We are back from our punishing tour of (parts of) England and Wales. You will recall that we went to Anglesey (Ynys Môn) in June, then back for a rest at home. We set off on 20 July again to Glastonbury (of course) then down to Dorset where I read Thomas Hardy books and we explored standing stones and megaliths (of course, given Sheila was there), I went to Wareham to see inscriptions from the Celtic speaking community that survived the Anglo-Saxon invasion for a while. We had ice-cream at Lyme Regis, found fossils at Charmouth and chilled at Eype. Felcity's farm-shop at Morecombe Lake near Chideock became a firm fave.
Then back up to Clun in Shropshire to find (guess what?) more standing stones and a trip over the border to Powys where I chatted in Welsh to a lady in a cafe in Montgomery (that was unexpected but she said there is a small community of Welsh speakers there, which is probably the first since Welsh died out there around 150 years before).
Then back to Morecambe in Lancashire so I could see Hawkwind!
And then home.
The Haunted Dolls' House by M. R. James (1862–1936)
I've just recorded this story. My version is sponsored by Gavin Critchley and dedicated to his friend Victoria who loves dolls' houses! Maybe not so much after hearing this story...
Hear the story on Patreon:
"The Haunted Doll's House" was first published in the Empire Review in February 1923, then collected two years later in A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925), and again in the 1931 Collected Ghost Stories.
In 1921, Princess Marie Louise — a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and by then a fixture of British royal cultural life — fell into conversation with the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and conceived the idea of commissioning the perfect dolls' house as a gift to Queen Mary, in recognition of the Queen's role during the First World War and of her own well-known passion for miniature objects. It became a vast collaborative undertaking — the completed house was the product of 250 craftspeople and manufacturers, 60 artist-decorators, 700 artists, 600 writers and 500 donors, all coordinated by Marie Louise herself. Among the writers she recruited for its library of miniature books, alongside figures like Arthur Conan Doyle and A. A. Milne, was James.
For the library, James supplied a tiny manuscript — handwritten, bound in vellum by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, small enough to sit on a dolls'-house shelf. That 3.8 cm book is still held in the Royal Collection.
He was canny enough not to hand over the copyright. So once the royal commission had run its course, nothing stopped him publishing the story in ordinary format — which is how it ended up in the Empire Review a year later, and in his own collections after that.
The story begins with a transaction. Chittenden, an antiques dealer, sells Dillet a spectacular Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas. What Dillet has actually bought only becomes clear once he starts cataloguing it. The house is Strawberry Hill Gothic — a chapel, a stable block, a clock cupola, a chapel bell, furnishings and costume worked out down to the drawer of tiny clothes. Dillet, delighted, calls it "the quintessence of Horace Walpole."
Horace Walpole (1717–1797) built Strawberry Hill, his villa at Twickenham, from 1749 onward, remodelling it over the following decades into a playful, ornamental version of medieval architecture — pointed arches, battlements, and fan vaulting borrowed for atmosphere rather than function. The style became known as Strawberry Hill Gothic. In 1764 he published The Castle of Otranto, usually credited as the first Gothic novel, making him the founder of the genre in fiction as well as in architecture.
In the story, the bell chimes one o'clock in the night and the house starts performing a whole silent drama in its windows, ending with a lawyer arriving too late, a coffin whose pall stirs on its own, and a thing James can barely bring himself to name crossing a nursery floor toward two sleeping children and killing them.
By morning Dillet is wrecked enough to need a doctor, and it's away from home, on the coast, that he runs into Chittenden again — who, it turns out, has seen exactly the same performance. What they do next is very Jamesian: they turn detective. That late lawyer gives them a motive to chase — a will arriving too late implies a will that mattered, which implies an inheritance worth poisoning someone for.
Working from the model's own details, particularly the miniature church, they trace the house to a real one — Ilbridge House, near Coxham — and confirm it against the parish registers and the memorials in the actual church: Roger Milford, buried the 11th of September, 1757, aged 76; his two grandchildren, Roger and Elizabeth Merewether, aged 9 and 7, who a memorial records died on the night of the 12th, though they weren't buried until the 19th. The dates line up. The story the house performed has a paper trail.
