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Lost Hearts

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For the episode of A Ghost Story for Christmas, see Lost Hearts (film).

"Lost Hearts"
Short story by M.R. James
"Lost Hearts" was collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904.
Text available at Wikisource
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Horror
Publication
Published inThe Pall Mall Magazine
Publication dateDecember 1895
Sculpture of Mithras sacrificing the bull, of the type described as having been brought from the Levant to Aswarby by Mr. Abney
Biblical magician Simon Magus whom Mr. Abney describes as having acquired magical powers through the sacrifice of a boy
Hermes Trismegistus, the Alchemical magus to whom Mr. Abney attributes the magical ritual of 'absorbing' the calcined hearts of three children, in order to obtain occult powers

"Lost Hearts" is a ghost story by British writer M. R. James, originally published in 1895. It was later collected in his 1904 book Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

Plot summary

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The tale tells the story of Stephen Elliott, a young orphan boy, who is invited to stay with his much older cousin, Mr Abney, at a remote country mansion, Aswarby Hall, in Lincolnshire. His cousin is a reclusive expert on the magico-religious practices of late antiquity who is obsessed with the gaining of occult powers and the acquisition of immortality. Stephen is repeatedly troubled by visions of a young gypsy girl and a travelling Italian boy with their hearts missing.

Publication

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"Lost Hearts" was first published in The Pall Mall Magazine in December 1895. It was collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904 and again in The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James in 1931. It has since been anthologised many times, including in The Supernatural Reader in 1953.

The occult scholarship of Mr. Abney

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In keeping with the antiquarian interests and considerable personal erudition that this author brings to bear in the settings which he creates for his stories, James provides a considerable amount of background information regarding the field of study of the ruthless and unprincipled classical scholar Mr. Abney - who regards the child murder of orphans as no more than a means to a (black) magical end. Abney's scholarship encompasses the belief systems of Neoplatonism, the mystery religions of late antiquity - notably Mithraism and Orphism, as well as the pseudoscience/mystical system of alchemy. In the course of the story, Abney mentions not only Censorinus, author of the treatise De die Natali (trans. "Concerning birthdays"), but also the mythical founder of Alchemy Hermes Trismegistus and the biblically attested magician, and founder of a gnostic sect, Simon Magus.

The spring equinox was approaching, as Mr. Abney frequently reminded his cousin, adding that this had been always considered by the ancients to be a critical time for the young: that Stephen would do well to take care of himself, and to shut his bedroom window at night; and that Censorinus had some valuable remarks on the subject…
…It is recorded of Simon Magus that he was able to fly in the air, to become invisible, or to assume any form he pleased, by the agency of the soul of a boy whom, to use the libellous phrase employed by the author of the Clementine Recognitions, he had "murdered." I find it set down, moreover, with considerable detail in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, that similar happy results may be produced by the absorption of the hearts of not less than three human beings below the age of twenty-one years.[1]

According to the Early Christian/Gnostic religious romance the Clementine Recognitions (to which James makes his character refer in the second of the two passages quoted above):

Simon claimed that he could make himself visible or invisible at will, pass through rocks as if they were clay, throw himself down from a mountain unhurt, loose himself when bound, animate statues, make trees spring up; throw himself into a fire without harm, appear to have two faces: "I shall change myself into a sheep or a goat. I shall make a beard to grow upon little boys. I shall ascend by flight into the air, I shall exhibit abundance of gold. I shall make and unmake kings. I shall be worshipped as God, I shall have divine honors publicly assigned to me, so that an image of me shall be set up, and I shall be adored as God."[2]

Furthermore (and with particular relevance to the main theme of "Lost Hearts"), the author of the Clementine Recognitions records an episode in which Simon made a familiar spirit for himself by conjuring the soul out of a boy and keeping his image in his bedroom.
Theosophist G.R.S. Mead provides a fuller account of this episode, furnishing a translation of the lengthier version in the Clementine Homilies, of which the following is an extract.

Simon did not stop at murder, as he confessed to Nicetas and Aquila "as a friend to friends." In fact he separated the soul of a boy from his body to act as a confederate in his phenomena. And this is the magical modus operandi. "He delineates the boy on a statue which he keeps consecrated in the inner part of the house where he sleeps, and he says that after he has fashioned him out of the air by certain divine transmutations, and has sketched his form, he returns him again to the air."[3]

Adaptations

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See also: Lost Hearts (film)

On 16 September 1946, the anthology series Stories Old and New featured David Lloyd James reading a 20-minute version of "Lost Hearts" for the BBC Home Service.[4]

On 25 December 1957, the association between M. R. James and the festive period began as "Lost Hearts" was read by Hugh Burden on the BBC Third Programme.[5]

On 5 March 1966, "Lost Hearts" was first adapted for television by ABC and broadcast by ITV as an episode of the Mystery and Imagination series. However, no archive recordings of this episode are known to exist and it is considered to be lost media.

On 23 December 1971, BBC Radio 3's Study on 3 presented the second episode of four-part analysis of The Horror Story, titled "Ghosts". The episode featured a discussion with Jonathan Miller and a reading of "Lost Hearts" by Bernard Cribbins. The series was repeated the following year.[6][7]

In 1973, "Lost Hearts" was adapted by Robin Chapman in 1973 as part of the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas strand, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark. The shortest of the adaptations, Lost Hearts was first broadcast on Christmas Day 1973 at 11:35 pm.[8] It starred Simon Gipps-Kent as the orphan Stephen and Joseph O'Conor as the much older cousin. The adaptation is noted for the distinctive hurdy-gurdy music that accompanies appearances of the two ghostly children. Ralph Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite is also featured. Now curated by the British Film Institute, this version of Lost Hearts has been released on DVD sets with other entries in the strand and in December 2022 on Blu-ray.

On 27 December 1977, BBC producer Michell Raper presented a 30-minute talk entitled The Ghosts of M. R. James, which also featured readings by Gerald Cross, Norman Shelley and Kenneth Fortescue from "Lost Hearts" and other works of James'.[9][10]

On 31 October 1978, the Hallowe'en edition of Radio 4's Forget Tomorrow's Monday ("a Sunday morning miscellany") featured Peter Underwood (president of the Ghost Club) talking "about all things strange, from Alchemy to Zombies", and Peter Cushing, who gave a reading of "Lost Hearts".[11]

From 29 December 1997 through to 2 January 1998, The Late Book: Ghost Stories featured readings of "Lost Hearts" and four other story by James. The stories were abridged and produced by Paul Kent and read by Benjamin Whitrow. Episodes were repeated regularly on BBC 7 (Later becoming BBC Radio 7) from December 2003, then on Radio 4 Extra from 2011. According to the BBC Genome database, the episodes were originally transmitted in a 30-minute slot; however, these listings may be incomplete, as all subsequent broadcasts have been 15 minutes long.[12][13]

In 2009, Nunkie Theatre Company toured A Warning to the Curious around the UK and Ireland. This one-man show was a retelling of two of James's tales, "Lost Hearts" and "A Warning to the Curious".

In 2007, Radio 4 presented M.R. James at Christmas, a series of five plays in the Woman's Hour Drama slot. Stories adapted included "Lost Hearts" with Peter Marinker as Abney. The plays were adapted by Chris Harrald and directed and produced by Gemma Jenkins. Each episode was introduced by Derek Jacobi as James himself. The series ran from Christmas Eve to 28 December, culminating in an original Jamesian drama, A Warning to the Furious.[14][15] The episodes were repeated on BBC 7 in December 2009 and (under the title M. R. James Stories) on Radio 4 Extra in 2011 and 2018.[16]

April 2007 saw the release of Tales of the Supernatural, Volume One, an audiobook presentation by Fantom Films,[17] featuring James stories including "Lost Hearts" read by Geoffrey Bayldon.

In 2018, a third film adaptation[18] of the short story was released by Severn Film Productions[19] in association with Action Image Productions,[20] co-written by Lynn Davies and directed by Max Van De Banks. The production features Nicholas Amer as Mr Abney, Louis Newton as Stephen Elliott, Margaret Baldwin as Mrs Bunch, Mark Llewellin as Mr Parks and Eleanor Catherine Smart as Emily. The film was shot on location at Eastnor Castle and Hellens Manor in Herefordshire and the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway. The story is updated to the 1940s (and later 1953) when, following the death of Stephen's parents, the young boy has been evacuated to the countryside during World War II. This production is unusual in that the film was shot in two parts, with the main elements being filmed in 2005 and the beginning and end of the film in 2016, with Louis Newton returning as Stephen, now a young man recounting to his bride-to-be the story of what happened ten years earlier. The film was entered in The Bristol International Film Festival[21] and received a nomination at the Moving Pictures Festival in Nieuwmoer, Belgium in 2018.[22]

On 31 December 2019, the second episode of Ghost Stories from Ambridge (a spin-off from The Archers) featured a reading of "Lost Hearts" ("on a biting December night, in the darkened attic of Lower Loxley, Jim Lloyd enthrals an assembly of Ambridge residents with three chilling ghost stories from the turn of the last century", teased the BBC webpage.) John Rowe played narrator Jim Lloyd and the 14-minute script was abridged by Jeremy Osborne.[23]

References

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  1. ^ The full text of Lost Hearts at Wikisource
  2. ^ Clementine Recognitions, Latin translation by Tyrannius Rufinus (died 410 C.E.) of a now-lost Greek original.
  3. ^ Mead, G.R.S.,SIMON MAGUS, An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism, Based on the Ancient Sources, With a Re-Evaluation of His Philosophy and Teachings, pub. The Theosophical Society, London. 1892, Part III.—The Simon of the Legends. Viewable online at The Gnostic Society Library http://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/grsm_simon_magus.htm Retrieved at 17.18 on Saturday 15/7/23.
  4. ^ "'Stories Old and New': M. R. James". The Radio Times. No. 1198. 13 September 1946. p. 8. ISSN 0033-8060. Retrieved 29 December 2018.
  5. ^ "Lost Hearts". The Radio Times. No. 1780. 20 December 1957. p. 39. ISSN 0033-8060. Retrieved 29 December 2018.
  6. ^ "Study on 3". The Radio Times. No. 2510. 16 December 1971. p. 49. ISSN 0033-8060. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  7. ^ "BBC Genome". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  8. ^ "Lost Hearts". British Film Institute Database. Archived from the original on 16 January 2009. Retrieved 22 August 2010.
  9. ^ "The Ghosts of M. R. James". The Radio Times. No. 2824. 22 December 1977. p. 43. ISSN 0033-8060. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  10. ^ "M. R. James on TV, Radio and Film". www.users.globalnet.co.uk. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  11. ^ "Forget Tomorrow's Monday". The Radio Times. No. 2868. 26 October 1978. p. 43. ISSN 0033-8060. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  12. ^ "Search Results - BBC Genome". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 31 December 2018.
  13. ^ "Search Results - BBC Genome". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 31 December 2018.
  14. ^ "Search Results - BBC Genome". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 3 January 2019.
  15. ^ "BBC Radio 4 - Afternoon Drama, A Warning to the Furious". BBC. Retrieved 2 January 2019.
  16. ^ "Search Results - BBC Genome". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 31 December 2018.
  17. ^ "Tales of the Supernatural Volume One". Fantom films. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2015.
  18. ^ "Lost Hearts". Lost Hearts Film. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  19. ^ "Reworking of MR JAMES Ghost Story Now Set in WW 2". Severn Film Productions. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  20. ^ "Action Image Productions". Action Image Productions.
  21. ^ "Severn Film Productions". Facebook. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  22. ^ "LostHearts Film UK". Twitter. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  23. ^ "BBC Radio 4 – Ghost Stories from Ambridge, Lost Hearts". BBC. Retrieved 14 February 2020.
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