M. R. James and Charles Dickens:

My speech at “City of Ghosts” in Canterbury, England, 3 October 2026

Yesterday, I presented a discussion of M.R. James’s debt to Charles Dickens for the “City of Ghosts” event at King’s School, Canterbury, England. The following is a copy of that presentation as written. I, quite naturally, diverged a bit from my text whilst performing it (as one will) with an aside to illustrate an idea or quote a bit for exemplification’s sake. Please enjoy!

Charles Dickens emerges as a significant, though secondary, influence upon James: less foundational than Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, but nevertheless important to James’s development as a reader, storyteller, and writer of supernatural fiction. The relationship is one of genuine and enduring admiration, complicated briefly in James’s youth by contemporary literary fashion and his father’s reservations, but ultimately visible in James’s narrative voice, humour, storytelling technique, and particular works.

James’s acquaintance with Dickens was initially delayed by the educational assumptions of his childhood. At his school in Temple Grove, modern fiction of the Dickensian sort appears to have been excluded from the school library; James later recalled that Walter Scott was presumably available but Dickens and Thackeray certainly were not. Consequently, although Dickens’s “The Signal-man” would become part of James’s supernatural inheritance, it was not among his earliest childhood reading. Nevertheless, Dickens was a significant influence upon James’s later writing.

By James’s Cambridge years, Dickens had become important to him, yet a revealing anomaly occurred when the young James, asked by the Chitchat Society to name the six greatest novels, omitted Dickens altogether despite what his “deepest regard” for him. The explanation is biographical rather than aesthetic. James’s father, the Reverend Herbert James, had recently sent a letter to Monty dismissive of The Pickwick Papers and confessing himself unable to “get up any steam for Dickens.” This paternal judgment, combined with a contemporary decline in Dickens’s critical reputation, appears temporarily to have affected Monty’s own judgment. It did not last. James returned to Dickens and embraced his “beloved ‘Boz’,” establishing an attachment that endured into old age.

There exists a more specific possible Dickensian influence in James’s characteristic narrative voice, however. A Christmas Carol moves readily between conventional third-person narration and the conspicuous, though momentary, presence of an unidentified first-person storyteller who addresses the reader directly. This resembles James’s characteristic, recurrent, but always anonymous narrator: the raconteur who briefly steps forward as “I,” establishes a personal relationship with his auditors, and then recedes while relating the supernatural history. I have borrowed a phrase from one of Monty’s interviews to call this “raconteur voice” in the Dickens technique a form of moi-même narration, and it is in many ways similar to James’s mature method. I stop short, however, of asserting direct derivation: although James may have learned something from Dickens, Le Fanu is clearly the more probable immediate model.

Le Fanu will stretch all credulity to impose a “raconteur voice” onto his ghost narrative. Take, for an example, his Squire Toby’s Will. The story is related in third person throughout except for the opening in which an anonymous first person tells us as we pass Gylingden Hall on the old York and London road, in the days of stage-coaches, that he knows the story of the old Squire, Toby Marston. He then relates moments such as private conversations, dreams, and secret actions to which no person could possibly be privy. For Le Fanu, the ghost story gained its strength from the illusion of its being shared by a raconteur. Monty adopted this philosophy in his own writing but seasoned it with the Dickensian mode.

And humour becomes an important part of this adaptation. Dickens’s intrusive narrator does more than convey information: he establishes complicity with the reader through comic digression, mock seriousness, exaggeration, and the deliberate interruption of his own narrative. James similarly uses humour to establish the personality and credibility of the teller before the supernatural machinery becomes apparent. Yet James transforms the broad Dickensian comic manner into something characteristically his own: a dry, frequently academic humour that can operate almost beneath the reader’s notice.

It is, in Monty’s hands, a kind of scholarly in-joke. James’s narrators and characters wander off into irrelevant antiquarian information, pedantic qualifications, linguistic jokes, obscure references, and elaborate demonstrations of knowledge whose very excess becomes comic.

In “The Ash-tree,” for example, in the midst of discovering a blacked, bloated corpse lying in a bed, we suddenly are told one of the witnesses there would one day write a well-respected tract on Polyaenus. It is a piece of irrelevant classical erudition: but precisely the sort of digression one might expect from an academic who has momentarily forgotten that his audience does not share his enthusiasm for centuries-dead Macedonian rhetoricians.

“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” similarly develops humour within scholarly apparatus, in this case inscriptions, interpretation, symbols, but most tellingly in the seven-eyed cross, which becomes both intellectual puzzle and comic misdirection because he has created a treasure-hunt plot in which a cross, or X, literally marks the spot.

It’s a joke that goes unnoticed unless you’re paying attention.

But perhaps my favourite moment in that tale comes when the narrator describes Steinfeld Abbey and assures us that there is nothing there “of first-rate interest to be seen”, then adds:

“Except, perhaps, one thing, which I should not care to see.”

That is pure James.

Then, again, “Count Magnus” can turn grammatical nicety itself into humour. James’s academic learning is genuine, but he is sufficiently secure in it to make it the object of the joke by suggesting a particularly harrowing moment in the story shares with certain Greek and Latin particles no expectation of an answer. At other moments, the humour is intentionally performative, as when the landlord begins, ‘There are tales’, to which our hero eagerly interrupts with his wish to hear them before the landlord can complete his thought, saying, ‘There are tales I have forgotten.’

This humour is not extraneous to the terror. It creates confidence in the raconteur, relaxes the audience, delays the supernatural revelation, and establishes the rhythm by which James will eventually reverse expectations.

He wrote youthful parodies of Etonian and academic life which give us an early vision of this instinct: ln those teenaged essays, painstaking historical and institutional precision became his vehicle for college-themed burlesque. The same principle survives in the mature ghost stories, where the perfectly serious scholar, librarian, antiquary, or clergyman can become funny precisely because he remains perfectly serious in his attempts to stave off physical danger with intellectual erudition.

In “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, it is a man who shares a name with the Cambridge chair in archeology who asks our hero to do a little digging whilst on holiday; then, again, the listener needs to be up on his Greek to get the joke that the hero himself is the university’s Professor of “seeing is believing.”

Greek also comes to our aid in the closing moments of “The Mezzotint” when we learn that the unctious skeptic in the room is professor of Ophiology. He is not only an ‘oaf’ but also a ‘snake’. Non-believers beware: M.R. James is not sympathetic to you.

The relationship between humour and terror consequently approaches the structural. To paraphrase Voltaire, an M. R. James ghost story is often a well-structured joke, played to an audience too frightened to laugh.

Setup, elaboration, misdirection, timing, and payoff govern both the joke and the jolt. James accumulates apparently incidental details, permits his narrator an aside, establishes an expectation, and then overturns it. That is the structure of a joke: expectation and surprise. The difference is that the punchline may be a hand beneath a pillow, a face of crumpled linen, or something inexplicably moving under the bedclothes. The humour makes the narrative voice companionable; the terror then exploits the trust that companionship has created.

James’s admiration for Dickens nevertheless allowed for critical discrimination. He specifically refused to classify A Christmas Carol as a “ghost story proper,” since Scrooge’s supernatural experiences might ultimately be interpreted as a dream. This distinction is characteristic of James’s conception of the genre: supernatural fiction required something more objective and intrusive than either psychological or visionary experience. For this same reason, he classed Poe as a writer of psychological horror and mental aberration rather than of ghost stories proper. Dickens could therefore be admired profoundly without automatically satisfying James’s own developing rules for supernatural fiction.

Nevertheless, a particularly suggestive relationship appears between Dickens’s “The Trial for Murder” and James’s “Martin’s Close.” James’s tale uses elaborate layers of transmission to develop the narration: a story heard from another man, documentary evidence subsequently sought out, court records recovered but subsequently mediated through the written accounts of a dead narrator, who is (stick with me now) the son of a man who got his information second-hand from one of the witnesses: all this simply to create the illusion that the supernatural narrative has been discovered rather than invented, and is therefore to be accepted as truth. The manuscript sees James here pursuing the documentary authenticity associated primarily with Le Fanu, but doing so “with perhaps a nod” to Dickens’s “The Trial for Murder.” Dickens therefore informs at least part of the genealogy of James’s pseudo-documentary supernaturalism, even where James transforms the method into something recognizably his own.

The strongest demonstrable instance of direct Dickensian influence occurs very late in James’s career. In 1928 James told Nico Llewelyn-Davies (yes, that Llewelyn-Davies, one of the five “Peter Pan” brothers) of his admiration for supernatural stories that had been published in Dickens’s Christmas numbers of All the Year Round, describing some of the tales by Dickens and others as “very respectable.” Shortly thereafter, upon returning to those volumes, James was led to one of Dickens’s stories called Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Now, “Tom Tiddler’s Ground” was a well-known, capture-the-flag type of game, and this title prompted James to conceive a supernatural story based upon another children’s game, that of hide-and-go-seek; the unfinished piece was later called “The Game of Bear.” More importantly, this same Dickens story supplied the germ of James’s 1929 tale, “Rats.” In “Picking Up Soot and Cinders,” which is the first chapter of Tom Tiddler’s Ground, James encountered the memorable description of apparently heaving bedclothes beneath which rats are moving. James transformed that image into the central terror of his story entitled “Rats”: the apparently animated bedclothes now concealing not vermin but a chained, cadaverous supernatural figure (who is apparently spending eternity making a stiff-legged dash for the door should anyone be unwise enough to open it).

Taken as a whole, Dickens is an important strand within James’s literary formation. Le Fanu remains the dominant ancestor of the Jamesian ghost story, particularly in narrative mediation, documentary distance, and the creation of authenticity. As such, Dickens’s influence is more charismatic than systematic, but remarkably persistent. James admired “Boz”; returned repeatedly to his work; engaged critically with his supernatural fiction; shared aspects of his conversational storyteller; may have drawn upon “The Trial for Murder” in shaping “Martin’s Close”; admired the Christmas supernatural tradition associated with All the Year Round; and found in Tom Tiddler’s Ground the imaginative seed from which “Rats” developed.

Most importantly for comparison, Dickens and James both understood that the supernatural story is an act of performance. Dickens writes for a reading public but continually creates the illusion that Dickens himself has stepped forward to tell us the tale. This is possibly attributable to the fact that Dickens, a frustrated thespian, is known to have read his chapters aloud to a circle of friends before sending them off for publication. James goes one step further: his stories were intentionally written to be read aloud to friends, colleagues, and boys gathered at Christmas. With only the rare exceptions of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”; “Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance”; “The Story of an Appearance and a Disappearance”; “Two Doctors”; and the posthumous “A Vignette”, James wrote all of his ghost stories specifically to be heard spoken aloud rather than read silently from print.

The raconteur who is figuratively present in Dickens becomes literally present in James. Humour establishes the relationship between teller and listener; circumstantial detail secures belief; and only then does the ghost enter. Dickens makes the reader feel that the storyteller is in the room. With M. R. James, he actually is. As such, Monty is the ghost haunting his stories.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan