M. R. James' The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- Jan 2
- 12 min read
James’ favorite writer of ghost stories was, of course, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and few of the former’s tales of terror are more closely modelled after the latter’s style than “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.” Le Fanu’s universe was bleak, vicious, and vengeful, and typically involved the gradual stalking and ensnarement of a brazen sinner by the spirit of his victim (or that of some avenging entity). This is most obviously reflected in James’ favorite story of Le Fanu’s, “The Familiar.”
This tale follows the increasing paranoia of Captain Barton, a retired navy man, who finds himself followed by the limping spirit of one of his sailors (a man whose daughter Barton seduced and ruined, who confronted him of this act, and who later died in prison from the savage flogging that he was given in response). The misshapen figure follows him during his nighttime walks, and when Barton attempts to flee the country, he is horrified to see him limping after him in a French port. Eventually, the net is too tight, and Barton spends his last days terrified of the looming ambush – which comes in the form of a massive, spectral owl who crashes through his window before (apparently) transforming into the dead sailor and crawling into bed with his former captain – a sight that kills him.
“Mr. Justice Harbottle” also weaves a similar tale: a hanging judge is stalked by the spirit of a man he maliciously hanged for personal reasons, dreams that he is dragged to a court where the jury is made up of his victims, and the judge is a monstrous doppelgänger of himself, and ultimately is driven to hang himself with his bastard child’s jump-rope out of terror of the ghosts that he fears will come for him.
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Le Fanu also highly favored a particularly repulsive kind of ghost: one extremely comfortable and intimate with the living. They often paraded matter-of-factly in front of their victims in casual dress – padding around barefoot, in dressing gowns, with their wigs removed, revealing their shaved heads – often appearing in the bedrooms and antechambers of the humans they appear to, as if they are spouses settling down for the evening. They have an intensely intimate nature that violates the privacy and boundaries of their victims and flies in the face of Victorian expectations of decorum, decency, and discretion (in an age where it was shocking to see a man in shirtsleeves or hatless when outside, it was extremely uncomfortable to fathom waking up to a stranger standing at the foot of your bed barefoot, in a dressing gown and turban).
Worse still, they often exhibited the marks of their mortality with exhibitionistic glee: heads slumping on broken necks or tilting back to expose the gaping wound of their cut throats (“like another mouth, wide open”). These are ghosts that cozy up to their humans in disquietingly comfortable ways – often to illustrated the way that their humans have cozied up to the ideas that they themselves represent: various combinations of greed, wrath, lust, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride (in “Squire Toby’s Will,” a wrathful, gluttonous father and his two sons – one greedy, proud, and lustful and one envious and slothful – very intentionally represent each of the seven deadly sins).
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Likewise, in “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” Archdeacon Haynes seems to have unintentionally invited some rather comfortable company to share his solitary home. Whereas the most common “besetting fault” – as James puts it in “Count Magnus” – of these characters tends to be “over-inquisitiveness,” Haynes’ comes directly from the canon of Deadly Sins – envy and pride.
These two weaknesses are easy enough to excuse in polite, educated, Victorian society under the umbrella term of “professional ambition,” but Haynes makes a mistake: he lets his envy (of another man’s authority, enforced by seemingly God-ordained longevity) and his pride (in the work that he knows he would do so much more capably) push him towards a third sin – a capital sin – that unexpectedly puts him in the company of three intransigent house guests: and that – as with Le Fanu’s brutal Captain Barton and heartless Justice Harbottle – is nothing less than murder.
SUMMARY
The narrative opens with the unnamed narrator recounting how his interest in the case of Dr. John Benwell Haynes began accidentally, while reading early nineteenth-century obituary notices in the Gentleman’s Magazine. One notice, in particular, stands out: the obituary of Dr. Haynes, Archdeacon of Sowerbridge, who died at the age of fifty-seven.
The notice praises Haynes’s academic distinction at Cambridge, his ecclesiastical advancement, his learned sermons, his polished manners, and his devotion to the Cathedral of Barchester—especially its music and ritual. The tone is reverent and conventional until the final paragraph, which hints darkly that Haynes’s peaceful life ended not in calm decline, but in “a tragedy as appalling as it was unexpected.” The narrator withholds the rest of the obituary for later.
Some time afterward, while cataloguing manuscripts in Haynes’s old Cambridge college, the narrator encounters a tin box labeled “Papers of the Ven. Archdeacon Haynes. Bequeathed in 1834 by his sister, Miss Letitia Haynes.” The librarian reveals that a former Master of the college believed the box should never have been accepted and had kept it locked away during his lifetime. With the librarian’s permission, the narrator takes the box home to examine it, later resolving to turn its contents into a story, provided the identities involved are disguised.
The box contains diaries, letters, and account books belonging to Haynes. To understand the setting, the narrator describes Barchester Cathedral as it appeared during Haynes’s lifetime, using engravings and architectural references. At that time, the choir contained heavy classical woodwork dating from about 1700, including massive stalls and a prominent altar screen. Haynes’s stall was located near the bishop’s throne at the southeast end of the choir.
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Haynes came to Barchester in 1810 to assume the archdeaconry after the sudden death of his predecessor, Archdeacon Pulteney. The narrator reconstructs Pulteney’s death from Haynes’s papers: Pulteney fell down a staircase in his house after stepping where a stair-rod was missing. The fault was attributed to a careless maid, Jane, who was dismissed, though the stair-rod was later found hidden beneath the carpet. The incident deeply affects Haynes, who is shortly afterward installed as archdeacon.
Haynes’s early years in office are marked by energy and efficiency. His diaries detail the chaotic condition of the archdeaconry’s affairs under Pulteney: neglected dues, unheld visitations, decaying chancels. Haynes sets about correcting these issues and estimates it will take three years to restore order—a goal he achieves. During this time, he appears confident and contented.
Once administrative duties ease, Haynes turns his attention to the cathedral itself, particularly its furnishings and history. He drafts a letter describing the carved figures on the end of his stall’s prayer desk. These include a cat crouched with lifelike vigilance; a crowned figure with horns, talons, and concealed feet suggesting a demonic king; and a hooded figure holding a halter, whose decayed features reveal Death itself. Haynes traces the woodwork to a local craftsman named John Austin and notes that the oak used came from a grove called Holywood, including a tree known as the Hanging Oak. Local tradition held that executions had taken place there and that people once hung small straw figures from its branches to secure success in love or business.
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After 1816, the tone of Haynes’s diary changes. When his sister Letitia leaves him for the winter, he begins to feel oppressed by loneliness and darkness. He notes uneasily that he “absolutely shrink[s] from the dark season.” Soon he records disturbing sensations: voices in the house, impressions of unseen movement, and a growing sense of company where none should be.
On November 17, Haynes records a pivotal incident in the choir. Resting his hand on the carved cat during the Magnificat, he feels what seems like “a softness, a feeling as of rather rough and coarse fur,” followed by a sudden movement, as if the creature were turning to bite him. He is startled fully awake and rubs his hand against his surplice to rid himself of the sensation. Though shaken, he reassures himself that the figures are merely well executed.
The disturbances intensify. Haynes hears whispers at night, including a voice saying distinctly, “Let me wish you a happy New Year.” On another occasion, a whisper warns him, “Take care,” just before he nearly falls on the stairs. He feels a large cat slip between his feet, though none is ever seen. He insists repeatedly that these experiences cannot be due to mental decay and resolves to counter them with work and discipline.
On February 27, Haynes describes a particularly unsettling evening: the house seems full of movement without sound, and later, when a servant is expected to collect a letter from his room, a knock comes and a voice asks, “May I come in?” Haynes opens the door, but no one is there; moments later, the real servant appears from the far end of the passage. Haynes suspects he made a grave mistake by opening the door at all.
With the return of spring and his sister’s presence, the disturbances temporarily abate. However, when she leaves again in the autumn, they resume with greater force. Haynes now describes the wood of the carved figures becoming “chilly and soft as if made of wet linen” during evening prayers. The whispers grow more persistent, and he notes grimly, “The cat was on the stairs to-night. I think it sits there always. There is no kitchen cat.”
