M. R. James' The Mezzotint: A Detailed Summary & Literary Analysis

One of James’ favorite horror motifs was the object which had the power to influence the perception of its owner – literally. The subject of the following story, a mezzotint, was a type of engraving made on a copper plate that was renowned for its ability to capture the luminous effects of soft light; as such, it was often used to print replicas of nocturnal oil paintings. The subjects of mezzotints frequently blended ethereal beauty with a sense of the otherworldly: they have an uncanny manner of emphasizing shadow and light.

As such, the print in James’ story is a fitting vehicle to introduce the idea of the perception-altering, haunted relic. We will again see this trope in “The Haunted Doll’s House,” “A View from a Hill,” and “A Warning to the Curious” among others, and it speaks to James’ own fascination with the past and its unseen influence on the present. As much as he warned against becoming too engrossed in antiquarian delights (lest you find yourself making an uncanny bedfellow) he was equally, if not more so spiteful, of those who wrote the past off as a dead organism easily forgotten.

As nearly all of his ghost stories preach, James saw the endlessly long tentacles of time coiled around the dawning 20^th century, directing modern events from the shadows of long-gone eras. “The Mezzotint” – something of a sequel to “Canon Alberic” – introduces yet another of James’ favorite ideas: revenge – and revenge of a shockingly savage kind. He felt a deep kinship to the subjects of his study – Britons under the Normans, Tudors, Jacobeans, and Georgians – and he sensed that he understood their ruthless ways much more than his colleagues: their severe moral codes might shock Edwardian fops, but they registered with his own appreciation for Old Testament jurisprudence and Gnostic theology.

He saw mankind, at its root, as being capable of great evil, and that evil as opening itself up to a double measure of retaliatory violence. In “The Mezzotint” we are introduced to a chilling maxim that will be repeated in more than one of James’ tales: “the sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons…”

SUMMARY

The story centers on Mr. Williams, a curator at a university museum, whose quiet life of collecting topographical engravings is disrupted by a strange and supernatural occurrence. It begins innocuously enough: Williams receives a catalogue from a London dealer, Mr. J.W. Britnell, offering a mezzotint engraving for £2 2s. The entry reads:

“978.—Unknown. Interesting mezzotint: View of a manor-house, early part of the century. 15 by 10 inches; black frame. £2 2s.”

Though unimpressed by the piece—described as a mediocre view of a manor house—Williams requests it on approval. The engraving arrives on a Saturday, and Williams, joined by his friend Professor Binks, examines it. The manor depicted is typical of the period: three rows of sash windows, rusticated masonry, a parapet with decorative balls or vases, and a central portico. The artist’s name, “A. W. F. sculpsit,” is engraved on the margin.

Initially, the picture seems lifeless. But Binks notices something Williams had missed: “I should have thought there were figures, or at least a figure, just on the edge in front.” Indeed, a faint, muffled figure appears at the edge of the lawn, facing the house. Intrigued but skeptical, Williams dismisses the engraving as overpriced and unremarkable.

That night, after entertaining guests and retiring to his rooms, Williams glances at the mezzotint and is horrified. The figure has moved. Now, it is crawling on all fours toward the house, cloaked in black with a white cross on its back. Williams reacts instinctively: “He took the picture by one corner and carried it across the passage to a second set of rooms… and retired to bed; but first he wrote out and signed an account of the extraordinary change.”

The next morning, Williams invites his colleague Nisbet to breakfast and asks him to describe the picture. Nisbet sees no figure but notes, “One of the windows on the ground-floor—left of the door—is open.” Williams exclaims, “My goodness! he must have got in,” confirming the figure’s progression into the house. The two men compare notes and bring in another witness, Mr. Garwood, who had seen the figure the previous night. Garwood recalls: “The figure… was clear of the edge of the picture, but had not got far across the lawn.”

They decide to photograph the mezzotint and leave it out to observe further changes. That afternoon, they return to find Williams’s servant, Mr. Filcher, staring at the picture in horror. Filcher, normally composed and proper, is visibly shaken: “It ain't the pictur I should 'ang where my little girl could see it, sir.”

The engraving now shows the figure upright, striding swiftly across the lawn under moonlight. Its face is obscured by black drapery, and it clutches a child tightly in its arms:

“There was the house, as before, under the waning moon and the drifting clouds. The window that had been open was shut, and the figure was once more on the lawn: but not this time crawling cautiously on hands and knees. Now it was erect and stepping swiftly, with long strides, towards the front of the picture. The moon was behind it, and the black drapery hung down over its face so that only hints of that could be seen, and what was visible made the spectators profoundly thankful that they could see no more than a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs. The head was bent down, and the arms were tightly clasped over an object which could be dimly seen and identified as a child, whether dead or living it was not possible to say. The legs of the appearance alone could be plainly discerned, and they were horribly thin...”

