J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Mr. Justice Harbottle: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis

Among the very last of Le Fanu’s supernatural works—certainly his final great one—is this eerie reworking, or perhaps hazy prequel, to "Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street." It is a fitting conclusion to his career, not only because it encapsulates many of his favorite themes and motifs, but because it represents his first deep, psychological excavation of one of his most chilling tropes: the malevolently carnal aristocrat.

While Le Fanu had explored depraved noblemen before, this tale gives us a villain who is neither tragic nor tormented, but smug, self-satisfied, and decadently cruel.

There is, of course, the far longer and more involved novella "The Haunted Baronet"—itself an elaboration of "Sir Robert Ardagh"—but that narrative belongs to a different category altogether. Characters like Ardagh, the Haunted Baronet, Sir Dominick, the Dead Sexton, Ultor de Lacy, and even Schalken, are all part of a distinct trope within Le Fanu’s Gothic universe: the ambitious seeker or aspirant who, driven by desperation or arrogance, makes a pact with dark forces. These are Faustian figures, modeled after the likes of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s scholar, Washington Irving’s Tom Walker, or Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown—men whose fall stems from striving too high, from wanting too much.

II.

But the satin-swaddled villains that populate so much of Le Fanu’s fiction are not striving men. They are not lean, impoverished youths driven by dreams or ambition. To paraphrase Breaking Bad, “They are not in danger; they are the danger.” A man opens his door and expects evil to enter from without—but in these stories, evil is already seated in the parlor, smirking from beneath a wine-stained cravat.

These men are not drawn into wickedness by temptation or need; they are its originators. They don’t flirt with evil—they marry it. That distinction is what makes them so viscerally disturbing. Unlike the tormented, spiritually besieged characters in "Schalken the Painter," "Ultor de Lacy," or "Green Tea"—who suffer under external, possibly infernal, forces—the malevolently carnal aristocrat is not the puppet of a demon. He is the demon, clothed in velvet, perfumed with port. And unlike the bumbling ne’er-do-wells in stories like "The Dead Sexton," "Dickon the Devil," or "The Drunkard’s Dream," these men are not merely corrupt or foolish.

They are willfully evil—intellectually keen, culturally refined, and morally bankrupt. We find this archetype haunting stories like "Lough Guir," "The Ghost of a Hand," "The Tiled House," "Squire Toby’s Will," "Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," and others. They emerge as one of Le Fanu’s most potent and frightening creations—not because they traffic with the supernatural, but because they don’t need to. Their evil is entirely human.

III.

These figures tend to remain spectral presences in the narratives: glimpsed only in sinister paintings, suggested by disembodied hands, inferred through suspicious noises in the walls, verminous rats, secondhand reports, or fleeting visions. Yet their influence is oppressive, their presence unmistakable. They are men whose bodies reflect the moral corruption within: pale, puffy, and bloated from lives of indulgence; skin yellowed or purpled by alcohol; limbs swollen with gout; faces slack with sensuality and cynicism.

Their appearances are deliberately grotesque—a nightmarish exaggeration of aristocratic excess and degeneracy. They also have a signature look: a red satin dressing gown embroidered with florid designs, a velvet nightcap worn over a bald pate shaved for the wearing of wigs, and an overlong cravat tied loosely about the neck—sometimes suspiciously concealing a terrible wound or mark of violence. They are the walking corpses of an outdated social order, sustained by privilege and entitlement, unaware or unconcerned with the horror they radiate. And always, they exhibit a bizarre comfort around others—an unsettling, intrusive intimacy: they are too relaxed, too at ease, like someone entertaining guests while dressed in what amounts to an 18th-century version of an open bathrobe.

Le Fanu uses these characters to skewer the grotesqueries of aristocratic power. They are both caricatures and nightmares—grotesque symbols of indulgence, corruption, and unchecked power. Through them, Le Fanu gives voice to a political discomfort that haunted him as a conservative Irish Protestant watching the collapse of the old social contract: a world in which the powerful once had obligations to the powerless, but had abandoned them in favor of indulgence, predation, and self-worship.

