M. R. James' The Haunted Dolls' House, Explained: A Detailed Summary & Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Between 1921 and 1924, over 1,500 craftsmen plied away at what would ultimately become the greatest, most intricate dollhouse in the world. Commissioned for Queen Mary – consort to George V and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth – it featured working electricity, hot and cold water, a garage with seven model cars and a motorbike, over 1,000 miniature paintings, and operable elevators. It was a 1:12 scale model of a royal townhouse with a Georgian façade and an English garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll.
The attention to detail was astronomical: each room was fully furnished and its contents where made from real materials (the silver is silver; the porcelain is porcelain; the furniture is upholstered) by expert craftsmen who ordinarily made these articles in life-size. Medicine chests, tea services, crown jewels, and toilet paper are all included in the painstaking work.
Even the library included 588 1:12 books, some of which were literary classics (including the Koran and Shakespeare), while others were specially written – with the text included in the tiny pages – for the occasion. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously contributed the tongue-in-cheek Holmes story, “How Watson Learned the Trick,” while A. A. Milne, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling provided their own stories (George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, refused to play along).
By 1924 M. R. James had become a celebrated writer of first-rate ghost stories – his two greatest anthologies, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary were published in 1904 and 1911, respectively – and was asked to create an original supernatural story. It was his idea to set it in a dollhouse.
SUMMARY
The story opens in the antique shop of Mr. Chittenden, a dealer in curiosities, where the wealthy collector Mr. Dillet is negotiating the purchase of an extraordinary eighteenth-century dolls’ house. Though he jokingly downplays its value, both men know it is an exceptional piece. Chittenden calls it “a museum piece” and insists that, despite all his experience, he could hardly hope to find another equal to it. After bargaining, they settle on a price of sixty guineas.
Once Dillet leaves with his prize, Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden express relief that it is gone. Mrs. Chittenden thanks God to be rid of it, while her husband darkly remarks that the new owner may soon receive “a bit of a shake up.” They clearly know something unsettling about the house but have chosen not to reveal it.
The dolls’ house is transported with great care to Dillet’s estate. It is a magnificent Gothic miniature mansion nearly six feet long, complete with chapel, stable block, terraces, furniture, clothing, servants, horses, coaches, and every imaginable domestic detail. Dillet is entranced by it, calling it “Quintessence of Horace Walpole.”
Among its inhabitants are tiny figures representing a gentleman, a lady, two children, several servants, and an old white-haired man who lies in a four-poster bed. When Dillet reaches into the bed to retrieve the old man, he experiences a strange sensation, as though something had “yielded—in an odd live way” beneath his finger.
That night, after retiring to bed in the same room as the dolls’ house, Dillet is awakened by the sound of a bell tolling one o’clock. Although the room is dark, the house appears illuminated with uncanny clarity. It no longer seems to be a toy. Instead, it looks like a real mansion viewed from a great distance under moonlight. He sees trees behind it, smells the cool September night air, hears horses stirring in the stable, and realizes that beyond the house lies not his bedroom wall but “the profound blue of a night sky.”
The miniature house has become a living scene. In the dining room, the gentleman in blue satin and the woman in brocade sit together talking in great agitation. Both repeatedly stop to listen. The man opens a window and strains to hear sounds from outside. The woman’s face reveals fear barely kept under control. To Dillet it is “a hateful face, too; broad, flat and sly.” The woman eventually leaves carrying something small. The man steps outside and shakes his fist toward an upstairs window.
Dillet turns his attention to that upper room. There lies the old man, awake and anxious in bed, attended by a nurse. The woman enters carrying a bottle. The nurse prepares a hot posset of wine, spices, and sugar. Though the old man seems reluctant, the nurse and woman urge him to drink it until he finally complies.
Soon afterward, the old man suddenly sits upright in bed. What follows is horrifying. He becomes “flushed in the face, almost to blackness,” his eyes “glaring whitely,” his hands clutching at his heart, with “foam at his lips.” The nurse runs for help. The woman, her husband, and servants rush in, but the old man dies before them, his face relaxing from agony into stillness.
A short time later, a coach arrives bearing a white-wigged gentleman carrying a box of papers. He listens to the circumstances of the death, then departs. Watching him leave, the gentleman of the house displays “a smile not pleasant to see.” Dillet concludes that the visitor is likely a lawyer carrying a will.
The vision fades but later resumes. Now the corpse lies in the chapel upon a bier surrounded by candles. Suddenly the black velvet pall covering the coffin stirs of its own accord. It rises, slips away, and exposes the coffin beneath. One of the candlesticks topples over. The implication is dreadful: the dead man is not resting peacefully.
