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6

by Richard Holmes

 
 
 
 
 

The case of the Reverend
Richard Harris Barham, a minor

.canon of St Paul’s and the
_ pseudonymous author of the
once universally popular

lngoldsby Legends, is in every
respect a mosé?‘ singular affair.

The curious reader may pos-
sibly recall a tale told by M. R.
James entitled “The Stalls of
Barchester” in which an
apparently pious and exemplary
cleric is revealed in his private
diaries to have been the victim
of a series of appalling visita-
tions which lead to his eventual
des’truction_ Though Barham
was to hold, in real life, a
Divinity Lectureship and the
honorary position of Senior
Cardinal’s -stall, there can be
naturally no evidence that the
late Provost of Eton intended
anything like a personal
reference in his fiction. Nonethe-
less certain uncomfortable re-
semblances between the

' romance and the reality are not

altogether easy to shake off.
In the course of mv researches

 Saturday December 22 1973 '

nalism, contributing to John
Bull and Blackwo0d’s. In 1831
he was a founder member of the
Garrick Club, and soon his squat,
humorous figure, with its curi-
ous drooping left eyelid and
pale, almost white eyelashes,
was a regular feature of the
literary dining tables, along with
Hook, Sydney Smith, young Boz,
Cruickshank and Harrison Ains-
worth. In 1837, Bentley asked
him to contribute a comic series
to the newly founded “Miscel-
lan_\"", and the first issues saw
Oliver Twist running at the
front, and what were to become
the opening numbers of The
Ingoldsby Legend5—verse and
prose stories form “Tom In-
goldsby’s ” family chest—bring-
ing up the rear.

Barham’s existence, now com-
fortably established at Amen
Corner, seemed to be settled in
an unalterable rotundity of good
works, good humour and good
living. But mortality shadowed
him in the terrible, ineluctable
death of five of his beloved chil-
dren, until in 1840, on the loss

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lone pilgrim may still sip a port
at the Jackdaw at Danton and
meditate upon the C-ruickshanks.
l have walked in the graveyard
at Warehorne, where the west
wind moans across the Marsh
from Rye, and climbed the
shadowy timbers of Snargate
belfry_ where the smugglers
once stacked Dutch tobacco in
the eves. and in the failing after-
noon light heard the rattle of
ash leaves on the slates, and the
scuff of what I took to be sheep
against the chancel door.

But I first definitely began to
suspect something of the truth
on ‘examination in the British
Museum of the now very rare 3
volume definitive edition_ anno-
tated by Barham’s daughter
Fanny (Mrs Francis Bond), or
1894. It became clear from this
that many of the “Legends”.
especially the “Lays ” which
were lifted by Barham from the
Legenda Aureaa as a convenient
mode of attacking the monkish
wing of the 'I‘~ractez'-ians—“pa.le”
Pusey and the Newmanites—are
not essential to the collection,
and indeed disguise its true

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nave Deen continuauy and not
always agreeably reminded of

em,

The external facts of Bar-
ham’s life are, except for a num-
ber of odd lacunae, a charming
picture of the buoyant, club-
able Anglican life of Regency
and Early Victorian England.
Barham was born in the cathe-

dral city of Canterbury in
December, 1788, only son of
Alderman Barham, a local

worthy who lived a few yards
away from the Precint Gates at
61 Burgate Street. The Alder-
man was a great drinker of port,
and on his decease he weighed
27 stone and his front door had
to be especially widened for
the exit of his coffin. Of
B_arham’s mother, little was at
fl_I'St known except for contra-
dictory rumours of high spirits
and_low health.
Barham was sent to St Paul’s
School, Westminster, where he
successfully combined the roles
of inveterate hoaxer and head
boy, and then to Brasenose,
Oxford,-‘where he joined a crack
diuing"and debating club, the
Phoenix, and ran somewhat
wildly into debt and dissipation,
‘but survived to collect a_ degree
in 1811. Among his friends were

' Bentley, the future publisher,

and Book, the bohemian nove-
list. Back at Canterbury, he
came into the estate of Tapping-
ton Everard, was articled to an
attorney, and pursued a frolic-
some life among the theatrical
set, forming another club———the
Wigs-——where on at least one
occasion port and eloquence
degenerated into swords and
prejudice.

Then abruptly, at the age of
25, Barham reformed. He took
clerical orders, and moved to a

. series, of somnolent rural cura-
" cies at Ashford, Westwell, and

finally at Warehorne on’ the

very edge of the hills overlook?

