M. R. James(1862–1936)

Montague Rhodes James was born at Goodnestone Parsonage near Wingham in east Kent on 1 August 1862, the youngest of four children of the Reverend Herbert James, an Evangelical Anglican clergyman of Cambridge-Eton-Norfolk-clerical-gentry descent, and Mary Emily Horton, a daughter of a Royal Navy lieutenant. The household moved when Monty was three from Goodnestone to Great Livermere in Suffolk, where his father took up the Suffolk rectory that he and the family kept for the next forty-five years. The Suffolk-rectory childhood at Great Livermere is the geographical setting against which a substantial portion of his subsequent ghost-story work is set: the east-Anglian-rectory village with the small churchyard and the small private library and the fenland landscape of the Suffolk-Norfolk border country is the foundational landscape of M. R. James's literary imagination.

He was schooled at the small private preparatory school at Temple Grove, East Sheen from seven, won the King's Scholarship to Eton College at thirteen in 1876, took the Newcastle Scholarship at Eton (the Eton senior academic prize) in 1881 at eighteen, and went up to King's College Cambridge in October 1882 on the open Major Scholarship at the College. He took the Cambridge Classical Tripos First-Class Honours in 1885 at twenty-three, took the BA the same year, and was elected to a King's College fellowship on the strength of his Classical-Tripos performance in 1887 at twenty-five. He held the King's fellowship continuously from 1887 to 1905, served as Dean of King's from 1889 to 1900, and was elected Provost of King's in 1905 at forty-three. He held the King's Provostship for the next thirteen years to 1918.

The senior academic-medieval-manuscript-cataloguing work of his career ran in parallel with his Cambridge college-administrative duties across the 1887 to 1918 period. He worked through the Cambridge college-library manuscript collections of King's, St John's, Trinity, Corpus Christi, Pembroke, Peterhouse and Gonville-and-Caius, producing the catalogues (*The Manuscripts of King's College, Cambridge* 1895, *The Manuscripts of St John's College, Cambridge* 1913, *The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge* 1900-04 in four volumes, *The Manuscripts of Pembroke College, Cambridge* 1905, *The Manuscripts of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge* 1895, and the *Manuscripts of Eton College* 1895) that remain the standard reference catalogues for the medieval-manuscript collections of those colleges. The senior academic register of his career was, by the 1920s, the standard senior medievalist-and-palaeographer's reference work; he was a fellow of the British Academy from 1903 and received the Order of Merit in 1930.

The ghost-story side of his career came out of the Cambridge undergraduate-and-fellows' Christmas-reading tradition. He read the first-written ghost-story (*Canon Alberic's Scrap-book*) aloud to a circle of Cambridge friends at his King's College set of rooms on the Christmas Eve of 1893; the reception was sufficiently positive that he continued the practice across the next thirty years. The senior small ghost-stories were collected in four published volumes: *Ghost Stories of an Antiquary* (Edward Arnold, 1904), *More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary* (Arnold, 1911), *A Thin Ghost and Others* (Arnold, 1919) and *A Warning to the Curious* (Arnold, 1925). The thirty-eight published stories across the four volumes ran on a consistent foundational template that the modern ghost-story-criticism (H. P. Lovecraft's *Supernatural Horror in Literature* of 1927, the Penguin Edition introductions of the late twentieth century) treats as the foundational template of the modern English ghost-story tradition: the antiquarian or medievalist scholar protagonist, the east-Anglian or Continental-European setting, the disturbing manuscript or antiquarian-object discovery, the slow-building atmospheric intrusion of the supernatural element across the narrative, and the horror-of-cumulative-detail technique that the genre has continued to work on for a century since.

He left King's in 1918 at fifty-six on the unanimous Eton College Governing Body invitation to take the Provostship of Eton College (the senior administrative office of the school). He served as Provost of Eton from 1918 to 1936, the last eighteen years of his life. He never married, lived continuously at the Eton Provost's Lodging from 1918, was made a Companion of Honour in 1928 and received the Order of Merit in 1930. He died at the Eton Provost's Lodging on 12 June 1936, two months short of his seventy-fourth birthday, of complications from a stroke he had suffered three months earlier. He is buried at the Eton College Burial Ground at Datchet, on the Eton-Slough border. The James name in the English-side catalogue is the patronymic of James (the Latinate form of Jacob, carried into post-Conquest English Christian baptismal naming through the twelfth-century Reformation-of-the-Apostolic-Calendar revival of the Apostolic-Era James-the-Greater and James-the-Less cults); he carried the Goodnestone-and-Great-Livermere Evangelical-rectory-family variant of it through the medieval-manuscript-cataloguing work of his Cambridge and Eton career and through the foundation of the modern English ghost-story tradition.