Wormwoodiana

Lesser-Known Writers of Weird Fiction

2012-01-19T15:04:00.000-05:00

I just want to take this opportunity to call some attention to some recent entries at one of my other blogs, on Lesser-Known Writers. Most of the entries are illustrated with photographs and dust-wrappers. There should be (I would think) a considerable overlap of interest with readers of Wormwoodiana, in that many of the authors covered wrote supernatural fiction and are today fairly forgotten. Some of the authors wrote for Weird Tales (e.g., Bassett Morgan, and Lyllian Huntley Harris). Others wrote supernatural novels (Marion Fox, and C. Bryson Taylor). Interested in cricket fantasies? Check out the entry for Alan Miller. The "Labels" function in the right-hand column I use as a kind of index to the blog itself. But here are direct links to some entries of interest to readers of Wormwoodiana:

Vivian Meik (with newly discovered information), author of Devil's Drums (1933)

C. Bryson Taylor, author of the vampire novel In The Dwellings of the Wilderness (1904)

Marion Fox, author of Ape's Face (1914) and The Mystery Keepers (1919)

Blanche Bloor Schleppey, author of The Soul of a Mummy (1908)

Alan Miller, author of Phantoms of a Physician (1934) and Close of Play (1949)

Lyllian Huntley Harris, author of one known short story in Weird Tales, the subject of a later-day fraud

Bassett Morgan, prolific Weird Tales author

And many others, with more to come.

Archives of British Publishers/Keith Fleming

2011-12-26T17:30:00.008-05:00

Publishers' archives are valuable but underutilised sources of information about writers and their books, particularly writers who are little-known, or who worked under pseudonyms.

As far as I know, the largest archive of British publishers records is housed at the University of Reading, in the archive of publishers and printers.

An important set of archives that is more accessible than most is the Archives of British Publishers, which comprises the records of nine publishers copied to microfilm and microfiche, including George Rutledge, Elkin Mathews, Grant Richards, and Richard Bentley. It can be found in many major libraries.

A good example of how publishers' archives can be used is the case of the nineteenth century supernatural fiction writer, Keith Fleming. Fleming wrote three works of supernatural fiction published by George Routledge between 1889 and 1891, Can Such Things Be?, By the Night Express, and At the Eleventh Hour. The specialty publisher, Sarob, reprinted the first two in 2001 in a nice limited edition volume.

The George Rutledge papers in the Archives of British Publishers includes the contracts for the three Keith Fleming books. The signature on all three contracts is K.E. Fitzpatrick, indicating that ‘Keith Fleming’ was in fact a pseudonym. Two of the books also appear in Rutledge's book production ledgers. Can such things Be? was printed in a run of 4000 and 25 pounds was paid to “Miss Fitzpatrick”. At the Eleventh Hour was also printed in a run of 4000 and 25 pounds was paid for the copyright.

It turns out that "Keith Fleming" was in fact Kathleen Fitzpatrick, born in Ireland in 1858 or 1859, and who lived for much of her life with her widowed mother in Wales, not to be confused with the Kathleen Fitzpatrick who wrote The Weans of Rowallan.

New Issues of LE VISAGE VERT

2011-12-17T17:52:00.000-05:00

The year 2011 has brought us not one but two new issues of the excellent French magazine on the fantastic, Le Visage Vert. Issue 18 came out this summer, and issue 19 has just recently appeared.

one of the supplementary cards

Issue 18 (June 2011) begins with a translation by Anne-Sylvie Homassel of Howard Pyle's "The Salem Wolf", with the original illustrations from the December 1909 appearance in Harper's Monthly Magazine. This is followed by Michel Meurger's essay on the Salem witches in American literature. Other work translated from English into French include Robert Barr's "The Vengeance of the Dead" (with illustrations from its English Illustrated Magazine appearance in May 1894) and Amelia B. Edwards's "A Railway Panic" (1856). Two stories reprinted in their original French are "Une heure d'express" and "Le Roi du Léthol", both by Georges Price (1853-1922), from his volume La Rançon du sommeil (1910). The first story seems a direct descendant of the Amelia Edwards story. And two stories by Alexander Moritz Frey (1881-1957), along with an essay on him by Robert N. Bloch, are translated from the German. A full contents-listing for this issue can be found here.

A supplementary envelope that comes with this issue includes three cards, printed in color on both sides, showing some of the dynamic illustrations in full color, including three pages with illustrations by Howard Pyle for his own story.

Issue 19 (November 2011) is another bountiful volume. It includes stories by René Thévenin (French, 1867-1967), Harry de Windt (British, 1856-1933), Rhoda Broughton (British, 1840-1920), Ernst Raupach (German, 1784-1852), and the contemporary H.V. Chao (American, the pseudonym of translator Edward Gauvin). Criticism by Michel Meurger and François Ducos. A full list of contents can be found here. And there is similarly a supplementary envelope with colored cards.

Personally, the item of greatest interest to me is the fantasy story by the forgotten German dramatist Ernst Raupach, whose famous vampire story "Wake Not the Dead" (published 1822, translated into English without attribution in 1823) has long---in English---been misattributed to Ludwig Tieck. Raupach's story, "Die Wanderung", is a fairy tale very much like the ones that would be written afterwards by George MacDonald.

All of the publications of Le Visage Vert are elegantly and tastefully produced. You can see a full list (and order via Paypal) at this link. (Scroll down for the current and back-issues of Le Visage Vert).

The Victorian Hugos: 1885+

2011-12-17T13:40:00.000-05:00

Over at io9.com, Jess Nevins has been publishing a fascinating series on which novels and stories might have won Hugo awards--if there had been Hugo awards back in the 1880s. His discussions range around works of (proto-) science fiction, fantasy and horror, and are well worth reading. He intends the series (eventually) to cover the years 1885 to 1930, and he's off to a good start with five years already covered in the last couple of months. Here are the direct links to each year:

The Victorian Hugos: 1885

The Victorian Hugos: 1886

The Victorian Hugos: 1887

The Victorian Hugos: 1888

The Victorian Hugos: 1889

And another recent article by Jess will likely interest readers of Wormwoodiana (and it's nice to see the very strange novel Doctor Transit get some attention):

Sex Change in the Pulps: Demonic Shapeshifters, Feminist Conspiracies, and Wacky Erotic Shenanigans

All recommended!

W F Morris - His Other Novels

2011-12-06T14:14:00.002-05:00

That Bretherton was no accidental achievement is evident from two at least of Morris’s subsequent novels, both with settings involving the Great War. Just as in Bretherton, they are concerned with questions of identity, allegiance, chance, concealment and self-discovery. His second book, Behind the Lines (1930), is almost a match for Bretherton, and a commentator noted that “in spite of the flood of war books”, Morris was able to achieve “a quite different viewpoint from all the others”, and his book was “an outstanding success”. A subaltern is forced to flee when he accidentally kills an overbearing, taunting fellow officer: appearances are all against him and he does not trust to trench justice. He becomes a fugitive and has to make alliance with other deserters, lost soldiers and outlaws in a hand to mouth existence in the no man’s land that the opposing forces aren’t occupying. A clever, and just plausible, plot twist sets matter right.

His third novel, Pagan (1931), though set in peace time, unravels a macabre mystery that derives from the war, and again is founded upon the themes of lost identity, the outsider and tested loyalties. It is almost as powerful as the first two. Again, it has a sound mystery element, engaging characters, and well-described settings in the French countryside, still torn from the war. It is somewhat harder to find than the first two. All three books have at their heart a Jekyll & Hyde type theme, where both Jekyll and Hyde are understandable and may win our sympathy: a very difficult feat to pull off.

After these, Morris wrote four more novels that are more conventional adventure thrillers, but with his trademark flair for keen action, lively characters and unusual plotting. They followed at a pace of one every two years, until the last in 1939.

In the first of these, The Hold-Up (1933), the setting is the Auvergne in France, whose mountains, gorges and forests Morris evokes with a fine warmth. An Englishman, a war veteran, is a passenger on a country bus careering along the steep cliffside roads, when it is held up by a masked bandit and hostages taken. Yet there was an odd familiarity about the voice and the manner of the disguised villain – something which takes him back to the war. And the deportment and bearing of the young peasant woman who was one of his captives was not quite in character. As in his earlier books, Morris sustains a compelling mystery using concealed identities and characters who are more than they seem, though the plot is perhaps rather more in the run of the thrillers of the day. The book was still well-received, though. The Evening News thought it was “A first rate tale of adventure, romance and danger.”

The title of his next book, Something to His Advantage (1935), is from the wording of adverts placed by solicitors to trace missing legatees named in wills, asking them to make contact to learn about their good fortune. A young solicitor and his detective-novelist friend journey to a remote Norfolk village to give just such news to a reclusive beneficiary – who does not survive to hear it. The pair launch their own investigation. It’s a breezily-written, engaging enough yarn, but missing the strangeness and originality of his earlier work.

In No Turning Back (1937), two ex-soldiers with a flippant wit and devil-may-care attitude are drawn into a treasure hunt for Spanish gold. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones after it and find themselves chased – or chasing – halfway around the world. Both characters are enjoyably drawn and are a cut above the Sapper type of heroes, not least because they don’t take themselves too seriously.

They return in Morris’ last book, The Channel Mystery (1939), in a plot which takes its lead from Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Only here, the enemy is lurking in the minor rocks and islets of the Channel Isles. It was perhaps fitting that the author who wrote so compellingly of the First World War should end with a warning of what was to come in the Second. After that, it is not clear whether Morris stopped writing or could no longer find a publisher.

Yet there was one more ringing tribute. When in 1952 a master of the spy thriller form, Eric Ambler, identified his top five spy stories, four of them were very well known: The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers; The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad; The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; and Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham. The fifth must even by then have seemed more obscure to Ambler’s readers. It was Bretherton by W. F. Morris.

Blackwood on Film!

2011-12-04T18:25:00.000-05:00

There is a for me a special interest in seeing video or hearing a voice recording of a long-dead favorite author. I have heard some recordings of Arthur Machen, an author typically associated with the 1890s, and it almost felt like having a time machine when I heard his lilting voice. I have never heard any recording of Lord Dunsany, but suspect some may survive, owing to his broadcasts on the BBC. There are various recordings and even some video footage of Tolkien, but I doubt I'll ever hear the voice of David Lindsay (alas!). Or Kenneth Morris. Or E. R. Eddison.

I knew from Mike Ashley's excellent Algernon Blackwood: A Bio-Bibliography (1987) that late in life Blackwood did radio and television broadcasts. And some years ago some surviving clips of one of these 1951 television programs showed up in a BBC4 show "The Story of the Ghost Story", broadcast on December 23, 2005. I hoped (in vain) that this show might appear somewhere on US television, but it never did. No DVD came out either, but at last I've found it on YouTube. The program is just under thirty minutes, and on YouTube it appears in two parts, part one and part two. The snippet of Blackwood (less than twenty seconds) appears in part two, from the 6 minutes and 51 seconds mark, through 7 minutes and 9 seconds. Not much, but it is a privileged glimpse at the man, and it whets your appetite for more.

If more footage of Blackwood and other such classic authors survives, and could be complied on a DVD, I'd be first in line to buy it.

W.F. Morris - "Bretherton"

2011-12-03T00:59:00.005-05:00

Major W.F. Morris wrote a masterpiece of First World War fiction that won strong acclaim at the time from critics and fellow authors. Not only was it an authentic account of conditions at the Front, it was also a remarkable thriller, with a highly unusual plot, which won him comparisons to John Buchan and the best of the espionage writers.

One of the first to recognise him was Arnold Bennett. Writing in the Evening News in 1929, he observed that the two best war novels so far were The Secret Battle by A.P. Herbert, and The Spanish Farm Trilogy by R.H. Mottram: but now a third could join them. This was “Mr W.F. Morris’s Bretherton.” Bennett recalls that he has previously stressed the importance of mystery novels having a full human interest: this book provides that, “on a very generous scale”. He concluded: “Eight experienced readers out of ten will enjoy it, as I did. The ninth will say it is the finest English war-novel yet issued. The tenth will be rude about it. I understand that it is a first novel.”

He was right: it was the first novel by Walter Frederick Morris, a Norwich man who was born there on 31 May 1892, stayed there – apart from his war service – and died in that city in 1969. Morris had been commissioned at the age of 22 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 13th Cycle Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment in November 1914, went to the front in 1915, and by the time he was demobilised, at the late date of June 1919, no doubt a rather old 27, was a Major. He was to write six more novels after Bretherton. And as yet, it has been hard to uncover very much more biographical information about Major Morris. There is a self-effacing, fussless, just-get-on-with-it quality to some of the most attractive characters in his books, that I suspect their creator may have shared.

Arnold Bennett was not the only perceptive commentator to notice Bretherton at the time. John Squire, the influential editor of the London Mercury, was one of those “ninth” people Bennett accurately predicted. Squire said “of the English war-books, undoubtedly the best is Bretherton.” And he was not alone. The Morning Post thought it “one of the best of the English war novels. I do not expect anything much better.” The Sunday Times pinpointed its dual attraction: it was both “a mystery as exciting as a good detective story and an extraordinarily vivid account of trench-warfare.” A critic who was no particular friend of popular fiction, A.C. Ward, also praised it: “ W.F. Morris’ Bretherton [is] an adventure-mystery war-novel with an admirably ingenious and leak-proof plot. This book combines a brilliant exercise of creative imagination with a remarkable ability to reproduce, vividly, first-hand experiences, and there is one brief battle-scene…which is memorable.”

Bretherton (1929: US title, "G.B.") is set in the confusion and futility and weariness – but also the elation - of the last days of the war, when a British raiding party stumbles upon an eerie tableau in a ruined chateau, under fire. Following the strains of a familiar tune, “Just a Song at Twilight”, and understandably perplexed by who would be playing a piano in the middle of an ambush, they discover a British officer, dead across the keys, with a beautiful but also dead woman, in a fine formal gown, lying on a couch close by. And the British officer is in German uniform, the uniform of a General. The scene gives force to the book’s sub-title: Khaki or Field-Grey?

The rest of the novel unravels the clues to the meaning of that haunting scene. But it also does so much more than that. Four qualities give the book its particular force and attraction. The first of these is its handling of humour, a gentle, pervading quality that is integral to the book, not a forced contrivance. Morris seems to faithfully recall the banter and badinage in the trenches, the absurdity of incident, the incongruities of civilised men in distinctly uncivilised conditions, as well as the gallows humour and a seasoning of satire at the fatuities from the high gods of HQ. However tense his plot, however squalid the scenes, there is never far away this under-stated, lightly ironic counterpoint.

The second is Morris’s handling of the mystery element. This is built up subtly by well-placed minor incidents, by half-glimpsed perspectives from characters who enter the narrative at a tangent, by shadings and hints. The mystery is the focus of the book, yet the work is not subservient to it.

The third quality, and the one that struck contemporaries most, is its realism. One said that “men who went through the war will have respect for and interest in Bretherton”. There are unflinching, but brief, scenes of horror, such as we know also from the memoirs and literature of his more celebrated contemporaries. There is – unemphasised but clear – evidence of the futility of hard-won advances swiftly abandoned. The boredom and the banal brass-hattery of the war comes across well too, though lightly done. Morris evokes well the camaraderie of the trenches, but he is also not afraid to acknowledge the rivalries, dislikes, vexations and minor feuding.

Lastly, there are the things that Bretherton is not. It is not preachy: it has no overt agenda. There is no “King and Country” stuff, no sentiment, no prejudice against the enemy: and, indeed, perhaps uniquely, it is written from both sides of the war. All of these elements make Bretherton an astonishingly finely balanced, quiet masterpiece.

(In my next post I’ll cover the other books by W.F. Morris.)

Book Collecting

2011-11-26T14:27:00.003-05:00

Ray Russell of Tartarus Press has made a short film in which I talk about my book collection and especially some authors I think are unfairly neglected, such as Ronald Fraser and J.C. Snaith. It can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYsL7BUO6c4

Vivian Meik's DEVILS' DRUMS

2011-11-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

Front cover of dust-wrapper

I'm very pleased to say that the expanded edition of Vivian Meik's Devils' Drums (originally published in 1933), which I finished eight years ago (for a different publisher), has now come out in a very attractive edition from Medusa Press. Not only is the dust-wrapper attractive, but the design on the binding is as well, so I will show scans of both here. Meik's stories of central African voodoo are refreshingly different from most British horror fiction of the 1930s. One story from Devils’ Drums has been filmed. "The Doll of Death" was adapted for the television program, Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Directed by John Badham, it was the second to last episode of the series, broadcast on 20 May 1973.

This new edition is limited to 300 copies. Order via the Medusa Press website.

Here is the table of contents:

INTRODUCTION – Douglas A. Anderson

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

I DEVILS’ DRUMS

II WHITE ZOMBIE

III AN ACRE IN HELL

IV THE DOLL OF DEATH

V WHITE MAN’S LAW

VI . . . L’AMITIÉ RESTE

VII THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SHADOW

VIII RA

IX A HONEYMOON IN HATE

X DOMIRA’S DRUM

ADDITIONAL STORIES:

XI THE TWO OLD WOMEN

XII CHIROMO

XIII I LEAVE IT TO YOU

Spine and upper cover of binding

WORMWOOD 17 - AICKMAN'S PLAYS

2011-11-19T02:44:00.002-05:00

Wormwood 17 includes a fascinating article by Doug Anderson about Robert Aickman's plays. These are a completely unknown part of Aickman's literary work for almost all readers, and Doug helpfully summarises the plays and comments on their themes. As Doug concludes, drama probably wasn't the right form for Aickman's imagination, but even so it is intriguing to learn more about his work here.

By a frustrating oversight, Doug's essay was not included on the cover or contents page of this issue. However, readers should certainly not miss this opportunity to find out about such rare Aickmaniana.

WORMWOOD 17

2011-11-16T15:16:00.002-05:00

Wormwood # 17 is due to be published shortly and contains Joel Lane's new insights on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, as well as essays on Gabriele d’Annunzio's poetry, Reginald Hodder, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, Donald Armour’s Swept & Garnished, Robert Aickman's plays and an Overview of American Decadence, and our usual columns 'Under Review' by Reggie Oliver, ' Late Reviews' by Doug Anderson and 'Camera Obscura'.

Auction of John Loder book collection

2011-09-05T19:25:00.010-04:00

Back in May John Loder's book collection was put up for sale by Australian Book Auctions. John is well known for his bibliography of Australian crime fiction and his collection of Australian crime, assembled over many years, was second to none.

A highlight of the sale was a copy of A Study in Scarlet in the 1887 issue of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Randall Stock's bibliography identified 32 extant copies, of which 11 are in private hands - this was an unrecorded 12th copy. The copy was rebound without wrappers and had some minor repairs. It was estimated at $40-80,000 and failed to sell.

A Colonial Edition of Dracula, with a library lending label on the cover, sold for $1,864.

A signed first edition of Frank Walford's Twisted Clay (T. Werner Laurie, 1933) without dust jacket and hinges starting, with six other Walford books, sold for $559.

Australian pulp detective magazines from the 1940s and '50s sold very well indeed, particularly Action Comics magazines - three lots, including a set of Leisure Detective Magazine and Action Detective Magazine, sold for $1,107, $1,748, and $1,282 respectively.

A lot of Fergus Hume titles were up for sale including various early editions of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, though a rare copy of the Melbourne Kemp & Boyce edition (1886) failed to sell.

I picked up a set of The Australian Journal for $303 - volumes I (1866), XI (1876), and about 20 loose issues up to the 1930s. Lots of supernatural and crime fiction within.

(Note that all prices include the buyer's premium.)

Penny Pickwick

2011-08-28T05:48:00.006-04:00

A recent bargain book purchase was a copy of The Post-Humourous Notes of the Pickwickian Club, an early Dickens plagiarism by Thomas Peckett Prest and published by Edward Lloyd. Two volumes bound in one in the complete 112 parts that were published in weekly penny issues in 1837-39, for a mere 12 pounds from an online seller. Presumably they thought it was an early edition of the Pickwick Papers and not worth much.

Here is part of an early article on penny part fiction that mentions the Penny Pickwick and some of Lloyd's other publications.

NOVELS IN PENNY NUMBERS (The Saturday Review, 18 September 1862)

Jacob Tonson is said to have had the attics of a house in Little Britain in habited by a colony of authors whose services he could call into requisition when he chose. Three of these “famous pens” slept under one rug, while one suit served their purposes when stirring abroad; and from these attics, as from an arsenal, Tonson drew forth the arms which disturbed the Ministry, or set the hearts of the nation a flutter. Since those days, the position of the recognised author has amazingly improved, but we doubt whether the race of hack authors is not greatly degenerated. Originally recruited almost solely from the ranks of wandering scholars who had spent some years at one of the Universities, who had been ushers or classical masters at schools, and who possessed, therefore, a very considerable amount of learning, our cheap authors have by degrees dwindled down to those who never saw the inside of an Eton grammar, and whose ignorance of foreign literature is only equalled by their ignorance of their own. Hence perpetual carelessness and blundering in the most ordinary sentences – hence bombast and obscurities, and a general want of style and poverty of English, pitiable enough to contemplate. Doctor Johnson, indeed, said that “every newspaper was now written in a good style,” but it was after a long training in the school of Addison, Swift, Dryden, Pope, and of the Doctor himself. All these masters are now felt to be out of place, and the spasmodic, the turgid, the quaint, or the silly style, each taken from its most popular exponent, serves the purpose. But, although the scholarship survives, the race survives. “Time was that when the brains were out the men would die,” but that time has long passed away, and a man without brains is as lively as ever. Bad, too, as Jacob Tonson undoubtedly was, we have in these days fallen upon a worse set of publishers. There was an assumption of learning at least in the books that came from “Curll’s lewd press or Tonson’s rubric post,” but are clean abandoned now by the “classic muse” in the presses from which we are about to quote. Certainly we do not desire that quotations should lie all about an article like the top dressing on a field, or, to quote Mr Sneer in the Critic, “like lumps of marl in a barren ground, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize;” but we do wish to feel the presence of scholarship, and to meet, at least occasionally, with a thought.

Fifty or even seventy years ago, the issue of works of fiction, as well as of religion and history, in periodical parts, was very well known. The sale was no doubt circumscribed because of the weight of material; but the country bookseller, by the aid of the slow wagon, helped the London publisher to dispose of his wares, just as now, when both are aided by the railways. But these effusions, to which a temporary vitality had been given by the success of the novels of Mrs. Radcliff and the Minerva Press school, soon died out. Of what kind they were, it is hardly worth while to inquire. Mrs Aphra Behn had set her mark upon their predecessors, the crop of which was rank, filthy and lascivious. Mrs Behn’s plays were not of the cleanest.

The stage, how loosely does Astoa tread,
Who fairly puts all characters to bed –

Says Pope, and their titles may sometimes tell us what we may expect from their contents. But, as Lady Wortley Montagu, Sir Walter Scott’s grandmother, and other ladies will witness, bad as they were, they used to be read aloud in a circle of young ladies, and apparently relished and remembered. Hence, no doubt, the lingering prejudice and hatred against works of fiction – feelings which are slowly dying out, but are yet in some families in full force. Their badness and ingrained viciousness soon called for their banishment, and in a short time young people were ashamed to be seen reading them. “Here, my dear Lucy,” cries Lydia Languish, “hide these books. Quick, quick; fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet, throw Roderick Random into the closet, put the Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man, thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa, and there, put The Man of Feeling into your pocket.” Containing such fruit, it was no wonder that a circulating library was stigmatized as an “evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,” or that novels and their authors were both hated and despised. The blood and thunder romances, and the haunted castle school which Horace Walpole introduced, drove away these; and the advent of Sir Walter Scott brought the historical novel into fashion, and redeemed the whole series of fiction, but also seems entirely to have stamped out the novels in numbers, which the followers of the Della Cruscan school still indulged in. Consequently, when Mr Dickens first began to publish the Pickwick Papers in monthly parts, it was regarded as a novelty – an experiment, indeed; and the fact that novels had been issued in that form years ago, seemed to have been quite forgotten.

If the upper classes of society had become tired of the Minerva Press school, it is evident that there were lower strata into which ghosts, murders, and vampires could yet penetrate. About twenty years ago, Mr Edward Lloyd, of Salisbury Square, the proprietor of a paper afterwards edited by Douglas Jerrold, marking the success of Dickens’ shilling numbers, flooded the town with a succession of penny-number novels, especially adapted for the working classes. There was Ela, the Outcast; Ada the Betrayed, or the Murder at the Old Smithy; Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood; The Old Ferry House; and The String of Pearls, a blood-thirsty novel, the principal character of which, a barber of Fleet Street, contrives to cut the throats of his customers and turn them down a trap-door, whence they issue in the shape of mutton pies of great savouriness and celebrity. Of course, with these horrors – some of them described with a rough power by a more celebrated author, who tried his ‘prentice hand on them – there was a regular flood of Jack Shephards, Blueskins, Jonathon Wilds, Claude Duvals, and pirates and robbers without number. The game, indeed, seems begun with a Penny Pickwick, of course a rank copy of Boz’s celebrated work, and issued at the same time. This, the publishers of Mr. Dickens, we believe, tried to stop by an injunction; but as the grossness of the copy was perfectly apparent, as no one could doubt that the issue was at least colourably different, since one came out monthly, price one shilling, and the other weekly at one penny, the sages of the law held that the piracy did not interfere with the original work, and it was not suppressed. At any rate, it ran on till its attractions ceased, or its readers got tired of the issue, when the tale was wound up in a moderately thick volume.

The Holocaust by R. Murry Gilchrist

2011-08-19T23:50:00.005-04:00

Robert Murray Gilchrist’s great collection of decadent tales, The Stone Dragon and Other Tragical Romances (Methuen, 1894), owes much to W.E. Henley, ironically well known for his anti-decadent stance. Henley published many pieces in his National Observer that have become classics of the 1890s English decadent movement, including short stories by H.B. Marriott Watson, whose collection, Diogenes of London and other Fantasies and Sketches, dedicated to Henley, was also published by Methuen in 1893, stories and poems by W.B. Yeats, and verse by Graham R. Tomson.

Below is a list of Gilchrist stories that appeared in the National Observer, followed by the text of ‘The Holocaust,’ a tale in the same style as those that appeared in The Stone Dragon.

‘The Return,’ 2 July 1892
‘The Basilisk,’ 23 July 1892
‘The Writings of Althea Swarthmoor,’ 17 September 1892
‘Dame Inowslad,’ 7 January 1893
‘Witch-in-Grain,’ 6 May 1893
‘The Pageant of Ghosts,’ 19 August 1893
‘Bubble Magic,’ 18 November 1893
‘The Holocaust,’ 3 February 1894.

'The Holocaust' (The National Observer, 3 February 1894)
By R. Murray Gilchrist

My husband and master the bishop being called to Court, I journeyed yesterday to Broadlow. This morning my cousin’s second lady vehemently desired me to tell all I know of her who once held the place she adorns so brightly. We were in the still room, and the bantlings played on the floor, pulling the buckles of their mother’s shoes and croodling like culvers. The request was over-sudden; to gain time, I opened the green lattice, and looking out to the herb garden, said that little Bab herself had mounted by Neptune in the empty tank, and that in the sun-haze her countenance bore a plain likeness to one dead. And the row of clarifying waters in the window span round and round, and I swooned in madam’s arms. But she consoled me, and now to her will, I write the following history, in trust that my lord may never be permitted to read. The fustian preface I will omit; ‘tis but a record, unprofitable to the would-be adventurer, of life among the Barbary Rovers, of voyagers to Feginny, of the saving of a ship’s crew. Its six volumes are in the library, bound in pigskin, and revered by all. Of my cousin’s three years in Bologna – years devoted to the joys of Italian gallantry – little is known, for on that score he hath ever been silent.

Thirteen years ago he returned for good – even then scarce more than a youth – with the Princess Bice. As you know report tells that ere he travelled to Italy he and I had had love passages. The grandams teased me, and (for I am assured, madam, that you have heard) once I stole away from Broadlow for a month, and came back lightened. We were close akin, and Bible patriarchs enjoyed their handmaids…When news came of his marriage I prayed for a renewal of his ardour; but at the first sight of the Princes Bice, as she sat at his side in the big chariot, I knew that all hope was unavailing. Yet she was not more beautiful than you, dear lady; indeed her face lacked the mysterious and tender charm that shines from a woman whom nature has intended for motherhood. Where you are snowy, she was olive, her black her was dull and lifeless, not all quick and gold. If at any time Bab be taken into a darkened room, and the curtain lifted aback of her head some faint resemblance may be seen. Once, peeping unawares to the princess Bice’s dressing-closet, I saw her naked afront of the mirror – her wondrous hair unbound and tumbling to the floor. At my appearance her body flushed and methought I watched a rashlight burning in a grove of firs.