' ing A Romney Marsh--that
“ recondite region ”, as he later
wrote, productive only of sheep,
eels, smuggling, witchcraft and
pestiferous mildews. He married
a local girl, kept a gun, a dog,
and a vegetable patch, and reso-
lutely bred children For four

"‘ years, between 1817 and 1821_

he lived in this remote seclusion,
keeping a diary, composing cer-
tain literary papers, and riding
between the stout Georgian
brick church of Warehorne on
the knoll, and the low, flint.
Early English chapel of Snar
gate in the misty depths of the
Marsh below, where, through
_. the genial plurality of the Angli-
can Establishment, he also
- occupied the incumbency as
Earson. Warehorne, it might
ave seemed, was the last out-
_post of the civilized world;
Snargate, with the baleful invi-
tation of its name, the first out-
post of an altogether different
region.

In Barham’s 34th year came
‘another abrupt transformation.
Through the unexpected inter-
vention ,-_of a friend in London,
he captiired a minor canonry at
St Paul’s, moved to Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, rose to an appointment
in the Chapel Royal, and made a
rapid path in gentlemanly jour-

V;-‘Z:

v_......-_-_ V- -_e ———.a -— V -

The Ingoldsby Legends how-
ever achieved a spectacular life
of their own. In the next half
century Bentley produced no
less than 88 separate editions;
the Popular Edition of 1881 sold
more than 60,000 copies on the
first day of publication, and by
1900 more than half a million
“Ingoldsby’s” were in circula-
tion. They became a favourite
with illustrators—Cruickshank,
Tenniel, Leech, and perhaps
finest of all, in 1907, Arthur
Rackham who released a cob-
webby thermal of witches and
goblins from their pages. One
poem, “ The Jackdaw of
Rheims”, became a classroom
classic, while the whole volume
received that imprzmatur of
good literature, an entry in the
Papal Index Librarian Prohibi-
torum.

With Pickwick, Ingoldsby _be-
came a byword for Victorian
amiability, the apogee of hearth-
side fun and Christmas good
cheer. Comparisons bounced
roisterously between Chaucer
and VV. S. Gilbert. and the virtu-
osity of the sprinting, cartwheel-
ing verse—,with its smart slang,
outrageous rhymes and riproar-
ing metres designed specifically
for parlour recitat:'on—was uni-
versally acclaimed. Moreover
the “Legends”’ were strictly,
or rather jovially moral in in-
tention, as Thomas Ingol
himself wrote (one almost forgot
the Rev B.) in the envoy to " The
Witches’ Frolic ”:

Don’t flirt with young ladies ;
don’t practise soft speeches ;
Avoid waltzes, quadrilles,
V pumps, silk hose, and
knee-breeches ;—
Frequent not grey Ruin_s——
shun riot and rcvelry,
-H_ocus Pocus, and confining,‘
and all sorts of devilry ;--
Don’t meddle with broomsticks,--
they’re Beelzebub's switches ;
Of cellars keep clear—they’re
the devil’s awn ditches ;
And beware of balls,
banqueting, brandy and-
witches!
Above all! don’! run after
block eyes!——lf you do,-
Depend on’r you’ll find what I
say will come true
Old Nick, some fine morning,
will ‘ hey after you ’ 1 ~

Only one early critic drew
back from the convivial glow
into the surrounding shadow:
how was it, asked Richard Hen-
gist Home in 1844, that Barham
seemed obsessed by certain
bestial themes which he “ syste-
matically ripped up for amuse-
ment?”; why was it that the
canon seemed sometimes deli-
berately “to gambol and slide
in crimson horror”? No one
wanted to know.

Public reputations are frail,
and fame is only one of the more
transient forms of visitation.
The house at Burgate Street no
longer stands, and no complete
edition of The Ingoldsby
Legends is currently in print,
though old ones may be found
brooding in coffined rows in the
darker corners of seaside
secondhand bookshops. The
Ingoldsby Club_ which once
junketed at the Freemason’s
Arms off Great Queen Street, is
long since defunct, though the

or "’baIll§¢l'Qu-I’/xy§-"1(yG'-“=a!_1B~“.'.El(lVe'l"j'§ ' ,-
forms a sort of hermetic inap or .
spiritual .

chart of Barham’s
geography. It is a haunted land-
scape,_ across which ,mainy grim
apparitions move. Moreover the
“Legends”, far from being an
anthology of Myth and Marvels
(Bent,ley’s, not Barham’s, re-
assuring subtitle) are of the
darkest kind of black comedy,
packed with obsessionally re-
peated acts of violence and
supernatural revenge, and
redolentwith a kind of succulent
bawdy,-_in which the pleasures
of feasting constantly substitute
for those of lovemaking. The
central stories, both prose and
yerse, dcontaigy a blil-and 0:
orture an iogra , an
furtively connect  gome of
the more curious entries in his
Diaries, and some of the for-
gotten details of the Rev
Barhiam’s life.

