Bulwer-Lytton’s “The House and the Brain”

Bulwer-Lytton’s “The House and the Brain” also known as “The Haunters and the Haunted” appeared for the first time in Blackwood’s Magazine, August 1859. (Somehow August seems too sunny for this tale.) It has been reprinted one hundred and fifty times (at least) in several languages. It is an anthology staple like Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest” or Robert Hichens’ “How Love Came to Professor Guildea”. “The House and the Brain” was never reprinted during B-L’s lifetime but beginning 1909 (when it turned 50) it became quite popular.

I have seen it and seen it and never quite got around to reading it until now. The story is one of the foundational pieces of haunted house literature, but I avoided it. This might be because I heard Bulwer-Lytton was a bad writer. They have a contest named after him for intentionally over-written stories or “The Best of the Worst”. Which I think is quite unfortunate because B-L is quite readable. I prefer him to such Victorian chestnuts as Charles Dickens or J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

H. P. Lovecraft praises the tale thus:

“The House and the Brain”, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV’s mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written. (Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927)

The tale is clearly divided into three parts, with a short explanation of the narrator’s mind frame between them.

Part One

Finding a reportedly haunted house in G—- Street, the narrator goes to a Mr. J—– and is willing to pay to stay in the house. The owner refuses money but would gladly have someone “fix the problem” so he can rent or sell the property. The owner tells how he couldn’t keep renters. He hired an old woman to watch the place but she died. The narrator takes the keys and has his level-headed servant, F—, go on ahead to prepare a bed for him to sleep in. The man takes mortal weapons like a gun and knife as well as his dog. The only other thing he brings is a copy of MacCauley, an author guaranteed to calm his nerves if he gets spooked.

At first the house seems ordinary enough though they find a child’s footprints in the coal oil stain in the cellar. Things get stranger when the two men are locked in a small side room, reportedly the most haunted room in the house. After a tough hour, in which strange sensation come to them, they are released.

The narrator finds two letters in a drawer, which he reads. They were written to a woman about eighty years ago.  Her sailor husband hints at how she must keep the secret of what they did. The presence of ghosts grows stronger. The man sees his watch being pulled off the nightstand. He grabs his weapons before they disappear. The dog, who disliked the house from the start, begins growling. The servant, F—–, rushes into the room screaming, “Run! Run! It’s after me!” He charges out of the house and is never seen again. The narrator is not shaken, only disappointed. He returns to his bed to read.

Intermission

We now come to the intermission before the stunning second chapter. Bulwer-Lytton takes a few pages to explain his own philosophy on ghosts and why he does not fear like regular people. B-L discusses how Spiritulalism (all the rage in 1859) works through a medium. He decides there must be some person through which the phenomena are being projected such as a mesmerist.

Part Two

Now that the warm-up is over, B-L can get to the good stuff. A shadow grows in the room. The candles and fire in the fireplace, all grow dim as the darkness increases. The narrator can see a pair of pale-blue eyes in the shape that is reaching up to the ceiling. He commands his fear, knowing if he gives into it he will die. He manages to make it to the window and opens it. Moonlight comes in, weakening the shadow.

Looking to his bed, he sees the hand of an old woman reaching for the letters. They disappear. Then two ghosts appear, a pretty young woman and her husband, who stabs her with a sword. They disappear. An old woman ghost comes from the closet  to confront another ghostly man, covered in sea weed, a victim of drowning at sea. All the while weird light bubbles fly from the floor. Slowly the shadow fades and morning comes.

The narrator looks around the room. He finds his watch, frozen at the hour it was taken. Later, when he tries to have the timepiece fixed, it makes no difference. The device is ruined forever. He also looks over his dog, now dead. He surmises the dear animal died of fright but a closer examination shows that the brute’s neck was snapped by force. Of his servant F—–, he receives a letter three days later. The man has ruined his nerves by what he saw and is off to Australia to forget.

Part Three

Having left the house, the narrator goes to Mr. J—-, wanting to account for what he saw. The owner is not interested at first but the narrator propounds his theory on what is causing the problem. In a statement of philosophy that Colin Wilson will also adopt in 1971, the man feels that a natural but unknown power is in operation. (Wilson will call in Faculty X) and that it has a source or operator. (This is the “Brain” of the title. I admit he didn’t discover a gigantic , evil brain, but hey, I’m a Pulp guy…) He also points out that the focal point of this power is the side room.

Using evidence from the letters and information from the owner, the narrator pieces the story of the old lady who had been hired to watch the house and had died there. She had once been the daughter of wealthy and respectable tradesman. She married against her father’s wishes an unruly American, little less than a pirate. When her brother died, he left a young boy to her, along with the knowledge that she would inherit if the boy died.

Neglected, bruised, the boy died six months later. The sister inherited the family fortune and the husband took some of her money and sailed off with it. He died two years later. Rich but alone, the woman invested her money poorly, ending up in service. Over the years she sank lower and lower, until she went to the workhouse, where the house’s owner found her. Returning to the house she rented as a bride, she finished her days there.

The owner, at the narrator’s insistence, has the side room, which was an addition to the house, demolished. In doing so, a secret room is discovered under a secret hatch. In that room are found furniture and old clothes from eighty years ago. There is also a safe. Inside the safe is evidence that the owner was the American pirate, his portrait like that of a snake. A dark, evil man, he had placed other more mysterious items in the safe such as small book filled with magical symbols and a dish filled with liquid and a lodestone. When this is disturbed everyone feels like an earthquake has passed. The owner destroys the room and his house is free of ghosts there after.

Legacy

Bulwer-Lytton’s influence can be seen on later writers. Charlotte Riddell’s most reprinted story “The Old House in Vauxhall Walk”(1882) has a similarly murdered boy, abused and ultimately turned into a ghost. Riddell, I suspect, wanted to give that poor child some closure. The effort is too sentimental for my tastes. I prefer M. R. James’ vengeful children in “Lost Hearts”. Algernon Blackwood’s “The Empty House” (1906) has aunt and nephew avid watchers for haunted houses, like Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator, also seeking to spend time among real ghosts.

Conclusion

Bulwer-Lytton’s “The House and the Brain” works well despite its author trying to sabotage its weirdness with pseudo-science postulations. I know B-L was a serious student of the outre in his later years but he almost commits what I call the “Algernon Blackwood blunder“, too much goobly-gook in a tale of entertainment. Normally the long denouement at the end would be drudgery, with more Colin Wilsonisms, but the finding of the secret room and the safe actually make all the previous stuff worth the work. There is enough information but not too much, not making it a Gothic explique with a logical Scooby-Doo explanation. B-L hints at the dark sorcery behind the tale, leaving enough for us to guess.

I can see why this story was often reprinted (besides the public domain price tag). I prefer it to “Thurnley Abbey” by Percival Landon (1909) (another anthology perennial) which has a similar shadow ghost. I would place “The House and Brain” with J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s earlier “An Account of Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street:” (1851) and the later “The Judge’s House” by Bram Stoker. Many of these you can find in Peter Haining’s The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (2000).