Haynes suffers terrifying episodes of sleepwalking and waking visions. He dreams of “wet lips” whispering rapidly in his ear and wakes to find himself standing on the staircase, confronted by the silent form of a large cat below him. His diary entries become increasingly fragmented and desperate, culminating in repeated, heavily inscribed declarations: “I must be firm.”
He invites a cousin, Allen, to stay in hopes that company will help. Allen complains of noises, remarks on the presence of a large, wild cat, and claims to have seen a maid in the house wearing grey or white—descriptions that disturb Haynes, who notes grimly, “I supposed it would be so.” After Allen leaves, Haynes resolves again to endure alone.
The diary ends shortly before Haynes’s death. The narrator then returns to the obituary notice to recount the conclusion. On February 26, during a cold and stormy morning, servants find Haynes lying on the staircase landing. His spine is fractured in multiple places, consistent with a fall, but his face is horribly mutilated, “as if by the agency of some savage animal,” rendering it unrecognizable. Medical authorities conclude he has been dead for several hours. No explanation is found, and the case remains an unsolved mystery.
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The narrator, reviewing the evidence, becomes convinced that Haynes was indirectly responsible for Archdeacon Pulteney’s death and that his guilt played a role in the events that followed. Seeking further clarification, he visits Barchester and consults the local museum curator. There, he learns that a carved figure—once part of the stalls—was found years earlier in a wood-yard. When broken open, it concealed a folded piece of paper.
The paper bears a rhymed inscription attributed to John Austin, the stall carver, dated February 26, 1699. It reads in part:
“When I grew in the Wood
I was water’d wth Blood
Now in the Church I stand
Who that touches me with his Hand
If a Bloody hand he bear
I councell him to be ware
Lest he be fetcht away
Whether by night or day,
But chiefly when the wind blows high
In a night of February.”
The curator explains that the figure frightened its owner’s children and was eventually burned. The narrator recognizes the significance of the warning and its chilling coincidence with Haynes’s death date. With this final document, the narrative closes, leaving the haunting unresolved but grimly complete.
ANALYSIS
As previously mentioned, “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” is closely modelled after the anxious ghost stories of James’ literary hero, J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Both men shaped universes governed by a cold and vengeful intelligence completely without mercy and utterly devoted to executing a grim, Old Testament sense of justice. The difference between them is slim, but could be summed up by saying that they used different tactics to vent the building tension from their stories: Le Fanu used sex and vice to illustrate his deeper themes whereas James often relied on satire and humor.
In lascivious tales like “Schalken the Painter,” “Laura Silver Bell,” and “Carmilla,” Le Fanu uses erotic subtext to shape his thesis of human corruption, sin, and depravity, while in even his bleakest stories (“Martin’s Close,” “Lost Hearts,” and “The Haunted Dolls’ House”), M. R. James utilizes his Dickensian sense of humor both as a means of emitting the tension, and to subtly clarify his social and philosophical themes.
Such is the case in “Barchester Cathedral,” a story which takes both its titular cathedral town and its social background from Anthony Trollope’s Victorian soap opera: the six novels of the Barsetshire Chronicles. These books followed the surprisingly Machiavellian dealings – social, professional, and romantic – of the gentry and clergy in a small English city.
Although they might not necessarily come across as overtly humorous, James certainly injects a wry sense of knowing fun into “The Stalls of Barchester’s” opening section, for who else but he could go into such painstaking detail regarding the minutiae of a clerical cold war, like that which was silently waged between the young, ambitious Deacon Haynes and the old, negligent Dr. Pulteney? The scores of footnotes alone, which I inserted throughout the story’s first section in our annotated printing, are a testament to the tedious attention which James poured into this story’s darkly humorous subplot of murder done in the name of efficiency.