Barham’s Diaries, extant be-
tween 1803 and 1844, are filled
primarily with genealogical and
antiquarian notes, records of
after-dinner conversations-and
ghost stories. The fascination
with genealogy was the symptom
of a profound doubt about his
own identity. In later life, with
inonic branvado, he his tree
to ‘William FitzUrsg one of the
knights who murdered Becket at
Canterbury Cathedral; but the
real rootsofuncertaintyl close
in childhood, not saf y in
history. Inspection of Alder-
man Barham’s Will, and the obit.
uary columns of The Gentleman’s
Magazine, reveal that his father
sired not one but two children,
by different women, and neither
was immediately legitimate. The
first a girl, Sarah Bolden, died
after a long illness in 1798 aged
21. _ The sec9nd_,,l3_§:haxn-himself,
was}  cliilii-.hotIo£ a‘ Kenn, '
Harris," but of the A1derman’s
lI1:umble housekeeper, Elizabeth

ox.

Moreover Barham’s father
died when the boy was only six,
and he was removed from his
mother’s care (unsuitable rather
than unhealthy one suspects),
and fostered out to maiden aunts
called Dix. The effect of this
earl separation from his true
mo er, and the ap arent
banishment and eventual oss of
his elder half-sister Sarah, may
be imagnecl. _A Kentish autho-
rity (S. M. Ellis, 1917) says——
without realizing the signifi-
cance——that he found "Sara ”
together with Barham’s initials
scratched on a window at Bur-
gate House, a mute appeal. Or
perhaps an early incantation ?

Barham grew up with a sense
of banished or suppressed being.
a double identity, emphasized
by a crisis over his inheritance
(£8,000 of the estate was mis-
appropriated), and clearly ex-
pressed in thewild fluctuations
between the persona of the
Oxford buck and the rustic
cleric. All these themes duly
appeared in two early and long-
forgotten novels, Baldwin (a
Minerva Press blueback thriller
of 1819), and My Cousin Nicho-
las (1836, but largely drafted at
Warehorne), during that strange
but crucial period of self-exile
by Romney Marsh. Disinherit-

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patriclde and fratricide, a loved
one haunting her half-bro er,

even the first hint of demonic -

possession—-all are set forth in
shadowy, uncertain form. The
haunted Fortescue, from the
latter book, vividly recalls one
part of Barham’s youth :

The tales of (his mother), herself
a mine of legendary lore, had not,
even in his childhood, tended to
diminish his propensity to the
-sombre and the marvellous;
Fetches and Banshees, the warn-
ings of good angels and the shriek-
ing of bad ones, “black spirits
and white, blue spirits and grey ",
omens, prognostications, and pre-

. sentiments of death or desolation, _“
with all the mysterious machinery '

of an invisible world, formed no
slight portion of her aeed. The
very act that drove her andher
foster-child from
hearth, had been as plainly pre-
dicted to her as death-watches,
dreams and cizndle—snuffs could
shadow it forth. . . ._ 
By maturity, Barham’s- mind
had developed a deeply macabre
twist, which is resonant/‘
sick humour‘ of ‘his casually

1’  1 ,9. ' 19V5'3' 3501"‘
 lecting  early

gem reads, “On a Man with a
Remarkably Large Mouth ”:

Reader! tread lightly o’er this sad
For if he gripes you’i-e gone by G-d
Asked once if he liked children

(six altogether had died), " Yes, ’

Ma’am ”,. he replied, “ boiled
with greens”. He adored cats,
and -preferred to write after mid-
night with one perched, like
some familiar gargoyle, on his
shoulder. His daughter Fanny
was encouraged to treat them as
ople: one disguised as a baby,
eapt our of its cradle and
savaged an innocently cooing
Bentley; while his son Dalton
recalled that in Jacobean times
it would have brought them “in
disagreeable communication
with his Majesty's Witch Finder
General”. When" planning to
move house, Bai-ham an-
nounced: “Your mother . . .
is to be moved tomorrow, taking
care to preserve as much of the
earth about her roots as possible,
acrms the Churchyard into
Amen Corner, under a hot wall
with a southern aspect.” Of an
absent friend, Barham mused
that he was probably still alive
somewhere since “none of the

vergers have yet seen his ghost.

in the gloaming wandering
about the north aisle ”. It was
wit, but it had quicklime on it.

Barham was also strangely
fascinated by forensic matters.

ance, hoaxes, double identities, He was befriended by Sir

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'l'enniel’s illustration to the lesser-known

Richard Birnie, chief magistrate
of Bow Street, and the two cele-
brated “ runners" Ruthven and
Townshend. He attended the
trial of the Cato Street conspira-
tors in 1820, probably that of
Cephas Quested the Marsh
smuggler the following year, and
was conducted by Ruthven
round the still fresh scene of
the notorious Donatty stabbing
off Gray’s Inn Road in 1822. His
Diaries are packed with other
descriptions of weird cases of
suicides, mesmerism, hauntings,
houndings and visitations—-
many eventually transmuted
into the raw material of the
“Legends ”.

Barham’s first serious attempt
to grapple with the phantasma-
goria that occupied the dark

‘underside of his ‘mind, was a

fantastic ‘precursor of Edgar
Allen Poe’s tales, The Trance.
Conceived at Warehorne, later
published in Blackwood’s and
finally in The Legends, it was
inspired by a story ‘of Kentish
witchcraft and “ventriloquism ”
“Discovery of

with Barham’s own experience
(so he said) of the bedside con-
fession of an adolescent girl.
The Trancetells of a wild and
degenerate Oxford student
“Fredenick S—~"’ who lives a
double life and discovers the
satanic power of “summoning ”
the spirits of sleeping people.
While away studying in the Low
Countries, Frederick practises
on his innocent 17-year-old
lover, transports her, and forces
her to perform acts of horror
and “damning pollutions”.
Ultimately, all are destroyed,
except the Reverend narrator.
who is left appalled by his own
unspeakable discoveries. The
tale is brilliantly and intricately
unfolded, through several
frames of ironically bewildered

v narration and points eventually
' towards .

L. Stevenson’s Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde. With a
painful gesture of autobiogra-
phy, Barham eventually entitled
the story, A Singular Passage in
the Life of the La:te Henry
Harris, Doctor in Divinity. In
what -sense Barham himself
‘believed he had witnessed these

powers, one hesitates to
speculate.

He finally succeeded in
harnessing the doppel-giinger

theme in the Kentish “ Legend ”
of The Leech of Folkestone.
(Barham first used the word
“double-goer” in a letter of

"far more mysterious

Ingoldsby legend, ,
“ The Smuggler’s Leap ”.

1828, two years before the OED
first registers the appearance
of " double-ganger ” in English.)
This story provides the key to
the symbolic geography of
Ingoldsby. It tells of a country
gentleman, Master Marston, who
is being poisoned and bewitched‘
(wax doll and steel hatpins) by
a Folkestone doctor—the Leech.
Marston is met by a second, and
“ leech ”,
who appears with a travelling
fair on the edge of Romney
Marsh and offers to save him, if
he will accompany him into the
wilderness at the rising of the
moon. The black magic combat
for Marston’s life is a combat
between mainland and marsh-
land forces. Mainland repre-
sents civilization_ rationality,
domestic government (though
it is evil); while the Marsh re-
presents a dark, unconscious
region of disorder, hallucina-
non and drunken violent comedy
(which can be used for good).
The Marsh wins_ and Master
Marston is saved. It is the old
opposition between Warehorne
and Snargate_ but drawn large,
to express a whole spiritual
state. »
Barham’s sly, grimly
humorous introduction of the
Marsh, is _one of his justly
famous regional passages and is
still quoted in local literature:

Reader, were you ever bewitched P
——I do not mean by a ‘white
wench’s black eye ’, or by love-
potions imbibed from a ruby lip ;
—but_. were you ever really and
bona fide bewitched in the true
Matthew Hopkirfs sense of the
uzord ? . . . . The world, accord-
ing to the best geographers, is divi-
ded into Europe, Asia, Africa,
America, and Romney Marsh. In
this last named. and fifth quarter
of the globe, a Witch may still be
occasionally discovered in favour-
able ie, stormy, seasons, weather-
ing ungehess Point. in an eggshell,
or career-ing on her broomstick
over Dymchurch wall. . . .

The whole story, with its fine
Breughel like description of the
gingerbread fair at Aldington, is
a masterly combination of black
humour, folklore, and para-
psychology.

