S. Baring-Gould - A Book Of Ghosts

[dem]

Sabine Baring-Gould - A Book of Ghosts (Methuen, 1904)

Jean Bouchon
Pomps and Vanities
McAllister
The Leaden Ring
The Mother of Pansies
The Red-Haired Girl
A Professional Secret
H.P.
Glamr
Colonel Halifax's Ghost Story
The Merewigs
The Bold Venture
Mustapha
Little Joe Gander
A Dead Finger
Black Ram
A Happy Release
The 9:30 Up-Train
On the Leads
Aunt Joanna
The White Flag

Compulsively creative, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) was Squire of Lew Trenchard, author of almost a hundred books in various genres, and the composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers. I've never seen a copy of A Book Of Ghosts in my life, but thanks to such anthologists as Richard Dalby, Peter Haining and Hugh Lamb, have now collected most of the content in installments and you can download all of the stories for free at Horrormasters.

includes:

The Dead Finger: When it comes to leftie-haters, very few could outdo Dennis Wheatley, but the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould certainly gave it his best shot in this 1904 shocker. Who is to blame for the vampiric digit which persecutes our narrator so? As the undead himself explains - whinging paupers!

“Folk once called us Anarchists, Nihilists, Socialists, Levelers, now they call us the Influenza. The learned talk of microbes, and bacilli, and bacteria. Microbes, bacilli and bacteria be blowed! We are the influenza: we the social failures, the generally discontented, coming up out of our cheap and nasty graves in the form of physical disease.”

Had he been alive today he'd have likely landed a regular spot on LBC, but it's one of my all-time favourite vampire stories despite itself.

On The Leads: Instead of packing her off to a lunatic asylum, Aunt Eliza's family lock her away in the West Wing of Fernwood where her only means of escape is via a window and up onto the roof where she can scream and pretend to be a bat as much as she likes. One icy November, the inevitable happens .... Her ghost manifests itself in the form of a spectral arm, scrawny fingers working at the window latch ...

The Leaden Ring: The come-uppance of Julia Demant, eighteen-year-old heart-breaker who has already destroyed two young men by leading them on only to contemptuously reject their marriage proposals. As a result, suitor number one “married beneath himself” on the rebound and young James Hattersley blew his brains out. Old Aunt Elizabeth is scandalised by Julia’s indifference to the tragedy, her insistence on attending the ball to seek out victim number three, and launches into a tract about “the young lady of the present day” with whom she has no patience. One Baring-Gould has got this rant out of his system (he’s usually good for at least one per story: check out A Dead Finger), he treats us to a decent enough malevolent ghost story where-in Julia repeatedly experiences the sensation of putting a bullet through your head and dead James comes to claim her as his wife.

Jean Bouchon: The spectre of a French waiter who helped himself to the tips. When his grave is disturbed the coffin is discovered to be filled with coins. These are spent on commissioning an extremely flattering statue to the pilfering Bouchon. Certainly doesn't qualify as "horror", but an effective gentle ghost story.

[lobolover]

Interesting-are those the only ones worthwhile?

[unholyturnip]

This isn't actually all of his ghostly work. Sarob Press did a limited run of some of his remaining ghost stories in 1999 called 'Margery of Quether and Other Stories'. The title story is an effective vampire tale.

I have to profess, I'm not a huge fan of Baring-Gould. His ideas are cool, but he's not a gifted writer of prose. There isn't the eloquence of Henry James, nor the precision of M.R. James to truly pull these tales off to their most chilling capacity. He's one of the better antiquarian type horror writers though I think.

[ripper]

I first came across Baring-Gould when Richard Dalby included 'H.P.' in 'Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories.' To be honest, I just didn't like the story and it put me off reading anything else by him. However, after reading summaries of a few of his other tales on here, I decided to give Baring-Gould another go and downloaded an e-book version of 'A Book of Ghosts.' To my surprise, I am quite enjoying the stories I have read so far, particularly 'The Leaden Ring' and 'The Red-Haired Girl.' I rather enjoyed seeing cruel Julia get her just desserts in the former, while the latter read in parts like a true-life account, and the husband of the narrator is deliciously unfeeling, particularly in his reaction to the cook's fate.

