Ghosts, trains and trams:
the technologies of transport in the ghost stories
of M. R. James

Ralph Harrington

Draft only: not for quotation

The ghost stories of M. R. James were written between the 1890s and the 1930s; most of them therefore fall outside the strict chronological definition of 'Victorian'. Yet few figures were as self-consciously Victorian as James, and his stories reflect the Victorianism of their creator.⁽¹⁾ 'I am a Victorian by birth and education', he has his narrator remark in 'A Neighbour's Landmark', 'and . . . the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian fruit.'⁽²⁾ James was born in 1862 and died in 1936, and was a conservative character who remained 'steadfast in the Christian principles of his Victorian childhood' and 'had little time for the post-war [i.e., First World War] world'.⁽³⁾ James's ghost stories are set in a variety of periods from the seventeenth century onwards, but the majority are set firmly in what might be called James's own, Victorian, milieux: the England of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of the 32 published ghost stories,⁽⁴⁾ 23 are set between circa 1860 and circa 1930.⁽⁵⁾

An important part of the enduring appeal of M. R. James's ghost stories is their Victorianism, their recreation of a lost world for the reader. His heroes tend to be leisured gentlemen-scholars, inhabiting an enivronment of Oxbridge colleges, cathedral cities, rural lanes, and country houses, a world memorably characterised by John Betjeman as one of 'villages, country churches, mansion houses and lonely branch lines.'⁽⁶⁾ To the modern reader James's stories offer the attractions of escapism to a gentler, more civilised, orderly world, in which his characters, as his biographer Michael Cox has remarked, 'move in an unthreatened world' in which 'Order and custom prevail'.⁽⁷⁾ However, we should beware of labelling James's world 'escapist', or reading into his well-attested literary anti-modernism a wider anti-modernity.⁽⁸⁾ For James this period was the modern world, and he represents it as modern. Telephones, trains and motor cars all feature in his stories; his characters make use of the postal system, read newspapers and see advertisements, ride in trams and use bicycles, employ the services of travel agents, type letters and take photographs. They even use modern science to investigate the properties of objects seemingly possessing uncanny properties.⁽⁹⁾ James himself warned against allowing a modern setting to become too obtrusive in a ghost story; whereas 'The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date: the motor, the aeroplane, the newest slang, are all in place there', in the ghost story 'a slight haze of distance is desirable.'⁽¹⁰⁾ This, though, is more a warning against the mishandling of the setting than a criticism of a modern setting per se - a point emphasized by James shortly afterwards in the same essay, when he states his preference for a contemporary rather than an 'antique' setting for a ghost story:

On the whole . . . I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of a mere spectator.⁽¹¹⁾

The 'slight haze of distance' James advocates is to be created by such narrative devices as the finding of the traces of uncanny events in the past such as documents, rather than by simply setting the story in a remote period, and James's stories do tend to follow this pattern: thus, 'The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral' and 'Martin's Close' are set in the early nineteenth century and the seventeenth century respectively, but the action framing the narrative is set in James's contemporary world and involves figures from his own time coming across documents which give evidence of the supernatural events at the centre of the story.

The potential for self-identification on the part of the reader with the actors in James's stories is an important part of the success of his fiction, and his insistence on the importance of a setting characterised by the familiar and the contemporary clearly contributes to this aspect of his stories' appeal. 'A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical', he remarks in the preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), but 'it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself, "If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!"'⁽¹²⁾ The effect of the eruption of the supernatural into the lives of James's characters - the 'ominous thing put[ting] out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more and more insistently, until it holds the stage'⁽¹³⁾ - is all the more dramatic for this identification on the part of the reader with the world represented in the stories, and the mundane and modern circumstances of their actors' daily existence.

One of the chief manifestations of the ordering influence of modern technology and organisation in the society James reflects in his ghost stories is transport. Travel is an important ingredient of James's stories: his characters commonly travel to the locations in which the supernatural events take place, generally in pursuit of some scholarly or antiquarian purpose.⁽¹⁴⁾ Even in stories which do not have this framework, journeys of some description commonly form an important part of the narrative. In 'The Tractate Middoth' (1911), William Garrett travels by train between London and Burnstow, in 'A Haunted Doll's House' (1923) Mr Dillett drives (or rather is driven, by his chauffeur) to and fro in his motor car; while in 'Casting the Runes' (1911) the boat train journey from London to Dover is the setting for the climactic events of the story. James's characters are highly mobile, as a rule; they are members of a relatively privileged, well-off, leisured class of gentlemen-scholars and antiquarians who have the time and the means to pursue ancient manuscripts, mysterious messages in stained glass windows and the histories of obscure Swedish nobles by means of the technology at their disposal. As a result they are often on the move, by trains, cars, and other means of transport.