The three men watch the picture until evening, but it does not change again. After dinner, they return to find the figure gone and the house quiet. Determined to identify the location, Williams scours gazetteers and guidebooks. Finally, he finds a match in Murray’s Guide to Essex: “Anningley Hall… The family is now extinct, the last heir having disappeared mysteriously in infancy in the year 1802.” The guide reveals that Arthur Francis, the boy’s father, was an amateur mezzotint engraver. After his son’s disappearance, he lived in isolation and died on the third anniversary of the tragedy, having just completed an engraving of the house—likely the very one Williams now possesses.

Upon the return of Mr. Green, a senior Fellow familiar with the region, the house is confirmed as Anningley Hall. Green recounts a grim local legend: Francis had a vendetta against poachers and managed to drive them off his estate, save one—Gawdy, a descendant of a noble line. Gawdy was eventually caught poaching and hanged for killing a keeper. Green speculates: “Some friend of Gawdy’s… must have planned to get hold of Francis’s boy and put an end to his line, too.” But the implication is darker: perhaps Gawdy himself returned from the grave to exact revenge. Green shudders, “Booh! I hate to think of it! have some whisky, Williams!”

The story ends with the mezzotint now housed in the Ashleian Museum. It has been tested for sympathetic ink, but no explanation for its changes has been found. Mr. Britnell, the dealer, claims no knowledge of its origin, only that it was “uncommon.” Since its arrival at the museum, the picture has remained static—its haunting tale preserved in memory and mystery.

ANALYSIS

What is so haunting about “The Mezzotint” is its ghoulish specter – those hideously thin legs and that white-domed forehead with its stringy hairs – and the inhuman savagery with which it punishes Francis for usurping him in life: through the abduction and presumed murder of his baby son. Hot on of the heels of “Lost Hearts,” this is James’ second foray into depicting a revenant (the lean-jawed visitor in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” is a demon, after all), and it is the first to depict the dead with forensic realism – a trait for which James’ “thin ghosts” would become famous.

Outdoing even his model, Le Fanu (whose ghosts often had a queasy physicality about them), in gruesomeness, he portrays Gawdy not as a pale, brooding man in black – like most Victorians would have – but pictures him as a decayed skeleton slithering about in his funeral pall (the clothes having rotted away with the flesh, leaving him this single vestige of his aristocratic lineage as a shroud), clutching the baby to his bosom in a revolting perversion of paternal care.

II.

As mentioned before, James has used this story to illustrate the ancient maxim that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons. James was fascinated by the idea that rampant industrialism, individualism, and consumerism had shellacked humanity in a false patina of civility – like gilding a skull – but that a few idle scratches could accidentally expose the monster beneath. Only three generations stand between the savage abduction of Francis’ infant son and its discovery by the idle gaggle of sexless, ambitionless, golf-obsessed scholars: the child could have grown up to be one of their fathers. It was not so long ago – just at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and its wave of social mobility – that the loss of land was considered such a blow to honor that it merited the most barbaric of retaliations, or so James wishes to remind his readers.

And this is, after all, the moral of the story: Francis was a member of the nouveau riche (not unlike similar iconoclastic, Georgian-era fops in James’ stories) who had superseded Gawdy’s family as “lords of the manor,” probably due to a combination of politics and economics as family lineages became less important and the ability to build wealth. Gawdy attempted to reassert his rightful claim to the land (a powerful symbol in James) by poaching its game, and Francis’ “double-quick” (read: zealously eager) hanging of Gawdy – though legal – appears to be seen as unjust on some deeper level: a subversion of the correct order of things.

Green acknowledges this when he oddly considers Gawdy a “poor chap” for having the “bad luck” to shoot a warden. Although written, mortal law permits his death (that of a common criminal, incidentally, not that a nobleman), he is resurrected to rectify the violation of a deeper, spiritual law, and his barbaric slaughter of Francis’ son is a severe illustration meant – like the mezzotint itself – to depict the reality of what Francis has done: he has robbed Gawdy’s family of its final hope of restoration (“spes ultima gentis” is Latin for “the last hope of the family”), and so his only son is likewise taken from him (an eye for an eye), and when Williams and his lethargic band of Late Victorian academics stumble upon the scene, they are reminded of the reality of their own – and not-too-distant – brutal forefathers. 

You can read the originally story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated anthology of James’ best ghost stories HERE!