Her manner was haughty; at first it seemed as she mistrusted me, looking from her spouse to me and back again with some suspicion. He leaned on her shoulder, and it was as though I head, ‘This is she – was not I foolish? nay, sweetheart, trust me!’ The roses I had greeted her with were out carelessly aside.

My lord took my hand with ancient friendliness, ‘Diana is your gentlewoman,’ he said. ‘She will conduct you to the chamber.’

She smiled wryly, and laid her fingers on my palm, with a look bidding me kiss, so I raised their daintiness lothfully to my lips.

Then I led her through the lines of servants, past stately old Mother Humble – God rest her – and along the upper gallery to the bed-chamber; and there, when the door was shut, she put her hands on my shoulders and drew me to the hearth.

‘You were…’ she said. ‘He hath told me all, and I forewarn you that if – again – I can be an enemy worse than Satan himself. Yet, since you are his kinswoman, I had liefer you were my friend.’

At her girdle was a pouch made of silk, inwrought with a curious device of seed pearls; this she untied, and emptying to her table the comfits held therein, begged me to accept it as a token of her desire to act in all things well. From that even I became attached after a fashion; she held me as the flame holds the jenny-spinner. I strove to abhor her, yet was never happy save in her presence. ‘Tis to her I owe the accomplishments that commended me to the fancy of my husband the Bishop. True, in my girlhood I could strum on the harpsichord, but my music was never more than picking the tune with my forefinger and making base haphazard; and the Princess Bice taught me the rich fugues and solemn adagios of the Italian masters. The golden tissues that hang in the withdrawing-room we worked together on her toy-loom of ivory; and amongst my cousin’s books are many vellum scripts of our illumination.

Months passed, and the gossips began to grow impatient, for the couple had already spent nigh upon a year in Paris, and yet there was no sign of my lord’s happiness being consummated by the birth of one to inherit. The land, as you know, madam, goes with the title, and Sir Cadwallader, our Welsh kinsman, vowed, if ‘twere ever his, to divide the park into farms and to chop down every tree. My lord did not hate him (Sir Cadwallader being a fool), but it tore his heart to think of such beauty being destroyed. Day by day – hour by hour – the desire for a lawful child grew upon him, and she herself became impatient beyond measure, questioning minutely all the matrons and perusing all that has been writ. Several false alarms were given, and these themselves depressed the husband, for the continual deferring of hope fretted his soul. The chaplain spent long afternoons in prayer; and she harped on the idol-creed in which she had been bred, and sent to foreign shrines offerings of jewels and gold.

My lord’s demeanour changes, and, although he was never harsh, her caresses grew distasteful to him, and I have often seen him take away her hands from his brow, and crave leave to meditate. Then she would sigh like one demented, and for awhile in her voice as she sang I could find notes of anger and of braised tenderness, that wetted my eyes with tears, and made the fascination wherewith she held me deepen into love.

Three years after the return, my cousin was despatched to the Hague with secret messages for the Princess Mary of Orange, now – Heaven be praised – our queen, and in his absence, I saw her linger fondly over all that brought him to mind. She would sit in his chair, study his favourite books, and even kiss the breast of his coats, as if, perchance, she might detect some lingering aroma.

Once she strove with the women in the harvest field, hoping thus to cast away the curse of barrenness. At sunset – she had gleaned from noon – a wench passed by with her by blow, and she turned pale and sick, and came back to the house.

‘Diana,’ quoth she. ‘God’s mercy is unduly dispensed. Yon begger with her babe is starving. Go privately and bring the woman here, and feed her in my room!’

So I went and filled the strumpet with good things. Whilst she ate the Princess Bice stole the babe away, and when the half bemused mother noted its disappearance and cried out, I ran to the cabinet, and found madam, with the child patting her naked breasts and chuckling most jocundly.

Sometimes days passed without her making a comment on her grief, but anon she would lament. ‘’Tis not that I love children, Diana, but that I love my spouse. Love him – said I – marry, I adore him! Such is my devotion that were I to die in travail I should be tenfold more happy than to live unchilded.’

Each morning she writ an account of how the preceeding day had been spent; once by chance I tumbled on the unlocked book and read: ‘I am indeed weary, for what I know of his past assures me that I alone am to blame. Nay, I would yield up everything – cast away my riches – turn to the humblest wife in the land could I but once again wear him the flower of our passion. Yesterday I pondered, ‘twas as if between heaven and me hung a curtain of rusty steel God might not hear through. I have prayed and prayed and naught answers! I am tempted to turn to the Powers of Darkness. Are there no necromancers – no half-devils in human form who may help me? For now I am desperate and would travel over red hot plough-shares to compass my desire.’

A thousand preparations were made for my cousin’s home-coming. Every friend and kinsman of note was ordered, for the earldom had been given to reward his successful embassy. The Princess Bice grew paler and paler as the day approached, and mention of him brought the poppies to her cheeks. She had devised quaint entertainments, and the thought of his return made her heart beat so loudly that I might hear.

On an October evening she and I, hearing the beacon fired on Comber Knab, where had been stationed a watcher, set out to drive across the park, where the abysses writhed white vapours, like the steam from ever-shifting pots. She leaned from one window of the chariot; I from the other. The air was soft, but permeated with some subtle dullness; in the far landscape the basin-shaped depression of the Black Rake, surrounded by its tree-fringed cliffs, resembled an immense, solitary mere, with blackly glazed surface. The oaks of Hollym Chase wagged their heads above the underwood; the drowsy rooks wheeled to and fro. Twice the scritch-owl cried, and hills and valleys caught the horrid sound and echoed it with many reverberations; once a pike in the sullen stream sprang up and fell with heavy splashings. This was the good-night of all wild things; for after it the gloom deepened into inkiness, and across the sky was drawn a web denser than that of all former nights.

At the Cammer-Gate, where the wooden bridge crosses the gulf, the chariot drew up sharply, for an old man barred the way. He spake no word to the drivers, but moved slowly to the door from which my mistress leaned, and in the glimmering light of the lamp I marked his strangeness. His countenance was that of a physician, his attire of velvet edged with sable. He spoke in a foreign tongue, and she answered, her voice full of sharp gladness. ‘Twas not Italian – that I knew full well – but rather a barbarous lingo. Soon he threw into her lap a small packet, and pointing with a yellow hand to a copse of beeches, allowed the vehicle to pass. In a few minutes my lord had met us, and taken his seat by his wife’s side.

That night he was mightily loving. After supper, when the dance was opened, he was even handsomer than in the days when he had been lord of my own heart; and the Princess Bice seemed transfigured with delight. All the folk noted it; and many lamented that so fit a couple should be so unprofitable. Then, the morrow being Sunday, Dean Bastler, my mother’s uncle, who was deaf and decrepit, read his sermon on the relationship of Elkanah and his wife, taking for his text ‘Penninah had children, but Hannah had no children.’ He had never been a respecter of persons, and the discourse was little qualified to please, though, forsooth, the gaffer was eloquent enough. He told naught of Hannah’s joy, but recounted from history many instances of unprofitable wedlock, and declared that SIN alone was the cause. At the end he offered a lengthy prayer that the Almighty would see fit to bestow children on his host and hostess; and my lord, covering his face with his hands, which thing he was not wont to do, cried out Amen! As we left the chapel his lady fell on his bosom and whispered, ‘Am I not better to thee than ten sons?’ But he put her from him in silence.

An hour later I was sent for to her chamber, where I found her worn out with the frenzy of weeping. “All is over,’ she said. ‘For love’s sake be it done.’

My lord had cause to set out for London soon afterwards, and she bade him farewell with much tenderness. That night she drew me to a private place and undid before me the packet the old man had flung into her lap. ‘All it holds I know,’ she said, ‘but ‘twill be strange to you.’ And she showed me a handful of pastilicos. ‘Light one,’ she said.

I did as she bade me, and instantly a silence fell upon the place, so that even the crackling of the sea-coal was no longer heard. The air became redolent with marvellous perfumes, and I heard one tap-tapping at a door I wot not of, and felt unseen hands touching mine. She laughed, ‘To-night I will lie in the state bed,’ she said. ‘A whimzie has taken me; see that the purest linen is laid, and every window tightly fastened.’

Midnight was near when she withdrew from the company that was still in the house. At the foot of the staircase she trembled violently, and would have me clasp her waist; and when I had helped her undress she delayed me with a thousand pretexts, sitting uneasily in her chair by the fire and talking feverishly. On a table I saw in a copper chafing dish a charm of pastilicos; I made as though I would disturb its symmetry, but she called me to her side. ‘Nay, Diana, do not destroy my plan! She gasped. ‘Give me the taper.’

I placed it in her hands; she lighted it, and moved to the chafing dish and touched the pastilicos one by one. Then I flew to the door, but she followed me open mouthed and caught me in her arms. Her lips said, though no sound came, ‘Stay with me! stay with me!’

My limbs lost all power and I fell to the floor. The Princess Bice crawled into the bed. From the pastilicos arose an angry melody; then all was silent. Soon the air of the chamber trembled and gathered together over the smoulderings; and hovering there I beheld the figure of a man so fearfully and miraculously beautiful that my eyes were dazzled. The curtains parted and fell to, and I saw no more.

At daybreak I felt her breath upon my cheek, and heard her command of silence. Some time before noon all the servants were called together in the Council Room, where my mistress, very haggard but full of triumph, sat in the great seat from which Mall of Broadlow had dispensed judgment. ‘Friends,’ she said sogtly, ‘for I may call you friends, I have news of import. Your master’s trouble will soon be removed, for I have cause – and ‘tis not hope now, but truth certainly – to believe that in due time I shall bring him a child.’ So unexpected was her announcement that even those who had regarded her with disfavour, fell to their knees, and, as she passed through their midst, caught the edges of her skirt to kiss. Dean Bastler had stood at the door and one had repeated her words loudly, and he raised his hands in benediction; but she passed without any sign, and, although she spoke not of it to her guests, all matrons divined the cause of her vapourish spirits. And when my lord returned ‘twas to find the house mad with delight. The months passed quickly; all preparations were made for the lying-in; but the Princess Bice herself took interest in naught save her husband’s devotion.

The night of her lightening came at last, and by her request I sat with her before her labour. She had instructed me to light at a certain time the pastilico that still remained. As the clock struck I obeyed, and saw her rise from her bed and leave the chamber, ever increasing the space between us; I followed – sank upon the stairs – strove vainly to cry for succour.

Afterwards I crawled on hands and knees through many long deserted passages, and into the open park. Her bare feet passed hurriedly over the grass in the distance, then turned across to the road, and to the wooden bridge where we had met the old man. She reached the beech copse, and ere she entered a flame leapt forward to embrace her; I heard a long and terrible sigh. From the house came a crowd of searchers, headed by my lord; amidst the heart-burnt wood they found Bab lying on a bed of charred leaves.

'Penny Fiction' by Francis Hitchman

2011-08-13T07:08:00.008-04:00

The following article, by Francis Hitchman, appeared in the Quarterly Review in July 1890, and is one of the most detailed and interesting contemporary accounts of penny dreadfuls and penny part publications.

‘We must educate our masters,' said Lord Sherbrooke (then Mr. Lowe), in the course of the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867. The remark fell upon fertile soil, and Mr. Forster's Education Bill of 1870 sprang directly out, of it. The very class, who but a few years before had detected in the demand for education nothing but the greedy clamour of the clergy of the hated ‘Establishment' for more influence than was rightly theirs, and who under the influence of the happily extinct Manchester School of politicians, had been most vehement in their protest against State interference between parents and children, now demanded ‘free, compulsory, and secular education,' always at the cost of the State, and always to be directed by the bitterest enemies of that ‘State Church,' to which the working classes were indebted for all the education they had received for half a century. It is useless to resuscitate the miserable controversy. The Birmingham Education League is dead, and the quarrels which it stirred up are, we may hope, dead with it. We have been ‘educating our masters' in the three R.'s for nearly twenty years, and some of us are beginning to ask, to what use they have put that painful training in the rudiments which has cost the country so much solid money. The natural inquiry is, what do they read? Not indeed that they read much. The modern system of education, with the pressure of impending examinations forever weighing upon teachers and children, is admirably adapted to prevent the youth of the period from troubling itself greatly about literature in any form. The son of the working man, who leaves school as soon after he has passed the age of thirteen as possible, has no love for books, and, having ‘passed his standard,' not unnaturally thinks he, has practically done with the whole apparatus of learning for the rest of his life. By and by he will perhaps take some small interest in public affairs, or the concerns of his trades' union may become important to him, and in that case he will spend his Sunday morning over a newspaper. With the Sunday newspaper, however, we have in this place nothing to do. Except for one trumpery addition, their number and character remain pretty much what they were when the subject was dealt with in these pages more than ten years ago. Before the time for the Sunday paper arrives, however, the working lad that the enterprising publishers of Shoe Lane and the purlieus thereof have provided him with a certain store of amusement. A walk during the dinner hour - say from twelve to one - through the courts and alleys in the irregular space which is, roughly speaking, bounded on the north by Holborn, on the south by the Thames, on the west by St. Martin's Lane, and on the east by St. Paul's and its precincts, will afford the observant passenger sufficient food for reflection. He will find that while a certain proportion of the lads from the various offices and factories in that region are beguiling their leisure with various minor games, or indulging in the rough horse-play in which the London ‘larrikin' delights, many of the remainder are occupied in reading. In the same way the lads employed in City offices and warehouses, who in many cases have a great deal of leisure, naturally spend it in the same way.

It will, of course, be said that this is a laudable occupation. There are not a few good people in whose eyes a book is a species of fetish, and who look upon printed paper with as much reverence as do the Mahometans. To all such the boy, who, in their own phrase, ‘never has a book out of his hands,’ is worthy of respect and even of admiration. Unfortunately, however, the lad of this type revels in a literature which is not precisely of the kind for which Cobbett and Franklin hoarded their pence. No small proportion of it comes under the category of 'Penny Dreadfuls.' It had been hoped that books of this class had become extinct. A somewhat sanguine writer on the subject a few years ago expressed a lively satisfaction at the fact that he had inquired in vain for the catchpenny romances that were popular in the days of his youth. ‘The Mysteries of the Court,' ‘The Mysteries of London,' ‘The Haunted House, or Love and Crime,’ ‘Maria Martin, or the Murder in the Red Barn,' ‘The Haunted Cellar, a tale of Fleet Ditch,' and 'Joskin the Body Snatcher,' were, he found, ‘out of print.' It would seem, however, that they are 'out of print' only in the serial form. A walk through Holywell Street will show that they are still to be bought in sixpenny volumes - price four pence halfpenny at the discount booksellers and that they dispute the favour of the poorer class of readers with translations of the improving, romances of MM. Zola and Paul de Kock.

But this is not all. In a lane not far from Fleet Street there is a complete factory of the literature of rascaldom - a literature which has done much to people our prisons, our reformatories, and our Colonies, with scapegraces and ne'er do wells. At the present time no fewer than fifteen of these mischievous publications are in course of issue from this one place. They are not, it is true, very new, but they have a steady and considerable sale in the back streets, and are constantly advertised as in course of re-issue. First on the list comes 'Spring Heeled Jack, or the Terror of London,' No. 2 given away with No. 1, with ‘a splendid coloured plate gratis.’ The 'plate,' a coarse woodcut printed on tinted paper, represents a stage-coach crowded with affrighted passengers, over whose heads springs the devil with horns, hoofs, tail, and bat-like wings complete. The story is what might be expected a tale of highwaymen, murderers, burglars, wicked noblemen, and lovely and persecuted damsels, whose physical charms and voluptuous embraces are dilated upon with exceeding unction. It is almost needless to say that the highwaymen of the romance are not the sorry and sordid rogues we know them to have been in real life, but always 'dashing,' 'high spirited,' and ‘bold.' As a matter of course, they all carry pistols, which they use with unerring skill, which never miss fire, and apparently never require re-loading. It is equally a matter of course that the enemies of these gallant fellows - the constables, who at the time of the story, which is left in uncertainty but is presumably about the middle of the eighteenth century, are under the orders of a ‘Commissioner' - are ugly, stupid, ill conditioned, and cowardly; that it is a ‘paternal government' under which 'things have reached such a pitch that a man may be fined, perhaps imprisoned, for carrying a pistol to protect himself;' and that, in one word, all the officers of the law are ‘tyrants’ and 'oppressors,' whom it is the duty of ‘spirited lads' to resist to the uttermost. No. 2 on our list bears the promising title of ‘Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,' and is a delectable story of a barber under whose shop is a cellar into which his customers are precipitated through a trap door, to be robbed and murdered at leisure. By way of adding to the ludicrous ghastliness of the story, the corpses of the victims, who appear to average about one per diem, are made into meat pies by a fascinating woman who keeps a shop in Bell Yard. There is the usual apparatus of a gang of desperate criminals of superhuman strength, sagacity, and courage; and of stupid and blundering watchmen and honest folk. Everybody always goes armed, and is ready to produce his weapons on the smallest provocation, or none at all; and the use of a pistol is invariably represented as a proof of courage and presence of mind. ‘Cheeky Charlie, or what a Boy can do' - the third of these romances - is an impossible tale of an outcast boy, who is rescued by a personage very appropriately called ‘the Vagabond,' from the cruelties, of the workhouse and the Guardians of the Poor. The story is almost abject in its silliness - many children of twelve years old could write as coherently and as well - but it enforces with great energy the theory that the constituted authorities are both rogues and fools, the fool predominating. ‘Green as Grass,' No. 4 of the series, might also have been written by a sharp errand boy. The tale is of a swindling attorney, who with his son victimizes a wealthy but intensely vulgar family, whose foolish son gives the title to the book. It is stupid beyond expression in conception and execution alike, the fun is intensely depressing, and the illustrations so wretched as to suggest the idea that the artist (?) must be caricaturing himself. ‘Turnpike Dick' is described as the true history of all the celebrated highwaymen, and appears to be a hash up of the moral and improving biography of Dick Turpin and his ‘gallant companions.' The hero is always in company with a magnificent horse; is always armed with sword and pistols, sumptuously dressed; he has ‘a rich, mellow voice,' in spite of his 'nocturnal rambles' and frequently repeated ‘draughts of brandy;' he is of matchless physical beauty, and is naturally beloved by the most adorable of women; and he beguiles his leisure with wine and song amidst a select crew of 'knights of the road,' whom he treats in a ‘haughty yet affable manner.' The moon is always 'shining merrily' on his gallant exploits, and fortune is ever on the side of the handsome hero, and as constantly unfavourable to the stupid, cowardly, and ill-looking constables and their assistants. ‘Jack Sheppard,' burglar and prison breaker, is the hero of the sixth romance on the list. The story is constructed on precisely the same lines as the last mentioned, and may be compendiously described as a glorification of vice and crime. The ‘large coloured picture, presented gratis' with the first number, emphasizes this point, representing, as the epigraph informs, the reader, ‘Jack Sheppard commencing his career of undying fame (!) in the carpenter's shop.' The ‘Poor Boys of London, a Life Story for the People,' is a tale of slightly loftier pretensions, in the course of which the author displays his acquaintance with casual wards, thieves’ kitchens, and criminal resorts generally, and uses such descriptive and dramatic powers as he possesses to extenuate the offences of the 'poor boys' who, in his own phrase, are ‘driven to crime.' ‘The School on the Sea' is a tale relating the rebellion of a number of boys against an impossible sea-captain, who is the head of an equally impossible school on a ship provided by the Admiralty. The whole thing is a farrago of disgusting rubbish, but it appears to be popular. The title of ‘He would be a Clown, or the Pet of the Pantomime,' sufficiently explains the substance of the next serial on our list, the author of which, if he proves nothing else, demonstrates very clearly that he knows nothing whatever of the stage. ‘Tales of Pirates, Smugglers, and Buccaneers;’ ‘Three Fingered Jack, the Terror of the Antilles,' and ‘Lions and Tigers, or the Pirates of the South Pacific,' are romances, the substance of which may be guessed from their titles. The moral tone is simply deplorable. Lawlessness and violence are the subjects of the writers' fondest admiration, and the severer matter is pleasingly seasoned with love scenes of the 'luscious' kind, which are almost as offensive in their way as the performances of certain young lady novelists of a higher rank. Of the remaining works on this publisher's list no special mention need be made. 'Broad Arrow Jack,’ ‘Captain Macheath, the Prince of the Highway,' and ‘Famous Fights in the Prize Ring,' all point the same moral - that no life is so delightful as a life of roguery tempered with violence; that highwaymen and thieves are heroes; and their mistresses queens of beauty and romance, whose venal caresses are the rightful guerdon of skill, daring, and dash.

When it is remembered that this foul and filthy trash circulates by thousands and tens of thousands week by week amongst lads who are at the most impressionable period of their lives, and whom the modern system of purely secular education has left without ballast or guidance, it is not surprising that the authorities have to lament the prevalence of juvenile crime, and that the Lord Mayor, and Aldermen should constantly have to adjudicate in cases for which these books are directly responsible. The story is always the same. An errand boy or an office lad is caught in the act of robbing his master - 'frisking the till,' embezzlement, or forgery. In his desk are found sundry numbers of these romances of the road, a cheap revolver, a small stock of cartridges and a black mask. A little pressure brings out the confession that those ‘properties' have been bought by the youthful culprit with the intention of emulating the ‘knights of the road,' the tale of whose exploits has fascinated him. It is necessary, for the sake of other lads in the same employment, to press for a conviction and the boy is taken off to prison, to come out a passed recruit of the great army of crime.

Even where the literature offered for the consumption of this class of boys is not directly criminal, it is often dangerously foolish, and even vicious. One publication boldly announces itself as 'The Bad Boys' Paper;' and, though the editor, who adopts the pseudonym of Guy Rayner, ostentatiously announces that his ‘one aim and object is to provide a healthy and entertaining journal,' it is impossible to say that he has attained it. The hero of one is a boy who runs away from school after getting drunk with his comrades on smuggled punch in the dormitory; another relates the adventures of an English boy of fifteen in India, whose favourite companion is a tame tiger, and who does wonderful things with a bow and arrow; another is a story of low life, with all the vulgarity retained, and the humour carefully left out. The remainder of the paper fully comes up to the level thus indicated. An even worse specimen of this class of paper is a shabby and ill printed rag which has for title ‘The Boys London and Boys of New York.' This sheet is printed in London from stereotyped plates, which are very obviously manufactured in America, and appears to have been issued for many years past, the number for the week ending 29th September 1889, being 647. The staple is of course fiction, the character of which may be judged from the titles of the stories, instalments of which appear in this number: The Haunted Glen, a Story of Mystery (with an illustration of appalling hideousness); the Steam Catamaran, a Legend of the North West; the Shorty's Trip around the World; Johnnie Burgoo, or the Mystery of a Boy's Life; the Maniac Engineer; Mad Anthony Wayne; Cale Loring and his Demon Dog, and the Wreck of the ‘Columbus.' ‘The London Story Paper’, which is almost as old an undertaking as that just mentioned, is of much the same type, printed like it from American stereotypes, with illustrations a shade better.

English papers for boys are almost as foolish, but there is improvement in the external appearance of most of them. The oldest is the ‘Boys of England,' now in the fourteenth year of its existence. The editor and proprietor, announces somewhat conspicuously that this ‘journal of travel, sport, fun, and instruction' is ‘subscribed to by H.R.H. Prince Arthur and Count William Bernstorff.' Why those distinguished persons should honour the paper it is not easy to see. There is certainly nothing in its contents to induce tutors and governors to recommend it, though it may be admitted that there is nothing flagrantly offensive. The chief failings of the paper are its weakness, and curiously ‘second-hand' air. The American reprinted matter is especially thin and poor. Much the same thing may be said of two other publications of the same class which are issued by the same publisher - 'Boys of the Empire' and ‘The Boy's Comic Journal.' Other papers of a similar but slightly lower type are: 'Ching Ching’s Own,' ‘The Boy's Champion Journal,' ‘The Boys' Leisure Hour,' and ‘The Young Folks’ Paper.' They present no feature of special interest, and call for little remark. The best that can be said of them is that they are comparatively harmless; the worst, that no boy is likely to be the better for reading them. He will derive neither information nor instruction from them, and it may be doubted whether the time spent over them would not be infinitely more usefully employed in cricket and football or some lighter games. Boys cannot, of course, be invariably engaged in athletic exercise, but they would certainly be far wiser if they devoted themselves to chess or draughts, or even dominoes, than if they indulged in the intellectual debauchery which a constant study of books of this class implies.

For children of a larger growth enterprising publishers cater with great liberality and with corresponding profit to themselves. The number of penny weekly papers, leaving newspapers, trade journals, and professedly religious organs wholly out of account, is literally enormous, and their circulation almost fabulous. There is probably no family of the classes rather absurdly described as 'working' and ‘lower middle' in which one at least of these prints is not bought as regularly as Saturday night comes round. In many such families three, four, and even more are taken by various members and lent from one to another. Including such as may be seen on the counters of public-houses and the tables of coffee taverns and cheap restaurants, we are probably well within the mark in saying that every copy sold is read by six persons. Now as one of these prints boasts a circulation of 334,000 a week (?), another modestly announces its sale as ‘a little under half a million' (?), a third claims a quarter of a million, and several are known to sell over 100,000 weekly - it is obvious that the family penny papers combined must be one of the greatest social forces in the kingdom. Whether they are worthy of their vocation is a question which it may be worth while to investigate.

The first point which strikes the inquirer is the obvious niggardliness with which most of these prints are managed. The American cheap press is drawn upon largely and unblushingly. More than one of the weekly prints, to be mentioned hereafter, is composed almost exclusively of reprints of this kind, while several of the remainder obtain from one-third to one-half of their matter from the same source. Two methods of procedure are open to the enterprising publisher. In one case he simply cuts the story out of the American journal and reprints it as it stands, trusting to the printer's reader to correct the eccentricities of American orthography. This method may be commended for its comparative honesty. The author, it is true, receives no compensation for the use that is made of his work, but he is served no worse than the hundreds of English authors of infinitely greater pretensions, whose work is similarly ‘conveyed' every day in the United States. The English reader, too, is not plundered. The story presents itself for what it is - a tale of American life by an American writer - and as such he gets it at a very cheap rate. Greater ingenuity is required for the second method, which is, however, less popular with publishers on account of the greater expense which it entails. Under this system the publisher hands over a copy of the work which he wishes to have edited for the English market to one of the hacks in his employment. Pen in hand, this latter goes over the whole book, altering, striking out, writing in, and generally transmogrifying it. The title of the book is changed, as are the headings of the chapters; over-long chapters are divided; two short chapters are run into one; the dramatis personae are re-baptized, names that are familiar to the students of English fiction being substituted for American names and titles; the ‘brown stone, mansion on Fifth Avenue' becomes a stately edifice in Belgravia or Grosvenor Square; Saratoga or Long Branch becomes Brighton or Scarborough; the 'trip to Europe' is a Continental tour or a visit to Scotland; and the millionaire's country-house on the Hudson River becomes a hunting-box in the Shires, or a fishing lodge in the West of Ireland. The people are similarly changed. The Senator is transformed into a Duke or an Earl at the least - titles are very cheap in fiction of this character - the M. C. blossoms out into an M.P.; the Pittsburg ironmaster into a Manchester cotton lord, and the Wall Street operator into a prototype of the Rothschilds or the Barings. When a little more care is thought desirable, the style is modified in accordance with English notions of the fitness of things, and the more obvious Americanisms are suppressed. The book thus becomes an English novel for all practical purposes at a cost to the enterprising proprietor of the penny Weekly of about 5l., which, if he is in an unwontedly generous mood, he may perhaps make guineas. Instances have been known of a story so manipulated having passed through a periodical of the lower class, and having afterwards blazed forth in all the glory of chromo-printed boards for sale at the railway stations (price 2s.).

There is, it must be admitted, one trifling drawback to these ingenious operations in the copyright complications which occasionally result, a very odd instance of which occurred a year or so ago. An English writer, who is not altogether unknown in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street, produced a novel in the usual way in London, which had the customary run at the circulating libraries and at the end of the season was forgotten. Some time afterwards he was not a little surprised to discover that his story, with some changes of names and places, was appearing in weekly instalments in a well-known periodical. He naturally complained, and the sequel to his complaint was that he made the unwelcome discovery that his story had been translated into American, and re-translated from the American version into English. Legal proceedings were threatened, and the pillaged author confidently expected a considerable sum from the publisher of the, periodical, but the latter was, luckily for himself, able to show that the original story owed so much to a German original that he was able to set his opponent at defiance.

The proprietors of these publications do not of course rely only upon American sources for their wares. Ancient and forgotten Annuals, Keepsakes, Books of Beauty, Friendship's Offerings, Town and Country Magazines, and similar repertories of ‘genteel fiction' are regularly sifted for available matter. One editor indeed makes no secret of his dependence on these sources, as will be evident from the annexed advertisement which appears weekly in his papers:-

‘Literary contributions to…must be short, and very curious or very amusing, original, translated or copied. Copied scraps must be from old books, magazines, periodicals, or newspapers published originally at least forty-two years ago. Literary contributions (if used) will be paid for as follows: Original or translations, three halfpence per line, and extra when specially good; copied or cuttings from print, one penny per line. Compiled articles counted original.'

