Dr. Cinderella and the Bronze Artifact, Cardinal Napellus and the Copper Globe: Was Gustav Meyrink an Early Adopter of M.R. James’s Ghostly Fiction?

Hitherto unnoticed similarities between two short stories by Gustav Meyrink and two of the most renowned and widely read ghost stories of M.R. James are detailed through comparative literary analysis. Specifically, one early occult horror tale of Meyrink, The Plants of Dr. Cinderella (1905), shows no less than about 15 congruences beneath the plot level (concerning specific story requisites) with M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904), as does, to the same extent, a later, widely known Meyrink tale (The Cardinal Napellus, 1914) vis-à-vis M.R. James’s Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance (1911). Although direct, conclusive evidence is unavailable, a nexus of circumstantial evidence, building on extensive biographical and bibliographical inquiries, convergently attests to these assumed literary influences on Meyrink: for both cases, the chronology is intact and thus possible; Meyrink was expertly fluent in English and well-connected to England and English literature; and, these borrowings are reminiscent of other, already known originality issues surrounding Meyrink’s work. Altogether, these new discoveries shed fresh light on idiosyncrasies of Meyrink’s creative process, imagination, and literary production; on his still under-researched literary inspirational sources; as well as on the early reception of M.R. James’s ghostly fiction beyond the anglophone sphere.