The Chit-Chat Club
ROBERT LLOYD PARRY looks at the origins and output of an obscure and exclusive Cambridge University society that was transformed by the membership of MR James
On the surface there’s little forteansounding about The Chit-Chat Club, a Cambridge University society founded in the mid 19th century for “the promotion of rational conversation”. The club came into being in 1860 when Robert Francillon and Alsager Hay-Hill, two law undergraduates at Trinity Hall, established a routine to enliven those slow term-time weekends. They and 13 likeminded friends, it was decided, would meet in each other’s rooms at 9pm every Saturday, to read aloud and discuss original papers on literary, historic and philosophical subjects.
The titles of some of the papers offered in those early years, preserved in a set of minute books in Cambridge University Library, give an idea of the tenor of the meetings and the interests of the club’s members: “On the Practice and Qualification of a Historian”; “On some causes which led to the French Revolution of 1789”; “Yeast”. The club’s symbol was an owl – a playful reference perhaps to Francillon’s childhood pet, Jacob, but also surely an allusion to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Its motto was in ancient Greek, a stock phrase from Homer that translates as ‘winged words’. The Chit-Chat was, in short, classically educated, intellectually self-confident, and rather pleased with itself.
When in 1883 Montague Rhodes James (see FT292:30-37, 387:34-39) came up to Cambridge
An invitation to a Chit-Chat meeting c.1880.
as an undergraduate he noted its reputation for earnest exclusivity. “I am going to an institution called the Chit-Chat,” he wrote to his father. ”It is not a large society at all, only about 11 people, and the subjects terrible deep sometimes…”
During James’s 14-year membership, however, the atmosphere of the club subtly and gradually changed. Intellectual standards remained high and, if anything, the exclusivity increased; but the prevailing tone changed – softened, perhaps. The “terrible” depth was over time replaced by what critics described as “a frivolous solemnity”, as James, the de facto leader of the club, promoted his own preoccupations with historical and literary curiosities and the less frequented byways of antiquarian research. When he delivered a paper – and he spoke on 21 occasions, more than any other member in the club’s history – obscurity was celebrated. His
“It is not a large society and the subjects terrible deep sometimes”
first address, entitled “Useless Knowledge”, was a kind of sorrynot-sorry defence of his niche academic interests. And more detail of those interests emerged in subsequent papers: “Art Magic” in 1884, and “The Grotesque” in 1885.
James spoke regularly about strange and marvellous stories: “The Beginnings of Christian Fiction”, delivered in 1885, was probably a layman’s introduction to his pioneering work on the New Testament Apocrypha, the ‘damned data’ of early Christendom. In 1893 he spoke about his favourite writer of the supernatural, Sheridan Le Fanu, and he shared his lifelong interests in hagiography and religious marvels with talks on Cæsarius of Heisterbach, the author of a 13th century compilation of miracle tales, in 1889, and on the boy-martyr, St William of Norwich, in 1891.
The paper that would perhaps have appealed to Fortean Times
readers the most came in 1892, when James offered his thoughts on Walter Map, the 12th century author of De Nugis Curialium – ‘Courtiers’ Trifles’
– a compendium of curious tales and extraordinary ‘true’ events. Many of Map’s marvels are classical or folkloric, but he takes pleasure too in recounting contemporary phenomena, like Nicholas Pipe ‘the Man of the Sea’, “that prodigy… surpassing all wonderment… [who] for long periods, a month or a year… would frequent the depths of the sea with the fishes, without breathing the air…” James would translate De Nugis Curialium into English in 1923, but the book had fascinated him since he first came across it as a schoolboy in the library at Eton.
The furthest limits of rational conversation, however, were reached at the Chit-Chat’s 601st meeting on 28 October 1893, when the minute book tells us “Mr James read two ghost stories.” This is the earliest record we have of James reading his supernatural tales aloud, and the two that he offered the club that night – “Lost Hearts” and “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” – have become cornerstones of supernatural literature.
