M. R. James' A View from a Hill: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
Many of James’ best stories are nightmarish wish fulfilments of their author’s own personal fantasies. We see this in “A Warning to the Curious,” where the narrator bewails (“alas! alas!”) the 17th century destruction of an uncovered Anglo-Saxon crown, and proudly crows about laying eyes on one (“I can now say that I have seen an actual Anglo-Saxon crown”), full well knowing that the treasured glimpse cost Paxton his life.
We again get a glimpse into James’ personal daydreams in stories like “Count Magnus,” where Mr. Wraxall, a researcher obsessed with a historical character, is able to meet his long-dead idol after proclaiming “I would dearly like to see you,” “Tractate Middoth,” wherein the bookish library lackey is invited to participate in a high-stakes bibliophilic puzzle, and “Abbot Thomas,” where a scholar’s obsessive attention to stained glass windows ushers him into an architectural treasure hunt.
Even “Two Doctors” – widely panned as James’ worst story – has touches of wish-fulfilment with its Dr. Abell, who has harnessed dark powers to do research in utter comfort: “[what] if you could summon such [and such] a volume from your shelf or even order it to open at the right page[?]” None of his stories, however, do this with more relish or delight than “A View from a Hill.”
James’ greatest personal and professional sorrows tend to revolve around destroyed, defaced, or diminished architecture. In a letter written to protest a proposed renovation of some damaged stained glass windows of a priory at Malvern College, he rejects the idea that it would be “reverent” (to their religious themes) to update them, imploring the college not to rob the world of yet another historical artifact: “the question of reverence or irreverence seems to me not to arise here at all… We would gladly have had the whole, but that was denied us. We treasure what we have, neither adding to it nor taking from it.”
II.
The greatest villains in his stories are not the undead vigilantes or mutant spiders so much as the “pestilent innovators” of the 18th and 19th century who wielded Neo-Classical and Gothic Revival reforms like sledge hammers against the ancient churches and manors he so dearly treasured. Tales like “An Episode of Cathedral History,” “The Residence at Whitminster,” “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” the unfinished story “Speaker Lenthall’s Tomb,” and “The Uncommon Prayer-Book” feature supernatural forces violently avenging this manner of architectural desecration, and any character who makes mention of diluting an old East Anglian building with Greco-Roman or Gothic “improvements” is certain to encounter something nasty crawling in through his window.
“A View from a Hill” focuses on the other side of this equation: what if a person who adored and mourned these desecrations was motivated – like poor Mr. Wraxall – to find a way to see the object of his admiration? Would this unnatural pursuit be any less dangerous? Wouldn’t he be in league with the angry ghosts who so violently rebuke the “innovators”? But how could this be done? What compromises would need to be made to achieve it?
And what might the cost be of these compromises? Say that a pair of binoculars was treated in order to allow the viewer to see whatever he aimed them at just as they appeared five hundred years previously? He could see the past. He could walk into the past without leaving the present. But what would he see and who would he see? And could it – would it – look back at him?
SUMMARY
The story follows Mr. Fanshawe, an academic man who begins his holiday journey through the English countryside with quiet pleasure. Traveling by train on a warm June afternoon, he enjoys the stillness of rural stations and the unfamiliar scenery. His destination lies in the southwest of England, where he has been invited to stay with Squire Richards, an older acquaintance he recently befriended.
Upon arriving at the small station, Fanshawe learns that the Hall’s car is temporarily delayed, and he chooses instead to cycle the short two-mile distance. The ride refreshes him, and he arrives at a comfortable, modest country house, where Squire Richards warmly welcomes him. They take tea in a tranquil garden beneath a lime tree beside a stream, savoring the peaceful summer setting.
Later, Richards proposes a walk up a nearby hill to enjoy the view. Before leaving, he retrieves an old, heavy pair of field-glasses from a locked box. Fanshawe struggles to open it, cutting his thumb on its sharp corner, and jokingly calls it a “disgusting Borgia box.” Inside are the unusually weighty binoculars, made by a former local watchmaker and antiquarian named Baxter.