[dem]

Mar 16, 2015 10:25:04 GMT ripper said:

I first came across Baring-Gould when Richard Dalby included 'H.P.' in 'Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories.' To be honest, I just didn't like the story and it put me off reading anything else by him. However, after reading summaries of a few of his other tales on here, I decided to give Baring-Gould another go and downloaded an e-book version of 'A Book of Ghosts.' To my surprise, I am quite enjoying the stories I have read so far, particularly 'The Leaden Ring' and 'The Red-Haired Girl.' I rather enjoyed seeing cruel Julia get her just desserts in the former, while the latter read in parts like a true-life account, and the husband of the narrator is deliciously unfeeling, particularly in his reaction to the cook's fate.

His A Dead Finger is a guilty pleasure of mine, so I was quite disappointed to find that many of his other supernatural tales are relatively sensible, routine ghost stories. And then very recently I read Rosemary Pardoe's capsule review of The Merewigs in the excellent A Graven Image & Other Essex Ghost Tales

"The Merewigs begins well with a good evocation of its Blackwater Estuary setting, and a humorous incident in which the writer and his companion get stuck on a mudbank for six hours: but soon it declines into a paranoid and sexist attack on the 'bluestockings' who dared to frequent the British Museum."

Who could resist?

And, to save anyone searching it out, here's The Merewigs in all its 'woman, know thy place' glory. Don't say you weren't warned.

Attachments:

baring-gould - the merewigs.pdf (101.88 KB)

[ripper]

I read 'The Meriwigs' a couple of days ago. Agreed with you, Dem; it starts off quite well and the situation of the narrator and his friend as they are caked in foul-smelling mud is amusing. Baring-Gould doesn't seem to think too highly of young girls who spend their time filling their heads with light novels. I chuckled at the narrator's comments to the meriwigs towards the end of the story. If you haven't read the tale, I do urge you to give it a go.

I am taking my reading of 'A Book of Ghosts' at a leisurely pace. I have broadly enjoyed the stories so far, but I don't think I could read it outright from cover to cover.

[dem]

Mar 19, 2015 9:49:06 GMT ripper said:

I am taking my reading of 'A Book of Ghosts' at a leisurely pace. I have broadly enjoyed the stories so far, but I don't think I could read it outright from cover to cover.

Same here. The stories seem to work better in multiple author anthologies. All twenty-odd of his supernatural works in one hit is maybe too much of *ahem* ..... a good thing.

I remember H.P. now (The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories), another of his proto-suffragette blasters! Is The Bold Venture a ship-in-a-bottle story? I don't have a copy to hand, but I'm certain SB-G is referred to in Ronald Pearsall's terrifying Night's Black Angels: The Forms and Faces of Victorian Cruelty as some sadistic school-flogger.

[ripper]

I haven't read 'The Bold Venture' yet, even though in my ebook copy it is the story after 'The Meriwigs.' I have just been choosing tales at random and interspersing them with others from different writers. Yes, too many Baribng-Goulds at a time is probably something to avoid :-D.

I wonder what Baring-Gould's sermons were like? One can well imagine that he didn't hail from the more progressive wing of the church :-D.

I think what annoyed me about 'H.P.' was that I was really enjoying Dalby's 'Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories;' most of the stories and authors were unknown to me at the time and suddenly I bumped straight into Baring-Gould and his tale just seemed to stick out like a sore thumb among the others in its tone. Most of the stories were serious and many quite grim, but I thought 'H.P.' was too out of place. Perhaps Dalby included it to lighten the collection a bit, but I read that story once and have never read it since.

