Seven years in the writing, many more in the planning, OUP Oxford have just published For the Dead Remember: The Life of M. R. James by Darryl Jones, praised ahead of release as “an achievement of scholarship and storytelling worth celebrating”.
Regular downthetubes readers will surely know the work of M. R. James, regarded as the greatest of all ghost story writers – but a repressed member of the English establishment struggling against changing times.
Every Christmas around the turn of the twentieth century, Montague Rhodes James would gather his friends and students together in his rooms at King’s College Cambridge, for what he once described as a “dark séance”, in which he read a new ghost story by candlelight at midnight. But the ghost stories are only one aspect of the life and writing of this fascinating, complex, troubled, difficult man.
Monty James was widely recognised as perhaps the outstanding scholar of his generation, a man whose academic achievements were unparalleled, and who became the foremost living authority on medieval manuscripts, on stained glass, on Biblical apocrypha, and on the occult.
He was also a formidable academic administrator, as Provost of King’s College Cambridge and then as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, he led his institution through the difficult years of World War One, in which many of his colleagues and students were killed. After the war, he returned to the sanctuary of his beloved Eton, which he served as Provost until his death.
James’s life in Cambridge brought him into contact, and often into conflict, with many of the great figures and movements of his age, from Henry Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research to John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and the Bloomsbury Group, with which he had many connections. He was the friend of A. C. Benson, the teacher of Rupert Brooke. He was a repressed gay man, whose friends recognised this, even where he did not. He was often troubled by modern ideas and tendencies, widening social access to universities, degrees for women.
For the Dead Remember, described as “exhaustively researched … It is hard to imagine anyone producing a more thorough, well-documented and sympathetic biography than this one”, by Eamon Duffy, is also a story of the profound consolations of scholarship; and of a man who found meaning on the wilder shores of human experience, in a world of demons and ghosts.
Darryl Jones is Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and numerous articles, mostly on nineteenth-century literature and popular literature. In 2011, he edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of M. R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories. He is the General Editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes, for which series he edited The Hound of the Baskervilles.
• For the Dead Remember by Darryl Jones is available now from all good bookshops | ISBN: 978-0198835233 | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
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There’s actually no real evidence to suggest that M.R.James was gay. It’s a theory that’s gained some weight thanks to Mark Gattiss. James essentially lived an Asexual life, whether that was by choice, or because he was repressing his sexuality is something that we will most likely never know. Some seem to think that being asexual means that it’s a gay person trying to cover up, but that isn’t reality.