IV.

The wicked Judge Horrocks of "Aungier Street"—later reimagined and renamed in "Mr. Justice Harbottle"—is perhaps the most fully realized of this type. Le Fanu clearly modeled him after two real-life tyrants who loomed large in the historical memory of Britain and Ireland: the infamous “hanging judges,” Sir George Jeffreys and Sir John Toler. Jeffreys presided during the reign of James II—a period Le Fanu returned to repeatedly, fascinated by its religious conflicts and authoritarian excesses. Toler, an Irishman, scandalized his homeland during the late 18th and early 19th centuries with his brutality, corruption, and vulgar lifestyle.

Between them, Jeffreys and Toler form a grotesque composite that closely resembles Horrocks: Toler was physically repulsive, morbidly obese with a blotchy complexion and sagging jowls, while Jeffreys was infamous for his gleeful cruelty, his mocking smile betraying shameful appetites and private vices. Both men were emblematic of judicial sadism—the abuse of power for personal pleasure, the transformation of the courtroom into a theater of cruelty.

Le Fanu’s Horrocks is this legacy incarnate: bloated, lecherous, and pitiless. He is not merely a ghost, but a symbol of lingering injustice and moral rot. When Le Fanu resurrected Horrocks in "Mr. Justice Harbottle," he made a fascinating narrative pivot: instead of focusing solely on the hauntings the judge causes after death, he asks—what if the ghost was haunted before he became a haunter? What if the tyrant was judged before he could rise to judge again? And so the story opens with a spectral vision of the already-dead Harbottle, eerily echoing his appearance in "Aungier Street."

But from there, the tale turns inward, borrowing its deeper psychological structure not only from earlier Gothic hauntings, but from one of Le Fanu’s most overlooked tales: "The Drunkard’s Dream." In that story, a sinful man glimpses a vivid, punitive vision of the afterlife as a warning. But unlike the drunkard, Harbottle is not given this vision as a second chance. His is not a dream of repentance—it is a foretaste of damnation. He is not called to change; he is simply told what awaits. And in Le Fanu’s bleak, merciless cosmos, that is justice. No escape, no redemption. Only judgment, long overdue.

SUMMARY

THE JUDGE’S HOUSE

The story begins with a strange story told to the narrator by a sober, elderly business acquaintance who had suddenly decided to change his rooms. He had lived, up to this point, in a large, old house in Westminster, London, and although it was gloomy and dark, he had had no concerns whatsoever with the atmosphere, as it was affordable, and he was not imaginative. One night, however, he was reading late at night when the clock struck one and all of a sudden, the locked door to his study opened up and two men soundlessly crossed the floor in front of his bed, and passed into the sitting room on the other side (again, through a locked door).

The first was a swarthy, dark-eyed, lean man dressed in black mourning clothes from the mid-18th century (100 years earlier to this setting), with a sinister expression. Behind him trudges a stout, elderly man in an embroidered dressing gown, carrying a length of rope. His face is tremendously ugly and wicked-looking, and worse yet, it has the rigid, staring appearance of a corpse. Their steps are silent, but the man watching them feels their vibration. Horrified, he gets out of bed to check the doors: they are both locked, and he decides to hunt down new rooms that morning.

Fascinated, the narrator writes to a scholar friend of his whom he suspects may be familiar with the ghosts’ originals. His friend excitedly reports that he knows both the house described and the two men seen walking its floors after death: the man in the dressing gown with the villainous face was once an infamous hanging judge and libertine who suddenly hanged himself in his house in 1748. The death was extremely sensational and attracted widespread attention for the paranormal activity said to have lead up to and followed his death.

There are currently two extremely strong narratives written about the case. The more scientific (and seemingly more boring and theoretical) had once been in the possession of the paranormal psychologist Martin Hesselius, but had been lost shortly after he leant it to a friend. The other report – more literary and speculative in nature – still exists, and it is this which the narrator proceeds to relate.

