M. R. James' The Tractate Middoth, Explained: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
The classic Victorian ghost story almost always operated as a supernatural vehicle for restorative justice – an unfathomable circumstance where an act of villainy was so unnatural and vile that the natural order itself was broken by proximity, allowing the spirits of the dead, or other supernatural machinery, to rectify the deed on the mortal side of things.
While this may sound simplistic and decidedly un-frightening (in our culture ghosts almost never fight on the side of good or justice), 19th century readers still saw this breach in the life cycle as equally appalling to the mortal misdeed that caused it: they were chilling mirror images of a shocking event. Such an unnatural act or event, the idea goes, must engender a corresponding supernatural reaction to equal it.
The most common offenders were murderers, treacherous guardians, and faithless lovers. The first of these was always a favorite; James’ own “Martin’s Close” is an accurate pastiche of the trope, one famously used in Dickens’ “Trial for Murder,” where a ghost constantly intervenes in the broken justice system to convict the man who slit his throat. Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Amelia B. Edwards’ “Was It an Illusion?,” and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” are each truly chilling stories about betrayal by family members or guardians which each lead to the deaths of their wards, and are each exposed by the ghosts of their hapless victims.
Meanwhile faithless lovers – who often either allow their beloved to die of heartbreak, in childbirth, or by suicide – are punished in such nerve-wracking stories (usually written by women) as Mary E. Braddon’s “The Cold Embrace,” Edith Nesbit’s “From the Dead” and “The Shadow,” and Bram Stoker’s “The Growing of the Gold.” Sometimes the “evil deed” is just an unfortunate miscommunication (Margaret Oliphant’s “The Open Door”), unexpected disaster (Dickens’ “The Signalman”), or untimely death (Rhoda Broughton’s “Poor Pretty Bobby”) which resulted in a tragedy – through no fault of any of the characters – that still must be “put aright”: unsaid words are passed on, sentiments are shared, wrongs forgiven, and lovers reunited through the agency of the supernatural.
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One subset of these story types is the hidden or lost item which must be recovered. Usually it has been intentionally hidden and must be found to let the ghost (usually the one who hid it, or who had it stolen from them) rest in peace. This is the case in Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Pot of Tulips,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables,” Charlotte Riddell’s “The Open Door,” and Washington Irving’s “Dolph Heyliger” – among others.
The most direct forefather of the following story, however – other than “The House of Seven Gables” – is J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Squire Toby’s Will.” Both of these stories follow the typical model of the Victorian trope, but both warp it in characteristically dark ways: no longer are the ghosts simply agents of justice, but there is something twisted and trickster-like in their hauntings, and we can’t entirely trust their motives. Are they truly agents of justice, or do they represent something stranger or darker or wickeder?
SUMMARY
At the close of an autumn afternoon, an elderly man with prominent "Picadilly weeper" sideburns named John Eldred enters a famous library and asks an assistant, William Garrett, to retrieve a particular book for him: a 1707 Amsterdam edition of the Talmud’s Tractate Middoth, with a commentary by Nachmanides, catalogued under the press mark 11.3.34.
Eldred is anxious to obtain this particular edition and no other. Garrett knows the Hebrew collection well and goes upstairs to fetch it, but returns empty-handed. He believes he saw a short, elderly gentleman—apparently a clergyman in a black cloak—remove the book from the shelf. Yet when Garrett investigates, the book is back in its place and the supposed reader has vanished.
The long-whiskered Eldred returns the following morning. Garrett again goes to retrieve the volume, but after twenty minutes he has still not returned. The librarian discovers that Garrett has suddenly been taken ill and sent home in a cab.
Eldred, concerned that Garrett has suffered because of his errand, visits him at his lodgings the next day. Garrett is pale and shaken, and admits that his illness resulted from a terrible shock. He finally tells his colleague George Earle what happened.
When Garrett entered the Hebrew class, he once again saw the mysterious old clergyman standing before the shelves. This time it was broad daylight, and his appearance, even in the shadowy library stacks, was visible, though it was distinctly unwholsome: "he had a very nasty bald head. It looked to me dry, and it looked dusty, and the streaks of hair across it were much less like hair than cobwebs." Trying to be polite, Garrett clears his throat, leading the man with the dry scalp to turn and face him:
"He turned round and let me see his face—which I hadn't seen before. I tell you again, I'm not mistaken. Though, for one reason or another I didn't take in the lower part of his face, I did see the upper part; and it was perfectly dry, and the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bone there were —thick..."