The same thing is done by the proprietors of other weekly pennyworths, who enlist the great army of amateurs in their service by offers of prizes of one or two guineas for the best story of a certain length, reserving to themselves the right of publishing all the competing compositions, even though they may not adjudge the prize to them. There are besides a great number of persons to whom the pleasure of appearing in print is a sufficient reward for a great deal of labour, and from them much ‘copy' is obtained. For the rest, the verses and miscellaneous paragraphs, which fill up the odd corners of the minor prints of the day, are raked together from all conceivable sources: ancient jest books, collections of anecdotes, defunct and abortive magazines, and the boxes of odd volumes which may be seen outside secondhand bookstalls and brokers’ shops, are all put under contribution.

A different origin may be ascribed to much of the ‘original’ work which appears in the columns of some of these prints. One proprietor, for example, has a regular manufactory of periodical fiction. Thither a little band of ‘literary gentlemen' bend their steps betimes each morning, and until four or five o'clock in the afternoon they labour in the transmogrification of American novels as a above described, or, in the production of new and original romances of high life and the passions. Sometimes by way of stimulating their invention, the proprietor provides them with a set of illustrations which have done duty before, and which they may ‘write up to' as best they can. More frequently, however, they have to rely on their own unassisted genius. The principal point upon, which stress is laid, is that every instalment of these romances shall contain at least one situation susceptible of pictorial treatment. It is hardly necessary to say that the gentlemen who accept engagements of this kind are not as a rule very distinguished members of the Republic of Letters, though in some few instances their antecedents are better than might be expected. One example, who was tolerably well known a few years ago, was a University man, a beneficed clergyman, who, having had a misunderstanding with his bishop, threw up his living and abandoned the clerical dress and habits. Another man of the same type bore an historic name, took honours at Oxford, and was expected to do great things. His abilities were of a high order, but he was idle, reckless, and, worst of all, constitutionally incapable of resisting the seductions of drink. He had a facile pen and great stores of information, but he never succeeded in accomplishing anything beyond the veriest hack-work. His greatest achievement was a romance written for a weekly paper now defunct. The proprietor had made a journey to Paris, and whilst there had picked up for a small sum some fifty or sixty wood blocks which had been used to illustrate a romance by Ponson du Terrail. These were handed over to the hack in question, with instructions to arrange them in any order that he pleased, and to write up to them so as to use them all. This romance, whose principal merit was that it presented not the faintest resemblance to anything that Ponson du Terrail ever wrote, achieved a considerable amount of success, but produced little in the way of either money or reputation for the unfortunate author, who died in a London hospital a year or two after the story was completed.

It must not, of course, be supposed that the Grub Street of today is populated exclusively with broken-down University men. A goodly proportion of them began life in the unambitious capacities of compositors, reporters, and hangers on of the newspaper press. One well known personage of this class began what in moments of confidence he delights to style his ‘literary career,' when acting as shopman to a second hand bookseller in a manufacturing town of the Midlands. Another distinguished person of the same type translates dubious French novels on week days, and on Sundays actually officiates as minister of some sort of Dissenting chapel. A third was a village schoolmaster in Scotland, while of a fourth a curious anecdote was told a few years ago in a monthly magazine. ‘A friend of the writer,’ said the magazinist, 'has in his service a housemaid whose father writes novels for a Fleet Street publisher from 10 to 4 daily.' A still more amusing illustration of the social status of some of our popular instructors was lately related by a lady, the wife of a well known physician. Her cook having repeatedly neglected to send up the dinner with the punctuality which is desirable in a well-ordered household, she remonstrated with some sharpness, and to her astonishment was informed that the young person in question was so much occupied with the novel she was writing that she had been unable to pay due attention to her duties in the kitchen. It would be easy to multiply instances of the same state of things, but the fullest information could probably be given by the officials of the Reading Room at the British Museum. Those who wish to see the subject, treated in the most amusing light, however, may be referred to a clever novel of the ‘Besant and Rice' series, which has for title ‘With Harp and Crown,' and in which real and well known persons are described under feigned names.

From writers of this type it is, of course, hopeless to expect work of any high pretension, nor as a matter of fact is it to be found. But if the literary level of the weekly press be low, its morals are irreproachable. Fortunately it has been found out immorality and indecency do not pay. Not merely is Lord Campbell's Act a stringent one, stringently enforced, but the feeling of the public is distinctly against nastiness of the kind which is the surest passport to the favour of the Parisian democracy. A print such as the Vie Parisienne, the Gil Blas, or the Petit Journal pour Rire, would not live for a month in London, for the sole reason that shopkeepers and newsvendors would not exhibit it, and decent people, whether of the ouvrière or of the petite bourgeoise class, would not buy it and would not place it where their families might see it. It is easy to vent cheap sneers at the pruderie anglaise which has brought about this state of things, and for tenth-rate novelists, who would never have been heard of but for their clumsy Zolaism, to say unpleasant and ungracious things about English girls. The fact remains, and it is certainly one of which no Englishman need be ashamed, that the popular literature of to-day is singularly pure in tone, and that any violation of decency would inevitably lead to such a falling of circulation as would practically amount to the ruin of the paper guilty of it. At the same time it must be admitted, that this very care for purity and decorum produces some rather anomalous results in itself; while the innocent ignorance of the writers on all points connected with those exalted personages, about whom they write so fluently, is sometimes laughable to an almost painful degree. One or two elementary truths might with great advantage be impressed upon the minds of those authors. It might, for example, be pointed out to them that peers of the realm do not as a rule look for their wives amongst the shop girls and milliners' apprentices of Regent Street and Bond Street; that baronets are not, as a rule, superhumanly wicked; that the chorus and ‘extra ladies' of the minor theatres are not necessarily superhumanly virtuous; that ladies of birth, family, and position, are not invariably much worse from the moral point of view than their own maids; and finally, that gentle- people, of whatever age or condition they may be, have occasionally some notion of the value of self-restraint, and are sometimes actuated by motives a little higher than those of a sordid self-interest.

If those few and simple rules were observed, and if the caterers for that taste for high life, which obviously prevails amongst those whom Mr. Laurence Oliphant was wont to call the ‘lower middles,' would but condescend to write from a somewhat higher point of view than that of the servants' hall, something better might be afforded than is to be found in these romances. Take, for example, the batch of papers which represent what may very fairly be called the ‘J. F. Smith school of fiction.' This is perhaps the oldest of all the styles of the penny weekly press. ‘The London Journal,' in which it took its rise, made its first appearance nearly forty nine years ago. As usual it began as ‘a weekly record of literature, science, and art,' but science and art were left on one side at a very early period, and the paper became a vehicle for thrilling romances of fashionable life of the most exciting kind. The principal author was a Mr. J. F. Smith, who was, if not the founder – that title being properly due to the notorious G. W. M. Reynolds - the great exemplar of the penny periodical romance. Mr. Smith, who died at the beginning of the month of March last, was a man of more than respectable abilities, and was content to lead a queer, disreputable Bohemian life on the salary of a Parliamentary Under-Secretary. Curiously enough, he was absolutely unknown amongst journalists, and even amongst ‘literary men' of the type immortalized by the author of ‘Caste.' Yet, as the writer of the single obituary notice which appeared in the daily papers remarks, ‘he had a thousand readers where Dickens had ten, or Thackeray one. He was the people's chosen author; he won the throne of their affections, and he held it unassailed.' During the time of his greatest prosperity he lived in a second-rate Bloomsbury boarding-house, and his only public appearances were at the office of the late Mr. Johnson, the proprietor of ‘The London Journal,' where he wrote his weekly instalment of copy, and whence, having drawn his salary, he disappeared for a week. With few exceptions his works were thrilling romances of fashionable life, but he began his career as a writer of fiction as a devotee of the ‘romantic school.' His first success was achieved in 1849, when, after Rush's murders, he wrote an exciting novel with the taking title of ‘Stanfield Hall.’ It's only fair to say, however, that the tale, though sufficiently sensational, was not a mere vulgar reproduction of the story of Mr. Jermy, but a work more in the style of the late G. P.R. James, with a touch of Charles Dickens's humour. ‘Stanfield Hall' was followed by ‘Minnigrey' ‘Woman and her Master,' 'Amy Lawrence,' and an endless series of tales upon the same lines, thanks to which 'The London Journal' was at one time the best property of its class in London. In the course of time Mr. Smith seceded from 'The London Journal’ and joined the staff of a rival print of the same, kind 'The Family Paper' of Messrs. Cassell where it is said that he was not quite so successful. He had, however, founded a school of romancers which is with us to this day. Mr. Pierce Egan the Younger, whose name suggests memories of the Tom and Jerry era, was the most successful amongst them; but he was nearly, if not quite, equalled by a certain Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth whose name will not be found in Mr. Mudie's lists Miss Braddon, Mr. Charles Reade, Mrs. Henry Wood, whose romances, however, scarcely hit the popular taste. Mr. Smith had founded his school, and the class for which he catered was satisfied with his method. Its principal characteristics were summed up some time ago, and they have not changed in the interval. The romances if Mr. Smith and his imitators, it was, said, ‘contain plenty of vice and not a little crime, but the criminal always comes to grief in the end, and virtue is duly rewarded with wealth and titles and honour. The villains are generally of high birth and repulsive appearance; the lowly personages always of ravishing beauty and unsullied virtue. Innocence and loveliness in a gingham gown are perpetually pursued by vice and debauchery in varnished boots and spotless gloves. Life is surrounded by mystery; detectives are ever on the watch, and the most astonishing pitfalls and mantraps are concealed in the path of the unwary and the innocent. Nor are reflection and observation wanting. Maxims of the most tremendous morality, overwhelming aphorisms, and descriptive passages of surpassing fineness are scattered lavishly over the pages.’

So far as it goes, this description was perfectly accurate in the fifties and still remains so; but one really important point has been omitted - the stories are all identically the same. When one has been read, all have been read; the names and the localities only are changed. Lady Laura's hair is brown, and her eyes are blue in one story; Lady Constance in another has black hair and violet eyes, but each goes through the same adventures, each is made love to by an unprincipled adventurer - Captain Hawke in one story, Major Falcon in another - each rejects his guilty overtures with the same superb disdain, and if, when the trying scene is over, Lady Constance goes into hysterics, Lady Laura takes her revenge by ‘falling into a deathly swoon.’ So with the other persons of the story. For some inscrutable reason known only to the penny romancer, the baronet is always a villain, is always the possessor of colossal wealth, which he squanders remorselessly for the guiltiest purposes, while the Earl is as invariably the best and noblest of men, against whom, calumny and cruelty launch their envenomed shafts in vain. There is always a stolen child and a missing box of deeds, containing amongst other things the parchment certificate of the marriage of the hero's parents, without which of course - the Registrar-General's office being unknown in the land of Smithian romance - the hero is considered by everybody to be of illegitimate birth. When at last, through the supernatural skill of the detective and the simple mother wit of the comic servant, the missing deed box is discovered, the hero is placed in possession of his title and estates; the wicked baronet is discomfited and sent into exile; the intriguing lawyer, whose intrigues would not have puzzled a child, is led off to the bulks, which, it appears, still exist at Chatham; and the virtuous heroine is rewarded for her constancy by promotion from the servants' hall to that coronet which, as Foote taught the world a century and a half ago, is the invariable reward of ‘Piety in pattens.’

All this, it will be said, is very poor stuff, but the, popular appetite for it seems to be practically inexhaustible. ‘The London Journal' is still in existence, though but the ghost of its former self, subsisting mainly, as it would seem, on it's ancient reputation, and by the republication of those thrilling romances of Mr. Smith by which it first achieved success. Its place has been taken by a rival publication almost identical in size, shape, and general appearance, which has for title ‘The London Reader,' and is now in the twenty-seventh year of its existence, and by a ‘Family Reader' now in its twentieth year. All three have something more than a family likeness; even the illustrations might be drawn by the same hands. The men are always ten and a half feet high at the least, and the women about eight feet. Both are handsome in the same way, with straight noses and strongly accentuated mouths, and both, men and women alike, habitually stand with the head a little on one side, the body leaning forward, and one hand thrust backwards behind the hip, an attitude into which a lay-figure may be put readily enough, but which no human being would voluntarily adopt.

These illustrations were adopted in the first instance as a means of marking the difference between ‘The London Journal,' and its predecessor amongst the penny weeklies, ‘The Family Herald.’ This last-named paper, which made its first appearance in 1844, is a really favourable specimen of the class to which it belongs, and has had the honour of being praised by two such very dissimilar critics as the late Leigh Hunt and ‘The Saturday Review' in its former days. Hunt, in the last pages of his 'autobiography,' tells how in his old age he was still cheerful and could still call for and enjoy his ‘Family Herald,’ adding a few words of kindly commendation of the little paper. The ‘Saturday,' in its turn, once allowed an article in praise of it to appear in its columns, which, though perhaps a little warmer in its eulogies than the circumstances warranted, was not without a certain justification. The ‘Family Herald' is, in fact, what it has always been, a very creditable specimen of the popular literature of the day. The bulk of the matter is, of course, fiction, but space is found for other things. Of the fiction it may at once be said that it will compare favourably not merely with that which appears in magazines of its own class, but with the stories which adorn the pages of magazines of much greater pretension. Several well-known writers, indeed, first made their bow to the public in the pages of ‘The Family Herald,' notably that Miss Warden, whose ‘House on the Marsh' was the sensation of the season a few years ago. In themselves the stories are at worst inoffensive, but they have certain positive merits which can be fully appreciated only after a long course of penny fiction. In the first place, the tales are not too ‘genteel;' in the second, they are not wildly sensational. In other words, the writers do not strive to make up for their incapacity to delineate character by nicknaming their puppets out of the highest ranks of the peerage, and by putting into the mouths of high-born ladies language and ideas which would be considered vulgar even by the shop-girls and apprentices who form the majority of the readers of these papers. Nor do they endeavour, as a rule, to atone for the feebleness of their grasp of character by inventing situations of impossible horror and incongruity. The stories are, in short, very fair specimens of fiction of the second order, and may certainly claim recognition on the ground of morality and good feeling. That part of ‘The Family Herald’ which is not occupied by novels, serial and other, is filled with miscellaneous clippings on various subjects; riddles, and an essay on some social or general topic not political. These essays will seem to most readers the weakest part of the paper. They are very trite and commonplace, and consist mainly in the repetition of two or three obvious reflections in a variety of ways.

Partly by way of supplement to their weekly issues and partly as independent speculations, the proprietors of some of these periodicals publish short stories in a separate form, each complete in a single issue, to which they give the name of 'Novelettes.' Those of 'The Family Herald' are of much the same character as the stories in that journal. They are perfectly cleanly, sometimes rather dull, and sometimes mildly sensational. If their readers get little moral or ethical teaching from them, they are at least able to while away their leisure pleasantly. It is not always possible to speak at gently of some other of these publications. ‘The Bow Bells Weekly’ a rival of ‘The Family Herald,' which after sundry vicissitudes has lately made its appearance in a new form publishes one of these ‘Novelettes' every week. The idea seems to be a successful one, for the issue has continued for a period of about a dozen years, but an examination of the stories does not leave behind it a very exalted idea of the intellectual capacity of either writers or readers. The stories are all of ‘high life,’ or rather of something which the writers imagine high life to be. The puppets invariably address each other in the very finest English finest from the point of view of the servants hall, that is to say; and when the author speaks in his own person, his skilful manipulation of the pronouns 'who,' 'whom,' and ‘which,' with and without the conjunction, affords the reader a wonderful insight into syntax. The incidents are of the most romantic and blood curdling description, the mysteries enthralling, and the passions of every personage of the fiercest kind. A murder or two, a mysterious disappearance, an abduction attempted or successful, are but parts of the common form in which these romances are cast, and in the end everything always comes right; virtue, youth, and beauty inseparable allies in these stories are triumphant, and the villain, as always happens in real life, meets the fate he deserves. Of course it would be absurd to look for perfection, but it might have been hoped that the standard would be a little higher than it is. The publishers would seem, however, to understand their business, and, finding that trash will meet a ready market, content themselves with supplying it.

At the same time it might have been hoped that some effort would be made to rise above the level of mawkish silliness with which they appear to be content. One, in the series entitled 'The Princess's Novelette,' is as fair a specimen of this quality as could be desired. The heroine is the daughter of a London banker who is hustled by a body of working men at a station on the Underground Railway. She is rescued by a gentleman who ‘offers a striking contrast to the gay youth of gilded saloons.' Arrived safely at home, she contrasts her hero with her own brother, ‘by profession a soldier,' whom she at once puts through his facings with the question:-

‘”Augustus, are you fearless and brave?”
‘”Ella, my dear," said Mrs. Laughton, “what an extraordinary question to put to your brother! Soldiers are not all intended to risk their lives. The common privates, sons of labourers and mechanics, are drilled on purpose to fight. Gentlemen officers are to keep them in their proper places."'

Satisfied apparently with this lucid explanation Ella's 'ideas respecting marriage are altered,' and she sets to work to find the hero who saved her from the wicked working man. In the most artless way in the world she gets his name and address at the station and sets a private detective on his track, instructing him to meet her at the house of a nurse formerly in the service of the family. Having thus discovered all about her hero, she intrigues for an invitation to a house where she expects to meet him. There she flirts outrageously with a baronet of great wealth concerning whom the reader learns nothing save that he speaks of a waltz as ‘the mazy.' Having refused the baronet's offer of marriage, she invites herself to the house of an aunt in the country, in the hope that her hero, who rejoices in the remarkable name of Edwy Delyun, may make his appearance there. ‘Tastily but simply dressed,' she walks along the road which Mr. Delyun must traverse on arriving, in hope of seeing him, and on the following day ‘takes a light rod ' and goes out fishing by herself. She succeeds, of course, in hooking first the bough of a tree and next the susceptible heart of the innocent Edwy. Matters are brought to a crisis by a jealous poacher, who imagines that the young lover is endeavouring to secure the affections of a maid-servant of whom he is enamoured, and who naturally, according to the writers of penny fiction, shoots him in the back. The wound is a trifling one, but the fair Ella obtains assistance and completes her triumph.

This agreeable picture of maidenly modesty and the manners of good society is paralleled by ‘The Illustrated Family Novelist,' the number of which now before us relates the loves and sorrows of a young lady who falls in love with a handsome actor whom she accidentally meets in the street, and who moves heaven and earth to win him, the moral for the benefit of the smart shop-girls and milliners' apprentices who may be seen studying the paper in omnibuses and tramcars, being of course the desirability of making acquaintance with handsome and interesting young men in the street. Much the same kind of moral is enforced in all these ‘Novelettes,' which increase in number and apparently in popularity with every succeeding month. For this latter accident their extreme cheapness may possibly account; they are certainly amongst the least costly specimens of popular literature with which the student can make acquaintance. The price is always the same, a penny; and for that sum the reader is provided with a sufficiently sensational story worked out with as much elaboration as he is likely to require, and illustrated with from one to half-a-dozen pictures in woodcut or some of the more recent processes, not greatly inferior to the illustrations which accompany more costly periodicals. In actual amount of letterpress about as much matter is given as is usually found in one of the small one-volume stories prepared by publishers of a different type for the circulating libraries. Thus each number of the ‘Bow Bells' series already mentioned consists of sixteen large quarto pages, printed in double columns with three illustrations. Allowing for what compositors call ‘fat,’ and for the space occupied by the woodcuts the story thus contains about 25,000 words, equal to about 100 pages of the ordinary three-volume novel. The other series contain some a little more matter, and some a little less. Thus, ‘The Ladies' Own Novelette,' which is not quite so utterly futile in substance as some of its competitors, announces on its cover that it gives ‘TWO COMPLETE NOVELS' for its penny, and carries out its promise by issuing 32 pages of a size somewhat smaller than those of ‘Bow Bells,' and containing about 40,000 words or 150 pages of regulation novel size. The quantity and quality are very much alike in all the series, but the shape is sometimes altered, and various inducements are held out to subscribers. The lottery for prizes of more or less value is a favourite one, and prize competitions for successful answers to charades and arithmetical puzzles are hardly less popular. One widely circulated print of this kind advertises its willingness to sell paper dress patterns, with full instructions, at half price to subscribers who like to send a ‘coupon' cut from the cover and certain stamps, while several open their columns to ‘correspondents,' answering in this way questions on every conceivable subject, from the etiquette of courtship to the manufacture of cowslip wine, and from the art of corn-cutting to the authenticity of the Canticles.

There is, from one point of view happily, no lack of effort to stem the current of mingled wickedness and folly which threatens to turn cheap literature into a curse. The twin great Societies are doing admirable work; but the Religious Tract Society is doubtless greatly hampered by its name. There are probably thousands of the class whom it is most desirable to reach who refuse to read the stories of the, 'Leisure Hour,' on the ground that they 'don't care for tracts.' Nor, considering the feebleness and ineptitude of not a few of the earlier publications of the Society, can this feeling be a source of any real surprise. If, however, the same paper appears without the imprimatur of the Society, the class for which it is intended will buy and read it so long as it is conducted on its present lines. The wisdom of this course is proved by the popularity of the Society's two papers for children 'The Boy's Own Paper' and ‘The Girl's Own Paper’ which in the last ten years have proved themselves quite the best things of their kind. It would be pleasant to speak as highly of the series of penny novelettes issued by the Society, apparently in emulation of the exceedingly secular publications with which we have hitherto dealt. Unfortunately these stories, though well printed and got up, are written to a great extent on the lines of an old-fashioned tract, with a somewhat obtrusive moral, and are consequently hardly likely to be bought in large numbers by the class whom it is most sought to reach. Of course kind-hearted people will buy them extensively to give away; but that is a very different thing from such a circulation as the ‘wholly worldly’ press enjoys.

The series of stories issued by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, under the title of the 'Penny Library of Fiction,' is certainly not open to this objection. Some people may, indeed, be inclined to say that they err occasionally in the opposite direction, and differ too little from the sensational stories which their startling covers appear to emulate. The objection is, however, overstrained. The stories are good from the literary point of view; most of them, if not all, are eminently amusing and interesting; the tone is thoroughly healthy and masculine, and though religion is never paraded its influence is felt. Like the impluvium in the hall of a Roman house, it purifies and tempers the surrounding atmosphere in silence and almost unseen. It is even more satisfactory to be able to add that the stories stand on their own merits. Whether they are profitable to the Society as a commercial speculation we have no means of knowing; but judging from the wide circulation which our independent inquiries assure us that they enjoy, it is probable that they are. In any case there is every reason to believe that they really reach the class for which they are designed, and that they have in many cases served to create a taste for reading of a higher character than semi-vicious and wholly frivolous romances. It is useless to complain, as some do, that these publications are deficient in the very quality for which the societies are supposed to exist. The days of the tract are gone by, and the classes amongst which they were once distributed - not perhaps altogether without benefit - have asserted and are asserting themselves more strongly every day. The British working man, in short, will neither buy tracts nor read them. For the first time, perhaps, a good many people saw him in his true colours during the late strikes suspicious, haughty, jealous, irritable, and resenting above all things the very appearance of patronage and condescension. If we wish to improve the literary food which he will accept, we can do so only by offering him better things than have yet been presented at a similar price. No good will be done by an attempt at censorship, whether by Act of Parliament or by Act of County Council. Abortive prosecutions are above all things to be deprecated. If books come within the lines of Lord Campbell's Act, the law should of course be enforced; but ill-advised prosecutions like that of the ‘Decameron' some months ago, and prurient gossip like the Music Hall debates in Lord Rosebery's Parliament, do a thousand times more harm than good.

If we wish, therefore, to get rid of the worse and weaker forms of penny fiction, we must begin in the school-room – not necessarily by yielding to the popular cry for technical education for boys and cookery classes for girls at the public expense but by encouraging the growth of something resembling culture. The Catechism has gone, of course; it is a ‘sectarian' formula, and; as such, hateful to the ‘sectarians' of Secularism and Dissent. The Bible has followed the Catechism, though even so critical an observer and educationist as Matthew Arnold pleaded for it as the only relic of culture left to the working classes. The result is that we are in the position of the man in the Gospels. We have cast out the unclean spirit of ignorance from the working-class mind, and have left it empty, swept and neatly garnished with ‘the three Rs.' Let us beware lest the unclean spirit returns with seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and turn the class we have made our masters into the agents for the overthrow of society.

How the void thus created is to be filled up is the problem of to day. It is impossible, as, we have said, to fall back upon religious teaching in the Board Schools; to do so would raise a storm which no Ministry cares to provoke. While the settlement of this question is pending, however, there are happily some signs of light in the distance a healthy and natural light, and not the artificial glimmer created by philanthropic societies and individual benevolence. Publishers are beginning to awaken to the fact that the spread of education and the increased facilities of communication have created a vast new public to which it is worth while to appeal. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and kindred institutions, the Messrs. Chambers, and to a certain extent Messrs. Cassell in a more recent period, had, as it were, to create their public. To day the audience is gathered; the demand exists, it awaits only supply. The extent of the sale of the trash, upon which we, have spent so much space, proves the existence of a public who may be reached by a little courage and enterprise, and from whom a large profit may be drawn. Many publishers are happily that they are beginning to meet the growing demand. Messrs Cassell have led the way with a ‘National Library,' which it is no hyperbole to say is a marvel of good editing, mechanical excellence, and cheapness. Other publishers are following with cheap ‘libraries' of the masterpieces of English literature, and more modern books, such as Lady Brassey's fascinating journals of travel, and Captain Burnaby's 'Ride to Khiva,' while a great number of really good and wholesome works of fiction have recently appeared at the nominal price of 6d. – really 4 ½ d. or 5d. per copy. The greatest triumph is Perhaps the sixpenny edition of ‘Westward Ho!' Charles Kingsley's healthy and vigorous Elizabethan story. The first impression of this reprint - 100,000 - is, it is gratifying to learn, already sold, and the demand does not appear to be completely supplied even yet. Whether the other numbers of the same series will be equally popular is perhaps open to question. 'Hypatia' and 'Hereward the Wake' demand a considerable amount of knowledge in the reader, while 'Yeast' and ‘Alton Locke' deal with social problems which have materially changed their aspect in the thirty years that have passed since the books were first published. The experiment is, however, a spirited and courageous one, and will command the good wishes of all who desire to see sound literature made popular. It only remains for some publisher of courage, enterprise, and wit, to follow where the Christian Knowledge Society has led, by giving similarly good literature to the new generation, in the time-honoured penny number form, to make the romances of the highway and the prison things of the past.

Talk on Nineteenth Century Australian Gothic Fiction

2011-07-08T20:36:00.002-04:00

If you're in Sydney on 27 July, feel free to come along to this talk at the Art Gallery of NSW:

Nineteenth Century Australian Gothic Horror
In association with the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition The Poetry of Drawing Dr James Doig, editor of anthologies of Australian Gothic fiction, delves into the characters and stories of nineteenth-century Australian Gothic horror. The Pre-Raphaelite art style encouraged a significant revival of medieval and gothic imagery in British culture.

Time: 6:30pm-7:00pm Jul 27 Cost: Free
Venue: Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery Rd, The Domain
Enquiries: Art Gallery of NSW artgallery.nsw.gov.au (02) 1800679278

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/calendar/poetry-drawing-celebrity-event/

Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu

2011-07-03T14:15:00.019-04:00

Gary William Crawford, Brian J. Showers, and I submitted the full, final text for this compilation to Hippocampus Press last week and should have the book in print later this Summer or Fall. Jason Van Hollander will be doing the cover illustration. Contents are as follows:

Preface – W. J. Mc Cormack

Introduction – The Editors

Acknowledgements

I. SOME NOTES ON BIOGRAPHY

A Memoir of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – Alfred Perceval Graves

Anecdotes from Seventy Years of Irish Life – W. R. Le Fanu

Extracts from Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others – S. M. Ellis

The Portraits of Le Fanu – Jim Rockhill, Brian J. Showers and Douglas A. Anderson

A Void Which Cannot Be Filled Up: The Obituaries of J. S. Le Fanu – Brian J. Showers

II. GENERAL STUDIES

M. R. James on J. S. Le Fanu – M. R. James

Forgotten Creator of Ghosts—Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Possible Inspirer of the Brontës –Edna Kenton

Sheridan Le Fanu – E. F. Benson

From The Supernatural in Fiction – Peter Penzoldt

An Irish Ghost – V. S. Pritchett

“Prologue” and “Epilogue” to Madam Crowl’s Ghost – M. R. James

Doubles, Shadows, Sedan-Chairs, and the Past: “The Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu” – Patricia Coughlan

III. SOME SPECIAL TOPICS

Making Light in the Shadow Box: The Artistry of Le Fanu – Kel Roop

Le Fanu’s House by the Marketplace – Wayne Hall

Sheridan Le Fanu and the Spirit of 1798 – Albert Power

H. P. Lovecraft’s Response to the Work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – Jim Rockhill

“A Regular Contributor”: Le Fanu’s Short Stories, All the Year Round, and the Influence of Dickens – Simon Cooke

A Shared Vision: Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr – Gary William Crawford

Dreyer, Vampyr and Sheridan Le Fanu – Mark Le Fanu

IV. CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS

Contemporary Reviews of the Publications of J. Sheridan Le Fanu – Compiled by the Editors

V. STUDIES OF INDIVIDUAL WORKS

“Green Tea”: The Archetypal Ghost Story – Jack Sullivan

“Introduction” to The House by the Churchyard – Elizabeth Bowen

Three Ghost Stories: “The Judge’s House”, “Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House on Aungier Street”, and “Mr. Justice Harbottle” – Carol A. Senf

“Introduction” to Uncle Silas – M. R. James

Conversations in a Shadowed Room: The Blank Spaces in “Green Tea” – John Langan

“Introduction” to Uncle Silas – Elizabeth Bowen

“Addicted to the Supernatural”: Spiritualism and Self-Satire in Le Fanu’s All in the Dark – Stephen Carver

In the Name of the Mother: Perverse Maternity in “Carmilla” – Jarlath Killeen

Crossing Boundaries, Mixing Genres in The Wyvern Mystery – Sally C. Harris

“I resolved to play the part of a good Samaritan”: Metafiction in “The Room in the Dragon Volant” – William Hughes

“The Child that Went with the Faeries”: The Folk Tale and the Ghost Story – Peter Bell

The Smashed Looking Glass: Fragmentation and Narrative Perversity in Willing to Die – Victor Sage

Bibliography

Sources

Biographical Notes

***

Extra kudos are due Brian - The Keeper of the Text - for bearing the brunt of the typing, keeping track of the word count, and channeling the various revisions for this endeavor.

