SOURCE: Michalski, Robert. “The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Exchange in M. R. James's Ghost Stories.” Extrapolation 37, no. 1 (spring 1996): 46-62.

In the following essay, Michalski suggests that M. R. James' ghost stories reflect his concerns about contemporary society and politics.

If an interest in the supernatural or the occult betrays a fundamental nostalgia for times past and for superseded modes of thinking, M. R. James (1862-1936) is an anachronism even among writers interested in the supernatural.¹ Unlike other practitioners of the ghost story such as Henry James and Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James had little interest in the contemporary occult phenomena of spiritualism and psychic research (Briggs 124).² The plots of James's stories rely more on a reflection on the religious beliefs and superstitions of the past than on an engagement with the spiritual controversies of his own time.

Despite (and perhaps because of) their studied anachronism, James's ghost stories...