An elderly visitor to a certain famous university library is anxious to borrow a particular book, but someone – or something – seems determined to stop him getting his hands on it... The story starts at 00:01:25

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:28 The Tractate Middoth
00:47:38 Credits, thanks and further listening

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medievalist and scholar, and is probably the best known and most celebrated English ghost story writer of the 20th century, although he actually began composing supernatural tales in the late Victorian era, beginning with 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book' (1893). He was born in Kent, but spent most of his childhood in Suffolk, a county which features prominently in many of his stories, including 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'. Several of James's protagonists also reflect his own antiquarian interests, with academics and historians featuring regularly. James published four volumes of ghost stories in his lifetime: 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' (1904), 'More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' (1911), 'A Thin Ghost and Others' (1919) and 'A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories' (1925).

During a long academic career which encompassed several positions at King's College, Cambridge, and Eton College, M. R. James developed a tradition of reading his ghost stories aloud to a group of friends, most famously on Christmas eve, and the majority of his published stories were first heard in that setting.

The exact composition date of 'The Tractate Middoth' is uncertain; in James's own 1931 preface in which he gives the history of those stories whose origins he could recollect, it is stated only that it was one of his famous Christmas readings. However, as he does specifically mention that 'The Treasure of Abbott Thomas' was composed in 1904, and 'The Tractate Middoth' is the third story to follow that tale in sequence, we can tentatively date it from around Christmas 1907. It was later published in 1911 as part of James's second collection 'More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary'.

Note for returning listeners who think you may have heard this one before: you probably have; it was previously uploaded in 2020, but this version has been re-edited and re-mastered to clean up some slightly muddy or boxy audio, and fix some processing errors.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2020 & 2024.