As they walk uphill, Richards recounts Baxter’s history: an eccentric but skilled amateur archaeologist who discovered many local antiquities. Although useful, he was disliked and regarded as unlucky. Reaching the hilltop, the two admire a sweeping view of the countryside—fields, woods, distant hills, and scattered villages glowing in the evening light.
Using the glasses, Fanshawe begins observing distant landmarks. He describes seeing a large, impressive church tower, though Richards insists that nothing of the sort exists in that direction. Turning his attention to another hill—Gallows Hill—Fanshawe reports something even stranger: through the glasses, he sees “a largish expanse of grass… a dummy gibbet… and… something hanging on the gibbet,” along with figures and a cart. Yet when he lowers the glasses, the hill appears entirely covered in wood. Richards, unable to see anything unusual through the lenses, dismisses the vision, though he is unsettled.
That evening, back at the Hall, the butler Patten expresses concern that the glasses have been removed from their box, hinting at past trouble. Fanshawe later experiences a disturbing dream in which he dislodges a carved stone marked with a warning—“On no account move this stone”—only to reveal a dark burrow from which a hand emerges, first normal, then grotesquely transformed, reaching toward him. He wakes in terror.
The next day, Fanshawe reads Baxter’s archaeological writings and notices a drawing of a priory church with a central tower identical to the one he had seen through the glasses—despite no such structure existing now. That afternoon, he sets out on a cycling tour, intending to visit nearby villages and Gallows Hill.
After visiting churches and ruins, Fanshawe arrives at Gallows Hill. Expecting an open clearing, he instead finds dense woodland. As he pushes his bicycle through it, he becomes increasingly uneasy, sensing unseen presences: footsteps behind him, figures slipping between trees, even “a hand laid on my shoulder.” In the center of the wood, he stumbles upon three stone blocks arranged in a triangle, each with a square hole. Realizing something sinister, he flees in panic, eventually escaping but with his bicycle ruined by repeated punctures.
That evening, he recounts his experience to Richards and Patten. The stones, it is implied, once supported a gibbet. Patten then tells the story of Baxter’s death. Baxter had lived an isolated, peculiar life, often roaming at night with a fish-basket, engaging in mysterious activities. One day, neighbors found him badly injured after spilling a pot in which he had been boiling something—“nothing… but a few old brown bones.” He recovered, but soon after finishing the glasses—boasting they would be “filled and sealed”—he disappeared.
Witnesses last saw Baxter walking strangely, “as if… against his own will,” speaking in distress before vanishing. A week later, his body was found on Gallows Hill, hanging between the three stones, his neck broken. The inquest declared him of unsound mind.
The next morning, Fanshawe discovers that the glasses no longer work: “it’s as if someone had stuck a black wafer over the lens.” When Richards tests them, he drops them, breaking the lenses. A black, foul-smelling liquid spills out. Realizing the truth, Richards explains that Baxter must have “filled and sealed” the glasses with some distillation involving human remains—perhaps literally allowing the user to see through “dead men’s eyes.” He suggests that whatever Baxter disturbed or used did not tolerate such treatment and ultimately destroyed him.
They bury the remains of the glasses. Reflecting on the events, Richards remarks that it is perhaps unfortunate Fanshawe brought the glasses into a church, as it may have limited what he could see. Fanshawe, however, quietly considers Baxter’s drawing of the priory tower, suggesting that Baxter himself may have already seen more than was safe—or intended.
