M. R. James

Montague Rhodes James was born on 1 August 1862 at Goodnestone in Kent, the son of a clergyman, and grew up in Suffolk, where his father was rector of Great Livermere. He went to Eton as a King’s Scholar in 1876 and to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1882, and he spent almost the rest of his life inside those two institutions. He was a Fellow of King’s from 1887, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum from 1893 to 1908, Provost of King’s from 1905 to 1918, and Provost of Eton from 1918 until his death on 12 June 1936.

His real work, by his own reckoning, was scholarship. He catalogued the medieval manuscripts of the Cambridge college libraries one collection at a time, wrote on stained glass and church art, and edited the apocryphal books of the Bible; his translation The Apocryphal New Testament (1924) was a standard work for decades. He was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1930.

The ghost stories began as a sideline. James wrote them to read aloud to friends, most famously at Christmas, and in October 1893 he read two of them, Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book and Lost Hearts, to a Cambridge literary society. They were eventually collected in four slim books: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925).

What makes a James story recognisable is the method more than the monsters. A bachelor scholar on a research trip or a holiday finds something: a scrap book, a mezzotint, a whistle, a buried crown. The narration stays dry and faintly comic, full of the bibliographic detail James handled every working day, while the hints pile up. Then comes a single, brief, physical glimpse of something hairy, or wet, or wrapped in linen, and the story ends almost at once. He laid out his rules in a 1929 essay, “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” where he argued for a setting familiar to the reader and a ghost that is malevolent rather than sad.

His influence on English supernatural fiction is hard to overstate, and he had a circle of imitators within his own lifetime. If you’re new to him, start with “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” or Casting the Runes. For something shorter, try The Mezzotint, his cleverest experiment in form. A Warning to the Curious, from late in his career, is the bleakest. Every James story on the site has a Reader’s Companion with notes on its sources and settings.