M. R. James(1862–1936)

Montague Rhodes James was born at Goodnestone Parsonage in east Kent on 1 August 1862, youngest of four children of an Evangelical Anglican clergyman. The family moved when he was three to the Suffolk rectory at Great Livermere, whose fenland-rectory village and churchyard became the foundational landscape of his ghost-story imagination.

He won the King's Scholarship to Eton at thirteen, took the Newcastle Scholarship there at eighteen, and went up to King's College Cambridge in 1882. He took a first in the Classical Tripos in 1885, was elected to a King's fellowship in 1887, served as Dean of King's from 1889, and was elected Provost of King's in 1905, holding the office for thirteen years.

His scholarly work ran in parallel with the college administration. He catalogued the medieval-manuscript collections of King's, St John's, Trinity, Corpus Christi, Pembroke, Peterhouse and Gonville and Caius, producing the reference catalogues that remain the standard for those collections. He was a Fellow of the British Academy from 1903 and received the Order of Merit in 1930.

The ghost stories came out of the Cambridge Christmas-reading tradition. He read his first, Canon Alberic's Scrap-book, aloud to a circle of friends on Christmas Eve 1893, and continued the practice for thirty years. The thirty-eight stories were collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925), and ran on the template the genre has worked on for a century since: the antiquarian scholar, the disturbing manuscript or object, the slow atmospheric intrusion, the horror of cumulative detail.

He left King's in 1918 to take the Provostship of Eton College, which he held for the last eighteen years of his life. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1928 and received the Order of Merit in 1930, and died at the Eton Provost's Lodging on 12 June 1936, seventy-three years old. He is buried at the Eton College burial ground. The James name, the Christian patronymic of the apostle, he carried through the medieval-manuscript scholarship of his Cambridge and Eton career and the foundation of the modern English ghost-story tradition.