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST JUSTICE HARBOTTLE

Mr. Justice Harbottle lived in a gloomy brick building in Westminster, whose rooms were paneled with heavy wainscotting, and whose central feature was a massive balustraded staircase. He was considered a vulgar, brutal tyrant: well-known for his mistresses, orgies, and wild parties, and one of the most corrupt jurists in Britain. He scorned any legal advice from scholars, colleagues, and juries, making decisions based on personal and political bias, and handing down death sentences for petty crimes without concern for justice or humanity.

One evening in 1746 he was walking home from court when he overtakes a strange, bent old man in a green cloak. The stranger asks him if he knows the way to Judge Harbottle’s, because he has important confidential information to share. The Judge is both tantalized and suspicious, so he introduces himself and guides him to his house and ushers him into his study. There, the stranger – who calls himself Hugh Peters – warns him of a conspiracy to undermine his career: a secret cabal of his political enemies (Tories and Jacobites) have begun meeting with the objective of monitoring his court decisions for corruption, calling themselves the “High Court of Appeal,” and specifically interested in avenging injustices which Harbottle had committed against them.

They are, Peters says, taking particular interest in the case of a grocer named Lewis Pyneweck who has been arrested for forgery. This seems to worry Harbottle. He asks Peters for names, but Peters is still working that out (he claims to have been informed by one of their number who is himself putting together a roster). Harbottle threatens Peters that if he is up to any tricks, Harbottle will ruin his life, but all in all seems impressed that he has uncovered what his naturally paranoid mind seemed to suspect.

Peters departs, and as he does, Harbottle catches a glimpse of his face for the first time: it is deathly white and unwholesome. He shakes this off and rushes out into his lobby where his whole house is thundering with a raccous orgy being held by his friends and supporters. Among them is his lover and ostensible housekeeper, the curvaceous Mrs. --------, who is the prisoner Pyneweck’s lawful wife. Harbottle had stolen her away from Pyneweck at a time when their relationship was on the rocks, and although he is already a notorious cad, if it gets out that he hanged his lover’s husband (which he is fully planning to do) it would be the nail in his professional coffin.

Concerned, Harbottle calls one of his servants down from the party and has him chase Peters down with the hope of finding where he lives and subsequently more about him. The servant does find the old man in the green cloak, but almost immediately after he agrees to let the footman escort him, Peters distracts him and beats him over the head with his cane before running into the dark. Harbottle is seemingly pleased to have learned this, as his paranoia is doubly satisfied: there still must be a secret cabal, AND the ashen-faced Hugh Peters was nothing more than a spy and a thug. He is still disturbed by one thing, however: upon further consideration, Hugh Peters was a dead ringer for Lewis Pyneweck – only with a bloodless face – and although he at first considers that it may have been Pyneweck in stage makeup, this is impossible since the man is in prison.

He calls to his housekeeper who enters his study in a tight-fitting dress and ribbons, and immediately starts to caress his gouty ears. Apparently she has just received a letter from Pyneweck asking her to send him money to hire a lawyer to defend him. Flirtatiously, she teases that she hopes the Judge will find a reason to let Pyneweck off easily, but her lustiness is frozen over in horror when Harbottle announces that he has every intention of hanging him. Harbottle is offended that Pyneweck would solicit anything from her, and delights in telling his mistress that her husband has no chance at acquittal. She is surprised and frightened to hear this: she hadn’t thought of him for some time, and her feelings are more tender than she expected. They have a young daughter together, who thinks that her father is dead, and Mrs. Pyneweck wonders how she’ll face the girl.

A SUBPOENA FROM A DEAD MAN

Harbottle is true to his word: Pyneweck and six others are hanged for a variety of crimes. Mrs. Pyneweck is stunned and heartbroken, and Harbottle is delighted: he has spurned the threats of the “High Court of Appeals” cabal, asserted his mastery over Mrs. Pyneweck, and removed an inconvenient man from his life. Shortly thereafter, he is at the Old Bailey swearing in another jury when the crier delivers a letter to him. It was sent over by a man in the gallery – a lean, swarthy-faced man dressed all in mourning:

“That Judge descried, to his amazement, the features of Lewis Pyneweck. He had the usual faint thin-lipped smile; and with his blue chin raised in air, and as it seemed quite unconscious of the distinguished notice he has attracted, he was stretching his low cravat with his crooked fingers, while he slowly turned his head from side to side--a process which enabled the Judge to see distinctly a stripe of swollen blue round his neck, which indicated, he thought, the grip of the rope.”

