W.H. Chesson and "Possessed"

Johnny Mains's latest discovery was published earlier this month by the British Library in their Tales of the Weird series. It is the first ever reprint of a forgotten 1927 novel by the pseudonymous "Rosalie and Edward Synton" entitled Possessed. My copy arrived a few days ago, and I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but I noted in the introduction that Mains quotes from a short review of the book by the journalist Wilfred Hugh Chesson "of the famed W.H. Chesson diaries." 

Are Chesson's diaries really well-known? I happened upon Chesson some twenty years ago, and was struck by his numerous reviews in The Occult Review, covering expected writers of the weird, like Bram Stoker and William Hope Hodgson, but also covering many more names then-unfamiliar to me, like Regina Miriam Bloch, and Vere Shortt.  The reviews ran from 1905 through 1931--I wasn't able to get copies of every one that had been indexed (and some years of The Occult Review had not been indexed), but I got a fairly thick folder of a bunch of them. They made for interesting reading, and gave me many titles to seek out.

Chesson was one of those figures who become more and more interesting as one learns about them--at least that was the case for me. He wrote a few novels, one of them, A Great Lie (1897), is a fantasy about  a crippled fisherman's who body-swaps into a handsome man, and whose behavior and morality is altered. It has been suggested that it was influenced by M.P. Shiel, but my friend the late John D. Squires, one of the great Shielians, told me that A Great Lie predated Chesson's friendship with Shiel (which began after Chesson's wife's death in 1906), and that any influence by Shiel on A Great Lie was unlikely, for Shiel hadn't published much before 1897. 

John also told me about Chesson's many reviews of Shiel's books, and of the inscribed leatherbound set of Shiel volumes that one of Chesson's daughters owned (she committed suicide in 1926 or 1927, shortly after her marriage). Chesson's first wife, the poet Nora Hopper (1871-1906), was, and remains, better-known than Chesson. She was the chief breadwinner of the family, and wrote in her application to the Royal Literary Fund the year before her death that her husband had had "a complete mental breakdown and is now suffering from persistent spiritualistic delusions." After Hopper's death of puerperal fever in April 1906, Chesson, unable to cope, arranged to have one of their three children, the only son, Dermot Chesson Spence, adopted by another family. Dermot Chesson Spence published the weird fiction collection The Little Red Shoes and Other Tales in 1937.

Chesson also had been a reader for the publishing firm T. Fisher Unwin in the 1890s, and it was he who recommended to his colleague  Edward Garnett the publication of the manuscript of Almayer's Folly (1895), which became the the debut book by Joseph Conrad.  

Those "famed" Chesson diaries are now held at the Special Collections Division at the Georgetown University Library, covering primarily 1904 through 1934. They were catalogued in 2008, just before one of my visits with Georgetown friends, so I spent a few hours perusing them, fascinated by the details and saddened by the content. I had no real aim in reading them (though I took some notes on what Chesson wrote about giving up Dermot to the Spence family for adoption). I have long felt that Chesson deserves a retrospective article on him.

Chesson remained friendly with Shiel until the latter's death in 1947. Chesson himself died on 16 February 1953, aged 82. 

I close here with his September 1927 review of Possessed. 

Possessed. By Rosalie and Edward Synton. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), Ltd. 7s. 6d. net.

It would he hard to name a subject of discussion richer in debating material than the death-penalty, and those who read Possessed will have a lively consciousness of the tyrannies of justice possible under existing rules. Still the novel, though it provokes controversial thought, is not in the least a tract: rather is it an occult “shocker,” exciting curiosity in a more weirdly unpleasant mother-in-law than I remember to have hitherto met in my travels through fiction. An atmosphere of fetid hypocrisy portentous of crime accompanies her: she is worthy to be the villianess in a romance by Wilkie Collins.

Why does she apparently want to destroy her daughter and her daughter’s soldier-husband?—that is the question which eggs one on to the denouement, The title gives a clue to her awful predicament, and it would be unfair for me to provide another. The novel may be recommended to readers who like a “creepy feeling” with very little psychology and scarcely any interruptive elements.

W.H. Chesson