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I'm not 100% sure in my conscience if I should be numbering this into the main list, in that I read it for professional reasons (I've been asked to write a Foreword for a new edition) rather than for leisure interest; after all, when I recently read the proofs of a forthcoming book of mine it would have seemed silly to describe it here. Following a fair amount of humming and hahing, though, I decided my reading of T.G. Jackson's Six Ghost Stories was close enough to a leisure enterprise to qualify, so here we go.
Sir Thomas Graham Jackson was a prominent architect in the years to either side of the 19th century/20th century cusp. He did a lot of work for the Oxford colleges, as I discovered when I started googling him to see if I could find any juicy bits I could stick into the Foreword in the sort of casual, knowing fashion that might convince at least the more gullible members of the readership that the guy writing it had some clue as to what he was talking about. In the early 1970s I lived for a couple of unhappy years in Oxford; it was rather fun to find out that the author of the book I was reading had been the architect for several structures that I well remember, including the famous Bridge of Sighs.
According to Jackson's Preface, he initially wrote his six ghost stories merely for the amusement of friends and family; at a later stage, possibly after he received his Baronetcy in 1913, someone suggested they might be of interest to a wider audience, and so the book prosaically titled Six Ghost Stories came into being. It was originally published in 1919; the version I've been reading was the one issued in 1999 by Ash-Tree Press, with a long Foreword by Richard Dalby that for obvious reasons I'm not reading at the moment.
(An aside: The new edition is for charity, for the local history society in Wimbledon, where Sir Thomas lived. The society approached the Rodens at Ash-Tree Press, in British Columbia, and asked if by any chance the Word files still existed of their text, to save the expense and difficulty of pulling apart, scanning and OCRing a 1919 copy of the book. The Rodens apparently came back immediately with the files and free permission for their use. It's not all that often you come across publishers who're this nice.)
Anyway, the stories are enjoyable in a genial sort of a way -- which, I think, is exactly what Jackson was aiming for. He was clearly writing in emulation of M.R. James (we Foreword-writers know such literary arcana because Jackson says as much in his Preface), but disagreed with James in connection with one of the Master's rules for a good ghost story: that the ghost should be of malevolent intent. Indeed, it's hard to regard any of the ghosts in these tales as outright malevolent. There is one extremely malevolent spirit, but it's not in point of fact a ghost. Otherwise, a couple of the spectres are seeking no more than an equitable redress for the crimes committed against them; one is trying to fulfil a promise made centuries ago; one is trying to persuade a rather decent chap to put right the consequences of a shabby deed he semi-involuntarily committed; and one is a ghost whose motivations seem to be malicious pranksterism although it's rather hard to tell because the story in which she features, which I would guess to be Jackson's first experiment in the genre, is a bit muddled. (It actually works quite well nonetheless, possibly because ghosts don't have to obey things like plotting logic.)
If you're in search of the kind of ghost story that has you terrified to turn the lights off, then this is not the book for you. If, by contrast, the ghost stories you like to read are those ideally accompanied by a comfortable armchair, a crackling hearth, a pipe, slippers, a decanter of well aged port and a large, loving, hairy and probably rank-smelling dog, then T.G. Jackson's Six Ghost Stories is very likely indeed to fit the bill. For my own part, I'm delighted that the Wimbledon endeavour (maybe some other day I'll explain why a writer in New Jersey is producing a Foreword for a charity in Wimbledon) has caused me to read a very jolly little book I'd have been most unlikely otherwise to read.
Tomorrow I'm going to have the fun of finding out if the ideas I had while reading the book and the bits and pieces I've tracked down online today can be thrown together with sufficient serendipity to be called a Foreword. A 1500- or 2000-word or even quite a bit longer Foreword. There may be moments of white-lipped tension in store for all around me . . .