The figure disappears into the crowd and cannot be found by the bailiffs when Harbottle demands they bring him forward. He finishes swearing in the jury but appears to be in a confused and worried daze. Afterward it is said, as the jury considers the case they are hearing, that he looks as though “he would not have given sixpence to see the prisoner hanged.” In the privacy of his quarters he reads the letter. It is a subpoena for him to appear before “The High Court of Appeal” to answer for the “murder” of Lewis Pyneweck, which will sit on February the 10th. It is signed by Caleb Searcher, the Officer of the Crown Solicitor for the Kingdom of Life and Death.

At first Harbottle is enranged, then disturbed. He asks Mrs. Pyneweck if her late husband ever had a brother (who, he supposes, could have posed as him at the Old Bailey). At first she becomes hysterical at the mention of her husband, but eventually confirms that he has no living brother. Harbottle’s mood is very dark and concerned: it was now the 9th of the month and he eagerly looks forward to the 11th and the end of this foolishness.

[At this point, the narrator adds an intriguing footnote: the letter from Caleb Searcher was never found in Harbottle’s papers, although a supposed “copy” of it – one written in his own hand was indeed found after his death. The narrator wonders whether this was just a copy, whether it was written by a ghostly doppelganger, or whether he wrote it to himself in a delirium of guilt-ridden psychosis?]

ON TRIAL IN HELL’S COURTROOM

On the following evening – February 10, 1748 – the Judge is sitting in a carriage preparing to attend the Drury Lane theater with two of his jurist colleagues. He is tired of waiting for them and leans back in the coach, closing his eyes. He hears two men open the doors and slip inside, and he assumes that his companions have arrived. The coach rolls forward without compelling him to open his eyes, and it strikes him as odd that his friends are so grim and silent. Suddenly, they lurch forward and grab him; he opens his eyes and is shocked to see two men dressed as Bow Street Runners (18th century London policemen), shoving pistols in his ribs. He swears at them in rage and pulls the cord to stop the coach. As it rolls to a stop, he looks out the window and is stunned to see that they are no longer in London:

“…under a broad moonlight, he saw a black moor stretching lifelessly from right to left, with rotting trees, pointing fantastic branches in the air, standing here and there in groups, as if they held up their arms and twigs like fingers, in horrible glee at the Judge's coming.”

A footman comes to the door and looks in at him. Harbottle is horrified to recognize the sunken features of a former servant of his whom he had fired in a rage, and then sent to prison for supposedly stealing a spoon. The man had died there of typhus. Harbottle is stunned speechless, and the coach rolls onward.

After a while, they paused in the midst of the desolate moor, and Harbottle gathers that he is supposed to look out and see something. He does: a monstrously large, three-legged gallows with thirty-some rotting, skeletal remains swinging from the three crossbeams, and bones beginning to pile on the ground below. A leering, cartoonishly deformed hangman perches atop the gallows smoking a pipe. Despite his loose-hanging skin he bears an eerie resemblance to Pyneweck, and delightfully flourishes a new rope in the air while skipping along the crossbeam in a macabre dance while ravens croak overhead. Harbottle is horrified. The coach proceeds, and suddenly turns the corner and enters the courtyard of an immense, white building.

The guards hustle Harbottle down a dark, stony corridor which seems to be underground, past gigantic, bony soldiers with muskets, who grind their teeth at him. In a flash he finds himself dragged down a hallway and into a prisoner’s docket facing a courtroom filled with busy lawyers and clerks urgently working on briefs, while a monstrous judge in scarlet robes – Chief-Justice Twofold – faced him. As he grows used to the light, he realizes that Twofold is an exact caricature of himself, but twice as large – the same roaring voice, the same purple, sneering face – but grotesquely dilated. The whole room is enormous and dark and sullen: “If this was the High Court of Appeal, which never rose day or night, it might account for the pale and jaded aspect of everybody in it. An air of indescribable gloom hung upon the pallid features of all the people here; no one ever smiled; all looked more or less secretly suffering.”