[ripper]

Dem, 'The Bold Venture' does, indeed feature a model ship. Actually, there are no less than three model ships in the story. Jane, wife of fisherman Jonas, is intensely jealous of the love and attention that her mother-in-law, Betty, shows to Jane and Jonas's son, Peter. Betty carves a model ship for Peter, but before she can complete it, Peter is drowned when he falls into the sea after failing to go straight home after a visit to Betty. Betty finishes the model ship and it is buried in Peter's grave. Betty gets the blame for Peter's death from Jane, but soon Jane is pregnant and Betty moves in to help Jane. After the baby's birth, Betty again showers it with love and attention, even though Jane quickly makes Betty move back to her own house. Betty again carves a model ship for Jane's new son, who is named after Jonas, and wants to present him with it on his birthday. Crafty Jane buys her son a spiffing model frigate and Jonas proudly shows it to his grandmother, telling her that he doesn't want her crudely-made effort, the 'Bold Venture' of the title. Heartbroken, Betty is soon found dead by her son with her lovingly-made model ship in her hands. Jane catches cold at Betty's funeral and is also soon dead. And the 'Bold Venture' seeks its own revenge on the model ship that broke Betty's heart......

Not a bad story. It didn't go quite where I was expecting, but after reading a few of Baring-Gould's tales now, I am coming to expect the unexpected :-D.

[dem]

Ta, rip, that's the one. He seems to have had a thing for Betty's in peril.

David Murray Smith: "Then the bride put back her veil, and Betty, studying the white face, saw that this actually was not herself; it was her dead sister Letice"

Pomps and Vanities is another party political broadcast dressed up as a gentle ghost story, or so it seems to me. Following the death of their mother, identical twins Betty and Letice are farmed out to be raised by different guardians. Betty goes to live with Lady Lacy, a Devon-based liberal-minded Protestant who indulges the girl something rotten. Poor Letice gets lumbered with Miss Hannah Mountjoy of The Clapham Sect, depicted here as joyless, anti-everything stinkers who frowns upon music, sensationalist novels, and harmless worldly pleasures in general. As far as Miss Mountjoy is concerned, if you don't spend every second of your life singing the praises of the Lord, you deserve every torment the fiery pit can throw at you. Fortunately Letice catches scarlet fever, dies in her teens, and returns to earth just in time to vampirise her sister's pleasure during the coming out season. Only when she's had her fill of earth's "pomps and vanities" can she ascend to Heaven. Miss Mountjoy, meanwhile, is condemned to a lengthy spell in Purgatory, presumably for her opposition to the slave trade, social injustice, and the day's brutal penal system.

Should anyone wish to read it, a Book Of Ghosts is available to read on-line at Project Gutenberg (where you'll also find the rest of the illustrations)

David Murray Smith: Miss Julia Demant's bonnet is inexplicably blown off in The Leaden Ring

[ripper]

Well spotted about the Bettys, Dem. I had a quick look at that font of all knowledge and wisdom known as Wikipedia to see if anyone with that name was part of Baring-Gould's life, but I didn't see anything. He did have 15 children, though, which is pretty good going in anyone's book.

[dem]

Mar 22, 2015 8:59:19 GMT ripper said:

Well spotted about the Bettys, Dem. I had a quick look at that font of all knowledge and wisdom known as Wikipedia to see if anyone with that name was part of Baring-Gould's life, but I didn't see anything. He did have 15 children, though, which is pretty good going in anyone's book.

I don't always agree with E. F. Bleiler but he had A Book Of Ghosts banged to rights; "A rather dreary collection. Some stories present supernaturalism of a crude sort: others are too smugly clerical." Am half-way through Baring-Gould's longish vampire story Margery of Quether just now and he's still banging on about Nihilists, Commies, Radicals, Socialists, the youth of today and the innumerable deficiencies of womankind .....

[ripper]

Dem, I am not sure I could tackle anything from Baring-Gould that was much longer than the tales in 'A Book of Ghosts.' His rants can be quite distracting at times.