Aloof from the commonplace: reflections on the working notes of Robert Murray Gilchrist

By Sophia Adamowicz

One of the standout pieces of dialogue in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is uttered by Hector, a damaged yet passionate teacher in a Sheffield grammar school. Waxing lyrical about the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin, he explains:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours. [1]

Granted, Hector’s speech can be interpreted as a piece of rhetoric designed to stir the heartstrings of Posner, his gay student. But what he says is true. A historical text or piece of literature written before our time can resonate with us as strongly as one written by our contemporaries. It reminds us that, despite the huge shifts in culture, morality and style that take place over the years, we’re united by our emotions and experiences. Recently, I saw aspects of my own life reflected in a time-spotted mirror while in the Sheffield City Archives, where I was researching the little-known local writer, Robert Murray Gilchrist (1867-1917).

My affinity with Gilchrist was first sparked by hearing his life story rather than by reading his work. Like me, he grew up in Sheffield, but adored spending time in the Peak District. Eschewing a sensible career path, he quit his job as a cutler’s apprentice in his cousin’s company to become a full-time writer. I can’t say that I’ve followed exactly the same trajectory – my only connection with the Sheffield steel industry is that I have a ring made from the celebrated metal – but I chose to be self-employed partly because it gives me the freedom to fit my work around my writing. What appeals to me most about Gilchrist is that he was drawn to the bizarre, the melancholy, the Gothic. While the tone of his literary output mellowed over the years, his first collection of stories, The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances (Methuen and Co., 1894), was notably extravagant. The content and style of these stories alienated some of his contemporaries. One reviewer from the Glasgow Herald wrote, ‘They are weird and grim to the extent that the author seems to have been straining a little after his effects. […] If Mr Gilchrist were just a little less aloof from the common-place he might be more effective.’ [2] He didn’t get an entirely negative reception, however, with Arnold Bennett declaring himself a fan [3].

And there are signs that Gilchrist’s star is in the ascendant once again: a new edition of his stories, edited by Daniel Pietersen, has become part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, and Richard Wells released a chapbook of two stories in conjunction with his folk horror anthology, Damnable Tales, earlier this year. [4] It was through Wells that I came to hear of Gilchrist, and, after reading about the author’s life, I was inspired to place him at the centre of one of my own pieces of fiction (very much a work in progress at the moment!). I went on pilgrimage to my home town of Sheffield and the surrounding areas where Gilchrist spent his adult life – Eyam and Holmesfield. There, I went in search of the houses he’d lived in (more on one of those properties later), visited his grave in St Swithun’s churchyard, Holmesfield, and poured over the collection of Gilchrist material in the Sheffield City Archives.

Among the letters, diaries and handwritten manuscripts, one item stood out. Gilchrist’s commonplace book is bound with the cover of a volume of sermons from Hanover Chapel, Sheffield. A note in the front states that it was donated to the archives as the commonplace book of Edward Carpenter, an associate of Gilchrist. However, it is certainly by Gilchrist, as proven by both the handwriting and the content. As a record of the writer’s thoughts and ideas, it offers a valuable insight into his modus operandi. As well as being a collection of quotations and sayings that struck a chord with its owner, the commonplace book also contains original pieces of writing – often descriptions of settings – that Gilchrist later wove into full narratives. He was clearly fascinated with strange houses and local landscapes, and this interest shines through in his stories.

The first page of the book contains a draft of a passage from ‘Witch In-Grain,’ one of the tales edited in Pietersen’s new collection and printed by Wells in his chapbook. [5] The published version concerns the entwined fates of Michal, the protagonist’s sweetheart who has taken to reading ‘black-letter books’, and Mother Benmusk, an accused witch who seems to have cast a spell over the younger Michal. After being dipped, Benmusk tells the protagonist that he will find out the truth if he visits the nearby tomb of a king at midnight. Eager to test the validity of the crone’s words, he makes the journey:

I stole from the garden and through the first copse. The moon lay against a brazen curtain; little snail-like clouds were crawling underneath, and the horns of them pricked her face.

As I neared the lane to the waste, a most unholy dawn broke behind the fringes of pines, looping the boles with strings of grey-golden light. Surely a figure moved there? I ran. A curious motley and a noisy swarmed forth at me. Another moment, and I was in the midst of a host of weasels and hares and such-like creatures, all flying from the precincts of the tomb. I quaked with dread, and the hair of my flesh stood upright. But I thrust on, and parted the thorn boughs, and looked up at the mound. [6]

The earlier draft in Gilchrist’s commonplace book (entitled, ‘A visit to the Witches’ Meeting Place’) has many parallel sentences, but there are some notable differences. The setting is not the haunt of one ‘solitary figure’ – or two, as the short story later reveals – but the location of a ‘pageant’, where a coven of witches gathers. Significantly, he specifies that the action takes place on the banks of a river he would have known well: ‘The Sheaf ran like a river of oil, reflecting the alders and the steep banks’. [7]

