7/25/2023 0 Comments Inmost explainedHe sees a drunk man and a crying woman talking. In his case, he relishes street rows and the various “amusing phases of drunkenness”. Salisbury is a bit like Dyson in taking delight in the sights of London. He’s a stolid sort, and, on the way home from Dyson’s and pondering the “perverse dexterity” of Dyson in changing some woman suffering a brain disease into something more, he carelessly strays into a strange and rough neighborhood. Salisbury reserves judgement since Dyson has more to tell him, and they agree next week. Dyson asks Salisbury what he thinks of the mystery. Alteration of the brain will not be the only echo of Machen’s “The Great God Pan” in this story.Ī verdict of natural causes was entered. However, her brain tissue is altered so much “it resembled that of an animal”. Black has died, and an autopsy found no marks of foul play or poison. However, a newspaper article on “The Harlesden Case” catches his eye. However, he forgets it about it as the summer continues. Struck me with such a nameless terror, there was a mist of flowing yellow hair, as it was an auereole of glory round the visage of a satyr.ĭyson wonders how to reconcile this with the rumors that Black murdered his wife. In a rather long passage describing his sensations, he tells Salisbury it reminded him of Hell, a face that He was in the neighborhood and happened to glance at Black’s house and saw, in a window, the face of a beautiful woman that is somehow inhuman. A neighborhood rumor starts up that the doctor killed his wife. Black, when asked about her, says she felt ill. However, nobody saw them all winter, and Dr. His wife was uncommonly beautiful, and they were often seen walking about in the neighborhood and seemed very affectionate. Black settled there one or two years ago. It’s very lonely mid-day, a “city of the dead”. Harlesden is a place, one of the “out-quarters” of London, even past the suburbs. To prove his case, he tells Salisbury about the Harlesden case. (At this point in his life, Machen was also able to devote himself full time to writing because of an inheritance he received.)Īfter hearing from Dyson about his love of London’s mysteries and how the city needs its own Homer (a role Machen, with his love of the Illiad, may have seen for himself), Salisbury declares Dyson’s imagination about London “too fervid”. Since their last meeting, Dyson fell on hard times as a writer until he inherited some money. The story opens, as many early Machen stories do, with some random wanderings about London, and Dyson meeting his old friend Salisbury again after five years. The story is told, like Machen’s “ The Great God Pan”, episodically, but the story relies more on coincidence than a network of personal acquaintances. It’s also the only Machen story I would describe, after reading more than two-thirds of his fiction, as genuinely, viscerally horrifying. The great city the physiology of London literally and metaphysically the greatest subject that the mind of man can conceive. He is not a student of the occult like Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence nor does Dyson claim psychic sensitivity.ĭyson calls himself a “man of science”, and his science (like many a Machen protagonist) is However, he uses no apparatus like William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki does with his electric pentacle. It’s also his first story with Dyson, a character in four Machen works who has sometimes been called an occult detective. Machen has turned has his back for good on writing society tales. Written in 1892, there are several notable things about this story.
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