Whilst I don’t want to undermine in any way Dickens’s influence on pretty much all literary genres, I beg to differ: I would not—and I won’t put him above MRJ, regarding his contribution to ghost lore.
Few writers have understood this connection better than James – though Dickens, assuredly, is among them. His first biographer, John Forster, noted that “among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost story”. A new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum, named after the writer’s short story of 1852 – To Be Read at Dusk: Dickens, ghosts and the supernatural – celebrates the great man’s connection to all things said to dwell beyond the veil. ©
For those who are as yet unaware of their activities, Nunkie Theatre Company is one man – Robert Lloyd Parry – who performs (“reads” is somehow not quite sufficient) a wide variety of James’s original tales, without so much as a semi-colon changed. It is a glimpse into how the author may first have introduced them to his audience. Lloyd Parry chooses small, atmospheric locations – rickety theatres, crumbling chapels, poorly heated stately homes – and the power of these century-old tales is communicated in a way that no adaptation, even the best of them, can ever hope to match: James’s words delivered authentically, by heart and by candlelight. The effect is mesmerizing, and marks out Lloyd Parry as one of the country’s most idiosyncratic and underrated performers. On Christmas Eve he performs, live over Zoom (an eerie invention in its own right, often reminiscent of a Victorian seance), James’s tale of cupidity, “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” – greatly to be recommended just as the dark season reaches its zenith. ©
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