"The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ & Sunday Swipes No. 3

"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)

Only some of these are considered fantasy, ghost stories, or weird fiction. Not all are included in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

"The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was the first reprint in Weird Tales, "The Closed Cabinet" now the second. It looks as though both came from the same source, namely, Julian Hawthorne's collection from earlier in the century. Charles Dickens' story "The Signal-Man" was also reprinted in Weird Tales, in the issue of April 1930. A second by-the-way: Julian Hawthorne was the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and the father of Hildegarde Hawthorne (1871-1952), both of whom also had stories in Weird Tales, though both posthumously.

Next: Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945)

"Her Countenance Grew Fierce," an illustration by an unknown artist for "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the frontispiece for The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations, Old Time English, edited by Julian Hawthorne (New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1915). I have altered this image from a photograph taken of the original.

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:

No wonder Heitman's cover was so uncharacteristic of his regular work, and no wonder that the male figure on the right doesn't match very well the female on the left in its treatment or technique.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley