The Artist of Uneasy Shadows

James McBryde and M.R. James

My dear literary spirit,

It remains a truth universally overlooked that James McBryde—artist, medical student, friend—is the unspoken catalyst behind the ghost stories of M.R. James. Without McBryde’s ink, we may never have had Monty’s dread. Without his death, we might not have had the book.

McBryde, Monty, and Jimbo

James McBryde (or McB, as he was invariably called) came up to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1899 and quickly drew Monty’s attention—not only for his lively presence and humorous sketching, but for his deep fondness for the older scholar. Though nearly twenty years Monty's junior, McB entered James's life as more than an admiring student. He became, as Maisie Fletcher would later write, “almost like an adopted son.”

Born into a family of means, McBryde was initially pushed toward a medical career, earning his LRCP and MRCS, though they signaled only his passing qualifications rather than an ambition to practice. Medicine never suited him. Art called instead. When his father died—leaving him a substantial estate—McBryde saw an opportunity to realign his future. He enrolled at the Slade School of Art and proposed to Monty an audacious idea: to illustrate his mentor’s ghost stories. He hoped the quality of James’s tales, married to his own illustrations, might create a book of some value, a book that might open doors to his book illustration ambitions.

Monty, ever cautious, agreed to a trial sketch.

The drawing, full of affection and sly humour and done on the same Bristol board stock as he would later render the four printed illustrations, was enough to win Monty over. McBryde would go on to create only four of the planned illustrations for Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, including the rendering of Dennistoun in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book—a figure modeled, in part, on Monty himself.

The men bicycled together in Denmark and Sweden, which inspired McBryde’s Troll-Hunt. When James spoke of McBryde to others, there was a warm protectiveness in his tone. Their correspondence, as preserved by McBryde’s widow, Gwendolen, is equally affectionate and ever-polite—witty, tender, and emotionally tuned without being sentimental.

McBryde married Gwendolen Grotrian in July 1903. She was clever, talented, musical, and affectionate—and she came to admire Monty and idly wish she had been a boy if only to remain in his presence at university. The McBrydes seemed genuinely happy. For his best man, he named his old friend Raymond Foster—his roommate from medical school. Monty was unable to attend the wedding.

Tragically, within a year, McBryde fell ill with appendicitis and died 5 June 1904. Gwendolen, four months pregnant, gave birth to their daughter on 27 November—just three days after Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was released. She named the child Jane McBryde McBryde. Monty became her guardian.

The book, so long in gestation, now bore a dedication that rang with grief: “To the memory of James McBryde.” McB’s trial etching—long thought lost—had indeed inspired the publication. His vision, quite literally, gave Monty the impetus to publish. The image itself, the so-called “holy grail” of Jamesian ghost illustration, had long been thought lost or else misidentified as other drawings. During my researches for the biography, however, tucked away within the McBryde family and unregarded, I happily discovered—and purchased—the long-lost illustration, which has since been authenticated by King’s College, Cambridge (where I have left it on permanent loan to reside with the four published illustrations that are also held there). It illustrates McBryde's reconstruction of the tone of an M.R. James tale, for no such scene appears in any surviving M.R. James story. The vision was in all likelihood entirely of McBryde’s own invention unless it is, tantalizingly, an illustration of a heretofore undiscovered story—which, alas, is most doubtful.

After McB’s death, Gwendolen remained in familial contact with Monty. He praised her drawings for his children's book, The Five Jars, which he had written to and for McBryde's daughter, and Monty's goddaughter, Jane, and though the drawings were not ultimately selected for publication due to technical limitations, Monty could not resist keeping them “for a bit” out of sheer fondness. [On a personal side note, I own the copy of Monty’s The Five Jars that once belonged to Christopher Robin Milne, yes, that Christopher Robin Milne. It is inscribed to him by his father, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. The notion of my book having once been propped up beside the original Eeyore brings me no end of wholly un-professorial delight.]

Perhaps the most whimsical of Monty’s memorial gestures came in the form of a privately printed fantasy entitled The Story of a Troll Hunt. Following their 1899 trip through Denmark and Sweden—part sightseeing, part scholarly vagabonding—McBryde created an illustrated letter in homage to their adventures. The tale, smartly drawn and absurdly delightful, today strikes the reader as an early draft of King Kong as reimagined by Dr. Seuss. In it, Monty, McBryde, and their mutual friend W.J. Stone suffer seasickness en route to Denmark (with McBryde humorously untouched by the ordeal); they cross at Esbjerg—rendered “Ebsjaerg” in McBryde’s playful orthography—before heading inland to Kolding, where the “Troll-Hunt” proper begins and the travelogue dissolves into a wildly fantastic adventure.

Monty later arranged for the piece to be printed and distributed to a small circle of friends. In the introduction, he inscribed it jointly to McBryde and Stone, citing Ephesians 2:19: “now no longer sojourners, but citizens.” Thirty-two years later, he would choose that very phrase for his own gravestone. [And, in another idiosyncratic, weirdly personal flight, I note that 2:19 is also the date of my own birth. Sorry. We antiquarians are an odd lot.]

And so the relationship between M.R. James and James McBryde must be understood not as one of equals, nor merely as collaborators, but in the mould of the time honoured and most intimate of human configurations: that of mentor and protégé. Monty, the careful, reticent, rule-bound man of letters, found in McB someone to guide, someone to admire him openly, someone to laugh with him when others merely deferred. McBryde, for his part, gained not just artistic support but intellectual affection, the kind that shields and sharpens a young talent.

It was not a romance. But it was love. Love, in that other and more potent sense, where admiration runs downstream into friendship and pools there—still, deep, and enduring.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: The Legacy of Charles Dickens’ ghosts