The House by the Churchyard

The House by the Churchyard

First edition title page
Author	Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Publisher	William Tinsley
Publication date	1863

The House by the Churchyard (1863) is a novel by Sheridan Le Fanu that combines elements of the mystery novel and the historical novel. Aside from its own merits, the novel is important as a key source for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

The novel begins with a prologue in the voice of an old man, Charles de Cresseron, that is set in Chapelizod, Ireland, roughly a century after the events of the novel proper. This prologue details how, during an interment at the churchyard of the title, a skull is accidentally unearthed, which bears the marks of two crushing blows to the head and – even more disconcertingly – a small hole from a trepanning. The novel itself is Cresseron's reconstruction of the history related to this grisly item (though by and large his narratorial voice drops out and the novel is told from a conventional omniscient narrator's point of view).

The first chapter of the novel proper moves back to 1767, the period of the novel, and begins with another mysterious occurrence in the churchyard: the secretive burial of a coffin, with the occupant simply identified on the brass plaque as "R.D." But after this ominous opening the book turns (in its first half) to the careful and largely light-hearted elaboration of the social life and intrigues among the denizens of Chapelizod, from the powerful Lord Castlemallard to the soldiers in the local barracks under General Chattesworth, to the good Doctor Walsingham and his daughter Lily, to the gluttonous local Catholic priest Father Roach. The opening section of the novel is largely taken up by a farcical duel between two soldiers, Puddock and O'Flaherty, which arises from drunken misunderstanding and eventually is defused without any harm done. Le Fanu introduces hints of unease, though, with the advent of the mysterious Mr Mervyn, who takes up residence in the Tiled House, a building widely rumoured to be haunted. (At this point, Le Fanu interpolates a ghost story, "An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand", which has often been separately anthologized.) Mervyn courts the daughter of the General, Gertrude Chattesworth, but has a rival in the scheming Mr Dangerfield, the trusted manager of the English estates of Lord Castlemallard who is visiting Chapelizod and who also has his eye on Gertrude. Dangerfield destroys the romance between Mervyn and Gertrude by setting into circulation vicious rumours about him and his family. Mervyn is in fact the son and heir of the late Lord Dunoran, who was found guilty of murdering a man named Beauclerc to whom he had lost a considerable sum at cards; Dunoran then committed suicide in his prison cell. (It was his coffin that was buried at the beginning of the book – the secrecy required because of the dubiousness of burying a suicide on consecrated ground.)