In this episode Mike & Will whip out their library cards and prepare to crack the spine of ‘The Tractate Middoth’ by M.R. James.
Questions addressed in this episode include: Does Mr Eldred like MC Hammer? Did Sir Jimmy Saville make a pact with the devil? Is Miss Simpson a slamming hotty or merely a comely wench? And is it even politically correct to call someone a wench in this day and age?
Show Notes:
- The Lost Will of Dr Rant (1951) (archive.org)
This American television version of ‘The Tractate Middoth’ was part of the ‘Lights Out’ mystery series, and stars none other than a young Leslie Nielson!
- Cambridge University Library (cam.ac.uk)
The real world location of this story was the university library at Cambridge, though the current library is no longer housed in the same building as it was in James’s time.
- Bredfield, Suffolk (googlemaps)
The likely real-world location of Dr Rant/Mr Eldred’s house, Bredfield in Suffolk. Note Melton station about three miles to the south east (or shorter if you go across country!).
- E.W. Pugin (1834 – 1875) (Wikipedia)
Information on E.W. Pugin, who may or may not be linked to this story.
- The Real Tractate Middoth (google books)
More information on the real book can be read in ‘A history of the Mishnaic law of Holy Things, Volume 2’, available on Google Books.
- Squire Toby’s Will by J. Sheridan le Fanu (horrormasters.com)
The plot of this story by M.R. James’s favourite author of ghost stories bares some resemblance to the plot of ‘The Tractate Middoth’.
- Piccadilly Weepers and More (oook.info)
Information on Piccadilly/Dundreary Weepers and other fabulous contemporary facial hair styles can be found here.
- Tractate Middoth Postcard & Bookmark (Ghosts & Scholars)
- Burial of William McKenzie (forteantimes.com)
Liverpool architect and builder William McKenzie (1794 – 1851) was supposedly buried sitting up in a pyramid-shaped tomb to trick the devil, to whom he had sold his soul in exchange for luck at cards.
- Burial of Sir Jimmy Saville (telegraph.co.uk)
We were slightly mistaken in the podcast, Sir Jimmy Saville was not buried sitting up but propped up at a 45 degree angle so he could ‘see the sea’!
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In this episode Will & Mike follow M.R. James on a terrifying treasure hunt to Germany in ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’.
Show notes:
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Mike is away on holiday at the moment so in lieu of a full episode we are pleased to present a full reading of M.R. James’s essay ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’, read by Tom Hemmings!
Regular service will resume in a few weeks when Mike returns from his reckless galavanting.
Notes
‘Stories I have Tried to Write’ was written by M.R. James in November of 1929 and first published at the end of that month in ‘The Touchstone 2’, a publication of Eton College where James was Provost at the time. The editors would no doubt have preferred to have received a completed ghost story of the sort James had produced for the Eton Boy Scouts two years previously (‘Wailing Well’, one of the last James ghost stories to find print during his lifetime) but instead they received a short essay in which James runs briefly through a number of story ideas that never saw completion.
Some of these stories are the merest hint of an idea (the Christmas cracker, the tap on the shoulder) while others provide the outline of an almost completed story, with settings, characters, names and so on all prepared. As James mentions in the essay, some of these stories he not only tried to write, but did write, only later deciding they were not good enough for publication. A draft of the Marcilly-le-Hayer story can be found among James’s papers in King’s College Library and was publishes in Ghosts & Scholars 22 in 1996. Likewise, the draft of the story involving two students at King’s was found and published in Ghosts & Scholars 12 as ‘The Fenstanton Witch’.
Other story elements James mentions in the essay hint at plot devices that James did actually use in some of his published stories, for instance the mask that appears amongst the curtains brings to mind the leering face that peers through the hedge in ‘The Rose Garden’ and similarly in James’s story ‘A Vignette’, a story written in 1935 and not published until after his death in 1936. James’s reference to ‘common objects being vehicles of malice’ was an idea he later fleshed out into the macabrely humorous fable ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’ which was printed in another Eton publication, ‘The Masquerade 1’ in 1933.
The essay saw wider publication when it was included in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (Arnold 1931), and since that time many authors have yielded to the temptation to flesh James’s ideas out into complete stories. The most notable being Sheila Hodgson who produced not only a series of stories based on the ideas (published by Ash Tree Press in 1998 as ‘The Fellow Travellers and Other Ghost Stories’), but a highly enjoyable series of radio plays which were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between 1976 and 1992. As far as I am aware these radio plays have never seen the light of day on cassette or cd but can be tracked down by anyone with a search engine, bit torrent client and ‘relaxed’ attitude towards copyright law. Or so I am told. *cough*.
More information on the essay and the various stories it has inspired can be found in the excellent ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’ story notes at Ghosts & Scholars.
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