The period of James's stories is one in which inland transport in Britain was dominated by the railways,⁽¹⁵⁾ and accordingly railway travel features heavily in many of the ghost stories. Railway routes and timetables provide a framework within which James's characters move: James Denton, in 'The Diary of Mr Poynter', finds 'to his confusion that he could spare no more than a moment before retrieving his luggage and going for the train';⁽¹⁶⁾ the eponymous hero of 'Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance' finds that he must travel to London and that 'there was a train available in half an hour . . . he could be back, possibly by five o'clock, certainly by eight.'⁽¹⁷⁾ In some cases the railway journey serves as a deceptively tranquil opening to a story: thus, 'A View from a Hill' opens with an idyllic vision of recreational rail travel:

How pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station. You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers.⁽¹⁸⁾

In this opening passage the landscape is viewed from the vantage point of the train; the view from the train window provides an ordering principle that reflects the harmless, productive, peaceful countryside beyond. Later this point is reinforced through the train in turn being absorbed into the rural scene, as Fanshawe surveys the 'lovely English landscape . . . There were copses, green wheat, hedges and pasture-land: the little compact white moving cloud marked the evening train.'⁽¹⁹⁾ Such views, however, are not as innocent as they appear, and the very assumption that the ordering gaze offers control and comprehension is challenged through the agency of a pair of binoculars which, through occult means, reveal when used the dark side of this same landscape. The sunny rural idyll visible from the train becomes subverted into something far darker and more threatening; the church towers themselves, landmarks for the leisured gaze in the opening sequence of the story, become symbols of a dark and bloody past when the central character first looks through the glasses and sees back in time to the resurrected tower of long-ruined Fulnaker Abbey.⁽²⁰⁾

Railways have an important role to play in one of the most sustained and impressive of James's stories, 'The Tractate Middoth'. The chief character in this story is a librarian, William Garrett, who is haunted by an unpleasant apparition in his library; travelling to the seaside town of Burnstow for a rest and some sea air he is put off entering the 'desirable smoking compartment' he had identified in his train by the presence, standing in front of the door, of a figure reminiscent of the horror he had so recently experienced and, much shaken, he 'tore open the door of the next compartment and pulled himself into it as quickly as if death were at his heels.'⁽²¹⁾ This proves to be a piece of good fortune, however, for in the compartment are two women, 'a nice-looking old lady' and her daughter. Thus Garrett is provided with, in the former, a landlady, and in the latter one of the few examples of romantic interest in an M. R. James ghost story. Later, railway timetables prove to be of great importance when Garrett must intercept a book that has been sent from his library to a person of nefarious intentions in the country; by careful attention to the timetables Garrett manages to catch the right train and arrive at the same time as the book.⁽²²⁾

Another example of the train as an agent of social mixing and chance encounter is provided in the story 'The Uncommon Prayer Book' (1921), which has the main character, Mr Davidson, taking a train to 'Kingsbourne Junction'. His only fellow traveller is 'a piping old man, who seemed inclined for conversation'; Davidson accordingly strikes up a conversation, and his meeting with the old man leads him to the country house and the chapel where the adventure of the uncommon prayer book takes place.⁽²³⁾ The railway can also serve to symbolise the ordering structures of society which, as was argued at the beginning, are an important principle in James's ghost stories. In 'Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance' the arrival of Humphreys by train to take possession of the property which he has unexpectedly inherited is used by James to convey the atmosphere of deference and anxious expectation of change which his arrival provokes. As he gets out of his train at 'Wilsthorpe, a country station in Eastern England', he is met by Mr Cooper, his bailiff, and Mr Palmer, the stationmaster:

The stationmaster ran forward a step or two, and then, seeming to recollect himself, turned and beckoned to a stout and consequential person with a short round beard who was scanning the train with some appearance of bewilderment. 'Mr Cooper,' he called out, - Mr Cooper, I think this is your gentleman'; and then to the passenger who had just alighted, 'Mr Humphreys, sir? Glad to bid you welcome to Wilsthorpe.'⁽²⁴⁾

