-Chat anthology was born through conversations with Swan River’s founder, Brian Showers.
“When I first started doing the the M. R. James shows I made friends with Brian. He set up Swan River Press around about the same time as I was starting my touring. During one of our many conversations about M. R. James and ghost stories, he floated the idea for the book. At first it was just going to be a bit more like what I’m working on now – stories by M. R. James’ friends – but I soon realized that there was this small body of work by people who had actually been members of the Chit-Chat, and so it became based around that. I was quite pleased that things just kind of tumbled into place the more I researched it.”
At the time of writing, the full selection of authors to be featured in the upcoming collection has yet to be finalised. Robert has been hard at work researching figures for inclusion in the archives of various Cambridge colleges, which he admits has been slightly more difficult given present circumstances.
“With everything being shut it’s hard to get to the sources you want, but I had a really good day in the King’s College archive this week looking at some letters by a writer called Barry Pain, who’s a little forgotten now. He corresponded with Nathaniel Wedd, who was an exact contemporary of M. R. James and a classicist. He [Wedd] was kind of the opposite of M. R. James in that he wasn’t an old Etonian; he was more of a free thinker and not so conservative, yet there was this mutual respect between him and James. Unfortunately I haven’t found any ghost stories by Nathaniel Wedd, but I did discover that there are two unpublished novels of his, so next time I visit the archives I’m going to take a look at them. I mean they may be unpublished for a reason…”
Robert had also visited the Pepys Library at Magdalene College to consult A. C. Benson’s vast 180-volume diary, and we discussed his relationship with James, particularly with regard to the disapproval Benson occasionally expressed toward James, as quoted in Michael Cox’s 1983 biography M. R. James: An Informal Portrait.
“I think it’s the longest diary ever written or something like that. Extracts have been published, but the whole thing never will be, there’s just too much of it. I kind of suspect that very few, if any, have read the whole thing. I was just checking references in the diary, and it’s very interesting. Benson and James were old, old mates, and you do often have double-edged feelings about your friends, don’t you? It’s spread over the course of that many volumes, and it’s what he was feeling at that particular time. I think things are exaggerated because of a couple of quotations in the Cox biography.”
In addition to his long-established M. R. James performances, as an art historian Robert has for a number of years conducted a series of guided tours at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam museum. James himself served as the museum’s director between 1893-1908 (previously assistant director), and Robert in fact spent some time working there himself immediately prior to founding the Nunkie Theatre Company.
“It was a lottery funded job to write the content for an online guide of the collections. It was basically researching 300 objects from across the whole collection, writing about them, and getting them online. It was a lovely job. It came to an end when the lottery funding ran out, and that’s when I started doing the M. R. James stories, trying to snatch a living from that. In a way I burned my bridges as far as museum work goes. I left that behind rather, and part of me would like to have carried on, but there we go.”
Rather appropriately however, Robert’s very first performance took place within the Fitzwilliam, in a space James would have been intimately familiar with:
“What I describe as James’ office is the Founders Library, which is the most magnificent room in the oldest part of the museum. It always was and remains the office of the Keeper of Manuscripts. In James’ day there wasn’t a Keeper of Manuscripts – it was just one overall boss and he had an assistant. The Keeper of Manuscripts still sits at a desk at one end of the room, surrounded by these magnificent mahogany bookcases and a lovely fireplace, and it was in front of that fireplace that I first did my show. That room really fires the imagination most of all. I first did it to tie in with an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam of illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge collections, and of course M. R. James was the éminence grise behind that. I did Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book and The Mezzotint there, and they fit in well. In the story, the scrapbook ends up in the ‘Wentworth Collection’, so I renamed it the ‘Fitzwilliam Collection’ for the performance.”
I also asked Robert about any legacy, visible or otherwise, left from James’ time at the museum.
“There are the things that he acquired when he was the director. I can’t remember in terms of paintings and so on, but certainly a lot of manuscripts. There’s also a lovely picture of the staff of the Fitzwilliam Museum in the 1890s. They’re in the painting gallery, with lots of pictures hung terribly close together. M. R. James is in a group of about eight, and they’re looking at a painting of one of the founders.”
