While they are still available in print, it is more likely that those who want to get a copy of the `Ingoldsby Legends’ by the reverend Richard Barham (1788-1845), written under the pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby, are more likely to pick this up in a second hand bookshop. The stories enjoyed a great vogue in their time, and while they are reasonably celebrated in Denton, the village where Barham’s family had part of their ancestral estate, the only other monument to his work is the eponymous Weatherspoon pub opposite the site of 61 Burgate where he was born, to a long established Kent family.
Barham’s father died when he was seven. From around that age he attended St Paul’s School in London, and then Brasenose College in Oxford. He was ordained in 1814, and his career weaved between Kent and London. One reason for this is that he maintained part of his estate, which went under the name Tappington, and which figured in some of his stories, even when not resident in the county. Another was that sporadic appointments back in the Kent, in 1814 to the magnificent early English masterpiece of Westwell, near Ashford, as curate, and then to Snargate on the Romney Marshes meant he did often return. An accident while based in the latter in 1821 left him disabled. He was sent to St Pauls Cathedral to be a minor canon in 1821, and served in the King’s Chapel Royal from 1824. It was around this time, in the late 1820s, that he started to write for the very popular Blackwood’s Magazine. Pursuing a parallel career under his assumed name.
Barham’s `Legends’ appeared from 1840, with several of the stories issued posthumously. It is claimed that he wrote some of these while at the hall, which now serves as a farmhouse bed and breakfast. `A Spectre at Tappington’ is one of the more obviously linked tales, talking of `Tappington (generally called Tapton) Everard…[as] an antiquated but commodious manor-house in the county of Kent. A former proprietor had been High-Sheriff in the days of Elizabeth, and many a dark and dismal tradition was yet extant of the licentiousness of his life and the enormity of his offences.’ (Barham, `Ingoldsby Legends’, Frederick Warne and Co, London and New York, undated, 7). Interest in the supernatural is one of the core themes of his stories, whether they were in short story format or verse. Another was to celebrate the lore that accrued to particular places, and the strange memory traces associated with them.
It is this latter aspect that gives Barham’s work a literary historical importance, even if they are not easy to read and have less purely literary appeal today. Often grandiloquent and wordy, Barham lacked the ability to deliver moments of shocking ghostly revelation in the way that M R James, born in a village close by Denton, was clearly capable of. But as an amateur antiquarian historian, local legends and stories are embedded in pieces like `The Leech of Folkestone’, `A Legend of Thanet’, and `A Legend of Dover’ which may have been lost if they were not contained here. In the first of these, he writes of how `The World, according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Romney Marsh’ (ibid, 75). Folkestone gets harsh treatment in this story:
`Nor many miles removed from the verge of this recondite region, stands a collection of houses, which its maligners call a fishing-town, and its well-wishers a Watering-place. A limb of one of the Cinque Ports, it has (or lately had) a corporation of its own, and has been thought considerable enough to give a second title to a noble family. Rome stood on seven hills; Folkestone seems to have been built upon seventy.’ (Ibid, 75)
The manner in which Barham was able to reframe and narrate stories and legends about local places is most vividly shown in `Nell Cook,’ which, under the subtitle `A Legend of the “Dark Entry”’ recounts the story of a Canon living beside the cathedral in Canterbury in the past whose jealous cook, on him being visited by a female friend who she suspected of him having intimate relations with, then poisons them both with one of her highly regarded meals. In the most gentle, discrete way possible, the poem explains the very ungentle and indiscreet burial of her alive in a hole under the flagstones in a passage running from the cathedral to the King’s School precincts. The hint is strongly given that this was by the monks. Thereafter, the place had been haunted by a spectre. `And oh: beware that Entry dark – especially at night – / And don’t go there with Jenny Smith all by the pale moonlight.’ (Ibid 305). The conviction that a spirit haunts this place persists to the present, with the added, worrying embellishment that those who catch sight of it are doomed to die. The passageway, it has to be admitted, if going through it alone at night can be eerily quiet and atmospheric.
Barham did not have an easy life. His eldest daughter died in 1827, followed by four more girls in infancy, and his son in 1840. He himself was to suffer a long illness before his own death. Writing seemed to have been as much a distraction from all this mortality and grieving as anything else. But his stories have value now in the way they catch a little of the sort of haunted quality of the Kent countryside that Jocelyn Brooke, a century later, was to bring to the fore so much more.