Jim

A O Chater

2011-06-25T02:20:00.002-04:00

A 1963 study, The Modern Novel, by Paul West covers all the authors you would expect, but is also surprisingly acute about those not then so well known – Ford Madox Ford; Henry Green; Denton Welch; Ronald Firbank; Malcolm Lowry. This is the mark of a critic not afraid to venture beyond the established canon. He also briefly mentions some of the more interesting books by newer authors he has seen recently. One of these was Julian Fairfield by A.O. Chater (1961).

It is, he says, a book “in which what is said melts into the reactions the words produce.” Further, “in some ways Chater’s novel reverses the method of Nathalie Sarraute, who combines pre-speech in all its inchoateness with uttered words”. “Naturally,” West continues, “such explorations lead to muddle, imprecision, lack of pointing…and turgidity.” “They also,” the critic concludes, “lead to concentration on episodes to the neglect of overall structure – an error into which Proust falls.”

This doesn’t look very likely to send the reader away to pursue Chater’s title. So it may be as well to quote from the dustwrapper’s valiant attempt to describe the book: “Twenty years old, this novel’s hero decides to free himself from domestic claustrophobia and launch himself into a new life…He boards a train to an unknown town in the north, assumes the name of “Julian Fairfield” and proceeds with innocence and confidence to deny his past and recreate a present.” The word ‘recreate’ here is a very sly and apposite one, for ‘recreate’ is exactly what Fairfield does: the new present he encounters in the town turns out to be an exact shadow of his former life, in a carefully crafted, subtle and ingenious series of moves by the author. The town itself is not in the least fantastical: it has a castle, cathedral, inn, factory, railway station, and yet the way that Fairfield encounters them, and how they mesh with his destiny, has an unreal dimension to it.

The rest of the dustwrapper’s narrative sticks cautiously to observable facts, until it ends by invoking the author’s intent: “It is A.O. Chater’s concern to probe his hero’s motives, and to question the understanding and the control that he has over these events. Julian Fairfield is an absorbing first novel by a young writer, an exciting and mature study of a soul in flight – a coward soul.” “Absorbing”, if not exactly distinctive, is a fair word to use about the book; “exciting” is a lunge too far. The literary allusion to a “coward soul” does not help very much either: the book’s “hero” is a young man of apprehension and delicacy, who often faces defeat, but “coward” is too bold and unkind an epithet to fling at him.

There are a few books whose “atmosphere”, to employ a vague and yet useful term, is like that of Julian Fairfield - Peter de Mendelssohn’s The Hours and the Centuries (1944); and David Wheldon’s The Viaduct (1983). They achieve the effect of making an apparently naturalistic narrative seem dreamlike and strange, rather like a plainer de la Mare. It is perfectly possible that some readers may not see anything in Chater’s book at all: at times, as I read it, I found myself baffled by its calm, careful, simple style and rather remorseless mapping out of a particularly predestined plot. Still, I persevered: and the book has persevered with me, quietly insinuating its images and qualities into my thoughts ever since. And so I still cannot quite be sure whether it is a masterpiece or an interesting failure.

A.O. Chater seems to have written a few short stories as well as his novel, before becoming a full time botanist, a Fellow of the Linnean Society, and writing several titles in this field. In 1988 he was (as Arthur O. Chater) in the Department of Botany at the British Museum. It is recorded that he “embarked upon an investigation of the ants of Cardiganshire in 1986” and he also reported to a survey sightings of the pine marten. Whether his studies meant that he abandoned fiction, or whether there is somewhere a drawer-full of unpublished Julian Fairfields, I do not know. His single novel is a sort of English provincial Kafkaesque, deftly constructed so that it is a mirror image of itself, very plainly told (almost too plainly) and with an underlying tone of dejection and awkwardness: unusual, intelligent, possibly needing some greater strangeness to make it really work, and yet for all that a peculiar and memorable book.

Australian Hauntings: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Bibliography

2011-06-10T22:43:00.001-04:00

The third and final volume of James Doig's excellent trilogy of historical Australian supernatural fiction has now come out from Equilibrium Books. Following Australian Gothic (2007) and Australian Nightmares (2008), James put out a bargain-priced sampler collection with Wordsworth Editions, titled Australian Ghost Stories, that would get more distribution in the US and the UK. At last James has now finished the trilogy with Australian Hauntings: Colonial Supernatural Fiction. What makes this volume more special is the long introduction (about 20 pages) about what makes colonial ghost stories, how they work as stories in relation to specific aspects of the Australian experience or environment. A fine capstone to James's trail-blazing explorations of a specific area of supernatural literature that had been too little mapped.

The three volumes from Equilibrium Books can be ordered via their web bookstore here. James has also just published an article on "Australian Ghost Stories" in the June 2011 issue of the quarterly magazine of the National Library of Australia, which you can see here, as well as download a pdf of the article (which has some very interesting illustrations).

Another resource of interest is the post on "Australian Horror History" at the website of the Austrlian Horror Writers Association. There you can find the contents listed from several anthologies published over the last thirty years which cover the field of the Australian supernatural story. Especially worth noting is the list of "Recommended Australian Horror Stories to Circa 1950".

SONG TO COMUS

2011-05-31T08:51:00.003-04:00

In a smoky frowsty second hand record shop called Memory Lane at the bottom of Bridge Street, Northampton I found in 1979 an album with a pale yellow gatefold sleeve. It was a sampler for Dawn Records, and one track on it struck me straight away as strange and different: “Song to Comus” by Comus. It was about seven minutes long, and loped (no other word will do) through a landscape of English pastoral terror such as I had just begun to read about in the books of Arthur Machen. A fanfare-like acoustic guitar gave way to goatish singing, there were sinister flute and violin flourishes, and a young woman's ethereal voice echoed as though from some deep cavern. That song drew me to Milton’s poem Comus: A Maske, and the different illustrated editions of the work: but I soon found that the band Comus had caught the true panic witchery of the poem much better than most of its artists and critics.

Over the years I found other pieces by Comus, though none of course could match the wonder of that first song I heard. Under its influence, I wrote an adventure for my occult detective The Connoisseur, with a performance of Milton's Comus as part of it, “The Hesperian Dragon” (now in The Collected Connoisseur, 2010).

I often told people about the piece “Song to Comus” and some twenty years after I first found it, a friend told me that the guitarist from Comus, Glen Goring, now performed acoustic guitar sets at a tea shop and art gallery in Beccles, Suffolk, where he was introduced as “from the cult band Comus”, somewhat to his bemusement. This seemed like the reaching out of a ghostly hand from some ancient tapestry: the band had been so much part of a lost and distant past. And then copies of the band’s albums began to appear on CD and it became clear that quite a few others had been inspired and stirred by their music.

Astonishingly, drawn by these signs of admiration, the band (with nearly all its original members) reformed, rehearsed again and performed at a reunion concert at a music festival on board a boat in Scandinavian waters. That concert (there have been a few others since) was recorded and is now released on Steve Pittis’ and David Tibet’s Gnostic Dirt label, as East of Sweden (a punning reference to another fine Dawn Records band, East of Eden). I held my breath at the opening chords of “Song to Comus” but soon found with sharp delight that they performed the rite with all the old potency, and more.“This is the first time we’ve played since 1972” singer Roger Wootton announces: I can only think they must have strayed into some other realm around then, and found on emerging into the wan light of our world that almost forty years had passed in their absence. But at last the “Song to Comus” now sounds on these shores again, and who shall say what will follow?

Mark V

Robert W. Chambers's Artwork for The King in Yellow

2011-05-21T13:10:00.001-04:00

I've long understood that some of the artwork that appears on various covers of editions (but not the first printing) of The King in Yellow (1895) by Robert W. Chambers, was believed to be based on artwork by Chambers himself. At last the evidence has emerged! It comes in the form of original artwork by Chambers for a publicity poster from 1895, from the estate of Forrest J. Ackerman. A truly gorgeous poster!

A close-up shows the signature in the mountains to the right:

Here you can see a few of the modified versions that appear on books, including a later printing of the Neely edition and the Ace paperback from the 1960s:

For information about the restoration of the original artwork, there is an article here.

Chambers's own color-scheme is infinitely more seductive. I'd really like to see more of Chambers's own art.

Tolkien Studies 8, and a new Blog on Tolkien and Fantasy

2011-05-18T01:09:00.000-04:00

Tolkien Studies volume 8 has gone to the printer. The contents of the new issue can be viewed at my new blog Tolkien and Fantasy, which I've started in order to post news and musings about more modern and familiar writers. I will continue to contribute to Wormwoodiana as in the past, but I have also felt the need for a different forum for posts on more modern writers. Thus the new blog.

CRITICAL FICTION

2011-05-13T12:44:00.004-04:00

A new website has been launched devoted to the subject of "Critical Fiction" - loosely, fiction that aims to comment on or illustrate other fiction. Past exponents include Borges and Baron Corvo.

The website has some examples, including "The Man in the Yellow Mask" by Lucien Verval: http://criticalfiction.net/wordpress/

Medusa Press

2011-05-10T15:15:00.002-04:00

For some years now Medusa Press has been quietly producing occasional volumes of weird fiction, nicely designed and of high production values. I believe their first book was Frank Chigas's The Damp Chamber and Other Bad Places (2004), and since then they have published two further collections of his work, and also branched out into reprinting older materials.

I was delighted with Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon, which came out in 2006, collecting nineteen stories from three of Gordon's earlier collections, plus ten hitherto uncollected stories and one story newly written for this volume.

Last year Medusa Press released a new edition of a 1920s novel of legendary rarity, Oliver Sherry's Mandrake (Jarrolds, 1929), with a new introduction by Richard Dalby. Dalby tells us that "Oliver Sherry" was the pseudonym of an Irishman, George Edmund Lobo (1894-1971), a minor figure remembered primarily for his poetry. Though published last fall, I learned of this reissue only recently, and now having a copy I observe that Medusa Press has made an especially elegant reissue, with a distinctive dust-wrapper design as well as a really cool binding underneath. Good work like this should be noticed, so I copy the wrapper and binding below. Order via the publisher's website.

new issue of Fastitocalon

2011-05-04T18:02:00.000-04:00

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

E and H Heron

2011-05-03T02:31:00.002-04:00

It is well known that the mother-and-son writing team of Kate and Hesketh Prichard published their early work as E & H Heron, including the stories of Flaxman Low, occult detective, some of which were assembled as Ghost Stories (1916). It now emerges that the "E & H" were not merely imaginary initials: a bookseller (John Hart Rare Books of Norfolk) has for sale a presentation copy of their only other book under this pseudonym, the adventure yarn Tammer's Duel (1898) in which they inscribe their name as "Eustacia and Hildebrand Heron", in August 1911. In view of the lively and sometimes flippant correspondence between the two authors, often quoted in Eric Parker's memoir of Hesketh Prichard (1924), it is likely the names were a tongue-in-cheek private joke.

Mark V

Emily Plenderleath Harrison (1843-1933)

2011-05-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

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”.

John Guinan (1874-1945)

2011-05-01T14:12:00.000-04:00

Irish playwright and civil servant, who wrote four plays for the Abbey Theatre, “The Cuckoo's Nest” (1913), “The Plough Lifters” (1916), “Black Oliver” (1927), and “The Rune of Healing” (1931). Guinan wrote short stories for Irish newspapers, but these were never collected. His story "The Watcher o' the Dead" (Cornhill Magazine, June 1929), concerning a curious custom associated with the cemetery Gort na Marbh, was reprinted by Montague Summers in The Supernatural Omnibus (1931), and thus Guinan rates mention here. It is his only known weird fiction.

WORMWOOD 16

2011-04-18T10:59:00.003-04:00

Wormwood issue 16 has just gone to print. George Johnson surveys two 1911 visionary fantasies, Algernon Blackwood's The Centaur and J. D. Beresford's The Hampdenshire Wonder; James Doig reveals his research into H.W. Bousfield, author of anthologised supernatural stories; Tim Foley talks about Charles Allston Collins, brother of Wilkie, friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and writer of strange tales; John Howard celebrates Weird tales author Carl Jacobi; Ray Cavanaugh contributes a note on Nineties author Vincent O'Sullivan; William Charlton exemplifies the work of Thomas Love Peacock via a modern updating; and Paul Newman draws ateention to a neglected Sixties bohemian novelist, Walker Hamilton. With Doug Anderson's Late Reviews of forgotten classics, Reggie Oliver's reviews of contemporary books, and the Camera Obscura column listing unusual new titles, Wormwood 16 is crammed with rare and unusual writing.

Brothers of the Blood by J.P. Quaine

2011-04-16T21:12:00.003-04:00

Brothers of the Blood (Biblionews: Monthly Letter of the Book Collectors' Society of Australia, Vol 4, No. 5, April 1951)

By J.P. Quaine

With a pang of regret I must admit that the good old Cult of the Blooddrinkers is now but a memory! Most of the stalwarts who laughingly agreed when I suggested the gory title have been added to the bag of the biggest collector of all – Death! The passing of my old friend Barry Ono in 1940 was the beginning of the end. A new school has arisen. The “Old Boys” of today are the lads who read Magnets and Gems, Plucks and Union Jacks, and they have little in common with the few old fogies worshipping at the shrine of Jack Harkaway and Sweeney Todd. Nevertheless, the modern “Old Boy” has established his cult on efficient lines undreamed of by the pioneer “blood” collectors. We certainly used Joseph Parks’ “Collector’s Miscellany” (published in Yorks.) as our official organ but even the redoubtable Joe has gone over to the new old uns. References to our ancient loved ones in that periodical are paltry compared with the paeans of praise sung for the antics of Billy Bunter.

They have a president and an executive committee, a “digest” and an anuual “Who’s Who”, and a coat of arms. This is divided into four quarters: one with a book, a cricket cap and an inkpot; another with a pipe and magnifying glass; the third has a pistol and a mask and the fourth a slouch hat, bandolier and revolver. The motto is Puer manebit- the boy shall remain. So, while we old codgers are dying off, these boys who will never grow up, with the exception of a few octogenarians, range from men in their forties to boys in their teens. The British pontiff of this organisation is a very energetic Bunterite named Herbert Leckenby. In Manitoba, Canada, William Gander (old enough to cling affectionately to the early bloods), publisher of the Red River Rambler, devotes another little journal, Story Paper Collector entirely to “dreadfuls”. And right through the English speaking portion of the American continent, from the Red River to the Rio Grande, there are numerous groups, mostly Dime Novel Collectors, who also hanker after the British Bloods. They, too, issue publications devoted to their hobby; to my way of thinking, the most important of these is the Dime Novel Round Up issued by Reckless Ralph Cumming, the Sleuth of the Sierras, at Fisherville, Mass. USA. Ellery Queen, writer of detective thrillers, and Bragin, the well-known collector of bygone Yankee Bloods, formed a company some years back for the purpose of reprinting some of the rarer items in facsimile. These are sold to brother collectors at a dollar each. I have seen a couple and they were certainly masterpieces.

The practice of collecting and retailing old and rare penny weeklies began in England when George R. Sims, the playwright and novelist, introduced the hobby, though a bookseller named John Jeffrey had dabbled in the old publications as far back as 1890. But the real giant was Frederick Harrison, better known as Barry Ono, the vaudeville artist who pioneered the revival of old-time hits on the variety stage. He started his collection in 1906, when such oddments could be procured at moderate prices. His greatest competitor was a man named Frank Jay, who afterwards sold his lot at Brigand’s prices while the going was good. Ono, however, hung on to his collection which eventually reached over 6000 well-bound volumes. For fifteen years we corresponded with each other and swapped, wrangled, and exchanged Rabelaisian insults. I had the pleasure of entertaining him for a fortnight when he visited Melbourne in 1939 during a world tour. The following year he died of a heart attack brought on by the blitzing of Britain. His collection now reposes in that great book-mausoleum, the British Museum Library. [Ono’s collection is fully catalogued in James, Elizabeth and Helen R. Smith. Penny dreadfuls and boys' adventures : the Barry Ono Collection of Victorian popular literature in the British Library. London: British Library, 1998.]

Another oldtimer, Herdman, who was alsoa collector of old-plate, was murdered one night, in the middle of the thirties, by a burglar who was after the silverware. Herdman’s brains were bashed out, and the blood, appropriately enough, was splashed on the backs of a shelf of “dreadfuls”. So of the myriad pen pals with whom I used to correspond and swap lunacy, there remain but four alive! The before-referred-to Joe Parks of Yorkshire; Arget Harris, a sturdy old octogenarian of Brynnfrydd Road, Dowlais, Glamorganshire, who still lives in the days of Tymm Shon Catti (the Welsh Robin Hood); Henry Steele, a Cockney musician, and an expert on old London and its dark deeds, its bravos, swashbucklers, and cloak-and-dagger miscreants, and last, and most important ofall, John Medcraft. He is an Essex Hydraulic Leather Manufacturer in a large way of business, who has amassed the biggest collection in the world. He has runs of all the old journals, and practically everything that was issued that was issued in the penny weekly numbers between 1828 and 1900. His little lot runs into countless thousands; all mint copies, with startling coloured wrappers, and all the points of allure so dear to the heart of the collector. For be it known that the “blood” collector shares with his highbrow brother the desire for tall copies, wide margins and original wrappers. With Barry Ono’s collection out of the way, as aforesaid, Medcraft’s collection of “bloods” ranks first in the world.

South Africa has its group of collectors also. Every now and again overseas enthusiasts who know my weakness, send me copies of journals containing matter relating to the hobby. Of such is the Johannesburg Outspan which has featured several interviews with South African collectors. These have been written in the main by a brilliant scribe named Rosenthal. And in Australia Leon Stone, of Gordon, N.S.W., well-known as a collector of amateur journals, is also a modern “old boy” and is linked, through correspondence, with most of the overseas Billy Bunterites, including the creator of Bunter himself, Frank Richards. I think I have written enough to show that there are Brothers of “the Blood” in every country where there are men whoare still boys. Anyway, brother collector, don’t you think that he’s poorer man who never, in his boyhood, dabbled in “bloods”, and he’d be a poor collector who would not make just a little shelf-room for a Sweeney Todd, Varney the Vampire, Jack Harkaway, Deadwood Dick, or even Billy Bunter, Sexton Blake, and Nelson Lee. But I do regret the passing of the good old “Cult of Blooddrinkers”.

PEAKE STUDIES

2011-04-12T15:14:00.003-04:00

PEAKE STUDIES edited by G. Peter Winnington is one of the most consistently interesting and resourceful journals devoted to a single author in the fantasy field. The latest issue, Vol. 12 No 2 (April 2011), features three little-known radio talks by Mervyn Peake, in which he discusses how he sees things as an artist, book illustration, and, in a round table with critics and readers, the origins and inspiration behind Titus Groan. Unpublished Peake drawings, and news and reviews complete the 48pp issue. Details at peakestudies.com.

Mark V

"Lost" Stevenson Novel

2011-03-24T03:53:00.003-04:00

Newspapers always like a "lost manuscript" story, and The Herald [of Scotland] ran one a few days ago (20 March) under the heading: "Found: Louis Stevenson's Missing Masterpiece". Except that this was neither "missing" nor, by most accounts, exactly a "masterpiece". The piece was about his abandoned first novel The Hair Trunk, which follows the adventures of a trunk that is repeatedly stolen and involved in many wild scenes. Stevenson abandoned the yarn but the manuscript survived and is held at the Huntington Library, California. The real nub of the story was that a French scholar, Michel Le Bris, has completed the novel and it is to be published (in French) in April by Gallimard.

GENRE FOR JAPAN

2011-03-20T08:25:00.003-04:00

Two worthwhile auctions of SF, fantasy & supernatural collectables to raise funds for Japan:

http://genreforjapan.wordpress.com/about/

and

http://horrificjam.blogspot.com/2011/03/auction-to-help-aid-people-of-japan.html?zx=de5da77bd0bbd05d

I hear the second of these is due to feature some rare Tartarus Press collectables...

Mark

A BOOK OF WHIMSIES

2011-03-20T03:22:00.002-04:00

A Book of Whimsies by Geoffrey Whitworth and Keith Henderson (Dent, 1909)comprises twelve short tales, each pictured. Whitworth went on to become a theatre administrator, while Henderson is most known now as an artist who illustrated the epic fantasies of E.R. Eddison. This volume has the air of a youthful jeu d'esprit and is dedicated, tongue-in-cheek, to various respectable officials. The authors say by way of preface that “whimsy depends on a recognition of the ultimate oddness of all phenomena”: and, to those who ask about the meaning of their book, they retort, “what, pray, is the meaning of You?”
The stories read like early exercises in surrealism but really draw on the English tradition of whimsy most known through the work of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. The word “whimsy” has drawn to itself connotations of the fey but originally it was more robust than that, and could be used to describe most peculiar and original ideas. This book is in that stranger, more startling and rather unnerving tradition. The tales are often, though wildly fanciful, about breaking free of convention. Two examples may suffice. In ‘Frenzy’, a parson preaches upon the colour purple, throws off a false beard, pounds out a Bach fugue on the organ and then scampers up the spiral staircase of the church and throws himself off the tower: his vestments act as a parachute (but for how long?). In ‘Portmanteau’, two nude young men live together in a large trunk, solely for the pleasure of the moment when they can get out and stretch their limbs. The colour plates are beautifully done, with a rich, vivid patina, and they catch well the world-tilting essence of the stories, with figures and landscapes that are warmly naturalistic yet also subtly askew.

The Realm of Redonda--Facts and Legends

2011-03-05T01:13:00.001-05:00

John D. Squires has posted an especially interesting essay on the history of the kingdom of Redonda, from its Sheilian sources on to the various modern day claimants. The full title is "Of Dreams and Shadows: An Outline of the Redonda Legend with Some Notes on Various Claimants to its Uncertain Throne", and it's posted here.

An extensive ancillary piece, "The Redonda Legend: A Chronological Bibliography" appears here.

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber

2011-02-28T01:38:00.014-05:00

There have been a couple of excellent scholarly editions of Sweeney Todd in recent years. Wordsworth Editions recently published its 3rd edition of the text with a new introduction by Penny Bloods expert, Dick Collins, and Robert L. Mack edited the Oxford University Press edition in 2007.

Sweeney first appeared in The String of Pearls: A Romance, which was serialised in Edward Lloyd's The People's Periodical and Family Library in 18 weekly parts in 1846-7. A much expanded version was published in book form in 1850 by Lloyd and subtitled 'The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance'. Charles Fox published a celebrated version as Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street in about 1880, which was much reprinted. Above is an ad for it in Fox's Boy's Leisure Hour from 1888.

Melbourne book dealer John P. Quaine, who I've mentioned several times before, was a Sweeney expert, and, according to his obituary, owned several copies of the Fox version. He also wrote a radio play version in 1935 which was published in The Collector's Miscellany between May and December 1935.

The following article appeared in the Melbourne Argus on Saturday 8 July 1950, and was clearly influenced by Quaine, incorporating a couple of his inventions such as Sawney Bean, The Man-eater of Midlothian. Recent research has shown that James Malcolm Rymer, not Thomas Peckett Prest, was responsible for The String of Pearls.

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street!
By John Drake

Devaluation of the pound and demands from American book collectors, have turned the shilling shockers of the 19th century into prized possessions of 20th century bibliophiles.

In the last year British book dealers have watched with delight while the price of a bound Sweeney Todd, in good condition, has risen from about £25 to over £35.

Destruction of many 19th century blood and thunder magazines by people ignorant of their rarity, and the activities of collectors with a nostalgic yearning for the full-blooded fiction of the Victorian era, have all combined to force up the prices.

Sweeney Todd, Springheel Jack, The Blue Dwarf, and a hundred other characters, first appeared in weekly and bi-weekly instalments known as "penny parts" or "penny bloods." Periodically they were issued in collected form as "shilling shockers."

The 19th century shockers were created to satisfy the desires of the huge new reading public which sprang to life with the spread of literacy through England at the beginning of the century.
First story form to appear was the Gothic shocker.

Based on the framework constructed in such pure Gothic shockers as Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and Ann Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho," all Gothic shockers were set in huge castles and monasteries of the architectural style whose name they took.

These huge buildings almost invariably possessed a wing which, although closed down and never used by the owners, teemed with strange and dreadful life after dark. In the cobwebbed, dusty halls, the great organs played wild and terrible music on stormy nights, and behind the tattered curtains burnt flickering red lights.

And just as invariably the hero of the Gothic shocker entered the closed down wing to chase a pet dog, or track down the sounds of a child's weeping, and spent the rest of the novel heartily regretting his curiosity.

Typical of Gothic shockers were "Geralda the Nun," "The Black Monk," "Varney the Vampire," or "The Feast of Blood," "The Ranger of the Tomb," and "The Secret of the Grey Turrets."
One of the earliest breakaways from the rigid style of the Gothic shocker was "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

Sweeney's line of business, of course, was supplying human flesh for the manufacture of veal pies, and he was the most successful of all the characters ever created in popular thriller literature.

From his first appearance in a novel with so mild a title as "A String of Pearls" in 1840, until the shocker's popularity began to wane around 1900, Sweeney appeared again and again in stories based on cannibalism.

For half a century theatrical companies played Sweeney Todd to packed houses, and for half a century no stage carpenter thought himself a master of his craft unless he could make a barber's chair fitted to drop through the floor of the stage.

It is possible that Sweeney Todd was modelled on Sawney Bean, who was tried and executed for cannibalism in Scotland in the 13th century. Sawney Bean's exploits were retailed at one time in a shocker titled "Sawney Bean, the Man-Eater of Midlothian."

More probably he was based on a French barber in whose cellars 300 skulls were found shortly after the French Revolution. After the discovery of the skulls neighbours realised that, although the barber's next door neighbour made the finest veal pies in Paris, nobody had ever seen meat delivered to his door.

Sweeney was the creation, on his first appearance, of one Thomas Peckett Prest, who had already won fame among penny blood readers for his stories "The Maniac Father," "The Victims of Seduction," "Vice and its Victims," and "Phoebe the Peasant's Daughter."

Sweeney was "a long, low-jointed, ill-put-together sort of fellow, with an immense mouth, and such huge hands and feet that he was, in his way, quite a natural curiosity; and what was more wonderful, considering his trade, there never was such a head of hair as Sweeney Todd's. We know not what to compare it to; probably it came close to what one may suppose to be the appearance of a thick-set hedge in which a quantity of small wire had got entangled."

Sweeney also had a laugh which was so horrible that "people had been known to look up to the ceiling, then on the floor and all around them, to know from whence it had come, scarcely supposing it possible that it proceeded from mortal lips."

Sweeney's shop was in Fleet Street, by St. Dunstan's Church. On the other side of the church "was Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, which could be reached from Sweeney's cellars by means of underground passages.

Mr. Lovett's pies were famed for miles around, and were particularly esteemed by members of the legal profession.

"There was about them a flavour never surpassed and rarely equalled; the paste was of the most delicate construction and impregnated with the aroma of a delicious gravy that defied description. Then the small portions of meat which they contained were so tender, and the fat and lean so artistically mixed up, that to eat one of Lovett's pies was such a provocative to eat another that many persons who came to lunch stayed to dine, wasting more than an hour perhaps of precious time, and endangering (who knows to the contrary?) the success of some law suit thereby."

