"The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch was the first story in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales. "The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ was the last. _____ _____ was an anonymous author in the pages of "The Unique Magazine" and in the original. The original was Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Vol. CLVII, No. DCCCLI), published in January 1895. The publication of "The Closed Cabinet" was announced in newspapers in December 1894. In its issue of January 21, 1895, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called it "an old time Scotch story." (p. 12)
In an item called "Literary Gossip," the Bowling Green, Ohio, Daily Sentinel-Tribune (Mar. 7, 1895, p. 2) attributed authorship of the story to Lady Gwendolen Cecil, daughter of the Marquess of Salisbury. There isn't any source given for that bit of information. This was gossip after all. Her authorship was previously confirmed in The Author, Playwright and Composer, Volumes 5 and 6, page 246, also from 1895. Maybe that's the source of the item out of Bowling Green. By the way, The Collector's Index to Weird Tales by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook, an indispensable source in my writing of this blog, was also published in Bowling Green.
I'm not the first person to track down authorship of "The Closed Cabinet" to Lady Gwendolen. Scottish editor Johnny Mains (b. 1976) did that before me for his collection A Suggestion of Ghosts: Supernatural Fiction by Women, 1854-1900 (2018). More than a hundred years before Mr. Mains published his book, Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934) included "The Closed Cabinet" in his series Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories (1907-1909?). It looks like this series was also called and/or reprinted as The Lock and Key Library. Lady Gwendolen's story is in the volume Old-Time English Stories (1909), the contents of which are as follows:
- "The Haunted House" by Charles Dickens (1859)
- "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens (1866)
- "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859)
- "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (date unknown)
- "The Avenger" by Thomas De Quincey (1838)
- "Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin (1821)
- "A Mystery with a Moral" by Laurence Sterne (date unknown)
- "On Being Found Out" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1861)
- "The Notch on the Ax" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1862)
- "Bourgonef" by unknown
- "The Closed Cabinet" by unknown (Lady Gwendolen Cecil)
The image shown above may seem familiar to you. Have a look at the cover illustration for the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales, made by William F. Heitman:
Now here they are side by side, with the Weird Tales cover flipped:
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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