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I’ve always enjoyed horror stories, but only the ones from the late 19th and early 20th centuries—they create a creepiness that can’t be conjured up in today’s world and they avoid vulgar words and sexuality—it may have to do with the gas lights or habitually spooky architecture of the time, but M. R. James is one of my favorites. However, I found one recently by of all people the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, more commonly recognized as the composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers! He lived a life of wealth and luxury in England from 1834 to 1924—sadly missing the electrical recording process by one year. However, he wrote a number of horror stories and this one from 1904 has a political treatise imbedded in it which I found interesting:

A Dead Finger by Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould

It begins when the home owner is spending time at his country estate while an electrician in London is converting his mansion from gas light to the new medium of electricity. He’s awakened in the night by a pain in his side, only to discover it is a disembodied, rotting finger causing the mischief. He’s so horrified he packs up and returns to London, only to discover the finger has hitched a ride in his luggage. Over the course of several days, a vague but shapeless mass appears to be growing from the finger. With the help of the electrician and the device of science fiction, the being is trapped in an electrical field and is forced to divulge who and what it is with the following results. It appears he was a deceased person of the working class who died in great unhappiness and he takes the narrative here:

“Yes, I was always unsuccessful. I never liked to work and everything I did never fit right with me. The world and society was always against me. I hated the Royal Family, the landed interest, the parsons, everything, except the people—that is, the unemployed. Discontent was a passion, it takes control and makes a man dissatisfied with everything and hate everybody. But we must have our share of happiness—we all crave it one way or the other. Some think there is a future state of blessedness and so have hope. But when you have no hope of that sort and don’t believe in any future state, you must look for it in life here, so we seek to procure it after we’re dead. We can only do it when everything has decomposed and only a couple of fingers remain. We can work our way back to earth, pulling the shade of what is left with us. We grope about after the living—the well-to-do if we can get at them, the honest working poor if we can’t for we hate them too, because they are content and happy. If we can reach them, we can touch them and draw out their vital life force to rematerialize and that’s what I almost did with you. But just like always, I failed.”

Then he asked, what are you “Anarchists out of employ?”

“Some of us go by that name, but we are all one and have but one allegiance—Sovereign Discontent. We are bred to have distaste for manual work and we grow up loafers, grumbling at everything and quarrelling with the Society that is around us and the Providence that is above us.”

“And what do you call yourselves now?”

“Call ourselves? Nothing, we are the same in another condition, that is all. Folk once called us Anarchists, Nihilists, Levelers, Socialists, now they call us the Influenza. We are the social failures, the generally discontented, coming up out of our cheap nasty graves in the form of physical disease.”

“There you are said the electrician, all forces are correlated. If so, then all negations, deficiencies of force are one in their several manifestations. It is a paralysis of energy, it turns all it absorbs to acid, to envy, to spite, gall. It inspires nothing, but rots the whole moral system. Here you have it—moral, social, political discontent, that is all. What Anarchism is in the body Politic, that Influenza is in the body Physical."

“I don’t know what the electrician did with the Thing, but believe he reduced it again to its former negative and self-decomposing state.”