James’s enthusiasm for the curious, the irrational, the entertainingly supernatural, influenced his fellow Chit-Chat members. In 1884 Herbert Tatham, an old schoolfriend, addressed the club on “Ghosts”. We don’t know the precise content of this talk but, given the date and the author’s Cambridge affiliations, it seems likely that it was connected with the foundation two years earlier of the Society for Psychical Research, whose first president, Henry Sidgwick, was a prominent senior member of Tatham’s college, Trinity.
James’s influence can also be felt in the later literary output of his Chit-Chat contemporaries, several of whom went on to publish ghost stories of their own.
Tatham and Arthur Benson, who on leaving Cambridge both took up teaching posts at Eton, would entertain their pupils on Sunday evenings with morally improving tales which often took a supernatural turn, and the works of both men were published in the early 1900s. Arthur Benson’s brother EF Benson, perhaps the Chit-Chat’s most entertaining chronicler, was present at the influential 601st meeting, and in later life was frank about his undergraduate fealty to MR James. Several of the – justly admired – ‘spook tales’ that he published throughout his life show his hero’s influence, most notably perhaps “The Other Bed” (1908) which offers a more than casual nod towards James’s most famous ghost story “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1903). It was the youngest Benson brother, however, who was perhaps the most fortean-minded Chit-Chat member of all.
When RH Benson – Hugh to his friends and family – was five years old, one of his godfathers visited the family home with a gift for his young ward. His older brother, Arthur, recalled the occasion: “After luncheon, Hugh, in a little black velvet suit, entered the room, and said with his little stammer: ‘Tha-a-ank you, Godpapa, for this beautiful Bible! Will you read me some of it?’ ‘And what shall I read about?’ ‘The de-e-evil!’ said Hugh without the least hesitation.”
This strange child grew up to be a strange man. A devout, if restless, Christian, his interest in and relish for matters demonological and paranormal lasted long into adulthood. After an undistinguished schoolboy career at Eton, he went up to Cambridge in 1890, and followed his two brothers into the ChitChat. James was present in Hugh’s rooms in 1892, and doubtless listened with interest, as the host addressed the club on the works of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the 18th century Christian mystic and philosopher (see FT220:40-45) whose writings underlie several of Sheridan Le Fanu’s tales. James and Benson also shared an interest in the Elizabethan occultist John Dee (see FT328:1213).
But unlike James, Hugh’s fascination with alternative spiritual traditions and the paranormal was practical as well as intellectual. As an undergraduate he experimented with hypnotism, Spiritualism, and “crystal gazing.” And another Chit-Chat member, Robert Carr Bosanquet, recalled a not-altogether successful investigation into telepathy: “So far as I can remember, half a dozen of us in one room were told to focus our thoughts on the weather-cock on the University church, and after a time the medium in the next room, was aware of a cow [sic] perched on a steeple.”
The son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, Benson followed his father into the Anglican church after leaving Cambridge, then shocked friends and family by converting to Roman Catholicism. And it was while he was training for the priesthood in Rome that he began writing the supernatural tales that were collected in 1907 as A Mirror of Shalott. Set in the fictional Canadian Church of San Filippo in Rome, the book presents a circle of storytelling priests of various nationalities who, over a number of evenings, tell each other ‘true’ tales of the marvellous from their ministries, tales of “a spiritual world… crammed full of energy and movement and affairs.” James later dismissed these stories as “too ecclesiastical”, and indeed Benson sets out frankly to look at how far “supernatural” occurrences can be taken as corroborative of Christian belief. As one of the priestly narrators says, “My religion teaches me that there is a spiritual world of indefinite size, and that things not only may, but must, go on there which have nothing particular to do with me.” The collected tales tell of a number of intrusions of this spiritual realm into the material world.
When in 1897 the Chit-Chat Club, in James’s words, “expired of inanition”, Charles Fort was a young, struggling short story writer in New York City, several years from conceiving the books and compilations of phenomena that would one day transform his name into an adjective. As individuals, members of the ChitChat mightn’t have had much in common with the author of The Book of the Damned and Lo!, but some of them at least, shared and occasionally examined, in talk and in print, his view that the world was a stranger place than many of their fellow establishment figures were prepared to accept.