But while Mrs. Lovett's customers slavered over her supreme pies, industrial unrest was brewing below stairs.

The pieman who worked in her underground bakehouse was becoming dissatisfied with his working conditions. He was allowed to eat as many pies as he wanted, and he was housed and clothed, but he was never permitted to leave his dungeon. Nor did he ever see the supplies for his piemaking arrive. While he slept fresh supplies of meat mysteriously appeared in the room.
One morning he found a sheet of paper on the floor. On it was written: "You are getting dissatisfied, and therefore it becomes necessary to explain to you your real position, which is simply this: you arc a prisoner, and were such from the first moment that you set foot where you now are ... it is sufficient to inform you that so long as you continue to make pies you will be safe, but if you refuse, then the first time you arc caught sleeping your throat will be cut."
As he finished reading the threatening note a trapdoor above his head opened and Sweeney Todd's face appeared.

"Make pies,"advised Sweeney Todd. "Eat them and be happy. How many a man would envy your position - withdrawn from the struggles of existence, amply provided with board and lodging, and engaged in a pleasant and delightful occupation; it is astonishing how you can be dissatisfied."

But, not the slightest bit cowed by Sweeney's menaces, the pieman broke through a barred door at the back of the bakehouse, and in an instant discovered the source of the piemeat in an adjoining cellar.

The climax of the story finds Mrs. Lovett laboriously winding a fresh batch of pies up on a service lift from her underground kitchen, spurning offers of assistance, but tiring rapidly with the labour of hauling up an unusually heavy batch of pies.

"How the waggish young lawyers' clerks laughed as they smacked their lips and sucked in all the golopshious gravy of the pies, which; by the way, appeared to be all delicious: veal that time, and Mrs. Lovett worked the handle of the machine all the more vigorously that she was a little angered with the officious stranger. What an unusual trouble it seemed to be to wind up those forthcoming hundred pies! How she toiled and how the people waited, but at length there came up the savoury steam, and then the tops of the pie's were visible."

On top of the pics, of course, was sitting the young cook from the cellar.

In the midst of dead silence from the astounded crowd he announced: "Ladies and gentlemen, I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites; but truth is beautiful ¡it all times, and I have to state that Mrs. Lovett's pies are made of human flesh!"

"How the throng of persons recoiled! What a roar of agony and dismay there was! How frightfully sick about 40 lawyers' clerks became all at once . . .!"

Mrs. Lovett collapsed and died of shock, and of the effects of poison which Sweeney, who had made his pile and wanted to get out of the business, had put in her brandy.

Sweeney himself was arrested and later hanged.

Nicholas Culpeper

2011-02-24T16:34:00.003-05:00

I was sorry to hear of the passing of the bookseller and esoteric scholar Nicholas Culpeper, earlier this month. From, I think, nearly 30 years ago, I relished receiving his occasional closely-typed catalogues on coloured paper (bright gold, sunset pink, eggshell blue), full of well-selected, unusual, rare and recondite books in the fields of occult and fantastic literature. Issued at infrequent intervals from his home in rural Essex, they always seemed more than just a book list, but a talisman offering entry into a different, stranger and more enticing realm. Nicholas was also a kind supporter of the early Machen publications produced by Roger Dobson and I as Caermaen Books. There are so few real book catalogues around these days - I mean those that can be held and thumbed in the hand rather than viewed virtually on screen, and those that have a personal and original flavour - that it is all the more melancholy to hear of this loss of one of the most characterful and learned creators in this field.

Mark V

Reggie Oliver's first novel

2011-02-01T14:01:00.000-05:00

I just received my copy of Reggie Oliver's new novel, The Dracula Papers Book I: The Scholar's Tale (ISBN 9781907681028, $18.00 trade paperback), the first of a planned four book series, published by Chômu Press. I usually don't read series books until I have all of them at hand, but I may have to make an exception here. This is the third book published by Chômu Press, who have a highly interesting list of new and forthcoming books. Check them out here.

Wormwood indexed, also Avallaunius, Faunus and Tolkien Studies

2011-01-30T12:30:00.002-05:00

If you don't know about the massive magazine index maintained by Bill Contento, you might want to. It goes by the name of The FictionMags Index, but there are a lot more than just magazines with fiction indexed there, including a lot of small press journals relating to fantasy, horror and science fiction. Bill just put up the latest update, which includes indices I submitted of all seventeen issues of Avallaunius (1987-1997), the old journal of The Arthur Machen Society, and all twenty-two issues (so far) of Faunus (1998-present), the journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen. It's also been updated to contain the newest issues of Wormwood and Tolkien Studies, thus bringing the indices of these complete and up-to-date. The home page is located here. You can search by magazine, article author, article title, etc. etc. I find it very useful when I want to find which issues of Faunus had those articles on Amy Hogg, or in which volume of Tolkien Studies appeared the review of Douglas Charles Kane's Arda Reconstructed. The answers are only a few clicks away.

Mark Hansom

2011-01-29T17:35:00.006-05:00

I've mentioned the enigmatic Mark Hansom before. In recent times Golden Age thriller publisher, Ramble House, has been reprinting the novels in affordable paperback editions. Hansom appears to have been particularly popular in Australia. The publisher, Wright & Brown, sent copies of its publications to Australian newspapers where they were reviewed or noted. A few examples of thumbnail Hansom reviews are given below. Such was Hansom's popularity that the Australian Women's Weekly published a short story, a crime thriller titled "The Last Trick", on Saturday 1 May 1937.

Reviews

The West Australian, Saturday 9 November 1935

The Ghost of Gaston Revere, by Mark Hansom. Wright and Brown, London. 3/6. From the publishers.

Conceived somewhat to the spirit ot Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' Mr. Hansom's weird story concerns the in genious Dr. Gale's treatment of a patient's brain previous to an operation, that has the startling and unforeseen effect of letting loose a monstrous apparition on the world. The author is out to make his readers' flesh creep; but he a little overdoes it; and not everyone will have the patience to persevere with the book until Sir Bertram Knotts, the famous brain specialist, finally lays the unquiet spirit of Gaston Revere.

The Hobart Mercury, 13 December 1937

Master of Souls, by Mark Hansom, published by Wright and Brown, London; price, 3s 6d.

Labelled a "horror novel" in the publisher's blurb, the name is apt. A lightless ship in the Channel, a wrecked swimmer climbing on board, a man who plunges over the side to his death, are merely the preliminaries. These are followed by an introduction to the "Master of Souls" and a corpse which he partially revives, also the disembodied spirit of an ancient Egyptian woman, malignant and vile. With this setting follows a series of nerve-racking adventure sufficient to delight the heart of every lover of horror and crime.

The Launceston Examiner, 4 September 1937

The Beasts of Brahm, by Mark Hansom (Wright and Brown, London). Here be thrills a-plenty so long as one does not ask that the author should stick to possibilities. Mark Hansom exploits the macabre to the utmost. This tale opens with the finding of the dead and mangled body of a man in a lonely lane in Surrey. It is thought to have been mauled by an escaped wild beast, and the inhabitants live through a reign of terror wondering where the next blow will fall. The "horror," however, is something more loathsome than any wild beast. The mysticism of the East, magnified many times over for the purpose of the horror, is used freely until the accomplished Jeremy arrives on the scene to take charge, and free the district from its terrors.

The Hobart Mercury, 16 November 1937

THE BEASTS OF BRAHM, by Mark Hansom; published by Wright and Brown, London; price, 3s 6d.

"The Beasts ot Brahm" is a good example of Mr. Hansom's work, which has come into prominence since the publication of "The Wizard of Berner's Abbey." The dead and mangled body of a man is found in a lonely valley in Surrey, and it is thought that he has been mauled by an escaped wild beast. The inhabitants find themselves in the midst of a reign of terror, which continues until one of their number who has a knowledge of Eastern mysteries discovers the solution. The plot is carefully constructed and the identity of the murderer is not revealed until the last.

The Launceston Examiner, 29 June 1935

In "The Wizard of Berner's Abbey," by Mark Hansom, published by Wright and Brown (London), the assertion of Paul St. Arnaud, the wizard of Berner's Abbey, is that will is the supreme force in the universe - that will can transcend even death - gives the keynote of this tale of mystery and horror. John Richmond, a young medical student, finds himself faced with the apparently hopeless task of freeing a girl from the power of a man who has departed from this life. The ghost of Paul St. Arnaud is finally laid, and the mystery is scientifically ex plained; but in the meantime those concerned pass through horrifying experiences - experiences that the reader shares because of the skill with which the story is told.

The Launceston Examiner, 14 May 1938

"The Madman," by Mark Hansom (Wright and Brown, London). Perhaps it was inevitable that the author of "The Wizard of Berner's Abbey" should turn to the theme of insanity for one of his novels, and in his latest book, "The Madman," he has treated this theme with a high degree of artistic skill, providing a story of unusual interest. The story opens with a piano recital given by Margaret Kerr, a famous artist, where her fiance, a solicitor, learns that an old man has claimed to be a distant relative. He finds that this person is one Silas Goser, destined to be a client of his firm. The career of the mad man provides some exciting episodes before he is finally unmasked in a sensational climax. The narrative is absorbing and well written, dominated by an atmosphere of horror. There is a strong human interest in Mr. Hansom's work-an interest that reaches its height in the superficially casual but tragic conclusion.

KATHLEEN SULLY

2011-01-25T15:25:00.003-05:00

In the file of letters from the publisher Peter Davies to Sarban, there’s a brief letter from Nico Davies of 24 November, 1960, where he recommends to Sarban another of his authors, Kathleen Sully, citing a few books in particular. He says: "I'm glad you found things to like and admire in "Skrine". As I told you, I am sure, she is one of my favourite authors. Of the eight books of hers which have come our way - there is a new one scheduled for next February - there are to me splendid things in each. If my favourite is still her first, "Canal in Moonlight" ["Bikka Road" in the USA - MV], "Merrily to the Grave" and "Skrine" are not far behind."

I sent off for a few, and have read the one he sent to Sarban, Skrine (1960). It is set in a post-apocalypse world, very clearly and tautly told, and follows one man through hunger and desolation to a surviving community where by chance he is taken as a healer. At first feted, he comes into conflict with the boss of the town, and the wavering townsfolk turn upon him. Uncompromisingly bleak, it certainly lowered the spirits while at the same time eliciting admiration for her hard style and dark vision. Her other books seem no more sanguine in outlook but almost as good in her terse composition. Skrine, at least, has a possible supernatural element, in that the character sees the figures of those he has had to kill to survive, although a gap is left for these to be hallucinatory.

Kathleen Sully is another author whose work seems to have almost entirely passed out of view but on the strength of the books I've read so far she could attract the kind of devoted following that Phyllis Paul has acquired thanks to the efforts of Glen Cavaliero. They share a highly pessimistic, bleak outlook, although Sully also has an austere and remorseless prose style.

It was the resourceful Doug Anderson, as so often, who uncovered some biographical details: “Kathleen Maude Sully was born in 1910, died in 2001 at the age of 91… She gave an interesting comment about her writerly interests (c. 1970s): "Main interest now and ever since I could think: Man--why and whence .... Have written since a child but stuff mostly too off-beat for publication. Interest in general: philosophy; art; realistic literature; dancing; swimming and diving; teaching;' diet and health--mental and physical; why the chicken crossed the road." “ One of her dustwrappers gives a long list of workaday jobs she has held: they look like bread-and-butter chores to sustain her while her real soul was in her writing.

HENRY WESTON KEEN

2011-01-08T05:13:00.005-05:00

If we think the authors in our field are sometimes neglected, then they are positively feted compared with some of the illustrators. Quite a few of their biographical notices remark “very little known is about the artist’s life” or some variation on this. Amongst those of whom this is said is Henry Weston Keen (1899-1935), who illustrated a highly desirable edition of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as an equally admired book of Jacobean tragedy, Webster’s The White Devil & the Duchess of Malfi: and a few other books. The British Museum has a lithograph by him, ‘Ming & Incense’, in which the serenity of the idol and the slow tendril of smoke from the incense bowl are subtly conveyed, and a peacock feather’s black eye and faint tendrils are dimly delineated . He lived in London: and died of consumption, it is often said in Switzerland, and that seems (to judge from the usual sources) to be all we know of him.

I sent off for a copy of Henry Keen’s will. It is very brief, leaving six books of his choice to his brother, of 300 High Holborn, and the rest to Victoria May Barnes, who shared Keen’s then address, “Westwood”, Walberswick, Suffolk. The will was dated 25 June 1935: and he died the next day. The witnesses were R G Barnes of Southampton, and R E E Hadlow, a Merchant Marine Officer, of, Warley Lodge Farm, Nr Brentwood, Essex. The estate was valued at £208-13-9. When his brother registered the will, one month later, on 26 July 1935, he gave the farm address (in “Little Warley”) too: the witnesses were probably his friends. So it will be seen that Keen did not die in Switzerland, as some sources say, but in Suffolk: Walberswick was then a well-known artists’ retreat. Still, this does not tell us very much more and as the summation of the estate of a promising and subtle artist it has a certain poignancy. What lay behind that bequest of six books (evidently meant as a memento mori): why six?; and which six did his brother choose? What other books were there and what became of them? Who was Victoria May Barnes: lover, companion, nurse, friend? And what comprised that £208 estate (worth about £11,000 today)? Did it include a Chinese statuette (though not Ming) or a delicate incense bowl or were these copied from a museum or conjured from the imagination? What became of his unpublished drawings?

Some Famous Ghosts of Literature

2010-12-23T00:10:00.006-05:00

I'd forgotten all about this ghostly article by legendary Melbourne book dealer and Penny Bloods collector, John P. Quaine. It also appeared in The Argus, in January 1938, and mentions Roy Bridges' A Mirror of Silver at the end.

SOME FAMOUS GHOSTS OF LITERATURE
Queer Tales of Witches, Vampires, Ghouls, Banshees, -and Doppel-gangers

"Like one that on a lonesome road doth
walk in fear and dread,
And, having once looked round, goes
on and turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
doth close behind him tread!"

It is no use any longer disguising the unwelcome truth that we are living in an age of terror. I am not alluding to any of the numerous political and social worries over which the world weeps at present, but to another and (from the bookman's point of view) more unwholesome development.

Leering at us from every bookstall to-day is a bewildering array of ephemera devoted solely to alleged tales of terror, horror, and associated frightfulness. In every case the coloured wrapper is garnished with the portrayal of a fear smitten maiden in the clutches of a ghoul-like creature busily engaged in putting her to death by some unimaginable method of maltreatment.
It is only just to mention that the terror goes no further than the wrapper. The "nerve-jolting tales" describe the menace of unearthly love-makers. Usually the heroine takes a midnight stroll through a lonely, forest, crosses a glade, and encounters a select company of the "undead dead" dancing merrily on the moon-kissed sward. She discovers, of course, that they are not nice people to know.

These tales, so unutterably wearying in their straining after thrills, add nothing to the world's ghost-lore, and they are merely conducive to profanity. Students of the uncanny in literature positively refuse to enthuse over the antics of corybantic cadavers.

No simple scribbler can write a readable ghost story. Like an effective painting, it has to be the work of an artist. Surrealism in the field of the phantom is out of place. The Rev. Montague Summers, the world's greatest authority on terrific literature, avers that only those who believe in ghosts can write about them properly.

This is a somewhat debatable point. H. G. Wells and other writers who scout the idea of supernaturalism have produced some excellent ghost stories. The authors of such narratives, like the ever increasing army of people who collect them, are men and women of all shades of belief - or none at all. The ghost story enthusiasts, whether they believe in veritable psychic phenomena and are familiar with the activities of the doppel-ganger, polter-geist, wraith, or revenant, or, on the other hand, laugh at such manifestations as subjective hallucination ("plain hooey," in modern American), are united in their appreciation of the story-as a story.

So we of the Bug and Goblin Brother-hood are not concerned with the truth or falsity of any of the choice items we prize. Allegedly true accounts like Dale Owen's "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World," Mrs. Crowe's "Night Side of Nature" (a classic of legendary lore), or the scores of purely propagandist volumes issued from the era of the "Rochester Rappings" down to our own time find room on our shelves alongside such avowedly imaginary tales as Stevenson's "Body-snatcher" or Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

Now the collecting of ghost stories does not mean cramming our shelves with everything relating to the debatable land. Were it so, even the most modest collection would more than fill our Public Library. Only the very rare volumes or those produced by master hands are worth shelving, and the innumerable stereotyped tales of benignant or malignant phantoms gliding through dismal corridors may be classed with the modern ephemeral literature already alluded to.

The very air breathed by the specialist in supernatural lore is impregnated with warlocks, witches, vampires, ghouls, boggles, trolls, leprechauns, and banshees.

The orthodox spectre, with warning finger uplifted, plays only a small part in the great ghastly drama displayed before the mental optics of the occult student.

Of all the terrifying performers in these supernormal romances the vampire is universally regarded as first favourite. The vampire was rare in English literature before the beginning of the 19th century. On the Continent of Europe, of course, he was always a commonplace. Then Byron introduced us to one in his "Giaour"; Southey had another in his poem "Thalaba," but there was nothing in prose form until Byron's slight fragment, upon which Dr. Polidori based his gruesome story, so long attributed to Byron himself. This tale, it will be recalled, was, like Mrs. Shelley's much abused "Frankenstein," the result of that famous gathering at Geneva in 1816.

I am sure Coleridge's "Christabel" would have been a very fine vampire story, but just as we are beginning to appreciate the lovely Lady Geraldine the poet stops dead and refuses to finish the narration. It remained for the father of all modern phantastic stories, Le Fanu, to finish the adventures of the sprightly lady. His tale "Carmilla" seems built upon Coleridge's fragment, combining the dreadful terrors of Prest's "Varney the Vampire or the Banquet of Blood" with the eerie suggestiveness of "Christabel." The more modern "Dracula" is only an enlargement of "Carmilla," with sundry additional horrors thrown in.

Le Fanu, curiously enough, was neglected for many years; you will search the pages of encyclopaedias and bibliographical dictionaries in vain for any reference to him. With the exception of a memoir in the "Dictionary of National Biography" he was ignored until recently, but now at last he is coming into his own.

He is the great master in the field of fear. Just a century ago he began his "Purcell Papers" in the "Dublin University Magazine" (a periodical which seems to have specialised in fierce stories), entitling the first of them "The Ghost and the Bone-setter." He never relied on impressive titles for his pieces; neither did he open up with "a wild scream of horror," but in the old-fashioned manner of his era he led up gradually to the terrible denouement, investing the narrative with an atmosphere of dread. Even his long detailed accounts of adjacent scenery hinted at inevitable infernal atrocity; his forest foliage breathed anathema; like the mysterious tree in Thomas Hood's "Dream" there were

"A crouching satyr luring here, and there a
goblin grim,
As staring lull of demon life as Gothic
sculptor's whim."

Le Fanu admirers here and abroad are still engaged In identifying his unsigned fragments which appeared in various publications. The list is not complete, but we are hopeful that eventually some-thing like a collected edition of his works will be published.

Besides the many ghost stories which rely on sheer horror for their sensation there are the hundreds of humorous supernatural narratives which abounded in old-time periodicals. These, as long as they do not end with a natural explanation of the phenomena (which renders a ghost story null and void In the eyes of the cult), are added to the collector's bag. Thus Ingoldsby's "Spectre of Tapplington" (a prose piece apart from the "Legends"), Samuel Lover's "Stories and Legends of Ireland" (all pure burlesque), and other note-worthy works which have embodied tales of the supernatural, humorously illustrated, are allowable in a ghost collection.

Tales of witchcraft, of course, rank next in popularity to the vampire stories, and of these Harrison Ainsworth's "Lancashire Witches," with all the plates by Gilbert, is the rara avis.
Australia has contributed little to the literature of Ghostland. For years we had to be satisfied with "Fisher's Ghost," and that unfortunate spectre had to work overtime.

It is rather surprising that more has not been done in acclimatising the old world phantoms. It may be that we are lacking somewhat in tapestried chambers and baronial halls, which seem so necessary for a self-respecting spectre during his nocturnal perambulations. Still, there is ample scope for such work. Scenes of violence (more sordid, may-hap, than those which sent forth the oversea phantoms on their wanderings) were common enough in our early days, and the sin-expiating beneficiaries would be passable substitutes for the bewigged or beshackled wraiths of Europe.

Our own Roy Bridges, however, be-stowed a boon on the Brotherhood of the Bug and the Goblin when he wrote his "Mirror of Silver." It finds pride of place in many a ghost-lover's collection.

Christmas and Ghosts

2010-12-22T22:13:00.006-05:00

On a yuletide note, the following article, from the 12 December 1936 issue of the Melbourne newspaper The Argus, may be of interest - a rare insight into the history of these popular Victorian annuals. Roy Bridges was a Tasmanian author of popular novels and tales who lived for most of his life with his sister Hilda, herself a noted crime writer.

CHRISTMAS AND GHOSTS: AN ANNUAL OF THE EIGHTEEN-SIXTIES

The copy of "Beeton's Christmas Annual" is faded and fingermarked. It is musty with the burial of years in a deal chest, dating from the Portsmouth lad who, in 1817, left his ship to settle in Van Diemen's Land. The book was a Christmas gift to a youngster of this Tasmanian farm in the eighteen-sixties. The title page bears his name; a stone in the Sorell Cemetery has borne the name for years.

Not all the fingermarks, of a Christmastide stickiness, could have been his. Possibly none was, for his youth was of a time when a new book was rare and precious in the farmhouse. Even a paper-covered book must have a brown paper wrapper put on to protect it. This book, like all the children's books of the farmhouse of his time, came down to other generations because of the care shown through the eighteen sixties. So the "Annual" survives, draggle tailed, disreputable, and dog-eared, but bearing, from its shred of paper cover to its last worm-eaten page, a record of the pleasure it has given to youngsters from one generation to another down 70 years.

Not that the "Annual" was a children's Christmas book and no more. The idea of the publisher was Dickensian - Christmas was an affair for family and friends, and for young and for old. The "Annual" was planned to amuse the adult as well as the juvenile. Clearly it succeeded, for this number - for 1865 - was the sixth of the series, edited and published by S. O. Beeton, of the Strand, London, and written, illustrated, and decorated by authors and artists who could conjure up the spirit of Christmas on sound old English lines.

So the "General Contents" range from "Beautiful Helen" - F. C. Burnand's parody of a Greek comedy, not of his best work, but meant only for performance in the "Theatre Royal, Back Drawing-room" - to "Amusing and Curious Card Tricks" - were card tricks ever amusing? Certainly the pages of funny pictures by Charles H. Ross are really funny - illustrating the sort of jokes folk at Christmas parties would see very easily when they were in a seasonable mood and were beginning to see double, before beginning not to see at all.

But the quality of the "Annual" for entertainment-and its real quality lies in the ghost stories, collected as "Hatch-ups," or "Tales Told in the Dark" - the chief section of the worthy old Christmas book.

The tales are told by youngsters in a dormitory at the Rev. Jabez Owlthorpe's school - the idea recalls David Copperfield’s telling his stories to Steerforth and his fellows at Salem House. Mr. Owlthorpe's young gentlemen listen and thrill to, or laugh at, the yarns spun by their fellow with a skill that suggests an early development of literary talent. The usher seems a distant relative of Mr. Mell. Regardless of discipline, he listens secretly in the darkness, and nobody suspects his presence till he is due to take the floor and to reveal a gift for the ghostly decidedly suggestive of J. S. le Fanu. A deep sigh is heard from the middle of the room –a low, wailing sigh: "Gentlemen," says a solemn voice, "pardon the intrusion, but I have been an undetected listener to your stories."

He has interrupted, not to do his duly to the Rev. Mr. Owlthorpe and the young gentlemen, but to reveal himself as an authority on the awful. Nobody is afraid of him. Matched with the ghostly, ghastly, and ghoulish creatures of imagination, the poor, shabby-genteel usher simply docs not matter.

"Since I am here," says the usher, “shall I tell you a ghost story? Shall I tell you of a ghost that sat upon a rail in Australia, with the moonbeams shining through him, till his murderer was brought lo justice?"

“No, please don't!" says the smallest boy. “We have all read it!”

"Well," says the usher, "will you have the story of some other ghost not yet introduced to the public?"

“Yes, if it’s jolly horrible!"

“I must be a poor hand,” says the usher, "if I can’t make you feel like fifty eels running all over your body, and if I don't set your hair on end, so straight and so stiff that it pulls you out of your boots. I'll permit you to call me a humbug!"

They tell him gleefully to go ahead.

“Well," he says, "I have seen so many horrible things in my life, boys that I scarcely know what particular horror I shall put forth for your benefit to-night. I have heard of ghosts who were torn cruelly from their fleshy tenement by murder, walking to and fro on the earth till the appointed day arrives, when, in the course of nature, they would have died, until which time they had no right to enter the abode of spirits. So they wandered restless through the world without a home, haunting houses, sitting on graves in churchyards, or walking in lonely places There was a soldier at Perran buried alive, and his spirit was often seen at night haunting the new-made graves, tearing at the earth, as though he thought any poor creature like himself was buried living."

The dismal usher is warming up - or freezing down - to his work. He wants to thrill his audience, and he succeeds. He preludes his story, told to him by his cousin Phoebe, of a ghostly face looking from a stone wall in an old chateau of the Ardennes with the declaration, “I can never relate the history without referring first to Phoebe’s death at sea and her bridegroom’s dream: I believe my poor cousin has laid a spell on me which forces me to call her up to tell herself the story of the old chateau!”

The moonlight suddenly streaming into the room discloses the melancholy usher, leaning his pale face on one hand, and holding up the other to impose silence while he fixes his large, prominent eyes on the darkest portion of the room. All eyes follow his, and for a moment several nervous youngsters take a long bolster lying on the floor for the corpse of the dead girl sewn up in her shroud, and floating in the sea. The ticking of a watch grows loud and ghostly “a very death-watch in sound,” and the low growl of the dog downstairs seems to warn the approach of a ghostly visitant.

First the usher tells that his cousin Phoebe died on her way to India to marry Captain Herbert. On the night of her death her lover dreamed that he saw a woman’s hand floating towards him, he was on the seashore, and the waves cast it up at his feet. On the fourth finger of the hand was the diamond ring which he had given to Phoebe. He took the ring and read within it: “Died at sea on 10th September 1845.” On the arrival of the ship the ring was sent to him at Calcutta by a fellow passenger with a letter stating she died on 10th September.

Now as a girl Phoebe was one of a wedding party at the old chateau which was haunted. A white face showed from the wall in the lumber room upstairs. First a little girl who had been sent up to the little room in the turret to look for an embroidery frame came rushing into the drawing room, white as death, and went off into violent hysterics. After the “usual amount of hartshorn and fuss,” she shrieked out, “Oh don t let me see that horrible face again!” Quietened and consoled she told that looking from the wall she had seen a woman’s face - a face white as snow with dark hollow eyes and an expression of unutterable horror.

The room was searched, nothing was found. Wedding guests crowded into the chateau. The room, brightened with a glowing stove, was allotted to Phoebe’s brother Jack. He was about to go to bed late that night when he saw in the wall- “a face, dead, white, and ghastly, staring at him in a fixed and awful manner.” He rushed from the room, and roused Captain Herbert; again search revealed nothing. The young man did not spend the night in the room.

Next day was the wedding day. Phoebe ran up to the room, thinking to find her brother. Not finding him, she turned to go – when, suddenly, she saw in the midst of the wall a ghastly face, whose eyes met hers with a look of such unutterable anguish that she fell on the floor in a swoon.

After that, thorough search was made. High up in the wall a deep hollow was found – a stone had been left out from the masonry. From it a skull grinned at the searchers. It was resting on an iron collar. Long black hair and bones had fallen in a heap into the deep hollow space of the wall. Far back in the Middle Ages a girl, in chains, had been built up in the wall, with an iron collar set around her neck.

“We never heard the story,” the usher tells. “Perhaps, in the old cruel days when she died, the peasants feared their feudal lord too much even to whisper it among themselves, and so the tale of her wrongs, her crime, and her death, was lost in the world forever.

But the usher rounds it off very neatly. “The three who had seen the face in the wall died young. Jack was drowned about a year afterwards in fording a river in Australia, and the little girl, Maggie, before the year was out, was thrown from her pony, and “never spoke again. It looks as if death took the ghost-seers in succession, just in the order in which they saw the apparition.”