He is charged with murder and Pyneweck is on hand to testify. Harbottle is asked to give his plea, but instead, he upbraids the terrifying Justice Twofold and objects that the court is illegal and illegitimate, but he fails to initiate a logical debate: “[in response to this] the chief-justice laughed suddenly, and every one in court, turning round upon the prisoner, laughed also, till the laugh grew and roared all round like a deafening acclamation; he saw nothing but glittering eyes and teeth, a universal stare and grin; but though all the voices laughed, not a single face of all those that concentrated their gaze upon him looked like a laughing face.”

Harbottle has no choice but to plea: Not Guilty. The trial commences, and it is immediately obvious what the outcome will be: Twofold bullies, coaches, and coaxes the jury – not unlike Harbottle – and it is clear that there is an “understanding” between them. The jurors themselves are “mere shadows” marked only by their glowing eyes and mischievous grins, nodding eerily in synch with Twofold’s biased comments as if responding to a command. Without much difficulty they offer a verdict of Guilty. Despite Harbottle’s immediate objections, Twofold sentences him to die by hanging on March the 10th. The room darkens even further until all that he can see are glowing, leering eyes, and Justice Twofold’s voice booms out: “Remove the prisoner!”

He is dragged to a dungeon where two sinister blacksmiths – stripped to the waist and illuminated by the red-hot coals – are hammering together a shackle. Without a moment’s pause they lift it with tongs, clasp the cherry-red cuff around his left ankle, and weld it together over the burning skin which “smokes and bubbles” under the iron.

Harbottle wakes up howling in agony, but facing his two colleagues as their coach glides towards Drury Lane. He looks at his ankle: it is swollen from an attack of gout. He is no less disturbed however, and is a haunted man from that moment on.

“SOMEBODY HAS GOT INTO THE HOUSE”

Harbottle spends the next four weeks in a dark, paranoid mood. He rationalizes what he can, but is still hopelessly terrified by his vision. His doctor declares that his nerves are shot and prescribes the traditional advice: a seaside vacation. Harbottle concurs and begins preparing for an extended trip to Buxton, all the while cheering himself with the thought that one of his nephews is very ill, and how he stands to inherit a sizeable if the young man should die. On the evening of March 9th, the house is deadly quiet as the Judge prepares to leave in the morning. The doctor visits him and finds him sitting across from a blazing fire, clad in his red silk dressing gown. While the medical man lectures him on how best to cure his gout, three people in the house have strange encounters – encounters which will later make this case a famous example of possible paranormal activity.

Firstly, Mrs. Pyneweck’s (now fatherless) seven year old daughter is sent to play in the home’s empty rooms while her mother helps pack. Exploring the sitting room, she found the Judge’s sedan chair (a servant-powered mode of transportation: an enclosed seat lifted and carried by the means of two long poles on either side), illuminated by the last ray of the setting sun coming through a window. She peeks inside the sedan’s door, and in the rosy twilight, she is shocked to see a man – with a lean, swarthy face and dark, intense eyes – sitting perfectly still. Frightened, she summons her mother, but when they explore it with a candle, it is deserted.

Secondly, as Mrs. Pyneweck went upstairs to bring Harbottle his evening dessert, she looked up to the banister along the upstairs gallery and saw a strange man leaning over it with a rope in his hand. He was nursing a pipe in one hand and playing with the cord in another, and his facial features were long, droopy, and grotesque. At first she assumed he was a moving man who was using the rope to cord-up the Judge’s baggage, but when he turned on his heel and authoritatively walked down the hall, she became frightened. Following him upstairs into the room he had disappeared into, she is further distressed to find an empty room – with nothing in it put a coil of rope beside an empty trunk.