This shift from revelation to investigation is interesting. The Gothic's oldest mode is confession: someone eventually tells you what happened, often in a manuscript or a deathbed account. James keeps that shape but pushes past it — his characters don't just receive the truth, they go and research it, against parish registers and grave dates, like men building a case.
That's the detective story's method grafted onto the ghost story's material, and the detective story as a distinct form only exists because of Poe, who split investigation off from the wider Gothic tradition he was himself writing in and gave it its own rules.
Whether James picked that up consciously is another matter — there's no evidence he was reading detective fiction with any particular interest. But by the time James was writing, the investigative posture — evidence, motive, corroboration — was in the water in a way it hadn't been for Walpole or Radcliffe, and it shows up here whether or not James ever thought of it as borrowed from anywhere.
The story cross-checked against parish records is James's own working method transplanted into fiction. As a medievalist and cataloguer by profession, he spent his career doing exactly this kind of archival digging — registers, manuscripts, church monuments — and clearly relished it. Dillet and Chittenden playing amateur antiquarians reads less like plot mechanics and more like James letting his characters do the part of his own job he liked best.
What is the frog-thing?
James is careful, and cagey, about naming it. The text calls it something that "might be described as a frog — the size of a man — but it had scanty white hair about its head." That's not a monster with a fixed identity; it's the nearest available comparison for something that shouldn't have a name at all. But the clues point one way: the coffin that stirs earlier that same night, the white hair, and a haunting built entirely on revenge logic, with only one aggrieved party in the whole drama — the old man poisoned in the first scene. Read this way, the frog-thing isn't a demon summoned from outside to punish the family. It's the old man himself, up out of his coffin, decayed and warped into something barely describable, doing to his murderers' children what his murderers did to him. That changes what kind of horror this is. A demon is an external force, morally uninvolved. A reanimated grandfather is worse and sadder — it's the crime's own victim, distorted by death into becoming an agent of further death.
Salt for the stew
It's worth being plain about what the children's death is doing here, rather than dressing it up as a meditation on inherited guilt. It isn't there to make a point about who deserves punishment — the family's guilty pair don't get off. A later memorial records that Elizabeth, the daughter who helped poison her own father, "did not long survive the loss of a parent... and of two amiable children," and that her husband James Merewether, the man behind the ghost-prank, was "overwhelmed by the visitation" and spent the rest of his life in "secluded yet elegant Retirement." Everyone in this family is destroyed by the end. The retribution is complete.
The children's deaths come to us live, staged, in the vision itself. James didn't need to kill the children on screen to make his moral logic land; the family's collapse would have been just as complete. He picked the children because a child's death is simply more upsetting than an adult's. We can reach for James making a Biblical point about the sins of the fathers, but my reading is that including the deaths of children is merely an emotional intensifier: salt for the stew.
We see this same move in the arms race of horrible crimes in detective fiction where the Golden Age wrote about jewel thefts, now in gritty modern detective novels it's always about multiple abuse of the most innocent. I am not too hard on James for this because he doesn't wallow in it, but horrors visited on children in fiction have to really struggle to prove that they are not simply there for the titillation of a reader.
Perhaps lurking behind this is the real horror – that evil is inescapable and you're just lucky if you managed to dodge most of it.
Bosch, and the Lovecraft connection
James has a taste for a very specific kind of image. What Mark Fisher identified as The Weird. The juxtaposition of things that do not normally occur together — wrongness of form — bodies and creatures that are almost recognisable and categorically aren't. The frog-thing belongs to a small family of these across his work: the crawling thing under the sheet in "Oh, Whistle," the bristling horror of "The Ash-tree," and — maybe the strangest — the ink-hole in "Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance," where a hand-drawn plan of a maze inexplicably "seemed to go not only through the paper, but through the table on which it lay," down "still down, even into infinite depths," with a burnt-faced creature climbing up toward the viewer. It shares exactly the frog-thing's logic: an ordinary object quietly stops obeying the rules of its category, and something climbs or crawls out of the gap.
