On Mermaids & Mr. Machen’s Christmas Plans

Folk-Lore, Water Babies and Mermaids: The last reported appearance of a mermaid is so recent as the end of April 1910. Several people, including Martin Griffin, my informant, saw what they are firmly convinced was a merwoman in a cove a little to the north of Spanish Point, near Miltown, Malbay. She was white-skinned, and had well-shaped white hands. The party tried to make friends with her, giving her bread, which she ate. Then a Quilty fisherman got frightened, said she was “something bad,” and threw a pebble at her, on which she plunged into the sea and disappeared.

2 thoughts on “On Mermaids & Mr. Machen’s Christmas Plans”

What a wealth of fascinating matter in this article!

I did not twig to the fact Machen’s novelist friend was in fact himself until I searched for the quotation and found that it came from “The White Company”. En route I discovered that Arthur Quiller-Couch’s second novel was entitled (among other things) The Astonishing History of Troy Town when first published in 1888.

Wikipedia has articles on both “Hantu (supernatural creature)” – with publication details of a 1958 article, “The Malayan Hantu Musang and Other Possession Games of Indonesia and Indochina” – and “Troy Town” in reference to English turf mazes, something I presume Machen is playing with in his reference to “a pattern in the grass”. It also has a “Thomas Johnson Westropp” article, but I have not yet found an accessible copy of his “Survey of County Clare” online. (What a jolly Kingsley reference, by the way!)

There is a scan of Walter Jerrold’s 1910 book in the Internet Archive. But, is there something missing in the anecdote about the minor poet as to what he said? I also suspect “was” should be ‘has’ in the first sentence quoted from Mirabeau.

There is a splendid 2023 article by Mhairi Gowans online about that “certain shop in Lincoln’s Inn Fields” entitled “The curious history of the Old Curiosity Shop”.

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