Temperamental Authors

2010-12-16T00:09:00.001-05:00

I recently acquired an issue of the magazine supplement to the old New York World newspaper of the 1920s. Specifically, I got this issue, dated 6 February 1927, because it has a journalistic story by Leonard Cline that is completely new to me, but there turned out to be bonus: an illustrated article headed "Behind the Scenes in Temperamental Authors' Workshops" by Sarah Macdougall. Basically, the authoress solicited comments from a bunch of authors of the day, ranging from the noted (Sinclair Lewis, Rebecca West, Ellen Glasgow) to the less-known and now forgotten (e.g., Homer Croy, and Lulu Vollmer, the author of "Sun Up" and "The Shame Woman", who "does all of her writing on an ironing-board which fits across the arms of a wing chair in her studio home"). Some of the authors who provided comments are remembered for their fantasy writings:

Irvin S. Cobb was the first to be interviewed, because his day starts at eight in the morning and because the only time to ask him questions is before he leaves his Park Avenue home. "I don't like to work at all," said Mr. Cobb. "I'd never work if I didn't have to. When I do work, which is every day, I sit wherever there is a place to sit, take a pen, a pencil or a typewriter--in the city, in the country, on a train, on a ship, and I work. I have no moods. I don't need to have the light over my left shoulder. The only thing I need is an idea. I am always at work early in the morning. I was raised on an afternoon paper and I do my best work before noon. I never work at night. I do not care who is around while I am working. Ordinary noises of the city do not bother me in the least."

Robert W. Chambers is another man who does not like to work. But few Wall Street men toil such long hours as this author whose fiction has brought him as much wealth as if he were a successful financier. Mr. Chambers does his year's work in the winter months so that he may be free to play all summer. He does most of his writing in New York because he finds fewer interruptions in the city than in the country, and fewer distractions for the author. He finds October and November the best time to work in the country, "because every one else is in town." Mr. Chambers never works at night, and he is always on hand for a dinner party.

Lord Dunsany's plays have been written with quill pens. In Ireland he shoots geese for recreation. He takes the quils to London, and on his desk in his home in Cadogan Square a dozen quills are crowded in a jar.

The illustration of Dunsany is reproduced above. Either the artist was ignorant or misinformed, but no type of goose has a green head. Presumably the artist was drawing a common mallard, but that's a duck, not a goose. And a duck feather would not be as handy to use as a writing instrument as a goose feather, which is significantly larger.

Ghost Stories: stories of ghosts

2010-12-12T13:31:00.006-05:00

In my reply to the good news that a two volume set by John Locke, entitled Ghost Stories, and devoted to the since long gone magazine Ghost Stories, was recently published, I was glad to mention a little booklet (it numbers 32 pages) that I bought a long time ago.

I think it is the first study in regards to Ghost Stories, and am happy to post its cover here.

The bibliographical elements are: James R. Seiger, Ghost Stories, stories of ghosts, 'Neglected Repository Of Supernatural Fiction', essay by Sam Moskowitz, index by James Seiger, 'The Apparition In The Prize Ring', story by Robert E. Howard, introduction by Glenn Lord, Opar Press, Evergreen, Colorado, May, 1973. 32 pages.

How did the magazine look like? See here for depictions of 21 full colour covers.

W. Compton Leith

2010-12-10T17:49:00.003-05:00

For a long time I kept and would glance through a book by the essayist W. Compton Leith, Apologia Diffidentis (1908), which was dressed in vellum edges and marbled boards. I only lately learnt he was really Ormonde Maddock Dalton (1866-1945) – so a fairly close contemporary of Machen -, a British Museum antiquarian, co-chronicler of the bronzes of Benin, and also a byzantinist, who wrote a note on “The Byzantine Astrolabe at Brescia”, (Proceedings of the British Academy 12 (1926), pp 133-146), an instrument of 1062. I have his third volume, as by Leith, Sirenica (1913), which is a long meditation on the mythical riddle about “what Song the Sirens sang”, with many digressions and elaborations upon the theme. Somewhere still (though it is not readily to be found), I may have that first one: there was, it seems, a second, Domus Doloris (1909). He was compared to A.C. Benson, De Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne, and R.L. Stevenson, and (we might add) Machen in his discursive London Adventure style . Very fine, graceful, somewhat studied prose, with what used to be called “the smell of the lamp” about it, from overmuch burning of nocturnal oil. Not exactly fantasy, but certainly working upon its dim and misty margins.

GHOST STORIES: The Magazine and Its Makers

2010-12-03T14:12:00.002-05:00

John Locke, with his Off-Trail Publications, has quietly been producing some excellent books for anyone interested in the pulp magazines, and especially for those of us who, in particular, are also interested in the men and women behind the stories—the authors, editors, and artists. One recent release deserves special attention for the exemplary coverage of one particular pulp magazine, Ghost Stories. It ran for a total of 64 issues, from July 1926 through the December 1931/January 1932 number. There has been one previous anthology centered on this pulp: Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades: Memories of Ghost Stories Magazine (2000), edited by Mike Ashley. It contains seventeen stories, along with a history of the magazine by Mike Ashley, a short Foreword by Hugh B. Cave (who contributed two stories to the magazine in 1931), and two appendices: the first a checklist of issues of the magazine, the second an index to the contributors.

John Locke’s new project brings us not one but two books: twenty stories in volume one, and another fifteen in volume two, with no overlap of stories from Mike Ashley’s anthology and with plenty of extras. These volumes are formatted the same size as the original pulp magazine, so you get some neat extras like a sprinkling of facsimile ads, a bunch of the original illustrations to the stories, and full page reproductions of all sixty-four covers to the magazine.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 1 (9781935031093 $24.00 trade paperback) additionally includes a lengthy history of the magazine, putting it in the context of other magazines of the time, particularly those published by MacFadden Publications, who were responsible for nearly four years of the run of Ghost Stories before it was sold. Other lengthy sections give biographies of all of the editors, and all of the authors who are represented in volume one. And these are not the usual short one-paragraph biographies, but often a couple of pages, giving the results of original research on these people. There are also some statistical analyses of that magazine, showing that it paid 2 cents a word under MacFadden, but slipped to 1 cent (and up) under later owners. Over its run, Ghost Stories published 517 short stories, 12 novelettes, 47 serials (of various installments), 148 nonfiction items, 44 editorials, and one poem.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 2 (9781935031130 $24.00 trade paperback) continues on in the same comprehensive manner, with biographies of the authors who appear in volume two, a section on the artists, and the cover gallery of all sixty-four of the covers. (Each volume also has an index.)

To mention only a few of the stories reprinted in these two volumes, H.P. Lovecraft’s friend, Muriel Eddy, is represented with a short “True Ghost Experience” from the April 1926 issue. Nictzin Dyalhis's single contribution to Ghost Stories, “He Refused to Stay Dead” (April 1927) which had been announced in the previous issue as “My Encounter with Osric, the Troll”, is also reprinted. And Leonard Cline, author of God Head (1925) and The Dark Chamber (1927), is represented with his pseudonymous story “Sweetheart of the Snows” (August 1928), as by Alan Forsyth. It’s is a tale reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Glamour of the Snow”. Cline’s title for the story had been “The Lady of Frozen Death”, and his typescript version under that title can be found in the booklet The Lady of Frozen Death and Other Weird Tales (Necronomicon Press, 1992). Comparing the texts, one can see that the editor at Ghost Stories made numerous minor changes and additions, ones which tend to lessen Cline’s distinctive style and to add more pulpish sentimentalities.

This two-volume history and anthology brings the pulp magazine Ghost Stories, defunct now for almost seventy years, vividly back to new life. I recommend it highly.

Weird Words

2010-11-14T15:52:00.000-05:00

For some years, Dan Clore has been sharing, via a few e-groups of which we are both members, entries from his vast personal database of unusual words, and examples of their usage, from authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, E.R. Eddison, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and many others, ranging from James Branch Cabell and Leonard Cline to H.P. Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. This is quite fun, and I’ve always looked forward to his postings, covering words like: bemerded (Cabell, Eddison, Crowley); dwimmerlaik (Layamon, Tolkien); fray-bug (Eddison); kadishtu (A. Merritt, Henry Kuttner); lingam (Cabell, Crowley, Smith); scîn-lâc, scin-læca (Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, Machen, Crowley); Spintria (John Donne, Charles Maturin, Cabell, Compton Mackenzie, Montague Summers); tripsarecopsem (Eddison); and yoni (Cabell, Smith).

Now comes a first volume based on Clore’s database: Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon (trade paperback, $25.00) It’s a fine selection, a hefty 568 pages, but it leaves out most of the words I mentioned above, concentrating instead on words that Lovecraft used, like: blasphemous, Cyclopean, dæmonic/demonic, eidolon, eldritch, fœtid/fetid, ichor, leprous, litten, meep, night-gaunt, noisome, shoggoth, squamous, Tekeli-li (originally from Poe’s “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket”), and vigintillion.

Which doesn’t mean that all the really odd words are excluded. I was glad to see glame stone (from Arthur Machen’s “The White People”) make an appearance, along with hippocephalic, maunder, and nyctalops.

One of the first entries I turned to was that for Nodens, which has Tolkien, Machen and Lovecraft associations. Here is some of Clore’s entry:

    Nodens, Nodons, Nudens, pr.n. [see quotation from Puhvel] In Celtic mythology, a deity pertaining to healing, hunting, and the sea. Roman ruins found in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, dating from the fourth century CE, include a number of votive tablets bearing well-known inscriptions to this deity. Based on his appearance in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Strange High House in the Mist" and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, August Derleth made Nodens into the head of his pantheon of benignant Elder Gods.[Not in OED.]

    Titles: J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Name 'Nodens'" in Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (1932)

    Dr. McCaul quotes from a letter from Meyrick to Lysons that "Deus Nodens seems to be Romanised British, which correctly written in the original language would be Deus Noddyns, the 'God of the abyss,' or it may be 'God the preserver,' from the verb noddi, to preserve; both words being derived from nawdd, which signifies protection." Prof. Jarrett, a profound Celtic scholar, to whom I applied for a translation of "Deus Noddyns" without mentioning Meyrick's explanation, at once rendered it as "God of the deeps," a sense that every circumstance confirms.
                Roman Antiquities at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire: Being a Posthumous Work of the Rev. William Hiley Bathurst, M.A. (1879)

    The name of the god, as given in the inscriptions, varies between Nudons and Nodens, the cases actually occurring being the dative Nodonti, Nodenti, and Nudente, and the genitive Nodentis, so I should regard ō or ū as optional in the first syllable, and o as preferable, perhaps, to e in the second, for there is no room for reasonably doubting that we have here to do with the same name as Irish Nuadu, genitive Nuadat, conspicuous in the legendary history of Ireland.
                John Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (1901)

    Underlying the stories of Nūadu (genitive Nūadat) and Lug and that of Lludd and Lleuelys we may thus discern a Celtic myth of Lugus bringing relief to Nōdons; the latter is attested in dedications from Lydney (cf. Lludd!) in Gloucestershire bordering South Wales (Deo Nodonti) and seems to mean 'Fisher' (cf. Gothic nuta 'fisherman', from *nudōn[s]), the probable ancestor of the Arthurian "Fisher King" of the Grail legend, whose maiming resulted in the Waste Land.
                Jaan Puhvel, Comparative Mythology (1987)

    After I had seen most of the sculptured stones, the coffins, rings, coins, and fragments of tessellated pavement which the place contains, I was shown a small square pillar of white stone, which had been recently discovered in the wood of which I have been speaking, and, as I found on inquiry, in that open space where the Roman road broadens out. On one side of the pillar was an inscription, of which I took a note. Some of the letters have been defaced, but I do not think there can be any doubt as to those which I supply. The
    inscription is as follows:

        devomnodenti
        flavivssenilispossvit
        propternvptias
        quasviditsvbvmbra

"To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss) Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade."
              Arthur Machen, "The Great God Pan" (1890)

    Down the valley in the distance was Caerleon-on-Usk; over the hill, somewhere in the lower slopes of the forest, Caerwent, also a Roman city, was buried in the earth, and gave up now and again strange relics -- fragments of the temple of "Nodens, god of the depths."
              Arthur Machen, Far Off Things (1922)

    "By Nodens," said Caswallon drily, "your prayer was granted. Tros --"
             Talbot Mundy, Tros of Samothrace: Lud of Lunden (1925)

    A sea-god of the Britons, later confused with Neptune by the Romans.
              Talbot Mundy, note to Tros of Samothrace: Lud of Lunden (1925)

    Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.
                H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist" (1926)

    He spoke, too, of the things he had learnt concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the windowless monastery of the high-priest not to be described; how even the Great Ones fear them, and how their ruler is not the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.
                H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)

    And with his hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaick Nodens for their lord.
                H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)

    Dear, shall I pray the gulf's great deity,
    Nodens, to bring once more for you and me
    Some love-relinquished hour we could not save
    That westered all too swiftly to the wave,
    Ebbing between the cypress and the grass?
                Clark Ashton Smith, "Sea Cycle"

All in all, some fine browsing and reading is to be found in this book. I would have preferred that it have some kind of introduction, spelling out the methodology for inclusion and some history of the project, but I suppose that is my own particular bias. What is most clearly called for is a follow-up volume, of Weirder Words. Removing the Lovecraft-centric emphasis on any further undertaking would make for a more wide-ranging and engaging volume.

M.P. Shiel

2010-11-12T09:52:00.004-05:00

Wormwood 15 has arrived from the printer and will now be on its way to readers. I'll just include here an extract from my Camera Obscura column about an important new book: Harold Billings’ second volume in his trilogy about the life of M.P. Shiel. The fantast’s eccentric character, curious career and bizarre writing have caused him to be all but lost in legends: this new volume, about the crucial middle years of Shiel’s life gives us at last an authoritative path through this mythological landscape. Lucidly written, carefully researched and sympathetic but not uncritical of its subject and its work, the book ought to be on the shelves of any enthusiast or scholar of fin-de-siecle and 20th century British fantasy. M. P. Shiel: The Middle Years 1897 - 1923 (Austin, Texas: Roger Beacham Publisher, 2010) is published in a limited printing of 150 copies, of which 100 are trade paperbacks ($29.95 plus $4.00 for shipping and handling in the USA, $15.00 overseas) and 50 are numbered and signed hard-covers, priced at $65.95. Copies are available from the author (Harold Billings, 1807 Glencliff Drive, Austin, TX 78704 USA) and JDS Books, PO Box 292333 Kettering, OH 45429 USA. A limited number of the first volume, M. P. Shiel: A Biography of His Early Years, in the trade paperback edition, is still available at these sources.

Lovecraft on Le Fanu

2010-10-30T22:36:00.009-04:00

Many have wondered why H. P. Lovecraft held such a low opinion of the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose work merits barely a nod in Lovecraft’s seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” [W. Paul Cook (ed.) The Recluse, 1927. Revised 1933-4]:

“The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson . . .”

How could one of the most influential writers of weird fiction in the 20th century fail to appreciate one of the masters of the prior century, an author whose work was extolled as exemplary by M. R. James, whose work received an entire chapter in the same essay?

We may ascribe part of the answer to Lovecraft’s atheism, which would have taken issue with the trappings of Christianity in Le Fanu’s work, though the view of Christianity displayed in Le Fanu’s fiction is considerably less orthodox than one finds in either James of Machen. An examination of Lovecraft’s correspondence with Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth suggests that the nature of the works to which Lovecraft had been exposed were probably equally to blame.

After reading a reference to “Le Fanu’s anthology 'A Stable for Nightmares' ” in a letter from Donald Wandrei dated 5 January 1927 [Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Night Shade Books, 2002, p. 11], Lovecraft remarked, “I wish I could get hold of Polidori’s ‘Vampyre’ & something by Le Fanu. The latter has long been a familiar name to me, yet I have seen absolutely nothing of his.” [Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 14]. By 13 March 1927, Lovecraft had received Wandrei’s copies of A Stable for Nightmares and one of Le Fanu’s novels:

“As soon as I have read 'All in the Dark' I’ll return that and 'A Stable for Nightmares'.” [Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 54]

These are unfortunate choices for several reasons. A Stable for Nightmares was a gathering of eleven anonymous and unremarkable supernatural stories published by Trusley Brothers of London for the Christmas market in 1867. Seven of those stories reappeared in an American edition in 1896, with “Le Fanu” stamped on the spine, “J. Sheridan Le Fanu . . . Sir Charles Young, Bart. and Others” on the full-title page, and no author’s names supplied for any of the stories within. One of the stories new to this edition is Le Fanu’s “Dickon the Devil”, the second is “What Was It?” by Fitz-James O’Brien, and the third, “A Debt of Honor”, is attributed to Sir Charles Young by default. No evidence has been put forward to establish that Le Fanu had anything to do with the first edition, and the author had been dead for 23 years by the time the American edition appeared, yet various anthologists and critics have assumed that at least some of these anonymous tales were written by Le Fanu ever since.

Lovecraft had some suspicions concerning the authorship of these stories from the beginning:

“I see that Le Fanu collection has Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It?’—have you been able to identify others?” [Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 40].

Nonetheless, this first encounter with work he had first assumed to be by Le Fanu cannot have been an auspicious one.

Unfortunately, his second, more prolonged exposure was not much better. As a double-decker novel before a triple-decker demanding public, All in the Dark (1866) did not fare well with Le Fanu’s contemporaries, and in surviving notes for a lecture he delivered on Le Fanu on 16 March 1923, even the otherwise sympathetic M. R. James states, “Weakest of all the novels is All in the Dark—a domestic story with a sham ghost: an offence hard to forgive in any writer but much harder in Le Fanu’s case, seeing that he could deal so magnificently with realness without incurring any more expense.” [“The Novels and Stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu”, in M. R. James, A Pleasing Terror. Ash-Tree Press, 2001, p. 494. The first printing of this article in Ghosts and Scholars 7 omits this passage.]

Lovecraft admitted to August Derleth that he was not impressed with the book when he first approached it on 26 March 1927— “I’ll tell you about Le Fanu when I’ve read 'All in the Dark'—but I don’t think he’ll prove anything marvelous.” [Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, Hippocampus Press, 2008, p. 75]—then went on to pan the book to the same correspondent in a letter dated 26 July 1927, even though he admits that he has perhaps not read the best examples of Le Fanu’s work: “What I have read of Sheridan Le Fanu was a great disappointment as compared with what I heard of him in advance—but it may be that I haven’t seen his best stuff. I don’t know 'Uncle Silas', but the thing I read (I can’t even recall the name) was abominably insipid and Victorian.” [Essential Solitude, p. 100]

A few years later, Lovecraft was given the opportunity to read one of Le Fanu’s best novels, but again it was a work almost guaranteed to frustrate him. Although long touted as a supernatural novel based on the two early chapters devoted to “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House”, Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard (1861-2) is a sprawling portrait of life across class levels in 18th century Dublin that more often resembles the darker specimens of Jacobean and Restoration comedy than it does the Gothic novel. Derleth must have belatedly realized this when he decided not to publish the edition he had announced during the early years of Arkham House.

That he was misled concerning the book’s content is made clear by Lovecraft’s letter to Derleth on 26 September 1929:

“Just now I am making a bold effort to keep awake over an old Victorian novel which some damn’d misguided oaf recommended to me as ‘weird’—J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 'House by the Churchyard'. I had been disillusioned before by Le Fanu specimens, & this one just about clinches my opinion that poor Sherry was a false alarm as a fear monger, & I shall cut him out of any possible 2nd edition of my historical sketch [i.e. “Supernatural Horror in Literature”].” [Essential Solitude, p. 216]

Lovecraft seems to have given up attempting to read Le Fanu’s novels, but continued to express a desire to read “Green Tea”, “though”, he confessed to August Derleth on 20 November 1931, “I can scarcely imagine a really weird tale by the author of 'The House by the Churchyard' & other Victorian products which I have seen.” [Essential Solitude, p. 415]. He finally received an anthology containing the story in January 1932— “Cook has just presented me with 'The Omnibus of Crime', & I think the first thing I shall read will be the much-discussed ‘Green Tea’ by Le Fanu.” [Essential Solitude, p. 435]—but was initially put off by its length— “Well—I guess I’m too sleepy tonight to read ‘Green Tea' after all! It’s longer than I anticipated.” [Essential Solitude, p. 438].

This is the point at which we can assume that a combination of repeated disappointments, expectations too exalted to fulfil, continued difficulty in locating the author's work, impatience with Victorian manners, and distaste for Christian mysticism finally took their toll. After reading sham Le Fanu in an anthology, sham supernaturalism in one of Le Fanu’s own novels, and genuine supernaturalism diluted by the hundreds of pages of societal melodrama in which they appear, “Green Tea” may have appeared to be too little too late. To Clark Ashton Smith on 16 January 1932, Lovecraft wrote, “I at last . . . have read ‘Green Tea.’ It is definitely better than anything else of Le Fanu’s that I have ever seen, though I’d hardly put it in the Poe-Blackwood-Machen class” [quoted in an annotation to Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 15].

When August Derleth sent Lovecraft an article on Le Fanu in April 1935, Lovecraft remembered not “Green Tea” but his disappointment in the novels, “Thanks abundantly for the article on Le Fanu. I have 'The House by the Churchyard'—thought it is an insufferably dull & Victorian specimen. In reading it, it was all I could do to keep awake!” [Essential Solitude, p. 693]

If only Lovecraft had gained access to a volume of Le Fanu in full supernatural regalia his assessment may have been different, or perhaps with the aid of the critical apparatus M. R. James supplied in Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery—published in 1923, a mere four years prior to Lovecraft's first surviving reference of Le Fanu to Donald Wandrei—he may have seen a kindred spirit beneath those ostensibly Christian trappings. On the other hand, Heaven and Hell may have remained parochial to the cosmic materialist in Lovecraft no matter how creatively they had been couched by Le Fanu.

Robert Aickman and Philip Challinor: Akin to Poetry

2010-10-30T18:43:00.013-04:00

Philip Challinor. Akin to Poetry: Observations on Some Strange Tales of Robert Aickman. Baton Rouge: Gothic Press. 2010. 80 pp. $22.50 pb. ISBN 978-0-013045-19-0

The British author Robert Fordyce Aickman (1914-1981) was a man of varied interests and wide culture. Although he received a formal education focused on a career in architecture, his father's profession, he was, from a very early age, more interested in literature, music, and the theatre. He was theatre critic for The Nineteenth Century and After, chairman of the London Opera Society, active in multiple other operatic, ballet, and theatrical organizations, as well as cofounder—along with another writer of ghost stories, L.T.C. Rolt—of the Inland Waterways Association, a group dedicated to the preservation and restoration of England’s inner canal system. This last group consuming as it did a great deal of the author's time while he was most closely associated with it, is the focus of a great portion of his second autobiographical volume, The River Runs Uphill and is also the sole subject of two books Aickman wrote in the 1950s.

The first volume of Aickman’s autobiography, The Attempted Rescue goes into fascinating, excruciating, and often savagely funny detail about his parents’ dramatically dysfunctional marriage and the devastating effects this had on his own development. His Father moves about in the book like some kind of capricious, baffling, and frightening Olympian godling, too indifferent to the needs of others to be useful or understood by anyone else. His bitterly unhappy mother clings to her son as a surrogate for the love she felt she had lost elsewhere, laying the foundations for her son’s interest in the arts and his love for language, when not engaged in heated and nearly incessant battle with her husband. Her father, Aickman’s grandfather, was the charming swindler turned Victorian novelist Richard Marsh (1857-1915), author of The Beetle, a novel, whose popularity in its time, rivaled that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published the same year (1897).

Aickman is best known as the author of 48 “strange stories”, a title he used in what he felt was the absence of any really satisfactory equivalent for the German words “geistlich” or “unheimlich”, which he felt were the best terms serving the definition of the “ghost story” he established in the introductions and selections he made for the first eight celebrated volumes of Fontana’s Book[s] of Great Ghost Stories.

Aickman won the World Fantasy Award in 1975 for his story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” and the British Fantasy Award in 1981 for “The Stains”. He was a controversial figure in supernatural fiction during his lifetime and afterwards, earning accolades as “one of the most accomplished avatars of the English ghost story tradition” from such distinguished critics and authors of supernatural fiction as E. F. Bleiler, Ramsey Campbell, John Clute, Dennis Etchison, Michael Dirda, Neil Gaiman, Russell Kirk, Fritz Leiber, Peter Straub, Jack Sullivan, and others due to the high literary polish and ambiguity of his work, while at the same time eliciting baffled scorn from many others as a pretentious peddler of stories from which the conclusions had been lopped to give a false impression of profundity. His devoted but limited following has slowly, steadily increased thanks to a few significant reprint editions and wider critical acceptance. As late as Autumn 2005, a never-before published ghost story by the author appeared in the British journal Wormwood, edited by Mark Valentine.

I regret that two informal sources that mixed playful erudition with probing analysis of this author’s work are currently unavailable. No transcript seems to be available of the panel devoted to Aickman presented at the 2007 World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, with participation by Kathryn Kramer, Lisa Tuttle, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Dirda, and others. Also, the variety of approaches and perspectives brought to bear on several Aickman stories by a variety of academics and amateur critics at the now moribund alt.books.ghost-fiction group, once collected (amongst a number of more formal essays, all highly recommended) at Barb Yanney’s sadly defunct website Robert Aickman: An Appreciation are currently only available to those willing to delve through reams of Google and Deja group archives. To those diligent enough to search these archives, I particularly recommend the remarks by Robert Suggs and the late lamented John Eatman, two talented amateur critics who had an uncanny knack for ferreting out the finest details of whatever they examined and doing so with such joy in discovery as to make all this concentrated effort entertaining rather than labored.

To date, criticism of his work has been rather limited and much of that tentative, with S.T. Joshi’s assessment of the author, “So Little Is Definite” in Studies in Weird Fiction 18 (Winter 1996. Reprinted in The Modern Weird Tale, McFarland, 2001) offering a few insights concerning the use of language and landscape, but otherwise remaining as baffled, if not as infuriated, by the author as Joanna Russ had been when reviewing the collection Painted Devils for the February 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

More insightful have been John Clute’s essay in E. F. Bleiler’s Supernatural Fiction Writers (Scribners, 1985. Reprinted in Clute’s Strokes: Essays and Reviews, 1966-1986, Serconia, 1988), Peter Straub’s introduction to the Aickman retrospective collection The Wine-Dark Sea (Arbor House, 1988), Michael Dirda’s. “Crossing into Darkness: Robert Aickman’s `Strange Stories’ ” in Washington Post Book World, 11 Dec. 1988: 9 (Reprinted in Dirda’s excellent, wide-ranging compilation of essays and reviews, Bound to Please, W. W. Norton, 2005), Gary William Crawford’s frustratingly brief yet informative Robert Aickman: An Introduction (Gothic Press, 2003), a smattering of essays and dissertations in a variety of venues (see Crawford’s online Aickman database at aickmandata.com for publication information and short assessments of secondary literature devoted to Aickman), and at long last, the present collection of essays by Philip Challinor, some of which first appeared at the website mentioned above.

As already noted, Challinor’s essays are not the only valuable analyses available, but Challinor is unique, at this point in Aickman’s critical reception, in dealing with several individual stories in depth rather than attempting to infer as much as possible about all of Aickman’s work based on examination of themes common to several stories or choosing a single “characteristic” story upon which to base a key to all of the author’s works. Fritz Leiber’s description of Aickman’s impact, written upon the publication of Cold Hand in Mine in 1975, remains one of the best:

“Robert Aickman has a gift for depicting the eerie areas of inner space, the churning storms and silent overcasts that engulf the minds of lonely and alienated people. He is a weatherman of the subconscious.”

Although many of Aickman’s stories may share common themes and employ similar techniques, they affect the reader almost entirely on a subconscious level, employing allusions, metaphors, and subtle shifts in characterization, atmosphere, and geography to trigger memories and emotional responses in readers that a more straightforward plot and development would overlay and overwhelm. Furthermore, his use of allusion is so refined and so elusive that the author he most closely resembles is not any of his illustrious predecessors in the art of supernatural fiction, but the extremely subtle net of allusions and wordplay employed by James Joyce in Dubliners. Every word counts: from the title to the epigraph, to the names of characters, to variances in the way objects or locations are described, to recurrences or variations in dialogue. All of these interact with each other in a manner that elicits a very individual response that varies not only from reader to reader, but is also capable of striking the same reader in different ways depending on his or her experience, a phenomenon that Aickman described in his introduction to the 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966): “the successful ghost story is akin to poetry and seems to emerge from the same strata of the unconscious”.

In this remarkable collection of essays, Challinor has demonstrated that Aickman’s technique is equal to his intent by exploring eight stories from different stages in the author’s career as a writer of strange tales: one story from the 1964 collection Dark Entries (“Bind Your Hair”), three from the 1968 collection Sub Rosa (“The Unsettled Dust”, “No Stronger Than a Flower”, and “Ravissante”), three from the 1975 collection Cold Hand in Mine (“Niemandswasser”, “The Same Dog”, and “The Hospice”) and one from 1977’s Tales of Love and Death (“Le Miroir”).

