Richard Harris Barham: A Gothic Tale

Next on my bookshelf, and not even yet finished (far from it! it will entertain me a while yet) was my creaky old copy of The Ingoldsby Legends, a book once much better-known. I think I bought it subsequent to discovering its author. Back in 2008 I led a London Goth Walk about the City churches, kicking off at St Paul’s Cathedral, where, I had discovered, one mid-19^th-century canon had been, in his day, a famous writer of ghost stories. The urbane Revd Richard Harris Barham had grown up in Kent and incorporated elements of the county’s folklore into his stories and poems, published from 1837 onwards in Bentley’s Miscellany. They were extraordinarily popular, and carried on being popular when gathered into volumes of their own. Once upon a time, everyone knew the Ingoldsby Legends.

Barham beckoned his readers into a world slightly askew to our own: he wrote as Thomas Ingoldsby, and created an entire fictional family history of the Ingoldsbies which, very neatly, emerges only in fragments, centred on the hereditary seat of Tappington where the Barhams were based in real life. Villages and towns were real enough and even though, as the writer teasingly admitted, there was the odd anachronism in his renderings of what he insisted were genuine tales from the past, his pastiche fantasies were composed from convincing materials. The fun mainly comes from the fact that Barham is parodying the Gothic fiction of a generation or two before, and pulling off the feat of making it ridiculous and atmospheric at the same time: you can read Ingoldsby and both shudder and laugh several times in a page. For a 19^th-century priest Barham can be surprisingly risqué, as when he describes the denizens of Tappington Hall being turned out of their beds by mysterious nocturnal goings-on, and notes that a footman and a maid ‘cause a minor scandal/by appearing with a single candle’. And that brings us to his outrageous rhymes which must have caused him as much amusement as they do us.

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are more humorous than often credited, though in a different vein to Barham’s; he got going a few years earlier, and I wonder what connection there might have been between the two. We know that Barham owned a volume of Bentley’s Miscellany from 1840 which contained both one of his own ballads (‘Bloudie Jack of Shrewsbury’) and the first British appearance of two narratives of Poe’s – ‘The Duc de l’Omelette’ and, wonderfully, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, both illicitly printed by Richard Bentley without the slightest reference to their author. This book carries one of Barham’s bookplates, including his slightly weird coat of arms that incorporates a cardinal’s hat: at St Paul’s, he was one of the Cardinal Canons.

Not long after buying my copy, an adaptation of The Ingoldsby Legends appeared on Radio 4, written by Robin Brooks. It starts with a woman visiting Tappington Hall in search of the Revd Barham to find the source of his stories: the man who greets her takes her to look for him, while relating some of the tales he can remember. He is, of course, the author himself, and his teasing fits in well with the fun-poking quality of the work. But gradually over the course of ten episodes the tone darkens. Where is Barham’s family? Why is the church bare and empty so close to Christmas? What gave rise to his interest in ‘dismemberment and devilry’ and who is the woman? Mr Brooks noticed that there is one narrative in Ingoldsby which stands out strangely and uncomfortably. The other pieces are often silly – a ghost that steals trousers and an errant husband chased over a moor by a haunted grandfather clock – while remaining macabre and ghoulish. But ‘A Singular Passage in the Life of Henry Harris DD’ is different: alone among the several dozen pieces it has no leavening element of humour.

It relates the account of a clergyman who is called to the bedside of a gravely sick young woman, whose student fiancé has left for the University of Leyden, and who insists she is the victim of some devilry: twice she has been dragged in spirit to a mysterious room where two young men are carrying out occult rituals, and there she is made to participate in something she will not define any further than to express her shame. The good Dr Harris reflects that his own grandson is a student at Leyden and ponders whether he knows the mysterious fiancé. Well, you can work that out. No good comes of it all, and the story is told without any of the amusing atmospherics of the rest of the Legends: it is unrelievedly grim. It was also originally published not in Bentley’s but in Blackwood’s Magazine, somewhat earlier than the other stories, in 1831, before even Poe really got going in the genre.

In the radio adaptation, the woman knows that there’s something wrong with ‘A Singular Passage’, and wonders whether it is not told as a confession, a sideways penance for something the author has done in his youth. ‘This is your story, isn’t it?’ she accuses him, ‘You tell it from first hand’. ‘Not all stories are jokes’, he admits. She points out his sister’s death at the same age as the young woman in the tale, and other aspects of his background he might have preferred to keep quiet. This is of course just a fancy, like the Legends themselves: the story is not that far from Blackwood’s usual sensational fare, after all. But it piques our taste to speculate whether, like that other clerical teller of Gothic tales Montague Summers, Richard Harris Barham might not have had something to regret.