Thirdly, when the house was all but vacated, the scullery maid was busy tidying up from the movers when she thought she heard a series of loud, clanging noises from the kitchen. Investigating, she is surprised to find the room illuminated by a deep red glow, and smoke filling it. There, in the middle of it, she sees a blacksmith forging what looks to be an iron chain with the help of a small furnace. Looking up at her, he gestures knowingly at the ground, and she is startled to see Harbottle’s corpse laying on the floor.

The other servants rush to the sound of her hysterical screams (and of course find only an empty kitchen), but when they run up to the master’s chamber, he is found in one piece, getting dressed, and he loudly and furiously damns them for their nervousness, and demanding that they leave him alone.

But the morning finds the Judge in a much different state. Rumors of the judge’s death flourish from house to house, and his servants anxiously and secretively usher the doctor inside. He is followed by a coroner. The rumors are true: in the dark, early morning hours of March the 10th, Mr. Justice Harbottle picked up a cord which had been left coiled in an empty room, tied one end around the great banister – where the droopy-faced man had been spotted leaning with his pipe – and the other around his neck, and flung himself to his death. The inquest ruled suicide due to a fit of madness. But his two colleagues from Drury Lane, to whom he had related his nightmare in full detail, quietly spread the story, and dryly noted that his executioners had made their appointment.

ANALYSIS

Le Fanu’s "Mr. Justice Harbottle" presents a vision of Hell that is extravagantly Dantean—a phantasmagoric display of grotesque imagery, psychological torment, and moral absolutism. The story is one of the author’s most visually evocative tales, even if it is far from his best in terms of plot or literary polish. Yet, among his supernatural oeuvre, "Harbottle" is the story most suited to adaptation for the screen. Its lurid, exaggerated horrors feel made for cinema or television, like a fever dream rendered in vivid, theatrical color. What it lacks in subtlety, it compensates for with unforgettable imagery and psychological depth. Reading it conjures memories of several surreal and disturbing film sequences from my childhood—scenes which left an indelible mark. I think, for instance, of Albert Finney’s descent into Hell in "Scrooge," the harrowing “Night on Bald Mountain” finale of Disney’s "Fantasia," the surreal Trial sequence in "Pink Floyd’s The Wall," and others.

But perhaps the most uncannily Lefanuvian of them all is the 1935 Disney cartoon "Pluto’s Judgment Day." In it, Mickey’s mischievous dog dreams that he is dragged into an infernal courtroom by a spectral kitten and tried by demonic cats for crimes against their kind. The kangaroo court, leering with sadistic glee, convicts him without hesitation. As Pluto is hauled away to be tortured—hot coals inches from his paws—he awakens in terror, burned by a cinder from the fireplace he’d been sleeping beside. In this darkly comic children’s cartoon, we find a near-perfect analogue to Harbottle’s fate: the nightmare trial, the rigged court, the sentence carried out by ghoulish caricatures, and the line between dream and damnation so thin as to be meaningless.

II.

Unlike poor Pluto, whose punishment ends in redemption and a moral resolution, Harbottle is granted no such reprieve. Le Fanu’s story is not about penance or reform—it is about justice, cold and total. This theme draws heavily from the moral satire of William Hogarth, the 18th-century printmaker and painter whose graphic cycles exposed the vices of English society with brutal clarity. Hogarth is referenced directly in the story and echoed visually throughout. His illustrated sequences—precursors to modern comics—told moral parables: "Gin Lane" and "Beer Street" warned against drunkenness; "Industry and Idleness" showed the rise and fall of two apprentices, one hanged, the other prospering; "The Harlot’s Progress" charted a naïve girl’s descent into disease and death; and "Marriage à la Mode" satirized mercenary unions that bred adultery, murder, and shame.

Harbottle’s world seems carved from Hogarth’s acid-etched imagination. The leering jury, the grotesquely swollen judge, the freakish executioner, and even Harbottle himself—an exaggerated villain who resembles a walking political cartoon—belong to a satirical universe where moral failings are externalized in monstrous forms. The story revels in the absurdity of scale: the supernaturally massive gallows, the gigantic Doppelgänger, the funhouse-mirror features of the accusers. Le Fanu’s Hell is a pageant of exaggeration, a judgment day staged like a political cartoon come to life, where sins are not merely punished but grotesquely magnified and paraded for all to see.