Challinor’s identification of allusions and how these allusions contribute to the atmosphere and impact of the stories is apt and persuasive. Of “Niemandswasser”, he writes, “Aickman uses the English and German names interchangeably throughout the story, and there is a certain feline irony in his choice of a lake [Lake Constance] whose English name implies feminine fidelity” in a story that deals with broken engagements, gender-shifting doubles, and a pervasive sense of betrayal. His identification of a subtle reference to the German Romantic writer Annette Droste-Hülshoff is another nice touch, since, like the present Aickman story, Droste-Hülshoff’s famous novella “The Jew’s Beech Tree” is another exploration of the doppelgänger theme whose conclusion raises as many questions as it answers, and it serves to point out the delicate touch Aickman employs when delivering allusions and asides: “like many of Aickman’s seemingly casual asides, it both rounds off part of the tale and throws the reader slightly off-guard.” (Challinor, 16).

Joanna Russ in the review mentioned above, dismissed these subtleties, claiming, “Robert Aickman has left out the parts of his horror stories which explain what is happening and why, thus achieving a mystifying non-compossibility (i.e. you can’t put the damned thing together)”, but Challinor’s patient exploration of Aickman’s use of language and the precise methods the author uses to mis- and re-direct his readers proves otherwise. Challinor demonstrates that often it is not what Aickman has left out of his stories that threatens to confuse the reader, but what he has included:

“The presence of such a wealth of detail helps to emphasize the inexplicability of the weird phenomena; as though the narrator had difficulty deciding what was relevant and what was not, and so decided to put in everything. Relevant details are often so slyly inserted that their significance (at least in that conscious part of the reader’s mind to which Aickman so determined refused to truckle) only on repeated readings . . . ” (8)

“Aside from greatly enriching the texture of his stories, it is also a subtle kind of redirection; not imprecision so much as precision about the wrong things . . . the effect is both disorienting and richly allusive.” (19)

Time and again, Challinor points to the methods Aickman employs to reveal how much richer the world is than the one we normally see—the psychological and social decay that underlies the physical evidence in “The Unsettled Dust”, the ambiguities and seeming contradictions that counterpoint the male and female views of what occurs in “No Stronger Than a Flower”, the clash between private need and public myth in “Bind Your Hair”, the need to rationalize the unconventional “combination of sadness and carnal appetite [which] appears characteristic of the guests at The Hospice”, the “unsettling tangents” that allow settings and objects to shift out of recognition in nearly every one of the stories, and many more instances of the irrational erupting into and attempting to impose its individual will, upon the fabric of reality. In discussing “The Same Dog”, Challinor even manages to illuminate elements in the story by introducing passages from Aickman’s autobiography, a perilous enterprise that all too often results in readings that are either superficial or even smugly condescending. Curiously, Challinor’s exploration of “Le Miroir”, fascinating as it is, merely confirms my own estimation of the story as pretentious, self-pitying, and elitist with only a few flashes of wit to redeem it.

Look beneath the surface, Aickman tells us, and see a variegated realm whose patterns go beyond the obvious features of the world we think we all know, a world with hitherto unsuspected ties to our subconscious, containing truths we could not otherwise have recognized or grasped. Challinor has proven Aickman to be a worthy, if rather prankish, guide to these mysterious provinces, and has provided us with more of the signposts we will need to find our way.

Sarban

2010-10-20T09:56:00.003-04:00

I'm pleased to report that Tartarus Press have now announced the publication later this year of my study of Sarban, "Time, a Falconer"; together with a volume of his unseen writings, "Discovery of Heretics". The author of "The Sound of His Horn" and "The Doll Maker" has long been an enigmatic figure about whom not much was known. My study draws on his considerable archive of personal papers - letters, diaries, a chronology of his life - to present for the first time a fuller picture of a complex, sensitive and highly creative man. The volume of uncollected work includes long extracts from two unpublished novels, and many unfinished, but well-advanced stories. They reveal in particular that the extraordinary imagination at work in his three published books was still very active later in his life. Sarban deserves a higher standing in the field of fantastic literature, and it is hoped these publications will help to develop that. I'd like to thank Doug Anderson, a fellow columnist on this blog, for the help and advice he gave with my study.

Mark Valentine

Wormwood 15

2010-10-18T07:20:00.001-04:00

Wormwood 15 will be available mid-November. It will contain Stefan Zechowski: A Pilgrim of the Infinite by Brian Banks & Marta Mazur; Wilfred Rowland Mary Childe by Jonathan Wood; Gerard de Nerval: Exotic Voyager, Hashish Dreamer, Accursed Suicidalist by Adam Daly; Arthur Johnson: Another Sense of the Past by Robert Eldridge; Threshold in the First Half of the Tenth Chapter of Lucius Shepard's Viator by Adam Golaski; Under Review by Reggie Oliver; Late Reviews by Douglas A. Anderson and Camera Obscura. Please note that Under Review by Reggie Oliver is a new, regular column for reviews of contemporary publications.

The Colonial Edition of Dracula

2010-09-05T23:26:00.004-04:00

On the topic of Dracula and colonial editions, a stir was created a few years ago when Robert Eighteen-Bisang published details of an unrecorded colonial edition of Dracula that had turned up in Australia and sold on ebay. The fact that it remained unrecorded for so long probably has more to do with the lack of serious bibliographical attention given to colonial editions than the actual rarity of the book. Here is a contemporary notice of the Hutchinson colonial edition of Dracula from the Adelaide Advertiser, Saturday 22 January 1898, page 8:

CURRENT LITERATURE
Hutchinson & Co's Publications
The latest additions to Messrs. Hutchinson's Colonial Library include stories grave and gay, sensational and domestic. Pre-eminently striking is Bram Stoker's "Dracula," notwithstanding that it is in great part a reversion to old-fashioned methods. Its plot is unfolded by letters and diaries in regular painstaking fashion, after the manner of Wilkie Collins. As for the plot itself, it is ghastly beyond belief. Not even Sheridan Lefanu in his wildest moments ever conceived anything to equal it for haunting horror. It is a story of human vampires and demoniacal possession, of midnight apparitions and life-in-death. The book must be carefully kept out of the way of anyone with weak nerves; but for those who can stand it there is a fearful joy in the gradual making clear of the tremendous mysteries involved. The art of the author is of quality high enough celare artem. There is no attempt at fine writing, and the simple details almost bring conviction. If they quite brought it, farewell to the reader's peace of mind!

A Contemporary Review of Dracula

2010-08-15T23:12:00.004-04:00

Following is a contemporary review of Dracula published in the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus on 6 November 1897. It's a fairly negative review, typically sceptical, that references Edmund Gosse's recently published article, "The abuse of the supernatural in fiction."

"In Mr Edmund Gosse’s suggestive article upon the abuse of the supernatural in fiction published by us last week, he laid down one canon which, he truly enough declared, is violated by half the present day writers who trench upon the domain of the mystic and the abnormal. This law is that the products of their imagination, however extravagant and monstrous, must be so presented as to command our temporary intellectual credence. Although perfectly aware that the story cannot be true, we should be carried captive for the time being by the notion that it is. The rule will be generally accepted as one which ought to govern this province of literary art, but we can understand individual opinions differing widely as to the writers who do and do not observe it. Mr Gosse, for example, confesses that his common sense can be momentarily conquered by Mr H.G. Wells or Mr Frank Stockton, and gives the highest possible testimonial to Lord Lytton’s “Strange Story.” Yet Mr Wells’s half-human monsters and his wild idea of travelling back along the grooves of time by a mere piece of mechanism – a thing of wheels and rods and cylinders – will strike many people as the most audacious demands upon credulity made by any modern writer. If Bulwer Lytton, again, had singular power to thrill in the telling of a narrative, what is to be said of the utter impotence of some of his conclusions – the absurdity, for instance, which gives us as the climax to an elaborate process of incantation the materialisation of a human foot?

In his strictures upon certain contemporary dealers in the supernatural, Mr Gosse is upon surer ground, and will command cordial assent. The method of some eminent novelists who have lately pressing into their service denizens of another world, and even the arch-fiend in human form, is matchless in its naivete. The pity is that Mr. Gosse’s article was penned before he had an opportunity of studying the latest essay in the abnormal launched upon the literary world. We have been reminded how easy it was in the ages of credulity to avoid over-stepping the boundaries of belief. But in Mr. Bram Stoker a writer has arisen who intrepidly assumes that medieval gullibility is in full survival. He appeals to his readers with the most horrid, yet in some respects the most ludicrous, romance of vampiredom to be found in literature. It is a bold attempt to concentrate the fables and superstitions which have existed in Eastern Europe especially for many centuries into a shape sufficiently like reality to cheat the imagination of the nineteenth century. Can the modern reader be induced to bestow a passing belief upon vampires any more than upon sylphs and salamanders? Where most men would answer no, Mr. Stoker says yes, and confidently tries the experiment. It may be argued that he does no more than imitate the hardihood of Sheridan Le Fanu, but that gifted author contented himself with au outline, and never ventured upon the elaboration of detail with which Mr. Stoker surrounds his vampire Count Dracula and the victims upon whom that monster preys in modern England.
There is an extensive literature upon the subject of vampires, which this author must have studied with a minuteness and assiduity just sufficient to wreck his purpose. For If he had not painted into his gruesome portrait all the habits and characteristics supplied by a wealth of tradition, we could have believed in it better. Vampires – the "living dead," whose corpses cannot decay, but who have the power of rising from their graves at night to batten upon the blood of human beings - are the Vroucolakas of the Greeks. They have been treated of by an old German writer, Michael Raufft, in his learned book "De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis," by the Frenchman Calmet, and by many another grave-faced sifter of medieval superstitions. All agree that these unpleasant nocturnal prowlers, who stalk abroad murdering and blood-sucking, are most common in certain countries, to wit, Silesia, Moravia, Hungary. Consequently to Hungary - or rather, well to the eastward of Transylvania - Mr. Stoker betakes himself in search of the home of his foul wanderer. He dwells, half man, half brute, in a gloomy castle in the deepest recesses of the Carpathians, surrounded by a bevy of lovely yet loathsome females, blood suckers like himself. The mistake is that as Mr. Stoker designs to transport his monster to England, there to feast upon the teeming population of the metropolis, he is tempted to introduce Dracula in too strong a light. The more intimately we regard a vampire and take stock of his proceedings, the more disposed we are to forgot horror in scepticism. Ancient records of vampiredom avoided this, partly because they were deliciously vague. Raufft tells mainly of swinish munchings in the grave by certain evil-disposed and voracious corpses, which is n violation of social proprieties, but little more. Colmet, in his dissertation on the vampires of Hungary, contents himself with concluding that there are numbers of "revenans" whose bodies the earth rejects, but he refrains from committing himself to the theory that they may be actually caught either entering or leaving their graves. And ho takes the highly sensible view that a pretension of the Greek Church, to the effect that the earth would not retain corpses which had come under orthodox excommunication, may be accountable for the prevalence of vampiredom in Slavonic countries.
But no difficulties daunt Mr. Bram Stoker. At close quarters we are shown the vampire endowed with nil the attributes which the amalgamated superstitious of the ignorant in all ages have woven about him. He is man insomuch that he must pass the daylight hours in his human form reclining upon a heap of foul-smelling earth, loads of which he convoys with him as personal luggage for this necessary purpose. He casts no shadow, gives back no reflection in any mirror; he can come and go through the merest crevice, can materialise out of moonlight mist, can change at sunrise or sunset to bat or wolf, can command certain of the lower brutes, cannot cross running water save at slack or ebb of tide, can transform into vampires all upon whose blood he feasts; and so forth. We are gravely invited by our romancist to contemplate a monster of this perplexing sort astir in busy London - to watch him being fought by energetic, intelligent men of the modern world with such weapons as garlic flowers, sacred water, and crucifixes. No more staggering demand upon what Mr Gosse terms “temporary credence” could well be made, for Mr Bram Stoker writes for a community mainly Protestant and for an age in which belief in the efficacy of relics and symbols has almost disappeared. It is true that the author does not lean over-confidently upon these agents. They can but alleviate the danger to be apprehended from the viciousness of a vampire out on business. The radical cure is effected as of old by knife and pointed stake. Mr Stoker, though he does presume immensely upon the capacity of modern readers to gape and swallow, concludes that their credulity will not stand a severer test than that of their medieval ancestors. An infallible corrective of vampiredom has always been to cause the suspected grave to be beaten with a hazel twig wielded by a virgin not less than twenty-five years old. Yet in practice the severed head and the stake driven through the heart were ever preferred. When the pinch comes, our latter-day author discards his theory of remedy by exorcism as gracelessly as his predecessors abandoned the hazel twig."

The Stone Dragon - a colonial edition

2010-08-03T22:49:00.006-04:00

An advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald for 15 August 1898 lists a colonial edition of R. Murray Gilchrist's scarce collection of decadent tales, The Stone Dragon. Colonial editions are an interesting area of bibliography that is still a fertile ground for exploration. Copies of the Methuen first edition surface occasionally - John Eggeling at Todmorden recently had an ex-lib copy on offer for a couple of hundred quid - but I can't recall ever hearing of a colonial edition. Colonial editions usually have drab, uniform covers, so presumably a colonial edition of The Stone Dragon would lack the striking cover of the original (pictured here).

COLONIAL LIBRARY.
Bound in Red Cloth, and published at 3s 6d.
This Splendid Series of BOOKS, which were Selling Freely at ONE SHILLING EACH

NINEPENCE PER VOL.

Alderdene. Major Paul
Cumberern of the Ground. C. Smith
Children of this World. E. F. Pinnent
Cavalier Lady. Constance Macewan
Dumps and I. Mrs. Parr
Diogenes of London. J. [sic] B. Marriott-Watson
Double Knot. G. M. Fenn
Eli's Children. G. M. Fenn
Hovenden, V.C. F. M. Robinson
Hepsy Gipsy. L. T. Meade
In Tent and Bungalow. By author of "Indian Idylls"
Jaco Treloar. J. H. Pearce
Jack's Father. W. E. Norris
King's Favorite. U. A. Taylor
Jim B. F. S. Carew
A Lost Illusion. Leslie Keith
My Stewardship. E. M. Gray
My Land of Beulah. Mrs. Leith-Adams
Only a Guardroom Dog. E. E. Cuthell
The Poison of Asps. R. O. Prowse
Plann of Campaign. F. M. Robinson
Quiet Mrs. Fleming. R. Pryce
A Reverend Gentleman. J. M. Cobban
Secret of Madame de Moulac
The Gods Give My Donkey Wings. A. E. Abbott
The Stone Dragon. M. Gilchrist
This Man's Dominion. Deas Cromarty
Time and the Woman. R. Bryce
Toddleben's Hero. M. M. Blake.

ANTHONY HORDERN AND SONS,
UNIVERSAL PROVIDERS,
HAYMARKET (ONLY)

Guy Boothby interview

2010-07-24T04:01:00.004-04:00

Fellow Wormwoodiana blogger, Mark Valentine, recently introduced Guy Boothby's Dr Nikola, Master Criminal for Wordsworth Editions. The book contains A Bid For Fortune, and Doctor Nikola, both of which are fast-paced thrillers that still hold up well today. Boothby (1867-1905) is a noteworthy author who grew up in South Australia and was secretary to the mayor of Adelaide before he took up writing full time. Tragically, his life was cut short by pneumonia and he died in 1905 aged 38 at his property in Boscombe, near Bournemouth. Here is an interview with him from the Windsor Magazine in 1896. The first page has gone walkabout, so I'll start part of the way through...

An Afternoon with Guy Boothby

"Are your methods of working a state secret, Mr. Boothby?"
"I don't think so. I believe that the morning hour has gold in its mouth. In summer I am at work by five o'clock. Just now I am later, but certainly not later than seven. My average day is the orthodox eight hours."
"It goes without saying, considering the immense amount you have written in these last two years, that your daily task must be very considerable?"
"I should say that on an average I accomplish at least six thousand words a day. Of course part of that is dictated to my wife, who not only helps me in this way, but type-writes the final copy of all my work. But her assistance is not merely mechanical. Her interest in the development of my characters is unbounded. From the moment a character is outlined, my wife watches its growth with a sympathy and insight that mean more to me than I can well express."
"Do you arrange everything beforehand? "
"Provisionally, yes; but the characters always get the better of me in the end. They marry and otherwise dispose of themselves, quite independently. I know no more what may happen than I know whether the work will win the public favour."
"You have many surprises, then? "
"Particularly in the latter case. The success of Nikola, f or example, astonish me. But really this talk about myself is too much. I'd far rather hear about your work. My friends say in conversation I am a creature of digressions and sudden flights, always neglectful of the point."
"At present however it is my duty to keep you to it."
"Ah, there now, you remind me I am being interviewed."
"Then it must be my business to make you forget it. Now you see I have outlined my work for you, so we'll return to our theme with a very momentous question: Who is Dr Nikola?"
"That I am afraid I may not tell you, in view of future developments of that character. The name however was suggested to me one day in the train by seeing the name of Nicolo Tesla, the Italian electrician, in a public print. By the way, the Doctor's cat has won curious admirers. The other day a lady, quite unknown to me, wrote imploring me to tell her the name of Dr. Nikola's cat in order that she might call her own, tabby after the 'dear creature.'"
The conversation drifted away pleasantly to the joys and sorrows of the author's post-bag, concerning which Mr. Boothby has many good tales to tell. Among its chief joys are kind remembrances from brothers of the pen. Many of these, in the shape of autographed portraits, adorn the walls of the study. Among the photographs are those of Walter Besant, Clark Russell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope, Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling. "Talk of the jealousy of authors!" he cried. "There surely never was a greater fallacy."
Then our talk went further afield.
You must tell me something of your Australian life and travels," I suggested.
"My first book, 'On the Wallaby,' as you are doubtless aware, contained a record of my journey across Australia in '92. You will see my course marked on that map. The journey was made with one companion, and occupied thirteen months."
"What means of transport had you?"
"At first some pack‑horses, but these died off, then a rough bush buggy and a pair. They went blind latterly and we christened them Cyclops and Polyphemus. Once or twice we were at death's door, but somehow we pulled through. At the end of the journey we had a nine hundred mile row. Perhaps you'd like to see a relic of the expedition ‑ which I always keep by me for old acquaintance' sake ‑ my cooking pot," and from the corner Mr. Boothby produced the venerable utensil to which in a sense he no doubt owes his preservation.
Mr. Boothby's travels in the far East, New Guinea, and his sojourn in Thursday Island came next under review. Thursday Island is to him a place of many memories.
"Here," he continued, "are photographs of the pearl divers. There you see the huge oysters of these fisheries, valued not so much for pearls as for mother‑of‑pearl." Other photographs, too, Mr. Boothby showed me, photographs of places to which he has given a literary interest. "There," he remarked, "is the house where the scene of 'A Lost Endeavour' is laid, and this again is the scene of 'The Marriage of Esther.' Of the strange wild life of Thursday Island he has much to tell, but a novelist's incidental anecdote is sacred, for it is doubtless the germ of the future book.
With every phase of Australian life Mr. Boothby is acquainted. As he turns over his photographs with the visitor he is brimful of graphic comment on every picture.
"Here," he remarked, "is a capital picture of a Queensland sundowner." The picture represented a solitary figure standing in pathetic isolation on a boundless plain.
"A 'sundowner'?" I queried.
"Yes; the lowest class of nomad. For days they will tramp across the plains carrying, you see, their supply of water. They approach a station only at sunset, hence the name. At that hour they know they will not be turned away."
"Do they take a day's work?"
"Not they! There is an old bush saying that the sundowner's one request is for work, and his one prayer is that he may not find it."
The pathos of the Australian solitudes has entered into Mr. Boothby. He tells, as one who understands, how men who live apart - three hundred miles perhaps from the next neighbour ‑ are steeped in the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon, whose verses they recite to lighten their solitary toil. The humour, too, of the life ‑ rough and ready pungent humour ‑ he has made his own. There is one grim joke of an arrest ‑ but no, my lips are sealed. "I’m putting that into a story one day," said Mr. Boothby.
So the conversation flourished until at last Mr. Boothby arranged the pleasantest of interludes. "Come now," he said, "and let me introduce you to my wife," and a few moments later, in the enjoyment of Mrs. Boothby's charming company, I quite forgot my part of interviewer.
As we chatted on a multitude of themes my host suddenly surprised me by remarking, "Now you must see Dr. Nikola." The situation was exciting. I waited breathless for the coming revelation. Was the house uncanny, I wondered? Could the novelist really compel spirits and materialise the creatures of his brain?
" Nik, Nik he called mysteriously. "Nik!"
There was a pattering in the hall, an in bounded nothing more phantasmal than a very hearty bull‑pup, of the friendliest disposition. He was clever too, for at his master's bidding he pretended to have a violent cold in his head, sneezed, said "wolf " with perfect articulation, and played endless other tricks.
Young Nik's great friend is old Nik, otherwise Beelzebub, an aged bull‑dog of wonderful sagacity, and the hero of "The Beautiful White Devil," who entered next at his master's bidding. To little Dr. Nikola, alone of dogs, old Bel is kind and even fatherly. "Once in Nik's earliest puppy days, " said Mr. Boothby, "Bel, the little one, had been playing with a bone in my wife's morning‑room and had left it behind him when he followed her to the drawing‑room. Presently he became very unhappy and began to whine, when the old dog rose from before the fire and went out of the room to return with the bone, which he placed before his little friend as if to comfort him." Then at the word of command Bel stood stock still while Nik jumped over him, backwards and forwards, not once but many times.
A visit to Mr. Boothby's aquariums followed, for my host is a collector not only of old books, but of rare and curious live fish, which he brings together from all quarters of the globe. One can only mention his rarest and most interesting specimens, the fish with rudimentary legs and hands from the deep lakes of Mexico city. One of these fish had a leg eaten off, but Nature repaired the damage, and now the new leg is in its place. "That other little fish," said Mr. Boothby, pointing to another tank, "I found one morning on his back, more dead than alive, but by way of experiment I gave him a good dose of brandy, and he soon was as lively as ever."
As we returned to the study. Mr. Boothby told me of his early home at Salisbury.
"I was born in Australia," he remarked, but at six years of age I came to England, where I was educated. I lived at Salisbury in a quaint house ‑hundreds, of years old. It was a strange old place, and the man who would have been impervious to its influence would not have been able to say much about his imagination. I used to weave wonderful stories about that house to myself then."
"The future novelist was making, I see."
"I have always been drawn to literature. I was always a scribbler. At sixteen I returned to Australia and began my real life."
"Of which your books are substantially the record?"
"More or less, yes. Some of my earlier short stories found their way into Australian papers. The very first I always keep by me as a salutary antidote to swelled head. When orders come in pretty freely one is sometimes tempted to feel a little elated, but a glance at that story conduces to plainer thinking."
"I should like very much to have a list of your principal works, if I may."
Mr. Boothby turned to consult a ponderous ledger.
"Well," he confessed with some reluctance, if it interests your readers I am agreeable. In 1893 I wrote 'On the Wallaby,' in 1894 'In Strange Company,' in 1895 'The Marriage of Esther,' 'A Lost Endeavour,' 'A Bid for Fortune ' and 'The Beautiful White Devil.' This year has brought forth ‘Dr. Nikola,' and many other serials and magazine stories both in this country and in America and Australia. 'The Fascination of the King' is running in Chambers's Journal. "
Thereafter, with no reluctance at all, Mr. Boothby produced another ponderous book, of which he seems fonder than he is of the ledger ‑ the record of his favourite bull‑dogs' pedigrees and performances, kept on a most ingenious system.
By the time we had exhausted that record the afternoon had slipped away, so after a word or two more on various subjects, a hearty laugh over a funny picture of the novelist and his illustrator, Mr. Stanley L. Wood (drawn by the latter), and an examination of the model stage on which my host is working out a new play, the moment of departure came, and I took cordial leave of Mr. and Mrs. Boothby.

Fergus Hume interview

2010-07-21T05:27:00.005-04:00

An interview with prolific crime, mystery and fantasy author Fergus Hume (1859-1932), best known for the The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), which opens in Melbourne. Hume famously sold the rights of the novel for 50 pounds and the book subsequently became a great bestseller, selling over half a million copies in England.

From The Maitland Mercury & Hunter General Advertiser, 19 January 1893.
A Talk with Mr. Fergus Hume.
Raymond Blathwayt, in the December number of "Great Thoughts," had an interesting interview with the author of "The Mystery of a hansom Cab," from which we quote some passages:
"The only allusion I care to make to the 'Hansom Cab,"' said Mr. Hume, with a shrug of his shoulders, "is this. I wanted to go in for dramatic writing more than for novel writing when I was in Melbourne. Of course, I couldn't get my play accepted because I wasn't known at all. So I thought if I could write a book to attract the attention of managers, even a small book, that I might get a chance of getting a play on. I must add that on this determination I went to several booksellers in Melbourne, and asked whose works were most popular with their customers. The unhesitating reply was Gaboriau's. I had never heard of him myself, but I read his books and I thought 'Well, I can do as good as this at all events' and so I wrote the 'Hansom Cab,' which was pure fiction, not a line of truth in it. It was published and made an instantaneous success."
"I thought," I observed, "that it was published in England by the 'Hansom Cab Co,' and not in Melbourne at all."
"Yes, it was published in Melbourne at my own risk and expense. It was brought home by Mr. Trischler here, who formed himself into what was called 'The Hansom Cab Co.', with which company, however, I had no financial connection whatever. My connection, however, with Mr Trischler himself, was not destined to be a long one, and now my books are in the hands of various well-known publishers in London. The 'Piccadilly Puzzle,' I might mention, which was published by F.V. White and Co., has the distinction of obtaining the highest price ever paid for any 1s book in England.
"To go back to the 'Hansom Cab,' of which I may say I am heartily sick now, I want you to understand that I am doing all I can to get away from it. Everywhere and with everyone it is the same. Zola is known by 'Nana' when he ought to live by 'La Rêve'; Sullivan's 'Golden Legend,' one of the finest pieces of the century, is condemned, at all events, on the continent, because of his 'Mikado.' I utterly object to a man being committed by the public to one line only. Because a man makes a fool of himself once, to put it strongly," cried Mr. Fergus Hume, with great energy, "he is not to go on making a fool of himself all his life. I will not be bound down by the Tradition of the Hansom Cab."
I laughed heartily. "Hear, hear," I said, "you remind me of Mark Twain, who said exactly the same to me last year. Well, now tell me what are your aims and ideas for the future, and how do you propose to get away from your traditions?"
"Well," he replied, "I want to drop the ordinary novel of commerce for what I may term the 'Romance of Fantasy,' of which the 'Island of Fantasy ' is the first."
"Now," said I, "how do you blend the fantastic and the real, the impossible and the possible, so as to make it palatable to the ordinary common sense English reader?"
"I try to manage so as to make the improbable seem possible. I am following up this 'Island of Fantasy' with 'Aladdin in London,' which will be a similar work; and the third of the series upon which I am now engaged is called 'The Harlequin Opal.' In 'The Island of Fantasy' I endeavour to reconstruct the old Greek civilisation and adapt it to the present day."
"Ah," said I, "much as Conan Doyle reconstructed the fourteenth century. He told me he read 150 works bearing on that century before he wrote that work."
"Precisely," replied Mr. Hume. "Reading up again all the old classics, I super-added the Greek poets of Addington Symonds; I recalled all I knew of the Tragedies; the great pathos and fatefulness of Greek life and history. I studied the whole matter almost as a science, and as a result, I feel I have got somehow into the heart of the old Grecian life. I am now going in for the fantastical novel as a speciality, for I really think that people are getting tired of realism. But for my own part I think that my real strength as a writer -- and I have the authority of the 'Spectator' for saying so -- lies in poetry. I am about to publish a book of poems. And as he spoke, Mr. Hume handed me a very dainty little lyric, "Venus Urania," and which ran as follows :

To rose-red sky, from rose-red sea,
At rose-red dawn she came,
A fiery rose of earth to be,
And light thee dark with flame;
Then earth and sky triumphantly
Rang loud with man's acclaim.

A rose art thou, O goddess fair,
To bloom as men aspire,
Red rose to those whom passions move,
White rose to chaste desire;
Yet red rose wanes with pale despair,
And white rose burns as fire.