The competition between Mr Palmer, the stationmaster, and Mr Cooper, the bailiff, to be the spokesman for the community is amusingly sketched in by James in his account of their welcome to Humphreys: Cooper is 'Very pleased . . . to give echo to Mr Palmer's kind words' and 'should have been the first to render expression to them but for the face not being familiar to me, Mr Humphreys.'⁽²⁵⁾ Palmer, however, is a person of some consequence, as the stationmaster at Wilsthorpe; in a sense, he is the intermediary between the community and the outside world, and is on his own territory at the station, which is itself part of the wider railway network of which he is the servant and which gives him his status. He therefore has no hesitation in being the first to welcome Humphreys to Wilsthorpe, an act which Cooper clearly resents; but he still has to defer to the stationmaster in his official capacity: 'And here Mr Cooper also stopped, possibly in obedience to an inner monitor, possibly because Mr Palmer, clearing his throat loudly, asked Mr Humphreys for his ticket.'⁽²⁶⁾ This scene establishes the railway as an ordering presence in the hierarchical, stable society in which James sets his story - making the manifestation of dark forces that subsequently occurs all the more menacing and disturbing.

The railway itself, however, can be a threatening, dangerous environment, and James makes effective use of its darker associations in several of his stories. In 'Count Magnus' (1904) we read that Mr Wraxall, hunted by the malign forces he has disturbed in Sweden, lands at Harwich and 'not trusting the railway' chooses to travel by means of a road vehicle.⁽²⁷⁾ By 1863, the year in which the story is set, Wraxall could have travelled with relative speed and convenience almost anywhere in the country by means of a train from Harwich; why, then, did he not trust the railway? James does not provide any direct explanation of Wraxall's aversion to railway travel but it is possible to infer the reasons for it. Railway travel involved enclosure in the railway carriage; the railway passenger could not get out once the train was in motion, nor communicate with the outside world.⁽²⁸⁾ Wraxall is being pursued. He has already encountered his pursuers on the canal-boat he used for part of his journey home; on the boat he was among other passengers, but he clearly fears the consequences of being caught on his own in the secluded environment of the railway compartment by 'some person or persons . . . whom he had evidently come to regard as his pursuers'.⁽²⁹⁾ The interior space of the vehicle in which he chooses to ride, a closed fly, is under his control and its enclosure can be seen as protection; the railway carriage, by contrast, offers a threatening, entrapping enclosure. Wraxall's precautions do him no good, of course; his pursuers catch him regardless.

'Casting the Runes' (1911) offers another example of the railway as a threatening environment, only in this case it is the malign, supernatural agency in the story, Mr Karswell, who is trapped and brought, ultimately, to a form of justice. Karswell has 'cast the runes' on the quiet and scholarly Mr Dunning; a process that involves getting the victim to accept possession of a piece of paper bearing a runic inscription - 'some very odd writing . . . in red and black'⁽³⁰⁾ - which has the effect of 'bringing its possessors into some very undesirable company'.⁽³¹⁾ The piece of paper has to be returned to Karswell in order that the harm it contains will be directed at its originator; to do this Dunning and his confederate, Harrington (whose brother has already been brought to his death by Karswell and his malign runes) must place themselves in close proximity to Karswell and contrive to pass the runic paper to him, and have it willingly accepted by him. When they hear that Karswell is to travel by a boat train from Victoria station in London to Dover, they seize their chance and so arrange matters that they travel in the same compartment as their quarry. Dunning, who has the paper, spends almost the whole journey trying to find a way to get a suspicious and watchful Karswell to accept it back from him; eventually, at the last minute, an opportunity presents itself when Karswell gets up to go into the corridor and something slips from his seat to the floor:

Dunning picked up what had fallen, and saw that the key was in his hands in the form of one of Cook's ticket-cases, with tickets in it. These cases have a pocket in the cover, and within a very few seconds the paper of which we have heard was in the pocket of this one . . . It was done, and done at the right time, for the train was now slowing down towards Dover.⁽³²⁾

The railway journey here provides both spatial and temporal structures of enclosure. Spatially, the compartment is an enclosed space in which the forces of evil are confronted; the train has trapped Karswell, but the position is an ambivalent and threatening one, for it Karswell becomes suspicious the position will very quickly become reversed, with Dunning and Harrington becoming the victims and the enclosed space of the compartment working to trap them. Furthermore, the journey is an enclosed time. Dunning and Harrington must return the paper to Karswell between the former joining the train at West Croydon and the train arriving at Dover Harbour - a period of 1 hour and 45 minutes, according to the timetables of 1900.⁽³³⁾ As we have seen the operation is only just completed in time, in the last five minutes of the journey. Again, this defined and restricted period represents an opportunity to confront and defeat the forces of evil, but it is also a threat, for it limits the potential for bringing the confrontation to a successful conclusion. Once the paper has been taken by Karswell, the sense of threatening enclosure inherent in the railway compartment becomes even more apparent and takes a sinister turn: 'both men noticed that the carriage seemed to darken about them and grow warmer'.⁽³⁴⁾

