The Centenary of "Ghosts and Marvels" edited by V.H. Collins

Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, published in December 1924, is a small pocket-sized book of some 506 pages plus some xvi pages of front-matter. It is one volume of "The World's Classics" series published by Oxford University Press (the imprint was begun in 1901 by Grant Richards, and purchased by Oxford University Press in 1906). While the stories included are top shelf, making for an excellent anthology in and of itself (see the contents pages reproduced below), that is only a small part of the reason for celebrating this book's centenary. The main reason is that the editor or publisher had the inspired idea to get M.R. James to write the nine-page introduction. James begins with a statement that he is not responsible for the stories included, which gives him the chance to criticize or praise freely.  James continues:

Often I have been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvellous, the mysterious, the supernatural. Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre  is too small and special to bear the imposition of far-reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them. Those rules, I imagine, no writer ever consciously follows. In fact it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success.

Then James continues with his views and personal impressions. It is a valuable introduction because it is one of the few essays by James on the type of literature in which he himself would achieve great acclaim, with his antiquarian ghost stories.

The editor V. H. Collins was Vere Henry Gratz Collins (1872-1966), who was born in Windsor of an Irish father and a Canadian-Jewish mother, and who studied at Balliol College, Oxford, receiving Third Class degrees in 1892 and 1894. After some years as a schoolmaster, he worked for many years at Oxford University Press in London. He edited singly, and with others, more than a few dozens books for Oxford University Press, including Poems of Home and Overseas (1921), co-edited with Charles Williams, the poet and novelist who was later a member of the Inklings. Collins does not seem to have been much interested in the weird fiction genre (it was his boss, Humphrey Milford, who instructed him to compile the anthology), but he knew whom to ask for advice and recommendations. Charles Williams is thanked by Collins in both Ghost and Marvels ("the compiler owes thanks to . . . Charles Williams, from whose wide reading and judgement he has benefited throughout the preparation of the book") and its sequel, More Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Sir Walter Scott to Michael Arlen (1927, with an identically worded acknowledgement to Williams). 

In 1952, Collins published under the pseudonym Mark Tellar, A Young Man's Passage: An Intimate Autobiography of the Victorian Age (London: Home and Van Thal), which told (with identities disguised) candidly of his passionless first marriage (in 1897) and subsequent divorce, his numerous affairs with prostitutes and his sharing his personal sexual history with Havelock Ellis, the pioneer sexologist. The first chapter tells, sympathetically, the tragic story of Collins's father, Dr. William Maunsell Collins (1844-1926), whose increasing money problems led to charges of forgery in 1892, and in 1898, he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of a upper class married woman upon whom he had performed an illegal abortion, a crime he had been suspected of at least once previously. The TLS noted that "Mr. Tellar conceals little. . . . He rarely passes judgment on those who condemned him. His invented dialogue is seldom artificial. . . . And yet, on closing the book, the reader is left with wondering--without malice--what impelled him to write it" (6 June 1952).