The gruesome sight overwhelmed him, and he blacked out. Earle suggests that the musty smell of the library may have caused the illness, but Garrett insists that he saw something genuinely horrifying.
The librarian sends Garrett away for a week's rest at Burnstow-on-Sea. There, an accidental encounter with an elderly physician, Mrs. Simpson, and her daughter leads Garrett to rent rooms from them. One evening Mrs. Simpson mentions that books have “played me a sad turn,” and Garrett learns that her family has been searching for a mysterious book for more than twenty years.
Mrs. Simpson tells him about her uncle, Dr. Rant, an unpleasant and eccentric clergyman who died two decades earlier. Rant had ordered that he be buried sitting upright at a table in a specially constructed underground brick room. Local people even claimed to have seen his ghost in his old black cloak.
Rant had no children and left his property to be divided between his niece Mary Simpson and his nephew John Eldred. Shortly before his death, however, he told Mary that he had made two wills. One favored John; the other, properly signed and witnessed, favored Mary. The catch was that Mary had to find the second will herself.
Rant deliberately concealed it in a printed book rather than writing it as a conventional document. Thousands of books surrounded him, but he assured Mary that the book containing the will was not in his house.
It had been placed somewhere John could potentially find it but Mary could not. He further revealed two crucial clues: the will was written in English, although Mary would not recognize it as such when she saw it, and an envelope left in his desk contained another clue.
When Garrett hears the name John Eldred, he realizes that the mysterious man from the library and Mrs. Simpson's cousin are the same person. He also realizes that Eldred has spent years searching libraries and booksellers for the missing book.
Garrett suspects that the five figures are a library press mark and recognizes that they can be divided as 1.13.34, 11.33.4, or 11.3.34. Returning to his own library, he discovers that 11.3.34—the very Tractate Middoth requested by Eldred—is missing.
Garrett learns that Eldred has already arranged for the book to be sent to him. The library records identify the volume as a Talmud tractate and reveal that it had been donated in 1875 by “J. Rant, D.D., of Bretfield Manor.” Garrett traces Bretfield to the estate inherited by Eldred and immediately sets out to intercept the book.
Garrett reaches the vicinity of Bretfield just as Eldred receives the parcel. He follows him along a country road and sees the shaggy-whiskered antiquarian carrying the book beneath his arm. Eldred drops a box of matches, then discards pieces of string and the parcel's wrapper as he walks. Eventually he opens the book and begins examining it. As darkness gathers, he stops beside a felled tree and begins tearing out a page.
At that moment something black appears to fall upon the white page. A dark form rises from the shadows behind the tree, and two arms seem to enclose Eldred's head and neck. He struggles violently in its savage embrace, but makes no sound, then collapses. Garrett rushes forward with a laborer, but Eldred is dead.
Although mysterious black dust is found smeared on his face and stuffed in his mouth, the medical examination determines that he died from shock to a weak heart rather than suffocation.
The book is examined at the inquest. One fly-leaf has been partially torn through, and beneath the apparent Hebrew writing are three recognizable English signatures: John Rant, Walter Gibson, and James Frost, dated July 20, 1875. The Rector recognizes Rant's name. Garrett realizes the extraordinary truth: the writing only looks like Hebrew. It is actually English, and the leaf contains Dr. Rant's hidden will.
The will leaves the entire estate to Mary Simpson, proving that Rant's elaborate puzzle was genuine and that Eldred had discovered the book but was attempting to destroy or remove the crucial page before anyone else could find it. The Tractate Middoth is taken into the coroner's custody, while Garrett privately explains the strange history surrounding it.
The story ends with one final supernatural suggestion. Garrett finds himself incapable of shaking his memory of the dark, shadowy figure who seemed to wrap his arms around Eldred's face. The next day, on a bright, clear morning, he walks by the scene of his death and can't resist investigating it up close "though the recollection of what he had seen there made him shiver, even on that bright morning."
Approaching the fallen tree "with some misgivings," he walks around to the side where the figure had lain in ambush. Garrett is immediately startled, stumbling back, by the sight of some dark figure curled up in the shadow. On second glance, though, "he saw that it was a thick black mass of cobwebs; and, as he stirred it gingerly with his stick, several large spiders ran out of it into the grass."