III.

At its core, "Mr. Justice Harbottle" is a story about proportion: about sin growing heavier and punishment growing larger in response. Le Fanu, like Dickens before him, treats guilt as an accumulative weight. Dickens’ Jacob Marley is shackled with chains forged by his life’s deeds; Le Fanu’s Harbottle faces a scaffold the size of a building and an executioner out of myth. But while Dickens allowed for redemption—Scrooge changes, learns, lives—Le Fanu does not. His universe is bleak, Calvinistic even. Atonement is absent; justice is inescapable.

Once again, the mind returns to Finney’s "Scrooge," screaming in a blazing red Hell, surrounded by bare-chested, hooded demons fastening iron collars to his neck. But in Harbottle’s world, there is no final act of repentance, no transformation. There is only judgment. Le Fanu’s cosmology has no interest in mercy. Again and again in his stories, Hell appears, but Heaven remains conspicuously absent.

In "The Familiar," Captain Barton lives in dread of divine judgment but feels no solace in thoughts of salvation. In "Green Tea," Jennings is assured by Dr. Hesselius that he will suffer only what God permits—yet that “permitted” suffering ends in a gruesome suicide. "Carmilla" offers no comforting theology: the vampire is destroyed, but her victim Laura remains haunted, unresolved, her soul clouded in guilt. Le Fanu’s universe is not redemptive—it is retributive. His characters are not offered grace. They are pursued, haunted, judged, and ultimately broken by the very forces they have tried to suppress or deny.

IV.

As Le Fanu’s final major ghost story, "Mr. Justice Harbottle" serves as a fitting thematic capstone, a kind of thesis statement on the nature of justice, morality, and the self. Its moral logic is stark and unforgiving: no mercy for the penitent, no solace for the suffering, no redemption for the damned. In Le Fanu’s fiction, the engine of damnation is not divine wrath, but the self—twisted, divided, tormented. Long before Freud, Le Fanu was crafting stories of psychological horror that mirrored the tripartite model of the human psyche: the punishing Super-Ego, the ravenous Id, and the mysterious, chaotic Unconscious.

His stories frequently hinge on characters confronting distorted reflections of their own minds. The shadows that flicker just out of view, the barely glimpsed specters in the background, the moments of doubt and guilt—these are manifestations of the psyche in revolt. Harbottle, we come to see, has been feeding his sadistic Super-Ego for decades, using the legal system as a means of indulging his own cruelty while disguising it as civic virtue. He punishes the desires of others while ignoring the rot within himself. In the end, the verdict is delivered not by a higher power, but by his own split and splintered mind: You have done evil. Evil will now be done to you.

V.

This reading is supported by the story’s strange centerpiece: the discovery of an indictment written in Harbottle’s own hand. Is it a forgery? A premonition? Or is it, as the narrative implies, a document authored by his own subconscious? Like Captain Barton, pursued by his guilt, or Reverend Jennings, tormented by a rebellious Id, Harbottle’s persecutors may be nothing more than projections of a guilty conscience. The court is not just unfair—it is part of him. The leering jury, the grotesque executioner, the titanic judge—they are all facets of a fractured soul on trial before itself. And this is why there is no escape, no mercy, no retrial. How could there be? The judge, the jury, and the executioner are all parts of Harbottle himself.

The trial, though theatrical and hellish, is an inward reckoning, as grimly inevitable as death. Like "Pluto’s Judgment Day," "Scrooge," "The Wall," and Hogarth’s prints, Harbottle’s fate is sealed the moment it begins. No last-minute plea can save him from himself. In the end, "Mr. Justice Harbottle" is less about the supernatural than it is about internalized justice. It is a grotesque fable about guilt, power, and self-damnation—a vision of Hell in which the Devil is not needed because the human mind, left to its own devices, is cruel enough.

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated anthology of Le Fanu's best ghost stories HERE!