The railway compartment also features interestingly in one of the sketches of incomplete stories included in James's essay 'Stories I have Tried to Write', in which a passenger on a train in France is afflicted with the common ennui of a railway journey. He drowsily turns over the pages of his book and reads a conversation which seems to hint at a man's murder by his wife; the content of which uncannily prefigures aspects of his own experience once he arrives at his destination.⁽³⁵⁾

The presence of the malign supernatural in surroundings of quotidian mundanity is, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, one of the central motifs of James's ghost stories, and one of the keys to their success. To examine a particularly suggestive instance of this, let us look once again at a passage from 'Casting the Runes' in which another form of transport, the electric tramcar, is featured.

The chief protagonist of the story, Dunning, lives in a 'comfortable house in a suburb' and travels between home and the places of his researches - chiefly the British Museum - by urban and suburban public transport: 'A train took him to within a mile or two of his house, and an electric tram a stage further.'⁽³⁶⁾ James emphasises the mundane nature of this daily journey, remarking 'Let us follow him as he takes his sober course homewards.'⁽³⁷⁾ The electric tram is one agency of the world of urban/suburban modernity inhabited by Dunning; advertising is another:

As was not unnatural, the advertisements in this particular line of cars were objects of his frequent contemplation, and with the possible exception of the brilliant and convincing dialogue between Mr Lamplough and an eminent K.C. on the subject of Pyretic Saline, none of them afforded much scope to his imagination.⁽³⁸⁾

James conveys here the banal nature of advertising and the extent to which the modern urban dweller becomes immune to its blandishments. Yet this most commonplace and worldly means of communication becomes a channel for supernatural forces, with the appearance of an unfamiliar advertisement 'in blue letters on a yellow ground' bearing the enigmatic inscription 'In memory of John Harrington, F.S.A., of The Laurels, Ashbrooke. Died Sept. 18th, 1889. Three months were allowed.'⁽³⁹⁾ The tram conductor, when his attention is drawn to this odd notice, remarks that it 'ain't no transfer' and seems to be 'reg'lar in the glass'.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Dunning asks the driver and conductor of the car to enquire at the office as to the provenance of the advertisement, but by the following day it has disappeared, and the company official who deals with advertising declares that 'there warn't no advertisement of that description sent in, nor ordered, nor paid for, nor put up.'⁽⁴¹⁾ The details of the system whereby the advertisements are arranged through the tramway company's office only emphasises the mundane nature of the agencies of modernity at work here - the electric tramway, public transport advertising, and the bureaucracy associated with these things - and the potent subversion of all these structures of rational, stable modernity by the supernatural forces unwittingly stirred up by James's protagonists. The point is emphasised by another incident shortly afterwards, where as Dunning walks from his club to the train he encounters 'a man with a handful of leaflets such as are distributed to passers-by by agents of enterprising firms' - another illustration of the methods of communication at work in the modern commercial society in which Dunning lives. The leaflet thrust into his hand by a hand 'unnaturally rough and hot' is 'a blue one' with 'the name of Harrington in large capitals', but it is mysteriously knocked from Dunning's hand and lost before he can read it, and when he looks around there is no sign either of the distributor or the person who knocked the leaflet away. It is, of course, another diabolic communication.⁽⁴²⁾

The ghost stories of M. R. James gain much of their resonance from being set, not in exotic or remote times or places, but in the contemporary, everyday world which James knew himself. Technology was an important part of that world, and one of the most widely-dispersed and significant manifestations of modern technology was found in the sphere of transport. Trains and trams (and also steamships and horse-drawn vehicles, which have not been discussed here) figure importantly in James's stories, but they are not merely the dressing of the scene, neutral accessories to the main action. They frequently contribute to the unfolding of events and the atmosphere of the story in significant ways. James was able to draw on a repertoire of cultural anxieties associated with modern transport to enhance the tropes of enclosure and menace which contribute to the effectiveness of his stories. James, like the agents of the supernatural who stalk his pages, proved very successful at exploiting the ambiguities of technological modernity for his own, darker purposes.

This is a draft only; please contact the author before citing in published work of any description.

© Ralph Harrington 2001. Except for bona fide individual or academic purposes, this essay may not be reprinted in whole or in part, or stored, or transmitted by any means, including electronic, without the prior written consent of the author. All commercial use, reproduction or transmission of this essay is strictly prohibited.