There's something pictorial about how James stages these — a single grotesque detail glimpsed against an otherwise ordinary domestic or scholarly setting, while the rest of the scene continues as if nothing has changed. It isn't far from a Bosch panel: the ordinary and the monstrous sharing a frame with no boundary between them, so the eye slides from a nursery, or a plan on a library table, into something that shouldn't share the same picture.
(Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) was a Netherlandish painter working in 's-Hertogenbosch, best known for crowded, fantastical panels — most famously The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510) — in which ordinary domestic and pastoral scenes sit alongside grotesque hybrid creatures, tortures, and impossible transformations, all rendered with the same flat, matter-of-fact clarity as the everyday details around them.)
As is well known, H.P. Lovecraft praised James in his 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," singling out "Count Magnus" and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," and described him as "gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life." James made Lovecraft's list of the genre's "modern masters," alongside Machen, Blackwood, and Dunsany. The admiration only ran one way — James in his letters is disparaging of Lovecraft whom he had hardly heard of, but the affinity is traceable to exactly this kind of weird image of something 'that should not be.' We might even call it unspeakable, or unsprachlich, but James's thing that "might be described as a frog" and a hole in a hand-drawn plan going down into infinite depths are very close in nature to the weird dholes, ghouls and colours out of space that Lovecraft wrote of.
What I've Been Reading This Summer
In June in Anglesey, I started my Victorian-Novels-About-Rural-England with Middlemarch by George Eliot, which I loved, then when we were in Dorset, appropriately moved on to Far From the Madding Crowd, which I couldn't put down. From there I went to Jude the Obscure, which crushed me, and I vowed never to read it again, though I still couldn't put it down while. Jude, mate, what were you thinking – you dreamer!
Before I started the Victorian run, I'd finished Tom Cox's The Villager, which broke my heart with beauty and grief. Parts of it, I couldn't read. I had to put it down and walk away and leave it till the next day as the sense of loss in it was so deep. Loss of environment, landscape, community, people, friendship, art, time. A great book.
Once I was done with Jude, I picked up Grady Hendrix's Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, found by chance in an old red phone box in Kington, Herefordshire, that's been turned into a book exchange. A pristine hardback, already read and left for the next person. I'd enjoyed his Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, and this one has the same knack for capturing a particular time and place, in this case the American South, with plenty of social commentary and humour alongside the horror.
We also stopped in Shrewsbury, where I called into the Left for Dead bookshop on Wyle Cop and had a good chat with the owner, as I always do (about books and this time Staffordshire Bull Terriers). That's where I picked up a novel version of The Wicker Man, which is next on the list once I've finished the Grady Hendrix and Tom Doyle's Running Up That Hill, his biography of Kate Bush, also picked up in Shrewsbury. That Kate, her music has been a soundtrack.
I am not sure she and Hawkwind like each other's music, but maybe they do?
From the Shadows
We spent a week in Clun this August, deep in the Shropshire Hills — a lovely, slightly alternative, arty little place tucked into the border country. I'd actually been through in April too, walking Offa's Dyke up as far as the town, and saw a flyer for something called the Clun Green Man. We were back home in Cumbria by the time it happened, and by August, when we finally had a proper week there, it had already come and gone for the year. Story of my life — always a season out of step with the folklore.
Worth knowing about for next time, though, because it's a good one. Each May, on the old packhorse bridge at Clun, the Green Man comes down from the hill by the church — crowned with leaves and, in this version, antlered like a stag. From the other bank approaches the Frost Queen, the lingering cold made flesh. Before the watching village, they enact a ritual struggle: if the Frost Queen wins, summer stays away from the Clun Valley for another year; if the Green Man prevails, warmth and growth take hold of the hills.
The Green Man is usually just fertility and vegetation — the woods given a face — but Clun's version makes him stranger and more local by giving him antlers, as if he's not only the spirit of the leaves but of the deer and wild things in the surrounding hills too. Once he's won, he and the May Queen lead a procession up to the castle grounds, sealing the bargain that summer's back for another year.
I'll be timing it properly next time.
The close
Check out the website with the functioning story search archive.
Right then. Onward to September. See you there.
Tony.