Attention then shifts to the children’s nursery. The parents, now dressed in mourning, display little genuine grief. Instead they laugh and amuse themselves. The father dons a white garment and disguises himself as a ghost. Entering the room, he terrifies the children. The boy cowers beneath the bedclothes while the girl leaps from bed into her mother’s arms. After reassuring them, the parents leave.
Then comes the most terrifying sequence of all. A pale, unnatural light appears around the nursery door. The door slowly opens. Something enters. Dillet later says it resembled “a frog—the size of a man—but it had scanty white hair about its head.” The monstrous thing moves among the children’s beds. Moments later he hears cries, “faint, as if coming out of a vast distance—but, even so, infinitely appalling.”
Panic erupts throughout the house. Lights flash through corridors. Figures run. Doors open and slam shut. The stable clock tolls one. Darkness falls again.
Finally, the front of the house reappears. Torchbearers stand in two solemn rows. A funeral procession emerges. Servants carry not one but two small coffins down the steps. The silent procession moves toward the chapel, revealing the fate of the children.
Dillet remains awake until dawn, shattered by what he has witnessed. His doctor finds him badly shaken and recommends a seaside rest cure. There he encounters Chittenden, who admits that he and his wife had experienced the same supernatural spectacle. Chittenden explains that he dared neither destroy the beautiful dolls’ house nor tell customers that it staged “a regular picture-palace-dramar in reel life” every night at one o’clock. He offers to refund most of Dillet’s money. The two men discuss the vision and conclude that the old man was probably poisoned by his heirs before he could sign a new will that would disinherit them.
Obsessed with uncovering the truth, Dillet researches local history and eventually discovers records from Coxham Parish. There he finds that an elderly landowner named Roger Milford died on September 11, 1757, while two children, Roger and Elizabeth Merewether, died the following night. Church monuments reveal that Milford’s daughter Elizabeth inherited his estate and that her husband, James Merewether, spent the rest of his life in seclusion after the deaths of his wife and children.
Dillet becomes convinced that the dolls’ house faithfully reproduces the vanished Ilbridge House and that each night it reenacts a real eighteenth-century crime: the poisoning of an old man, followed by the supernatural vengeance that destroyed the guilty couple’s children.
The original mansion has long since vanished, leaving only overgrown foundations and scattered Gothic stones. Yet when Dillet hears the village clock strike four, he suddenly recognizes the bell. It is the same bell he heard in the nightmare vision.
As for the dolls’ house, it remains stored in a loft above Dillet’s stables, carefully covered and awaiting a buyer—preferably one from America.
ANALYSIS
Although it has often been considered a bit of a puzzler, "The Haunted Dolls' House" remains among James' most memorable, most anthologized works. Notoriously, he was very uncomfortable with the result: in an odd coda (omitted here for editorial reasons) he shamefacedly admits to his readers that he has basically upcycled the plot of “The Mezzotint.” While this is undeniably true, it is also fair to say that the story was stronger, in some regards, to “The Mezzotint.” Notably, it shows the influence of the increasingly popular silent cinema: the exaggerated pantomime of the ghosts is undeniably lifted from the expressive style of film that began with the Gothic dramas and science fiction fantasies of Georges Méliès and was currently at its zenith in the hands of Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and a young Alfred Hitchcock.
Silent film masterpieces of horror like The Phantom of the Opera, Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages, The Phantom Carriage, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Golem, all had a tendency to foster a strangely Jamesian quality in the way they told little but suggested much: the actual horror is deftly hinted at, but the Expressionistic atmosphere – billowing gently like a wispy fog bank – tells us more than the title cards: we sense the wrongness and depravity without having to have it explained to us.
Such is the nature – whether it is obnoxious to the reader or not – of this story. There is no supernatural hook or mechanism here, so far as we can tell: unlike most of James’ stories, there isn’t a suggestion of alchemy or black magic or conjuring. It appears to be more in the line of it’s predecessor, “The Mezzotint,” and tales such as “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance,” “Martin’s Close,” and “A Warning to the Curious” where the only apparent vehicle for the murdered person’s reappearance is their lingering emotions -- usually rage (Mezz., Dis/App), obsession (MC), or a sense of duty (WttC).
Indeed, as in “Disappearance/Appearance,” the dead man is an elderly man of authority with a taste for Old Testament justice (a clergyman with a reputation as a strict disciplinarian in that story, and a bitter old magistrate who doesn’t think twice about disinheriting his daughter and her husband in this one). The greatest mystery tends to be the nature, motives, and methods of the luminous “frog-man” who steals into the nursery with the aim of snuffing out the family line.