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Indeed, of all James’ villains, Haynes (who hardly even seems to count as a villain until we remind ourselves that he bears – as John Austin puts it in his strange prophecy – a “Bloody hand”) is surely the least villainous: he does not murder children (“Lost Hearts,” “Haunted Dolls’ House,” “Wailing Well,” “Mezzotint”), parents (“Haunted Dolls’ House”), critics or rivals (“Casting the Runes”), intellectually disabled women (“Martin’s Close”), peasants (“Count Magnus”), or even betray women to the witch hunters (“Ash-Tree”), hide bodies in wells (“School Story”), or consort with the devil (“Number 13”).
Instead, his murder is done as a service to the very worldview that James so frequently upholds: good order, efficiency, and the preservation of the High Church. And yet Haynes – perhaps inadvertently – has a bit of the heretical reformer about him: he is more interested in the “look” and fashion of things than the spirit of why they are done and what legacy they are preserving. In any case, he appears to have arranged Pulteney’s “accidental” death as a means of securing the ability to recraft the cathedral into his own pet designs, and although his reasons may have been well intended, and his victim an old man well past his prime and having lived a good and venerable life, he is no less a murderer than Mr. Abney or Count Magnus, and once his hand touches the wooden fixtures on the seat that he has acquired through bloody means, its curse falls on him in spite of his intentions, social station, holy orders, or pious life.
It is at this point that the story transitions from a gallows-humor take on social climbing in the Church of England into a fully Lefanuvian tragedy, complete with Le Fanu’s hallmark psychological horror. As in “Green Tea,” where Le Fanu’s ill-starred Reverend Jennings is haunted to death by a demonic animal who serves as an disturbingly apt allegory for suicidal depression, “Barchester’s” Haynes drifts through a series of progressively alienating moods that deepen and darken towards a deadly climax.
Like “Casting the Runes” (which also paints a compelling allegory of depression) this is one of James’ most psychologically profound stories, both in its treatment of a chronic mental disturbance and in its study of guilt. Le Fanu – like his heirs, W. W. Jacobs, Henry James, and E. F. Benson – was deeply interested in the entropy of a conscience infected with guilt (a theme which features strongly in “Schalken the Painter,” “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” “Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling,” “Squire Toby’s Will,” “Madam Crowl’s Ghost,” “Ultor de Lacy,” “Mr Justice Harbottle,” and many others).
James, on the other hand, was far less interested in internal guilt, and much more interested in thoughtless men who unknowingly break the rules set in place by bygone generations and otherworldly forces. “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” obviously breaks with this trend: James’s description of Haynes’ miserable decline from justified reformer to troubled mind, to tormented soul, goes far deeper into his mental gymnastics, defense mechanisms, and spiritual turmoil than in nearly any of his other stories.
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The final theme which I would like to draw attention to – the one which ultimately leads to Haynes’ undoing – is the unexpected influence of pagan forces on the ostensibly Episcopalian stronghold of Barchester. Haynes, who crows about his scholarly defense of the High Church of England – a denomination known for its disdain of superstition, even going so far as to write off the majority of biblical miracles as pretty allegories never meant to be read as literal – certainly does not expect to be hunted down by the forces of a curse that seemingly has roots in Britain’s pagan past.
Indeed, he is scandalized to learn that the so-called Hanging Oak had been a site of shamanic rituals (the hanging of Blair-Witch-esque stick figures in order to bring good luck) in living memory. This detail is the first of several suggestions – ultimately culminating in the discovery of Austin’s curse – that for all of his Victorian propriety, good breeding, and respectability, Haynes is being hunted down by forces completely beyond his control or understanding, and that, as his obituary puts it, “It might have been augured that an existence so placid and benevolent would have been terminated in a ripe old age by a dissolution equally gradual and calm. But how unsearchable are the workings of Providence!”
The question that Haynes must have been racking his brain and searching his soul about during his last days, and the one which James invites us to ask ourselves, is what kind of beastly Providence must this be? Certainly not the drowsy, bearded god described in Haynes’ Anglican theology books. If asked to imagine what such a deity might look like, I would probably direct the questioner to a grim piece of wood that once sat at the hand of the Archdeacon’s stall in the Barchester Cathedral: the King of Terrors.