“A book that’s worth reading is The Fitzwilliam Museum: A History by Lucilla Burn. It was the museum’s bicentenary [in 2016], and they published a nice illustrated book, which discusses, amongst other things, the museum’s directors. You find out what James did in the role, which wasn’t an awful lot, but he was very modest about it. The guy who came after him [Sir Sydney Cockerell] was a real museum professional, and he said something along the lines of “I found a pigsty, and I turned it into a palace”, so the pigsty was under James.”
Robert has been touring his M. R. James shows for over fifteen years now, and has been given the chance to perform in some venues with a particularly impressive Jamesian pedigree.
“I have a regular gig at the provost’s lodge in Eton – an annual show there because the current Provost’s [The Rt. Hon Lord Waldegrave of North Hill] wife is a distant relation of M. R. James, and obviously with him being the provost they’re very keen on James. Once a year they invite selected members of staff and selected boys to the lodge, and in front of the fireplace I do a show. A couple of years ago I did a show in the provost’s lodge at King’s as well. I’ve also performed in the church at Great Livermere, and once in King’s College Chapel, which didn’t really work as it’s far too echoey.”
Over the years, Robert has adapted a wide selection of James’ stories for his performances and covered many of his most well-loved tales, from ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ to Count Magnus. I asked him about the process of bringing James’ stories to the stage, and whether there were any yet-unperformed tales he’d particularly like to add to his repertoire.
“M. R. James’ economy is one of the great things about him. People think he’s got this fruity language, but he doesn’t really; he’s got an old fashioned, deliberately mannered language, but what he writes is very tight. Those stories that aren’t fail because of it. Some of them I tell more or less as they’re written, but I’ve had to adapt a couple of them. The Residence at Whitminster I did condense and try to give it a bit more of a shape. I think James does sometimes get carried away with “stage Cockneys”. He found himself so hilarious. In Casting the Runes you’ve got about a page of the cockney ticket collector, so I cut a lot of that. He also loved mimicking old fashioned writing, so in The Residence at Whitminster you’ve got the girl’s diary that goes on and on and on.”
“I do feel a bit ashamed for having done this so very long, but there is still an audience for it. I think I’ve done all those that I consider to be the best ones, but there are couple left I could quite happily do. An Episode of Cathedral History I’ve always liked very much. I used to do The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, but I couldn’t come up with a way of making it work as a live performance because it’s mostly diary entries. Me just reading the diary entries is rather boring to look at.”
The recent social restrictions have naturally affected Robert’s usual touring schedule, and stalled some planned performances that had been due to begin this year.
“Since last March I’ve not really been able to perform. I was able to fit in a couple of M. R. James shows in October last year, between lockdowns, but that’s all I’ve done. I had a whole tour of an H. P. Lovecraft show set up for last spring and within ten hours that had just disappeared. It was a performance of two Lovecraft stories: Pickman’s Model and The Music of Erich Zann. I did it as a supported project by Harrogate Theatre and performed it a couple of times. I wasn’t fully pleased with it but I was going to take it on tour when COVID hit. Whether I’ll revive that tour or not I don’t know. I did both of them online and they went down quite well, so I might.”
Aside from the planned H. P. Lovecraft shows, Robert has previously performed works by several other authors besides M. R. James. I asked him how he’d found the experience as an actor of stepping outside of the world of ghost stories.
“I did The Time Machine by H. G. Wells as well. The problem with that was, I was proud of the show and people liked it, but more often than not it was played before really bad houses. I’ve found an audience for M. R. James, and I was surprised there wasn’t one for H. G. Wells. There are a lot of authors I would quite like to do, but whether they’d get an audience I don’t know. I’d like to do Arthur Machen, but the world at large would not come to see Arthur Machen. So that’s the corner I find myself in. There are plenty of good stories out there, but it’s a big undertaking to adapt, write, learn and rehearse them.”
Naturally, with a shared interest in James’ published works, Robert and I ended up on the topic of book collecting, and he briefed me on some of his favourite personal acquisitions.
“My best ever M. R. James buy was on eBay. Somehow I got a copy of Eton & King’s, the first edition, for £10. There were other people bidding as well – I don’t know how I got it. I was chuffed with that, and had it on my shelf with a few other books. A while later, Brian Showers in fact was visiting, and he picked it up and looked through, and then suddenly stopped and said ‘Have you seen this?’ I hadn’t, but inside was a letter from M. R. James to the the original owner of the book saying “thank you for your letter”, headed “The Lodge, Eton College”.