Notes

1. For James's life, see Michael R. Cox, M. R. James: an Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); also useful are Sir Stephen Gaselee's obituary of James, 'Montague Rhodes James, 1862-1936', Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 22 (1936), and R. W. Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (London: Allen Unwin, 1980), which provides a full account of James's scholarship.

2. M. R. James, 'A Neighbour's Landmark', in Collected Ghost Stories (London: Edward Arnold, 1931), p. 514. Henceforward cited as CGS.

3. Cox, 'Introduction', in Casting the Runes, p. xv.

4. There are 30 stories in CGS along with James's essay 'Stories I have Tried to Write'. In his Oxford World's Classics volume Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, Michael Cox publishes two stories which were not included in CGS, 'The Experiment' and 'The Malice of Inanimate Objects'; he also includes the autobiographical 'A Vignette', which, like 'Stories I have Tried to Write', I do not class as a ghost story.

5. Most of these stories are set in the period from circa 1880 to circa 1920. The settings of some of James's stories are clearly dated, such as 'A Neighbour's Landmark' (set in 1889) and 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook' (set in 1883); in others the date can be worked out from detail given in the story, as in 'The Tractate Middoth', where the death of one character 'twenty years before' allows the reader to date the story to the 1890s. Several of the stories seem to be set more or less when they were written; 'The Diary of Mr Poynter' and 'The Uncommon Prayer Book' both come into this category. 'An Evening's Entertainment' is slightly problematic, but the setting and language suggest a mid-nineteenth-century setting. Of the other nine stories, three are set in the early nineteenth century (1837 and before), four are set in the eighteenth century, one in the seventeenth century and one in the sixteenth century.

6. Reference details to be checked.

7. Michael Cox, 'Introduction', in Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. xxiv.

8. Cox, 'Introduction', in Casting the Runes, p. xv.

9. 'The Mezzotint', CGS, pp. 46-7, 53.

10. M. R. James, 'Introduction' to V. H. Collins (ed.), Ghosts and Marvels (Oxford, 1924), reprinted as an appendix in Cox (ed.), Casting the Runes, p. 339.

11. James, 'Introduction', Ghosts and Marvels, in Casting the Runes, pp. 339-40.

12. M. R. James, preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, reprinted in Cox (ed.), Casting the Runes, pp. 337-8.

13. James, preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, in Cox (ed.), p. 337.

14. Thus Mr Wraxall journeys to Sweden to research his travel book in 'Count Magnus'; Professor Parkin travels to Burnstow during the long vacation from Cambridge to work on academic pursuits (and improve his golf) in 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to you My Lad'; Mr Davidson travels to Longbridge to carry out some research for his edition of 'the Leventhorp Papers' in 'An Uncommon Prayer Book'; Mr Somerton goes by ship and train to the German town of Steinfeld in 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas'.

15. See H. J. Dyos & D. H. Aldcroft, British Transport: an Economic Survey from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), pp. 116-32; Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), pp. 373-6.

16. 'The Diary of Mr Poynter', CGS, p. 398.

17. 'Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance', CGS, p. 348.

18. 'A View from a Hill', CGS, p. 533.

19. 'A View from a Hill', CGS, p. 539.

20. 'A View from a Hill', CGS, pp. 540, 548.

21. 'The Tractate Middoth', CGS, p. 218.

22. 'The Tractate Middoth', CGS, pp. 228-9.

23. 'The Uncommon Prayer Book', CGS, p. 491.

24. 'Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance', CGS, p. 318.

25. 'Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance', CGS, p. 319.

26. 'Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance', CGS, p. 319.

27. 'Count Magnus', CGS, p. 117.

28. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 82ff.

29. 'Count Magnus', CGS, p. 117.

30. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 257.

31. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 260.

32. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, pp. 263-4.

33. Bradshaw's Railway Guide, 1900.

34. 'Casting the Runes, CGS, p. 265. In a later James story, 'The Malice of Inanimate Objects' (1933), supernatural forces show their ability to use the compartment as a trap for their victim. Mr Burton becomes subject to a vengeful campaign and tries to ensure his safety by reserving a railway compartment to himself, 'But these precautions avail little against the angry dead . . .' The safety which Burton seeks in the solitude and protected space of his compartment are turned against him, sealing him in with his supernatural enemy and isolating him from assistance; the compartment becomes his tomb. The story is not in CGS, but was included in Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, pp. 291-2.

35. 'Stories I have Tried to Write', CGS, pp. 643-4.

36. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 243.

37. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 243.

38. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 244.

39. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 244.

40. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 245.

41. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, p. 26.

42. 'Casting the Runes', CGS, pp. 248-9.