Ghosts and Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James

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In July 1918, after thirty-six years as undergraduate, don, and finally Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, M. R. James—‘Monty’ to his many friends and admirers—formally accepted the Crown appointment of the Provostship of Eton. It was, as James himself admitted, ‘a great wrench’ to leave King’s; but against this was the emotional pull of Eton, where he had been a Colleger from L876 to 1882. ‘It is truly a pleasure,’ he told his friend Henry Jackson, ‘the prospect of being knit up so closely with Eton, which of all places holds perhaps the first place in my affections.’

For James, the Provostship of Eton represented a homecoming; for many of those he left behind in Cambridge it was a loss to the university that could not easily be filled, if at all. Edmund Gill Swain, a former Chaplain of King’s, spoke for many when he wrote: ‘it is the end, but for a few survivals, of King’s as we knew it, you being a real link with the past. Your intellectual and other antecedents belonged to the King’s of history, to enter into which has been the main pleasure and privilege of my Life.’

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