Robert’s copy of Eton & King’s, complete with letter from MRJ himself to the book’s original owner.
“I recently bought this book that was actually by E. G. Swain; not published in his name but under a pseudonym. It’s a selection of plays that he wrote for the choristers at King’s, with M. R. James. I don’t think James necessarily helped him write them, but it was part of the entertainments they put on, the culmination of which of course was A School Story. He wrote that for the choristers, but leading up to that, there were these kind of skits, pantomimes and comic plays. Occasionally in G. David’s [bookshop] around the corner I have found some books by James. I found The Biblical Antiquities of Philo in there, which I was quite pleased with. I’d long wanted to find a copy of Old Testament Legends browsing an antique shop, but I never found it in real life so ended up ordering it online.”
Robert has released a number of professionally-filmed DVDs of his performances, and in recent years has made and presented two documentaries on James’ stories, 2017’s Wits in Felixstowe, which delves into the background and writing of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, and 2019’s Dim Presences, which covers A Warning to the Curious. Both are excellent documentaries and well worth seeking out for any James fan, and I wondered if there may be a third instalment in the pipeline.
“Christopher Thom, who I collaborate with, is a cameraman and a director, and we work on them together. In fact next week we’re going to be filming a new DVD which I’m thinking of calling M. R. James: Live at the Chit-Chat. It’s going to include Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book and Lost Hearts, just candle lit and single-take like the other DVDs I’ve done; very simple and straightforward. For that DVD I’ll do a short documentary – probably it’ll just be a talking head of me discussing the Chit-Chat Club. But yes, I’d love to do another full-fat documentary. I want to go to Scandinavia and do one about James’ time there, covering Count Magnus and Number 13. I will at some point release a Scandinavia DVD with those two stories on it, and I’d love to do some filming there. I’ve got a couple of things I think I’ve found that are not generally known about – the inspiration for Count Magnus and so on.”
Despite Robert’s extensive filmed back catalogue of M. R. James tales, he has no desires to produce any fully-fledged filmic adaptations of the stories himself.
“I do think the best way of presenting them is simply as storytelling. I mean I certainly I wouldn’t turn my nose up at that kind of part, but it’s not something I’m planning to do myself. I was in Mark Gatiss’ documentary about M. R. James [2013’s M. R. James: Ghost Writer]. I remembered he had expressed a desire to do an adaptation of Count Magnus, so I said, “if you ever do Magnus then consider me for Mr. Wraxall”.”
With life returning to some semblance of normality, Robert will be returning to the stage with a full tour beginning this Autumn. He currently has a string of dates for M. R. James performances planned, running from October to December, and full details of the schedule and tickets can be obtained through the Nunkie Theatre Company website.
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Robert for taking the time to conduct this interview. If you would like more information about his M. R. James project and other endeavours, please visit the Nunkie website. Robert also has a fantastic YouTube channel which is regularly updated with readings of stories by James and many other authors, and a Bandcamp page with a selection of audiobooks available for purchase. Both Wits in Felixstowe and Dim Presences are currently available to stream via Amazon Prime. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat is still available as a paperback through Swan River Press.
It’s been a few months since my last update here. In truth I’ve been taking a bit of a break and pursuing other hobbies, and new book acquisitions on the M. R. James front have been few and far between in recent weeks. I have, however, made a few small updates to the site over the past few days, and thought it would be worthwhile covering these in a short post.
Firstly, a further three books I acquired between the tail end of last year and the first couple of months of 2021 have been added to the collection pages. Two of these are works by MRJ – Cambridge Under Queen Anne and A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Eton College. The Eton catalogue, which I had been coveting for quite a while, came with an interesting bundle of letters, dating from the early 1970s, from the ‘Keeper of Library and College Collections’ at Eton to the previous owner of the book – a university academic who required a copy for some of his own manuscript research. Obviously I only have one side of the correspondence, but it appears the academic in question received the book from Eton in exchange for a couple of other titles gifted to the library. A visit to the college itself was subsequently organised in mid-1972. Unfortunately due to the dates involved I cannot at present include any images of this correspondence on the site for data protection and copyright reasons.