ANALYSIS
Throughout James’ writings – increasingly so towards the end of his life – a recurring stock character of his is the ill-fated amateur archeologist: a renegade outsider whose motives are often murky and self-serving at best and utterly diabolical at worst. While the protagonists of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” and “A Warning to the Curious” belong to the former category, and those of “An Evening’s Entertainment” and “Lost Hearts” belong to the latter, “A View from a Hill”’s Baxter lands uneasily in the middle. He clearly knows that his activities are unwholesome (something nearly all of James’ amateurs seem to acknowledge) and does his probing in secret (another common thread), but – like poor Paxton – his motives do seem to be scientific at heart: he doesn’t appear to be driven by financial greed (unlike Somerton or Eldred), ego-driven inquisitiveness (unlike Wraxall or Parkins), or a sinister thirst for supernatural power (unlike Abernathy, Magnus, Aberic, or Davis).
Instead, we catch a glimpse of an extremely Jamesian character – in the most literal sense – who serves as both a figure of wish fulfilment and, perhaps, one of gratitude for the breaks that the author received in life. In the first sense, of course, James would have delighted in the opportunity to lug a pair of magic binoculars from parish to parish, visually time travelling with just a peak through the lenses.
In the later sense, Baxter represents what James may have been forced to resort to had he not been given access to his Eton/Cambridge education: Baxter is distrusted and marginalized almost exclusively because he is a tradesman rather than an academic. Had he been more like Dennistoun in “Canon Alberic,” his nosiness would have been socially excusable, and although he may have come across as a bit of a ghoul, it would have led to far less negative press, one imagines, and perhaps he would not have found himself resorting to the black arts to practice archeology.
Indeed, the great tragedy of Baxter’s death is that he likely began dabbling in magick in order to give himself a fighting chance at competing with his professional rivals – socially, financially, and educationally privileged men from James’ own “Oxbridge” caste – which ultimately became too much of a good thing.
II.
And here we come to the other primary theme of this story: the dangers of peering to deeply into the past. “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” Nietzsche’s observation is applicable to nearly each of James’ stories, but none illustrate this more perfectly than “A View From a Hill.” James poses the question – regardless of metaphysics, the supernatural, or the existence of an afterlife – “is there not something deep and hidden within our own selfhood which can be awakened by yearning too deeply for contact with a bygone era or unsavory field of study?”
Even if we exclude the category of ghosts, many of us who have become obsessed with esoteric topics can attest that the obsession can sometimes become frightening – not just due to the time, energy, and passion invested into it, but from the things within us which seem to call us towards the shadows. It could be an obsession with history, true crime, the occult, war stories, disasters, sexual fantasies and fetishes, heists, assassinations, conspiracies, executions, travesties, genocides, scandals, mysterious disappearances, kidnappings, serial killers, torture, shipwrecks, plane crashes, mass traumas, or – say – horror fiction.
At first we find ourselves drawn to them out of disgust or a sense of moral obligation – to better understand humanity’s dark nature and combat it going forward – but at what point to we wonder what is it within ourselves that brings us back, time and time again, to such dark material? Something within us, we must acknowledge, finds comfort and peace here, and even the least puritanical among us will eventually find that disturbing.
In James’ case, he often wondered if his obsession with the past was healthy, and frequently found himself more at home with the dead than the living. In Baxter’s case it wasn’t merely a figure of speech: James plays it out – in a world where the supernatural is real, what is the logical conclusion of a life spent constantly obsessing over the dead, prying intrusively into their private worlds, and digging up their peacefully sleeping secrets? Surely, he concludes, the trespasser will eventually be collared by the homeowner and his desire to transit between both worlds will eventually be impossible: he will have to choose between the limitations of the present world or crossing into the unpredictable rules of the unknown dimensions beyond reality.
Ultimately, Baxter is dragged off and hanged as a thief by the ghosts of the bodies he disturbed, and while we largely dismiss this as fiction, James’ warning lingers in a very material way: how intently and for how long can we obsess over our chosen bête noire before something very real – something inescapably part of our own personality – reaches out from the abyss and lays claim to our very soul? Far too many of us have felt that hand on our shoulder, and it makes this story – for all its oft-cited flaws of pacing, characterization, and tone – unforgettably chilling.