"In the 'Island of Fantasy,'" continued Mr. Hume, in reply to a suggestion of mine as to the ethical intent of fantastic literature in general, "I endeavour to show how entirely possible it might be for an over-wealthy millionaire to carry out the Utopian project I suggest to a successful conclusion, and to do real and lasting good with his wealth; to show how a life such as that led by the ancient Greeks, and that nurtures the genius under every possible advantage, ought to be encouraged and not discouraged. It is, perhaps, treating genius rather as an exotic, but as my hero Justinian, who conceives and carries out the idea, says, 'Place a plant in the dark, and it grows not; give it plenty of air and sunlight, and first the green leaves appear, then the bud, lastly the flower. These Greek people in their island home, who are descendants of the ancient Hellenes, and in whom the spark of genius has been nearly trampled out by centuries of Turkish misrule, are my green leaves, which by means of my wealth I have placed in the light. I have allowed them to be tended and looked after, and now who knows but that a glorious flower may be produced?'
"There, that is my idea," said Mr. Hume. "I want to show what money can do and ought to do. Think what lies in the power of such a man as that young Mr. Astor, whose father died the other day, and left him £15,000,000. Now there is the ethic intent of the 'Island of Fantasy,' but the critics looked on it, kind as they were to me, too much in the light of a fairy story."
"Ah," said I, "but the critics haven't always been as kind to you, have they?"
"No," he replied, "they have been hostile for many years. They believed no good could come from the writer of 'The Hansom Cab.' But I am bound to say sometimes critics are very irritating. Look at Rider Haggard for instance, how they are always pitching into him for being too 'Bluggy,' as Toddie used to say. But battles can't be fought without blood. If you describe battles you must do it realistically -- the critics seem to expect you to do it in rose-water English.
"Here is an instance in my own case. In one of my books one of the characters improvises some wretched doggerel on the spur of the moment; it was only meant to be doggerel, and the critics with ridiculous unfairness actually quoted the doggrel as 'a specimen of Mr. Fergus Hume's poetry.' And again, they are so fond of asking why such and such a book was written. 'What is the object of it?' say they. Well, as De Quincey said: 'There is no moral, big nor little, in the "Iliad."' I don't know that books are written primarily, as a rule, with any other object but that of getting money for the authors of them. I have noticed, curiously enough, that the most spiteful reviews appear in women's papers."
"You are about to produce a volume of Fairy Tales, are you not, Mr. Hume?"
"Yes," said he; "and I trust the public will like them. Mr. Harold Boulton and myself are hard at work also upon the libretto of a comic opera -- a new departure -- and to which the music is being set by Mr. Charles Willeby, whose songs are already well-known in London."
"Well," I replied, with a laugh, "you are certainly drifting very far away, and in very many directions, from 'The Hansom Cab.'"
"Yes," said he. "That poor book! It was the very first book I ever wrote. It made a tremendous sensation, and I have been judged by it ever since. All my literary education I have had to pursue under the very eyes of the public. Was there ever a man since the world began so 'sair trodden down' -- as the Scotch say -- by his traditions. The 'Hansom Cab' is a regular Frankenstein's monster to me, and I am pursued through life by this monster, which, after all, is but the creation of an immature boy."

J.P. Quaine - A Blood and Thunder Merchant

2010-07-17T06:10:00.007-04:00

I've mentioned the Melbourne bookseller, John Patrick Quaine (1883-1957) a few times on this blog. He was a well-known identity in Melbourne and a keen collector of Penny Bloods and Dreadfuls. Following is a short article about him, published in November 1945, that appeared in Bohemia: the All-Australian Literary Magazine, a rather grand title for the official organ of the Melbourne Bread and Cheese Club, of which Quaine was a member for many years.
A Blood and Thunder Merchant
During the month the Worthy Scribe spent a bloodcurdling hour or two interviewing the Sanguinary-minded Fellow J. P. Quaine, the Bookaneer, and discovered it is just on 30 years since this gory Fellow burst into being as a bookseller like a bolt from the blue. Previous to that period his predatory performances had been confined to part-time prowling round secondhand bookshops, vainly seeking what the bookseller had already hunted for and failed to find ‑ a five pound book for four pence! He has since watched with a leaden eye similar optimists delving midst his own piles of dusty impedimenta. Though better known in recent years as a collector of "skulps," "Shilling Shockers" and "Penny Bloods," his collection of British First Editions was noteworthy. He specialised in this type of publication. His avaricious spirit often caused him to keep for himself the more desirable items; so he was never quite sure if he could be called a collector or salesman!

However, the probe of impecuniosity compelled him to part from many of these cherished volumes. Since 1917 he has been a thorn in editorial cushions. Whenever his constitutional laziness could be overcome, he contributed special articles to the magazine supplements of the Melbourne papers, as well as inflicting his outpourings on interstate and even oversea editors! Being a dyed-in-the-wool Dickensian, he (by request) gave lectures and papers under the Auspices of the Melbourne Fellowship. As an additional example of the enormities he was capable of he compiled, in 1942, 30 talks, entitled "Tales of Terror Tactfully Retold" for the ABC. He has two testimonials upon which he preens himself. One is from Public Librarian Pitt thanking him for his assistance and exhibits during the Saturnalia attendant upon the Picwick Celebration in 1936, the other is from the late C. J. Dennis written in reply to a query in connection with "Herald" articles. It concludes thus: "I have your 'Duke and the Dustman's Daughter' here, which I am going to use. I shall be pleased to accept articles by you written in your inimitable style." Fellow Quaine says he would frame this note only he fears the green ink signatures might fade.

Quaine admits that during the last few years his notoriety has waned somewhat; a new generation is rising that knoweth not Joseph. He has done everything but make money, and expects to finish up selling matches round the pubs!

Edward Lloyd in Harper's Magazine

2010-07-12T06:11:00.006-04:00

Here is an extract from an early article on ‘King of Bloods’ Edward Lloyd from Harper’s Magazine, vol. 64, 1882. The writer observes “Mr. Lloyd's story has never been quite exactly told,” and that still holds true. No mention is made of Lloyd’s early publishing ventures into Penny Bloods - not a respectable past for a successful newspaper tycoon. The approximately 200 Bloods that he published between 1836 and 1856 include such celebrated titles as James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire and The String of Pearls and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Dickens’ imitations.

"After inquiring for Mr. Lloyd at the palatial offices of The Daily Chronicle, I was directed to 12 Salisbury Court, and there in an unpretentious little room I found Mr. Edward Lloyd, a hale, hearty, middle-aged, florid-complexioned, white-haired gentleman. He introduced me to his son, a stalwart young fellow, who was amused at the surprise I expressed at not finding the head of the firm a tottering old gentleman of the aspect usually thought characteristic of Father Time and the venerable Parr. Mr. Lloyd is old enough to have originated the cheap press, and young enough to be vigorously occupied in establishing the newest daily paper. Responding to a remark about the literary interest of the locality in which I found him, he said, "This house use was Richardson's printing-office; in this room he wrote Pamela, and here Oliver Goldsmith acted as his reader.” The old familiar story: you are treading on historic ground every foot you move in London, historic not in a mere antiquarian sense, nor in the narrow meaning of age being historic, but in the breadth of human interest and universal fame. There is not a court hereabouts but it is linked with the history of all that is great and glorious in English letters, from Shakspeare to Hood, from Fielding to Thackeray, from Caxton, the first printer, to his great successors, and from The English Mercurie to The Daily News. ''I can show you Richardson's lease of these very premises," said Mr. Lloyd presently, and turning over the deeds which convey to him a large extent of the local freeholds (now strangely connected by passages and subways from Salisbury Court to Whitefriars), he handed me the parchment. It was a lease dated 30th May, 1770, from Mrs. Jennings to Mr. Richardson, the printer-novelist's signature a bolder one than would seem characteristic of the gentle tediousness of Pamela. Mr. Lloyd's freeholds and leaseholds are a curious mixture of properties, extending into Whitefriars, under streets and over streets, and they are all devoted to the mechanical requirements of Lloyd's Newspaper and The Daily Chronicle. The very latest inventions in the generation and use of steam, the newest ideas of Hoe in the way of printing, are pressed into the service of these two papers. Colonel Hoe is Mr. Lloyd's ideal machinist; Mr. Lloyd is Colonel Hoe's ideal newspaper proprietor.

"Have you ever been to America?” I asked

"No; I had once made up my mind to go, and had fixed upon the ship," Mr. Lloyd answered ‑ "the Arctic, I think she was called. Douglas Jerrold was against my going, and persuaded me all he could not to venture upon it. 'But,' said he, 'if you must go, give this play into Jim Wallack's own hands.' He gave me the manuscript of The Rent Day, which had been produced at Drury Lane. The object of my going was to see Hoe, and arrange for two machines on certain revised terms, so that if one broke clown, I should have another to fall back upon. Just before the time for sailing I received a letter from Hoe telling me that I could have just all I wanted. In consequence of that letter, I did not go. The ship I was booked for went to the bottom."
Mr. Lloyd's story has never been quite exactly told. Briefly it is this. As early as 1829, when he was only fourteen, he was strongly imbued with Liberal opinions, and with the idea of starting a "free and independent newspaper" for their advocacy. There was a fourpenny stamp duty on each paper, and in due time Edward Lloyd labored hard with others in the direction of its reduction. He started a newspaper, and issued it without a government stamp; so likewise did other London printers; but after a short struggle they succumbed to legal proceedings for their suppression. In order to keep the question of unstamped papers before the public, Mr. Lloyd started a monthly unstamped journal, believing he could legally issue such a publication; but the Stamp‑office authorities stifled it with crushing promptitude, though it turned out afterward that he was within the law, Mr. Charles Dickens having, at a later date, issued a monthly paper on similar lines. In September, 1842, Mr. Lloyd published Lloyd's Penny Illustrated Newspaper, consisting chiefly of reviews of books, notices of theatres, and literary selections, thus keeping, as he thought, just outside the pale of what the law designated a newspaper. Within three months the Stamp‑office discovered what they regarded as a few lines of news in the literature of the journal, and they gave the proprietor notice that he must either stamp his paper or stop it. He chose the former course, and continued the paper at twopence until January, 1843, when he enlarged it to eight pages of five columns each (about the size of an eight-page Echo), called it Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper, and charged two-pence‑halfpenny for it. During the same year he again increased its size, and sold it at threepence. At this time the general price of newspapers was sixpence, and they carried a penny stamp duty. Mr. Lloyd's innovation met with the determined opposition of the news agents. They one and all refused to sell the paper unless the owner allowed them the same profit per sheet which they obtained on the sixpenny journals. An offer of thirty per cent. was scoffed at, and the trade entered into a conspiracy to put down the three-penny weekly. The sale was considerably retarded by this opposition, but Lloyd pushed it by advertisement and otherwise, and the excellence and cheapness of the newspaper were attractions the trade could not annihilate. One of Lloyd's methods of making it known was ingenious, not to say daring. He had a stamping machine constructed for embossing pennies with the name and price of his journal, and the fact that it could be obtained "post free." The announcement was made in a neat circle round the coin on both sides. The machine turned out two hundred and fifty an hour, and Lloyd used up all the pennies he could lay his hands on. The Times drew attention to the defacement of his Majesty's coinage, and thus gave the paper a cheap and important advertisement. Parliament passed an act against the mutilation of the currency. The affair helped to make the threepenny paper known, and in spite of "the Trade," which continued to oppose it, holding meetings and combining against it in every way, it progressed in circulation and influence. From a sale of 33,000 in 1848, it rose year by year to 90,000 a week in 1853. Two years later than this, Lloyd had lived to see the most ardent desire of his life accomplished the passing of an act abolishing the stamp duty, and the establishment of a really free and unfettered press. From this period dates the enormous success of Lloyd's Newspaper. The question of production was tile next serious question. Mr. Lloyd put himself in communication with Messrs. Hoe and Co., of New York, which led to his introduction of their rotary printing-machine. The success of this new invention, exemplified in Lloyd's offices, elicited a general acknowledgment of its superiority over all others, and "the Hoe" was at once adopted, not only in the chief London offices, but by the leading newspaper proprietors of the country, and in Ireland and Scotland. Wherever there was a journal with a large circulation, there "the Hoe" became a necessity."

Tolkien Studies Volume 7 (2010) goes to the printer!

2010-07-06T13:15:00.001-04:00

Volume 7 of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review finally goes to the printer today, and I can release the table of contents. This is the largest volume ever, and I regret to say that some material planned for this volume didn't make it in. A long book review got bumped to the next volume, and the Cumulative Index to volumes one through five will be available, for the time being, only through Project Muse, once volume 7 goes live (soon). Subscribers to the hardcover volumes of Tolkien Studies should receive their copies sometime in August.

Tolkien Studies volume 7 (2010)

CONTENTS

v Editors’ Introduction

vii Conventions and Abbreviations

1 "The Books of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist" VLADIMIR BRLJAK

35 "Faërian Cyberdrama: When Fantasy becomes Virtual Reality" PÉTER KRISTÓF MAKAI

55 "Coleridge’s Definition of Imagination and Tolkien’s Definition(s) of Faery" MICHAEL MILBURN

67 " 'Strange and free' —On Some Aspects of the Nature of Elves and Men" THOMAS FORNET-PONSE

91 "Refining the Gold: Tolkien, The Battle of Maldon, and the Northern Theory of Courage" MARY R. BOWMAN

117 "Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, and Consolation in Sir Orfeo: The Medieval Foundations of Tolkienian Fantasy" THOMAS HONEGGER

137 "Elladan and Elrohir: The Dioscuri in The Lord of the Rings" SHERRYLYN BRANCHAW

147 "Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and His Concept of Native Language: Sindarin and British-Welsh" YOKO HEMMI

175 “ 'Monsterized Saracens,' Tolkien’s Haradrim, and Other Medieval 'Fantasy Products' MARGARET SINEX

197 "Myth, Milky Way, and the Mysteries of Tolkien’s Morwinyon, Telumendil, and Anarríma" KRISTINE LARSEN

Notes and Documents

211 “ 'The Story of Kullervo' and Essays on Kalevala" J.R.R. TOLKIEN Transcribed and edited by Verlyn Flieger

279 "J.R.R. Tolkien and the Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Fairies" JOHN GARTH

291 "Book Reviews" COMPILED BY DOUGLAS A. ANDERSON: containing a review/essay by Tom Shippey on JRRT"s The Lay of Sigurd and Gudrun; John Garth on JRRT's Tengwesta Qenderinwa and Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets Part 2 [Parma Eldalamberon XVIII]; John D. Rateliff on The Hobbitonian Anthology of Articles on J.R.R. Tolkien and His Legendarium by Mark T. Hooker; Arden R. Smith on Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction to the Linguistic and Literary Background of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction by Elizabeth Solopova; John D. Rateliff on Tolkien’s View: Windows into His World, by J. S. Ryan; and "Book Notes" by Douglas A. Anderson

347 "The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2007" DAVID BRATMAN

379 "Bibliography (in English) for 2008" COMPILED BY REBECCA EPSTEIN, MICHAEL D.C. DROUT, AND DAVID BRATMAN

399 "Notes on Contributors"

Comments Moderation and Auto-Spam

2010-07-06T12:59:00.001-04:00

I recently turned on the Comments Moderation for Wormwoodiana, owing to the amount of auto-spam that started showing up in the comments (and I deleted them). I will, of course, clear for posting any real comments, and they are welcome. But meanwhile, I note that the spammers are attempting to be craftier. Here's a comment from today that I rejected:

"I have been reading and looking for Karl Hanns Strobl, a dark prince of German horror and is amazing and disturbing how many blogs related to viagra online [link removed] are in the web. But anyways, thanks for sharing your inputs, they are really interesting. Have a nice day."

Sigh.

R.I.P. E. F. Bleiler

2010-06-16T13:52:00.000-04:00

A true titan in the field of supernatural literature has passed away. Everett Franklin Bleiler, born 30 April 1920, died Sunday evening, 13 June 2010, at the age of 90. He leaves a legacy of superlative work that ranges from The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948, revised 1978 as The Checklist of Science-Fiction and Supernatural Fiction) on to such indispensible works as The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1998), not to mention the large number of books he edited and introduced for Dover in the 1960s and 1970s. I use his works on a near-daily basis.

Peter Pan's First XI

2010-06-06T05:20:00.003-04:00

May I recommend a newly published book, Peter Pan's First XI by Kevin Telfer (Sceptre) ? This tells the story of J.M. Barrie's literary cricketing team, the Allahakbarries, whose players included Conan Doyle, A.A. Milne, P.G. Wodehouse, Hesketh Prichard (half of the ghost story duo 'E & H Heron'), Jerome K. Jerome, and J.C. Snaith, whose work I wrote about earlier in this website. Most of them were much better with the pen than the bat or ball, although Conan Doyle (who once took W.G. Grace's wicket), Prichard and Snaith were of first class standard. The book links the club, who played against village teams or an Artists' XI, to the myth of the lost Edwardian golden age, and shows how the twilight of Empire affected these men, the game and the next generation. Cricket's link to the fantastic may be seen, of course, in such works as E.R. Eddison's A Fish Dinner in Memison, where a country house match is the centrepiece of the book; in Lord Dunsany's elegaic 'Autumn Cricket'; and in L.P. Hartley's smouldering masterpiece The Go-Between where the young hero takes a catch while standing in a fairy ring. Sax Rohmer's The Bat Flies Low, alas, is not about the game.

Mark

A New Journal: Fastitocalon

2010-05-11T20:36:00.001-04:00

I understand the first issue of the new academic journal Fastitocalon is just out (though I haven't got my contributor copy yet). Articles are in English, though it's published in Germany, and edited by Thomas Honegger (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) and Fanfan Chen (National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan). I have a column in it, "Notes on Neglected Fantasists." Those authors covered in my first installment include: Elinore Blaisdel (1902-1994), George Blink (1796-1874), Oscar Cook (1888-1952),Alan Miller (fl. 1920s-1940s), Francis C. Prevot (1887-1967), and Ernst Raupach (1784-1852). Herein it is revealed for the first time in English that the famous vampire story "Wake Not the Dead!", which is often attributed to Ludwig Tieck and considered an important pre-Polidori vampire story, is in fact by someone else, and its first publication occurred in its original German three years after Polidori's 1819 watershed tale "The Vampyre". Tolkienists will be pleased to note the contribution to this issue by Amy Amendt-Raduege, "Better Off Dead: The Lesson of the Ringwraiths". A table of contents, and various information about the journal, can be found at the publisher's website.

The Ghost That I Like Best: Famous Authors on Their Favourite Spooks Pt. 1

2010-05-02T17:58:00.000-04:00

In the December 8, 1923 issue of T.P.’s & Cassell’s Weekly, there appeared a symposium of responses to a question along the lines of “What is your favourite ghost?”. Here are some of the responses. More will appear in a future posting.

Thomas Burke

Yes, but what sort of ghost? The author’s “ghost”? Ghosts in literature? Ghosts I have met? I have never yet met a ghost, and don’t want to. With Charles Lamb, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them. Of ghosts in literature I prefer those with plenty of clanking chains and grisly robes, ghosts that do squeak and gibber round the ivied walls at midnight. Marley’s ghost and the ghost of Hamlet’s father are most unsatisfactory; they are ghosts with moral purposes. Ghosts in fiction should have no purpose beyond that of hair-raising; and in this matter the best ghost I know is the ghost in G.W.M. Reynolds’s “Bronze Statue,” because I was twelve years old when I read it, and it was the first and only ghost that raised my hair.

Vere Hutchinson

You are quite right to think I have a favourite ghost. I frankly confess the more ghostly the story or legend the happier I am! I think there has never been anything so terrible or realistic as Kipling’s “The End of the Passage.” I do not remember anything with such horror in it. To me it is the one great classic of the uncanny. Then there is that mad, jolly yarn of Richard Middleton’s, “The Ghost Ship,” the most crazy, most enchanting fantasy; to be read on a dark night with a wild wind and driving rain. It is absurd, if you like, with its village of nice, properly conducted ghosts, but it seems to me to have a magic of its own, and after you’ve read it, if the real ghostly spirit is upon you, then open your window and you can see “The Ghost Ship” sailing through the air, with her flare of lights and her noise of singing, her great masts raking the stars—I swear you can!

Edward Shanks

My favourite ghost is chosen by pure favouritism, It is not much of a ghost, but it is my own, or, at least, I have a good long lease of it, which is nearly as good.

The house in which I live consists of two old cottages thrown into one. The little room which I use as a study was once, so far as I can judge, the kitchen and sole living-room of the smaller cottage. One day, some fifty years ago, the labourer who lived here, oppressed, I dare say, by the too close presence of his wife and children, hanged himself from a beam in this room. So says village tradition: and there is to this day a large, firm nail in the beam, from which a man might very well hang himself. He might, that is to say, if he were a dwarf or without legs; any other sort of man would find it difficult. And, for reasons which will appear, he cannot have been legless.

This tradition, once heard, vanished from my mind. But after some time it happened that I was working alone past midnight, all the others in the house being long asleep. Not quite alone, for my cat was there—a detestable cat, kept only for mousing, not at all an author’s favourite cat who shares his study and his labours with him. Something, I do not know what, made me look round.

There, directly beneath the suddenly sinister-looking nail, was the cat, walking up and down with all the motions and the pleased expression of a cat which is rubbing itself against someone’s legs. Up and down she went for several minutes, purring softly, while I sat looking over my shoulder, unable to move. Then I went to bed and left her there, and left all the lamps burning and all the doors open behind me.

And yet, strangely, in the morning the pride of possession threw out the horror of the night. It was my ghost, my very own; not a freehold ghost, to be sure, but even a leasehold ghost is more than most people have. He is my favourite ghost, now almost an “affable familiar ghost,” and I look at all others as a man who loves his own mongrel fox terrier looks at the champions assembled at Cruft’s.

W. B. Maxwell

My favourite ghost is that of Lord Strafford in the novel “John Inglesant.” “All to nothing,” he seems to me the most appropriate and majestic apparition that has ever been imagined.

As many of your readers will remember, it is two nights after Strafford’s execution (the consummation of King Charles’s betrayal of a loyal servant), and Inglesant, on duty at the palace of Whitehall, sees the dead man pass through the outer rooms and enter the King’s bedchamber, “He was falling asleep when he was startled by the ringing sound of arms and the challenge of the yeoman of the guard on the landing outside the door. The next instant a voice, calm and haughty, which sent a tremor through every nerve, gave back the word ‘Christ.’ Inglesant started up and grasped the back of his chair in terror. Gracious heaven! Who was this that knew the word? In another moment the hangings across the door were drawn sharply back, and with a quick step, as one who went straight to where he was expected and had a right to be, the intruder entered the antechamber. . . .”

If anything could make me believe in ghosts, it would be Shorthouse’s conception and handling of this dread visit.

Algernon Blackwood

My favourite ghost story is what I believe to be also the shortest:

“Do you believe in ghosts?” said Jones.
“No,” said Smith.
“I do,” said Jones—and vanished.

Its authorship I do not know. It may be a chestnut too. Next to this, I place “Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James, for its majestic horror; and “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, for it cumulative horror and its inevitableness.

W. L. George

I am very fond of supernatural stories, and am sure that the best I have ever come across exhibits the intangible couple of ghosts, those of the governess and the valet who float about the lake and establish a connexion of nameless horror and vileness with the two children who occupy the centre of the story called “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James.

May Sinclair

If by my “Favourite Ghost” you mean the apparition that has most appealed to me in literature I should vote unhesitatingly for the ghost or ghosts in Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.”

WORMWOOD 14

2010-05-01T03:58:00.003-04:00

Wormwood 14 is now out and should be with subscribers and contributors shortly. There should be something here for most readers, with features on Thomas Ligotti, E.R. Eddison, R. Murray Gilchrist, Richard Marsh, Robert Walser and Joseph Payne Brennan, along with our regular columns on decadent literature, lost classics and recent books. Mark V

Lucius Shepard The Taborin Scale

2010-04-24T13:28:00.011-04:00

The Dragon Griaule, the vast immobile creature, sleeping or presumed dead, around whose bulk has grown cities, has been familiar to readers of Lucius Shepard since "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December 1984. Shepard has returned occasionally over the last twenty-five years to regale us with more stories of Griaule's influence on the lives of the people who live on his body, or in the cities nearby. The Taborin Scale, published in an elegant edition by Subterranean Press, is the latest entry in the growing series. This novella concerns the numismatist George Taborin, who by means of a scale from Griaule finds himself and a prostitute, Sylvia, transported to what appears to be an earlier time when Griaule was young. Griaule is herding people to no apparent purpose. Taborin rescues a young girl called Peony from abuse, and with Sylvia the three form an odd kind of family. Shepard excels at depicting unusual people in even more unusual circumstances, and his prose is as elegant and shimmering as ever, casting its own spell over the reader just as Griaule's presence works its influence over Shepard's characters. The Taborin Scale is yet another example of one of the best modern fantasists at the height of his powers.

Wormwood 14

2010-04-16T13:34:00.004-04:00

I'm pleased to announce that Wormwood # 14 is now at the printers. Thanks to the fine contributors, it's an excellent line-up, with Joel Lane on The Ruins of Reality: Thomas Ligotti and the uses of disenchantment; Jon Preece exploring E.R. Eddison's manuscripts: Laurence Bush celebrating the “Soft, Delicious Things” of Decadence in R. Murray Gilchrist; Callum James exposing Richard Marsh's past; Adam Daly drawing our attention to Robert Walser: Strange Supplicant, Idiot Savant, Master of the Microgram; Mike Barrett investigating The Exploits of Lucius Leffing:Joseph P. Brennan’s Supernatural Sleuth; and Brian Stableford and Doug Anderson offering their well-regarded columns on decadence and lost classics respectively. Mark V

Newly discovered Kai Lung stories

2010-04-01T15:38:00.004-04:00

Ernest Bramah's immortal Chinese storyteller Kai Lung has been a great favourite of the literary cognoscenti for over a century. The beautifully mannered prose and humorous incident has won over devotees such as Hilaire Belloc, critic Sir John Squire - and Lord Peter Wimsey, who is found quoting Kai Lung with approval in several of Dorothy L Sayers' detective books. Now four completely unknown new Kai Lung stories have been found and published in a new title, Kai Lung Raises His Voice (Durrant Publishing). Academic and enthusiast William Charlton (co-author of the first Arthur Machen biography)found them among Bramah's papers at Austin, Texas, and quickly realised what a prize they were. They date from the Edwardian period when Bramah's writing was at his best. "They confirm my belief," he says, "that Bramah is one of the really great humourists of our language". The collection also includes six other Kai Lung stories from Punch in the 1940s, previously only available in a limited edition, and one more from a 1924 anthology. Details from www.durrantpublishing.co.uk. Anyone who already admires the Kai Lung stories will be delighted by these new additions to the canon; anyone who doesn't know them has a great treat awaiting. Mark V

Australian Ghost Stories

2010-02-08T23:51:00.004-05:00

A shameless plug for an anthology I've edited collecting rare Australian weird tales from the 1860s to the 1930s. The book forms part of Wordsworth Editions' admirable Mystery & Supernatural series that publishes rare and out-of-print volumes at budget prices.

Australian Ghost Stories collects what I believe are the best stories of their kind published in Australia or by Australians during the golden age of the supernatural tale. It includes stories by well-known Australian writers such as Henry Lawson, Edward Dyson, Marcus Clarke and Guy Boothby (of Dr Nikola fame), as well as lesser-known authors such as Roderic Quinn, Mary Fortune, Beatrice Grimshaw and Ernest Favenc amongst many others.

I'm hoping the anthology will showcase some neglected Australian writers of popular fiction.

Nikola at the Theatre

2010-02-02T04:00:00.003-05:00

A couple of early dramatisations of Guy Boothby's Dr Nikola should be recorded:

From the Otago Witness, 25 June 1902

"A dramatisation of Mr Guy Boothby's novels, "A Bid for Fortune" and "Dr Nikola," was produced at the London Princess's on Saturday, March 29, under the title of "Dr Nikola." The work was adapted for the stage by Messrs Ben Landeck and Oswald Brand, who found plenty of sensational material in the Australian novelist's works. The first act, which deals with the beginning of Dr Nikola's quest for the charmed stick from Northern China, closes with a very powerful situation between Nikola and Dick Hatteras, the hero. Later the spectators' interest is sustained in a gambling saloon at Port Said, where Dick is entrapped, and in Sydney, where he is imprisoned in a cellar, from which he escapes in time to rescue Phyllis Weatherall, the heroine, from the hands of her persistent persecutor. Dr Nikola comes to a very terrible end. Through all the scenes there has hovered around, silently, the Chinese High Priest of Hankow, who, like Nikola, is eager to lay hands on the charmed stick. He speaks no word, but his face, appearing suddenly in unexpected places, causes an irresistible thrill. In the last act, when Dr Nikola is in his laboratory thinking that victory is within his grasp, the face appears at a window in the roof, and presently the High Priest is seen descending by a rope. There is a terrible struggle between the two desperate men, and in the end the Chinee, twisting his pigtail around the doctor's throat, contrives to choke the life out of him. Here, indeed, was a sensation for the Princess's patrons, and (says a London paper) on the first night of representation it thrilled them into an enthusiastic demonstration of approval."

In the lterary copyright records at the National Archives of Australia is a copy of Dr Nikola, a Drama in Four Acts, by Victorian actor Jefferson Tait. It was first performed by Philip Lytton's Dramatic Company at Good Templar's Hall, Stanthorpe in Queensland in March 1911. At the end of this dramatisation Nikola survives and is last seen heading towards a monastery in Tibet being met by welcoming monks.

Gormenghast continued...

2010-01-23T07:44:00.003-05:00

Possibly old news by now, but a recent Daily Telegraph article explains that a continuation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, by his wife Maeve, has been found in the Peake family attic, in faded ink in a few old notebooks. Peake had written a page and a half of the next volume (which the Peake Society published in a chapbook) and his wife carried on from there, based in part on how he had said it would develop. His son, Sebastian Peake, is now talking to publishers.

Mark V