Presenting my latest cover illustration for Swan River Press, and another story collection edited by Robert Lloyd Parry:
Ghosts on the Cam is the third in a series of linked anthologies. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020) collected supernatural tales by members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club, of which MR James was a leading light. Friends and Spectres (2024) looked more widely at works by MRJ’s friends outside the club. In the present volume the authors’ personal connections with MRJ are less strong, though his literary influence is just as powerfully felt. But what really binds the tales collected together here is the town of Cambridge itself, with its libraries and chapels and echoing cloisters, its murky river and misty streets. Many of the authors studied at Cambridge; several worked there; two were born there. In a series of introductory essays Robert Lloyd Parry looks at how and why a small market town on the edge of the Fens has produced so many writers of the supernatural.
A photochrom print from 1905.
As with the cover wrap for Friends and Spectres, we’re out in Cambridge at night, only this time the scene is a distinctly chilly one. The Cam is the river that runs through Cambridge, so a view of the river itself seemed unavoidable, especially when it’s crossed by the elegant Bridge of Sighs which connects two of the buildings of St John’s College. The name of the bridge derives from the Ponte dei Sospiri in Venice, a more appropriate borrowing than when applied to the Hertford Bridge in Oxford which also bears the name Bridge of Sighs even though it spans a narrow road. The bridge over the Cam was built in 1831, and is especially attractive for its Gothic styling which matches the college buildings while making the structure seem much older than it is. The bridge also benefits from having been built parallel to an older bridge close by, the so-called Kitchen Bridge (or St John’s Bridge), which has provided a platform for numerous photographers to capture the Bridge of Sighs from the middle of the river.
The abundance of photo reference was certainly useful but cameras can generate unforeseen problems when you’re trying to create a single extended view of a place which has only ever been photographed as isolated details. Most of the photos of the area concentrate either on the bridges or the mass of college buildings which are enclosed by a wall pierced by Gothic windows. David Hockney used to say that photographs never show you things the way they are, by which he meant that they don’t show you the world as it appears to our eyes: photo views are cropped more narrowly than our field of vision, and lenses of all kinds distort perspectives. Hockney’s dissatisfaction with photography led him to create his mosaic views of people or places constructed from multiple overlapping photographs. I had to do something similar (albeit much more precise) to achieve this view of the Bridge of Sighs which is wider and deeper than anything you’d be able to capture with a camera. The older photos of the bridge revealed that the group of trees by the bank have been pruned back several times, while the river wall had gone in the opposite direction, having once been overgrown with ivy. Since all the stories are set in the past I’ve restored some of these earlier appearances although the buildings themselves have changed very little since the bridge was built.
That’s a lot of words about architecture for a book which is really concerned with the supernatural. There is a ghost in the widescreen picture if you look carefully, possibly two ghosts. As with Friends and Spectres I leave it to the viewer to decide about the second figure.
Ghosts on the Cam will be published in December, and is available for pre-order here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Friends and Spectres
• Ghosts of the Chit-Chat