The third title is something a bit different in the form of a copy of the new Jamesian pen-and-paper roleplaying game, Casting the Runes, which was published by The Design Mechanism earlier this year. At this point I haven’t yet had time to fully delve into the intricacies of the game, but I’m planning to cover it in greater detail in a future post.
Aside from these few new book pages, I’ve been making some minor style and formatting changes to the site to compensate for some broken functionality introduced by a recent update to the WordPress editor, and have also added James McBryde’s four original illustrations for Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to the relevant story pages (Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book and ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’).
I’m planning a number of reasonably extensive pieces and articles this year, so hopefully I’ll have some more substantial content for you soon. As always, any new book acquisitions will continue to be added to the collection pages for those who are interested in such things.
Just a short post today to bring you all three pieces of exciting news for the M. R. James aficionado:
Fans of the long running A Ghost Story For Christmas strand will be delighted to learn that writer/director Mark Gatiss will be making a return to BBC Two this Christmas with another Jamesian adaptation, The Mezzotint. Details have just been revealed following completion of principal photography, which, judging from the slate pictured on the BBC website, took place entirely last week.
Rory Kinnear will star as the protagonist and recipient of the titular mezzotint, Mr. Williams, and Robert Bathurst will fill the role of Mr. Garside. The BBC press release also revealed the names of an additional five cast members, including Frances Barber as a “Mrs. Ambrigail”, suggesting a significant expansion on James’ original story and, I expect, a dramatisation of the actual events depicted in the haunted print. While some will no doubt find issue with these changes, it seems to me a justifiable direction to take when attempting to translate this particular story to the screen. Despite some alterations I’ve largely enjoyed Mr. Gatiss’ previous adaptations and am keen to see what he does with The Mezzotint. It’s no bad thing that those of us interested in James have such a high-profile individual willing and able to get these dramatic works commissioned in the first place for us all to enjoy, and I was most disappointed we missed out on a new entry into the series in 2020.
Continuing the theme of adaptations of James’ works, director Chris Crow has just announced a new feature-length adaptation of James’ classic A Warning to the Curious, currently in development and scheduled to begin shooting this coming winter. According to the post on Chris’ website, the film “embraces the original story whilst elevating the Folk Horror and Psychological Horror elements”. What this means for adherence to the spirit of the original tale remains to be seen, but I will certainly be following this project with interest.
Finally, and slightly late, is news that Dr. Jane Mainley-Piddock’s new book Casting the Runes: The Letters of M. R. James, which I have discussed previously, achieved its funding goal through crowd-funded publisher Unbound toward the end of January, and is now in the writing stage. The most recent update from the start of February provides an insight into the current state of progress with the transcriptions. Following the funding goal announcement, Dr. Mainley-Piddock has also revealed that the aforementioned MRJ superfan Mark Gatiss will be providing a foreword to the completed book.
Although the funding target has now been met, there is still time to back the project and receive one of the numerous available rewards should you wish to. Full details (along with updates) can be found on the project’s page over on Unbound.
Welcome back for the first post of the new year, in the depths of the dark season. I had originally begun to put something together for a planned pre-Christmas post, but it ended up a somewhat directionless ramble on the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas strand that I ultimately decided not to publish. While enough has probably been said about that particular series over the years, I’m sure that I’ll return to the subject in detail at some point when I’m able to organise my thoughts on it slightly more coherently.
Nevertheless, as is traditional over the festive period I did sit down to re-watch many of the classic MRJ adaptations that make up the bulk of the AGSfC strand thanks to the DVD set released several years ago by the BFI, as well as the repeat of Mark Gatiss’ 2019 adaptation of Martin’s Close on BBC Two on Christmas Eve. I always find it difficult to choose a favourite from the series (leaving the 1968 Whistle… to one side in this instance as it’s technically not part of the series proper), although I increasingly find myself drawn to The Stalls of Barchester as my go-to adaptation, in no small part due to the beautifully dark cinematography made possible by the somewhat unusual decision to shoot both interiors and exteriors on film rather than video (a trait thankfully carried through the original run). Generally the series’ low points are few, although for some reason I also decided to watch the decidedly un-Jamesian original story The Ice House again, which left me feeling as bored and confused as I have been on all previous viewings. A somewhat sad way to officially end the original series, but at least we have 1979’s Schalcken the Painter which may as well have been an episode and provides a more fitting conclusion. I’d love to know my readers’ favourite adaptations, so please leave a comment below with yours.
