The Full Monty – How MR James Redefined the Ghost Story

You might not expect that a clergyman’s son born in Victorian England would grow up to write tales of the supernatural that would still chill people almost a century after his death. But such was the case for author M.R. James. 

His stories left behind the Gothic style of his forerunners and used more realistic contemporary settings. As a result, James’ tales of spirits and paranormal events have become part of the TV landscape in Britain and Australia where ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ is an annual staple.

But James was also a noted medievalist scholar who additionally became the provost – the head – of two major English colleges and the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University – a much more suitable career for a Victorian clergyman’s son. So, it should come as no surprise that the protagonists and plots of his tales reflected the people and world around him, leading to his work frequently being referred to as ‘antiquarian ghost stories’.

Montague Rhodes James was born at Dover in Kent in 1862. From the ages of three to forty-seven, he lived primarily at The Rectory in Great Livermere, Suffolk. The county and the towns James knew became the settings for a number of his ghost stories including one for which he is best known.

‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, taking its title from a 1793 poem by Robert Burns, was set in the seaside town of Felixstowe. It featured as its protagonist a young professor who finds a whistle in the crumbling masonry of an ancient church. Blowing on the whistle calls up a seemingly vengeful spirit from which the professor is saved at the last moment, the experience converting him from a sceptic to a chastened believer in ghosts.

James would read his new ghost stories to friends at Christmas time, and it was then in 1903 that ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ made its debut. You can read it here.

James’s stories were published in a series of collections, beginning with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904, and three more collections through to 1925.

James died in 1936 and is buried at Eton.

The author believed that a ghost story must “put the reader into the position of saying to himself, ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!'”

He also noted: “Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”

Although many of James’s tales depict scenes and images of violence, he believed it was better to suggest rather than describe such things. He wrote in 1929: “Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories… At the same time don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces … are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded…”

Of the numerous television adaptations of James’s stories, the very first was American—The Tractate Middoth adapted as The Lost Will of Dr Rant starring Leslie Nielsen. View it on YouTube .

However, most TV adaptations of James have been made in Britain including Whistle and I’ll Come to You in 1968, and A Warning to the Curious in 1972. The latter was part of the BBC series A Ghost Story for Christmas, which produced five of James’s stories in the 1970s: The Stalls of Barchester (1971), A Warning to the Curious (1972), Lost Hearts (1973), The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974) and The Ash-tree (1975). Many may be found on YouTube along with later adaptations including A View from a Hill and Number 13.