One of the five rivers of Sheffield and the one that gives the city its name, the Sheaf flows north of Heeley, the area where Gilchrist lived with his family before he moved out to the Peak District in the autumn of 1892. While the ‘Witch In-Grain’ takes place in an unnamed village, the story has its roots in an environment much more familiar to both Gilchrist and myself. The witches meet beside the river that has its source in Totley, close to Holmesfield, where Gilchrist lived from 1895 until the end of his life, not far from where I attended junior school. Gilchrist transforms this stable of my childhood geography lessons into a sinister stage for the magical arts.

Gilchrist’s commonplace book is full of curious odds and ends. Take, for example, his description here, which is reminiscent of settings in ‘The Stone Dragon,’ ‘The Manuscript of Francis Shackerley,’ and ‘Dryas and Lady Greenleaf’. Gilchrist uses the adjective 'weird' in the title, as if predicting that his work will one day be considered foundational of the Weird fiction sub-genre:

A Weird Staircase

A door with opaque glass panels, which being opened showed ^disclosed^ a broad flight of oak stairs whose walls were surmounted by a frieze of grotesquely carved heads; – here a goblin’s; here a veiled woman’s which Morris touched as he passed – making the veil slide back and exhibit the skull of a child [,] white and ghostly; – here a frieze so wonderfully wrought that the prominent eyes seemed to sparkle and leer as they passed. [8]

Gilchrist’s imagery is unsettling. The head of the ‘veiled woman,’ reminiscent of the sculpture by Raffaelle Monti at Chatsworth House, is revealed to be that of a child. Was the infant dressed as a bride, or was the cadaver’s shroud mistaken for a vestal veil? No context is provided, so it is unclear what kind of a story Gilchrist planned on weaving around this startling image – if he even had a story in mind. Much of what appears in the commonplace book, particularly towards the start, is purely observational note-taking about a variety of unlinked subjects. He describes Filey as ‘rigid and inhospitable, cold virgin to Scarborough’s countess,’ gets angry about girls laughing on trains, notes that, ‘It is quite possible for a man without either trouble or pain to fall into such a state that he hates the sunlight and blue skies,’ and describes a ‘Procession of Cloud Animals’ that ‘marched in pairs bound for some Goblin-Ark.’ [9] These are working notes designed to inject atmosphere into a longer narrative.

The most captivating of the entries for me are the ones concerning tangible history. He writes twice about Highcliffe Nook, also known as Haycliff Nook - a property or collection of properties just outside Eyam, Derbyshire (the photograph opposite shows Highcliffe today). From his personal letters, I have gathered that he lived there with his life-long partner, George Garfitt, from the autumn of 1892 until mid-1895. The experience must have impressed him deeply. Not only did Gilchrist go on to create a fictional version of Eyam in Natives of Milton, but he also set at least one of the tales from The Stone Dragon around the area: ‘My Friend’ describes the stone circle that can still be seen today on Eyam Moor. The 1903 story, ‘Bubble Magic,’ also contains descriptions of Highcliffe’s immediate environs, lifted from the entries below. [10] Although one of the main characters in ‘Bubble Magic’ is the Duchess of Siena, the tale owes more to the grounds of Gilchrist’s Peakland house than it does to Tuscany, which he never visited.

I have yet to encounter Highcliffe Nook itself in Gilchrist’s work, though it may well be there – his output was staggering (he wrote twenty-two novels, six short story collections and other pieces besides) and very little of it is accessible now outside copyright libraries. [11] If I ever do come across it, or a fictionalised version of it, I’m sure I’ll recognise it from the vivid description he gives in the commonplace book:

The Nook in a November Twilight

Inexpressibly eerie lay the tall ^highly chevroned^ house, against the background of gaunt, leafless sycamores and sky of crystal-green-citron. The rippling ^mumbling^ of the two springs the only sound; the light in the house-place window the only sign of life. Frozen snow lay thinly on the ^over-^ grass-grown road [.] [12]

When I first read this entry, a ghostly hand reached out from the page and took mine. Only the day before, I had visited Highcliffe and spoken at length to the current owners of Jumber Cottage, one of the four residential buildings on site. I, too, had been captivated by the building, and wondered what it must have been like for Gilchrist to leave home at the age of twenty-five and set up house with his partner, George Garfitt. It was clear from the commonplace book entry that he was enthralled by the neo-Gothic spookiness of the place, which somewhat made up for the loneliness he felt out there, separated from his beloved sisters and mother. A second entry on Highcliffe sheds light on some of its earlier history and the geography of the area:

The Nook

A rough and sandy road runs along the ‘edge’, hollowing slightly at a place where two troughs stand behind an 18th-century building – three storeys high, which, out of living memory and when men and women worked bravely in the lead mines, was used as an inn. The water, although the altitude is at least 1,200 feet, prattles faintly, when, after passing under the roadway, it falls through the quaintly named Jumber – a long clough – to the place known, when book-learning was excellent, as the Athens of the Peak. [13]

After reading this entry, I went back to Highcliffe, where the springs can still be heard ‘prattling’ when the road is quiet. To my delight, the two troughs were still there, just across from the houses. As I often do when encountering old objects, I reached out to touch them.

Did the stonework hum with the energy of all those travellers and residents who drank from the troughs before me? I’m afraid to say they did not. There is a distance – a necessary one – between us and our forebears. We are not the same as those who came from a different time, who swam in a different milieu. The new edition of Gilchrist’s work comes with a note from the publishers, warning the reader that ‘there are […] uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today.’ [14] Although we shouldn’t allow these unpleasant features to ruin our enjoyment of work from the past, it is our responsibility as readers to be mindful of the differences between the world as it was then and as it is now. However much I may try to get into his head for the purposes of writing a story, I must remember: I am not Gilchrist; Gilchrist is not me. When Alan Bennett wrote of the hand that reaches through the text, he wasn’t talking of ghosts, but he may as well have been. That spectral touch reminds us of our common humanity as, together, we wade through the fog of history – but such uncanny and unexpected moments of connection could also hint at the otherness of the passions we hold close to our hearts.

[1] Alan Bennett, The History Boys (Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 56.

[2] Review of The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances from The Glasgow Herald, Saturday 3rd February, 1894, The British Newspaper Archive < https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000060/18940203/014/0004> [accessed 25/10/2021].

[3] For more on this topic, see Nicholas Redman, ‘Arnold Bennett and Robert Murray Gilchrist’ in The Arnold Bennett Society Newsletter 96, 5:11 (Spring, 2016). The article contains useful biographical information on Gilchrist, though some of the details are inaccurate. For instance, Redman strongly implies that Gilchrist moved out to the Peak District when he turned 21, whereas his correspondence suggests that he was 25 at the time of the move.

[4] I Am Stone: The Weird Tales of Robert Murray Gilchrist, ed. by Daniel Pietersen (The British Library, 2021). See also Pietersen’s talk on the collection, which can be found on his blog: ‘The Return – The Literary Resurrection of R. Murray Gilchrist’, Daniel Pietersen, <https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2021/10/08/the-return-the-literary-resurrection-of-r-murray-gilchrist/> [accessed 25.10.21]. The Gilchrist chapbook was printed as part of a Patreon package with Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology, selected and illustrated by Richard Wells (Unbound, 2021).

[5] As noted by Richard Wells in his recent printing of the text, ‘Witch In-Grain’ first appeared in the May 6 edition of the National Observer in 1893. It was re-printed the year after in The Stone Dragon. I argue in this blog that the description of the witches’ meeting place on the first page of the commonplace book precedes the story. Although no date is given for the entry, it seems to me to be the seed of a narrative that Gilchrist later develops, rather than a refinement or condensation of an existing story. A later entry in the commonplace book records comments on the tale by W.E Henley, editor of the National Observer from 1889-93: ‘A satisfactory conception, marking, according to Henley, a new departure’ (p. 13). It strikes me that Gilchrist wouldn’t record these compliments if they hadn’t been recently made, which dates that part of the book to around 1893. It is clear that Gilchrist used the commonplace book over a number of years, perhaps even from when he first started writing full time to the year of his death. One of the last entries can be dated to 1911.

[6] ‘Witch In-Grain’ in I Am Stone, p. 126.

[7] The Commonplace Book of Robert Murray Gilchrist, Sheffield City Archives, MD 3876, p. 1.

[8] Ibid., p. 12.

[9] Ibid., pp. 9-10, p. 13.

[10] ‘The place was full of life; ripples of mirth came from the streams that prattled across the path’; ‘We reached a narrow clough that sloped to the river’; ‘Panthea threw open the door and gazed eastward along the grass-grown road’. ‘Bubble Magic’ in I Am Stone, p. 155, p. 157 and p. 159.

[11] ‘Introduction’ in I Am Stone, p. 10.

[12] The Commonplace Book of Robert Murray Gilchrist, p. 13.

[13] Ibid., p. 17.

[14] ‘A Note from the Publisher’ in I Am Stone, p. 15.

Many thanks to the staff at the Sheffield City Archives for their assistance, the current owners of Jumber Cottage for telling me all about the history of their house and taking me for a walk around the stone circle, and Daniel Pietersen for helping me with a transcription query.

All photographs are my own.