The image recalls Garrett's earlier description of the mysterious apparition's hair as “much less like hair than cobwebs,” subtly suggesting that the horrifying figure he saw in the library—and the thing that attacked Eldred—may have been connected with the uncanny world of dust, webs, and the dead.
With the will recovered and Eldred dead, Mary Simpson inherits Bretfield Manor. Garrett's part in solving the mystery brings him into the Simpson family, and the story closes with the dryly humorous observation that there is “no great difficulty in imagining the steps” by which a young library assistant eventually becomes the prospective owner of Bretfield Manor.
ANALYSIS
The story to which “Tractate Middoth” owes the most to for its inspiration is unquestionably J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Squire Toby’s Will.” The tale follows a violently dysfunctional family: the eponymous squire (a drunken, brawling parody of John Bull), his younger son Handsome Charlie (arrogant and athletic), and his older son Scroope (swarthy, disabled, and lazy to a fault). Toby resents his older son for his weak will and physical deformities and disinherits him in favor of his brutal, younger son (a chip off the old block). The Squire dies, violently, in a drunken stroke, and Scroope is almost immediately evicted from the family home by a jubilant Charlie.
However, things turn against him almost instantly: he is disabled himself in a hunting accident and finds himself befriending a strange bulldog who creeps out the servants with its oddly humanlike behavior (he even resembles the old squire). Eventually he has disturbing dreams of the dog worming its way into his bed and rasping to him in his father’s voice: the Squire is now being tormented in Purgatory and wants to make things right; he and Charlie have done Scroope wrong, he says, and it can be made right. There is a second will – one dated later than the first – which re-inherits Scroope. The voice tells him where it can be found, in the closet of an unused room.
Charlie awakens with a start and almost follows his father’s wishes – he heads out to find the will and notify his impoverished brother – but something hardens within him and he turns back. Disgusted, he shoots the dog, and represses his fears. Shortly after, Scroope dies in his penury and is buried. After the funeral, two familiar-looking men dressed in mourning slip into the house and it is haunted from that day on. Charlie is tormented by shadows, sounds, and the sight of his father and brother glowering at him in rage.
Inevitably, Handsome Charlie is found hanging by his cravat – in the closet of an unused room, where Squire Toby’s will is found nearby.
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Le Fanu’s story, in turn, is largely influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables,” which also involves a stolen inheritance, a grotesque, greedy squire, and a family blighted by hidden secrets, sins, and rivalries. Like James’ “Tractate Middoth,” it also involves a plucky romance between a beautiful young heiress and an clever, socially ambitious middle-class man.
At the end of the novel, the scheming, elderly villain is found dead, possibly from a supernatural visitation. Like in “Squire Toby’s Will,” the ending is muted, with the MacGuffin (in this case a property deed) uncovered, but too late to set anything right: the stolen land it was supposed to restore has already been settled, and it is worthless.
What these two stories tell us about “Tractate Middoth” is that James’ characters may have gone through a somewhat stranger and darker experience than they realize. A great deal hangs on what Doctor Rant’s motivations have been: does he truly (like Squire Toby) want to restore the will to its rightful owners, or have they just been pawns in a game? Has he been gunning for Eldred all along – a perverse, greedy man, and a chip off of Rant’s own proverbial block (just as Charlie embodied his father’s vices) – and if the haunting seems designed to punish avarice, then what will happen to Garrett now that he has married into the Simpsons’ family (presumably somewhat for love and presumably somewhat for money)?
Is his own quiet, scheming nature apt to summon the specter of Rant back to him? This is certainly a possibility, otherwise it may be one of the weakness of this story: that the fascinating character of Rant is inadequately explored and fleshed out. Certainly the most memorable feature of the entire story is Rant’s ghoulish appearance – with his webbed-over eye sockets, suggestive of the “blindness” that both Mary and John have displayed with their fruitless searches.
Whether or not the story is meant to have a sequel, it is certainly true that Rant’s malevolent, trickster-ish nature is a fascinating distortion of the classic Victorian restitutive ghost; he is not apparently motivated by a desire to see justice done (unlike even the choleric Squire Toby), he is not driven by guilt – so it seems – or even by basic human sympathy for Mary’s poverty. What does motivate him? The answer to this – which we never learn – is the delicious enigma that makes what is otherwise a relatively mediocre ghost story one of James’ most subtly haunting.