After the " Leech ” (1837, his
sixth “Legend ”), Barham was
able to break free from the
artificial, rather Pickwickian
formula of the “ Ingoldsby ”
household at Tappington, and
ran deliriously through the folk
mythology of Canterbury,
Dover, Reculver, Barham Down,
St R0mwold’s, Sandwich and

 

 

other Kentish locations. The old
symbolic oppositions and identi-
ties frequently occur (see
Smuggler’s Leap, or The
Brothers of Birchington, or The
Witches’ Frolic), but other
themes and obsessions were now
entangled. ‘

One, Nell Cook .' I returns to
the losses and humiliations of
Canterbury, with particular
poetic force and psychological
insight. It is a tale of the “ Dark
Entry”, a haunted gateway in
the Cathedral Precincts. Nell
is the servant and lover of a
libidinous Canon, a situation
with obvious autobiographic
undertones Her charms are
described with typical apprecia-
tion in terms of the delicacies of
her haute cuisine: “Her
manchets fine were quite divine.
her cakes were nicely browned "
&c. All goes sweetly until Nell
is jilted, when in vengeance she
kills her master and his new
lady, with a isoned warden
pie. “The Cane ’s head lies on
the bed-—his “Niece ’ lies on
the floor ! They are as dead as
any nail that is in any door.”
Nell’s punishment is to be
entombed under the flagstones
of the gateway, with a piece of
the fatal “ kissing-crust ” (viz the
“soft part of the pie or loaf
where it has touched another in
baking”, a fiendish resolution
of the culinary and erotic
metaphor). Nell’s murderous
ghost, with “ eyes askew ”, ever
after guards the Dark Entry at
dusk, to the terrorof the school-
boy narrator, for she breathes
death. By the end of the poem.
the “Dark Entry ” seems to
command a mass of childhood
symbolism, the gateway to.
memory, the gateway to sexual
experience, the gateway to the
Inferno.

But perhaps the wildest and
most horrifying of all Barham’s
visitations are those of dismem-
berment. They feature notably
in The Hand of Glory. St
Gengulphus, and Bloudie Jacke.
As a boy, Barham’s arm had been
crippled in a coach crash on the
way to London, and a surgeon
had threatened him with ampu-
tation, though in the event an
instrument of catgut and silver
rings was substituted. But the
memory, itself perhaps a meta-
phor of disintegration and
disinheritance, stayed with him.
In Bloudie Jacke (1840)—an
English bluebeard who murders
eight wives, the ninth called
Fanny—it reaches a grotesque
climax when the villain is him-

self dismantled by a vengeful
mob:

“ They have pulled off your arms
and your legs, Blondie Jacket
As the naughty boys serve the blue

flies ;
And they’ve torn from their,
sockets,
And put in their pockets
Your fingers and thumbs for a
prize !
And your eyes -'
A Doctor has bottled~—from Guy's.

judiciously annotating these
stories in her edition of 1894,

Fanny Barham observed that

many images were taken from
her father’s Bow Street interests,
particularly the ghastly Green-
acre murderinvolving a profes-
sional “ resurrecti onist “. They
lead ultimately to those two
most beloved figures of late
Victorian horror mythology,
Count Dracula and Jack the
Ripper. No doubt
blessed release that Barham
never lived to encounter these
last grim incarnations of his

private world, stalking the north .

aisle of St Paul’s or rising from
the mists around Old Romney.
At least I hope he did not,
though there is the question of
the ve late story, softly
entitled erry ]ervis’s Wig.

_Barham, and it would appear
his Ingoldsby Legends, for the
present lie at peace. Most of his
papers slumber in transatlantic
libraries, his volumes doze on
dusty shelves. But when I walk
under the bare woods of Alding-
ton Fright, and hear the rocks
calling in the gathering gloom,
it is difficult to dismiss from
my mind the small, hurrying
figure of that singular canon,
and the poor cursed Jackdaw
that the world half-remembers
him by:

“ He cursed him in sleeping, that
every night

He should dream of-the devil, and
wake in a fright ;

‘He cursed him in eating, he cursed

him in drinking,

.He cursed him. in coughing. in

sneezing, in winking ,'

He cursed him in sitting, in
standing, in lying ;

He cursed him in walking, in riding.
In flying,

He cursed him in living, he cursed
him in dying !—

Never was heard such a terrible
curse I I

But what_gave rise To no little

surprise,
Nobody seern'd one penny the
worse! ”

 
 
 
 

111, TfaVel,_ Bridge, p 9 . , _ . - ' p

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