It is fairly well-documented that M. R. James was a huge fan of Dickens. According to A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James by S. G. Lubbock, this passion for Dickens began at Eton when he discovered the College Library “supplied the whole works of Dickens which were not on our shelves at home. . . . I put Charles Dickens in the forefront of the accessions to my pleasure which Eton gave, for it was wholly new.”
In the same memoir we learn that he knew the works of Dickens so well, he knew many texts by heart. Lubbock tells us he could identify from memory any Dickens quote, and what's more “And there was no character of Dickens whose part he would not sustain, if the circumstances seemed to call for it, at a moment’s notice”.
References to Dickens also found their way into his ghost stories. For example, both Rats and An Episode of Cathedral History both contain Easter eggs for the Dickens fan. However recently I came across a passage in Dickens that may shed some light on one of James’s most enigmatic tales.
First appearing in the London Mercury #35, in November 1936, A Vignette was the last story James ever had published, indeed it first saw print some five months after his death. It is a simple tale - which you can hear here - but one that has sparked much debate among devotees of his ghost stories. For this final story is noticeably in a somewhat different style to his other tales, and seems much more personal. It is also very clearly set in his childhood home, the Rectory at Great Livermere, Suffolk. And these elements have caused some folk to wonder whether the strange encounter described in this tale was not merely fiction but based upon something that happened to James himself.
In the story our narrator recounts some strange incidents in his childhood, centring around a certain piece of woodland just beyond the back gate of the rectory. These oddly eerie incidents culminate with him seeing a strange face appearing in a hole in that back gate of the grounds. The face disappears, and on further investigation, our narrator only spots “a draped form shambling away among the trees”. And that is the story.
A Vignette is a brief but haunting story, but one that is somewhat inconclusive, and indeed, it does read more like a memoir of a possibly paranormal encounter rather than the usual well-rounded ghost stories James wrote. So was it a fictionalised incident for James’ own life, or was it inspired by something else?
Well, I think I may have discovered a possible literary inspiration. The other day I was re-reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It is a book I am very familiar with, and I have read it numerous times - indeed a few Christmases ago I released my own reading of it - but this time one passage suddenly leapt out at me. It is a passage in Stave One - Marley's Ghost. In fact, it is the first appearance by the famous spectre. The incident comes just as Scrooge is going home on Christmas Eve, and has reached the door of his gloomy dwelling. Just as he is about to enter his dark abode, Dickens tells us -
Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face.Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.
And when I read this, for some reason I suddenly thought of A Vignette and the appearance of that face in the door. So I retrieved my copy of The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, and when you compare the two descriptions, they do indeed have a good deal in common. Here is the relevant passage -
It was not monstrous, not pale, fleshless, spectral. Malevolent I thought and think it was; at any rate the eyes were large and open and fixed. It was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows.There is something horrifying in the sight of a face looking at one out of a frame as this did; more particularly if its gaze is unmistakably fixed upon you. Nor does it make the matter any better if the expression gives no clue to what is to come next. I said just now that I took this face to be malevolent, and so I did, but not in regard of any positive dislike or fierceness which it expressed. It was, indeed, quite without emotion: I was only conscious that I could see the whites of the eyes all round the pupil, and that, we know, has a glamour of madness about it. The immovable face was enough for me.
Now, there are several similarities here - both spectres present livid faces that appear to be hot. Both do not move or speak. And finally, both spectral faces convey an aura of malevolence despite being described as having emotionally neutral expressions. And to my mind, given these shared traits and James’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Dickens, I can’t help wondering whether the strange spectre in A Vignette was inspired by old Jacob Marley’s head on the door.
In his essay Some remarks on Ghost Stories, James does say “I do not call A Christmas Carol a ghost story proper”, an assessment I would largely agree with. But the opening Stave of the novel, which details the manifestations of Marley, does contain some marvellous eerie incidents and I can’t help wondering if they made enough of an impression on James that the spectre in A Vignette is an echo of Marley’s ghost. The similarities in the descriptions seem too strong to be merely coincidence, but it is quite possible that the influence was purely subconscious rather than deliberate. All of which does not solve the questions surrounding A Vignette, but certainly does add an interesting element to consider when contemplating the final ghost story of M. R. James.
