Mrs Bunch on the other hand is more interesting: she might well have been in on the whole deal – perhaps Abney was going to test out the method and if it works, she can have a go too (in return for keeping chummy w/ the victims so they DON’T run off). Obv it all went wrong so she kept schtum and no-one was any the wiser. But Abney seemed obsessed with writing everything down in incriminating detail & footnotes so I doubt he’d have left off Bunch’s involvement. Unless SHE wrote those notes FOR him and scrubbed out any mention of her! Perhaps her intellect is vastly superior to even that of the ghosts!

a: she gets into his dream
b: IN THE BATH NO LESS
c: she smiles at him twice!
d: her little hurdygurdy-playin boyf is jealous and scratches stephen’s nightie to flinders
[s] e: then they all lez up [/s]

obviously it is a flirtation he is well able to resist, as she has omitted to moisturise and defoliate recently

re: ancient v modern, well, yes and no — i think there’s several layers of ironised regaling of the situation going on (the story is after all told by someone the adult stephen told it to); so yes abney is — as you say — actually saying the ancients were onto something we moderns are too pussy to appreciate, but he goes on to say the stuff about goths i mean ghosts can’t hurt you, despite mere popular opinion, which really IS moderns copping attitude at the ancients (in the form of folk wisdom), except actually folk wisdom is (per the story itself) right

ditto actually with mrs bunch — who he makes a lot of fun of (viz the “resources of her powerful intellect”) , and who really must be a bit useless when it comes to looking out for the kids in her care, as you argue, BUT “great friends they remained” — she may be something of a fool, when all’s said an done, but she’s a better bet than abney’s ideas of the ancients OR the moderns

there’s an echo of this in CAB-S, the sacristan’s daughter that doesn’t understand her dad’s obsession: what’s going on is knowledge and events and being that only SOME people have the capacity (innate or learned) to interract with, and be harmed by

deadgirl has no interaction with stephen in the story! i thus declare yr ‘being flirty’ a torchwood too far, my dere.

Isn’t abney’s ancients/moderns thing rather the other way round? ‘modern people have qualms about things like murderizing children but the ancients knew it to be an awesome idea’.

abney i take to be a massive — if rather off-piste* — scholar of alchemical works, all of which (irl) pimped liek crazy off stuff that was DECLARED as byt simon magus and hermes trismegistus, when it very likely wasn’t (if either of them existed which er they may well not have done)

*he’s a kind of precursor to karswell in fact: whereas an actual real official scholar of this stuff — like casaubon or someone — knows who wrote what and what they believed, he doesn’t try it out and find it works: karswell and abney DO

moar dramatic irony: abney contrasting the news of the ancients and “us moderns”, in an “oh my dears we are wiser and more cultured these days” kind of tone, which is the kind of naive smugness mrj really likes to tweak

there is a distinct go-between-ish sechsual undercurrent in this story also: abney is obviously a TITANIC PERVE, but the deadgirl is being quite flirty with billy stephen elliott also

why do the ghosts bother menacing stephen at all?

there’s a weird later echo of this story in Margery Allingham’s “Sweet Danger” – at least in the “local man of letters run mad by too much book-larnin’, increase of mania means victim choice moves from the unlikely-to-be-missed to the more socially secure” aspect.

this means that the climactic comedy phrase is: “I contemplate with the liveliest satisfaction the enlarged and emanicipated existence which the experiment, if successful, will confer on me” WAHT IS UNNSUCCESSFUL THEN??

abney on the telly: “the psychic portion of the subjects, which popular language dignifies with the name of OMG GOTHS in ALL THE EYELINER EVAH”

unlike alberic — with its quilt of actual and hinted (viz knowingly/teasingly occluded) references to historical texts and etc, the hermetic stuff here seems a lot more handwavey, madey-uppy more than sneaky scholarly citation (maybe that’s why james wasn’t happy?)

so far, in stories one and two, we’ve encountered and neatly established two of the james formats

A (CAS-B): bachelor scholar looks at what he shouldn’t, is spookatised
B (LH): hero of tale watches tale of spookatisation unfold as unharmed bystander