The Romance of Old Clothes

Adeline Tintner has demonstrated Henry James’s interest in and indebtedness to both folklore and popular literature for images, motifs, and even occasionally, for his donnée. And, although she does not deal with it, we feel that James must have had some such derivation for his earliest ghost story, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868). Two possible sources are suggested by the motif of the “fatal chest”: a popular melodrama of the time, entitled The Mistletoe Bough: or, The Fatal Chest, and, oddly enough, the story of Cinderella, which Tintner finds allusion to in a number of James’s other works. That this “death by chest” motif had popular currency is suggested in Folktales of England, edited by Katherine Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue.

Briggs relates a folk story, told as a true one, about a pretty, young Parson’s daughter, who, as a part of the “games and merriment,” on her wedding day, hid herself in an old chest in an attic. The lid closed on her, knocking her unconscious, and locked itself. Everyone looked for her, but she was not to be found. Some unspecified years later, someone opened the chest, “and there her lay in her wedding gown, and her were just a skeleton” (87). Briggs does not seem to have found any European version of this “death by chest” although, in England, at least two locales claim to be the site of this “true” story (Briggs 88).

It is likely that James never heard this story recounted by an old “Granny” (Briggs 87). But he could have known of a literary version that appears in a poem by Samuel Rogers, entitled “Ginevra,” included in his collection Italy (1822–28) (67). Rogers’ poem adds nothing to the folktale, except for changing the characters to Italian aristocrats. However, Maurice Willson Disher in Victorian Song: From Dive to Drawing Room notes that the story “has become part of the apocrypha of English history” (89), and Briggs adds that the story has long “been well known in the United States” (88). Both attribute this to a popular nineteenth-century ballad by Thomas Haynes Bayly, entitled “The Mistletoe Bough.” Bayly’s song, telling the same story, retains Rogers’ aristocratic characters but resets them in England. More important, this song was first introduced as the ballad in a popular melodrama, also based on Rogers’ poem, by the name of The Mistletoe Bough; or, The Fatal Chest (or The Mistletoe Bough; or, Young Lovel’s Bride) written by Charles A. Somerset, and first performed at the Garrick, Whitechapel, in 1834 (Disher 89).

There is not much in the folktale or its musical retelling to connect it with James’s story, except for a similar cluster of motifs: the death of a young woman (two, in James’s tale), the chest, and the mention of the wedding dress, that is, clothes connected with a marriage and the death of a bride. Somerset’s play, however, revises and expands the story considerably: When the bride, Lady Agnes de Clifford, hides in the chest on her wedding day, she is stabbed by a rejected suitor, Reginald de Courcy, who locks her in, still living. Ten years later, on the opening of the chest, Lady Agnes’ ghost rises up to accuse the villain and drive him to suicide.

The Mistletoe Bough was apparently enormously popular both in England and the United States, and Henry James must have known of it if he did not actually see it. For it was performed in New York at the time of James’s youthful initiation into the theater as recorded in A Small Boy and Others. It opened at the Bowery Theatre on August 30, 1852, and was followed, on September 3, by The Serious Family, which was being performed at the same time at Burton’s (Odell 6: 221), a performance which James refers to in A Small Boy and Others (105). ¹ The Mistletoe Bough was performed again at the Bowery in September 1863 (now subtitled in Odell: or, The Bride and the Ghost), as one in a long series of...