New M. R. James acquisitions, November/December 2020
I have a number of others to add over the coming weeks, including a copy of the Eton College catalogue of Mss. received as a Christmas gift, which contains a number of interesting letters relating to some research carried out in the early 1970s. I’m planning to put together a more detailed piece on this particular acquisition in due course.
There is also one new addition to the Ghost Stories section in the form of the incomplete tale The Fenstanton Witch, taken from the original manuscript held in Cambridge University Library archives. My sincere thanks go to N. J. R. James and Rosemary Pardoe for allowing me to reproduce this transcription on Antiquarian Ghosts.
Finally, I wanted to put in a small plug for a project many of you may already be aware of: Dr. Jane Mainley-Piddock’s book Casting the Runes: The Letters of M. R. James, which is currently seeking funding through crowdfunding publisher Unbound. I’m personally very keen to get my hands on a copy of the book, so please do consider backing the project if you’d be interested in seeing more of James’ personal correspondence published. The funding target stands at 71% at the time of writing.
Also a short note to say that Christopher Thom and Robert Lloyd Parry’s fantastic documentary Wits in Felixstowe is now available to watch on Amazon Prime here.
This 40-minute film is a wonderful examination of the story behind perhaps M. R. James’ most famous ghost story (and my personal favourite), “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, and provides a fascinating insight into both the story and James’ life, as well as some great location filming around Cambridge and the Suffolk coast.
Hello and welcome to Antiquarian Ghosts, a new site dedicated to the father of the modern ghost story, M. R. James. As I mentioned in the introductory section of the homepage, I had originally envisaged this site primarily as a place to assemble a visual catalogue of my ever-growing collection of M. R. James’ books, but the idea soon evolved into wanting to create a more comprehensive space to explore my interest in James and his works.
Currently you’ll find a section for the aforementioned book collection, alongside full text reproductions of all of James’ completed ghost stories, a short biography, and an articles section which will contain original pieces on James’ life, works, and any other suitably Jamesian topics.
I’ve spent a several weeks populating the site with the content currently available, and am planning to expand the scope of this as time progresses. Ultimately I’d like to add more information and more photographs for each of the books in my collection, and indeed if there is a specific aspect of a particular book you would like to see in more detail, please do let me know. I also intend at some point to add a section for discussion and review of the many adaptations of James’ ghost stories that exist, particularly those made for film and television.
A little about me: I am 35 years old, originally from Cambridge and now living in Ely, Cambridgeshire. I work for a well-known academic publisher with a strong historical tie to M. R. James himself (I’m sure you can guess which), and where I have been for the last twelve-and-a-half years in a variety of roles.
I can’t remember exactly when I first discovered M. R. James and his ghost stories (some time in my early twenties), but I do remember that it was due to, of all things, a terrible Channel 4 list programme entitled 100 Greatest Scary Moments, during which I encountered my first glimpse of Jonathan Miller’s 1968 BBC adaptation Whistle and I’ll Come to You (ranked at a paltry number 80). Apparently the programme originally aired in 2003, but it must have been a later repeat that I had watched. Nevertheless, the short piece of footage I saw of the final bedroom scene piqued my interest enough to convince me to search out a copy of the full film, and my fascination with James developed from there.
I began seriously collecting James’ written works at the start of 2018 (having the type of personality which is unfortunately susceptible to such things), and while the task of collecting a copy of everything he ever published is probably somewhat unachievable without very deep pockets, I’m nevertheless really enjoying hunting down new items and learning more about MRJ as I go. I hope you will find the collection I’ve assembled thus far similarly interesting.
I’m looking forward to growing this site with more additions to the book collection (something in James’ own hand would be the dream acquisition) and hopefully providing some new and interesting content for those of you similarly interested in the legacy of M. R. James. Please enjoy the site.
Antiquarian Ghosts 