M R James and “There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard”
This originality of James is to be found in his story “There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard”. Here James decides to parody the Shakespearean story “A Winter’s Tale” and finish the story started by Mamilius.[1] James’s use of the public school tradition of Boo stories is very original here. As provost of Eton and a previous schoolboy himself he would be very familiar with the tradition where a story is made and told just to get to the part where the teller stops and yells boo, usually when the lights are turned off, so that the teller can usually physically touch the other people gathered to hear the tale and scare them out of their wits.[2]
The story is successful in that it deals with the idea of a story told with the sole object of inducing a pleasant terror in the readers or audience, as was James’s intent all along. This story can be linked in with his story “A School Story” which mentions specifically “The Folk lore of Private Schools” as McCulloch notes:-
It was James’s way of saying boo...a version of Rawhead and bloody bones, a strikingly gruesome and strikingly unoriginal image presented with minimum context and maximum immediacy...[3]
The immediate shock of the audience that James first told his tales to proved their effectiveness, and later on after their publication the readers were expected to recoil pleasantly from the almost knowing fun of the scare.[4] James’s experience as provost of Eton led him many times to tell cautionary school stories to the boys under his tutelage, indeed as Michael A Mason notes
If a class in school were told the story of “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard”, and the chief masculine genius in obstreperousness were fixed on in good time as the target, it might be possible to position oneself in readiness for the climax, and then to drop on him with the most gratifying effect.[5]
As Mason explains the surprise generated in a quiet room, by a class of boys or indeed any audience, by a sudden unexpected physical encounter, especially if it was in the dark and the encounter was not seen to be enacted, then the shared shock was again a product of the Whartonian “pleasant shudder”, or a scare enjoyed in a safe, unthreatening space.[6]
James mentions this technique being used to good effect in his collected ghost stories.[7] Therefore the oral tradition of telling cautionary tales can be linked back to Shakespeare as Mamilius is a boy telling his own horrifying tale for effect. Indeed James paid tribute to this idea of oral tales being told down the ages
Nothing is more common form in old fashioned books than the description of the winter fireside, where the aged grandmam narrates to the circle of children that hangs on her lips story after story of ghosts and fairies, and inspires her audience with a pleasing terror. But we are never allowed to know what the stories were. We hear, indeed, of sheeted spectres with saucer eyes, and-still more intriguing-“of Rawhead and Bloody Bones” (an expression that the Oxford English Dictionary traces back to 1550), but the context of these striking images eludes us...[8]
“There was a man Dwelt by a Churchyard” is certainly one of the oldest story formulations in the English story telling tradition; certainly it was old when Shakespeare included it in “A Winter’s Tale”. It is of an object stolen from the dead and the dead returning to claim it. As James said of this type of tale:-
It turns out to be a variation on what is indeed a well-known type of tale-the man who steals something from the dead (in this case, a bag of money from a grave), and how a revenant comes to seek it, and draws gradually closer, closer,...[9]
John Poole the protagonist of the story is not a sympathetic character at all. He moved into the house by the churchyard because the rent was cheap as he had something of a reputation for being a miser. After the burial of a local old woman who was feared by all of the people in the area as they thought she was a witch, he suddenly became very much richer.
Meanwhile John Poole went about with a curious air, half exulting, as it were, and half nervous. More than once he spent an evening at the inn, which was clean contrary to his usual habit, and to those who fell into talk with him there he hinted that he had come into a little bit of money and was looking out for a somewhat better house...[10]
In fact he had retrieved the purse of money that the old woman had left to the church to bury her, a sum of money that they refused, and which was left in her grave by the parson. The old lady presently returns to collect her money and while Master Poole is in bed one night, climbs in at the window and stalks about the room loudly asking “Where is it”. At this point in the story the narrator breaks off to enact jumping on the unsuspecting victim who is listening to the narration of the story.[11]
This tale was included originally in The Snap Dragon which was an Eton magazine or ephemeral on the 6th of December 1924. It was not published in James’s next collection of stories, A Warning to the Curious in 1925, but was included in The Collected Ghost Stories in 1931. It was not intended by James to be regarded as a story as to him it was intended to be read aloud as a mild but amusing joke, something to scare people with, except that because of all of the tradition of storytelling in “There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard” it certainly bears much more scrutiny.
It certainly has his typical richness of setting and narration, and the pace of the story builds up to that unexpected and chilling ending which leaves the reader with first the frisson of being scared which develops into that pleasing Jamesian terror. This Jamesian terror was an important plot device utilised by James to introduce the Whartonian “Pleasant Shudder”. However where this tale relies heavily on the Shakespearean link in order to introduce this knowing feeling of terror, other Jamesian tales relied on older forms of storytelling, especially the older oral or folkloric tales.
[1] Ibid,p.329
[2] Ibid,p.123
[3] Simon MacCulloch, “The Toad in the Study: M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, and Forbidden Knowledge”, in Warnings to the Curious A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, (ed). By S. T. Joshi & Rosemary Pardoe, (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2007),p.106
[4] Christopher and Barbara Roden, Preface to M. R. James, A Pleasing Terror (Ashcroft, British Colombia: Ash-Tree Press, 2000), p.x
[5] Michael A. Mason, “On Not Letting Them Lie: Moral Significance in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James”, in Warnings to the Curious A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, (ed). By S. T. Joshi & Rosemary Pardoe, (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2007), p.123
[6] M. R. James, Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1989), p.xvii
[7] M. R. James, “Preface to Collected Ghost Stories”, in M. R. James, A Pleasing Terror (Ashcroft, British Colombia: Ash-Tree Press, 2000), p.369
[8] M. R. James, A Pleasing Terror (Ashcroft, British Colombia: Ash-Tree Press, 2000), p.357
[9] Jacqueline Simpson, “The Rules of Folklore” in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James, in Warnings to the Curious A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, (ed). By S. T. Joshi & Rosemary Pardoe, (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2007), p.147
[10] M R James, Collected Ghost Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 1992), p.329
[11] Michael A. Mason, “On Not Letting Them Lie: Moral Significance in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James”, in Warnings to the Curious A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, (ed). By S. T. Joshi & Rosemary Pardoe, (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2007), p.123