The Weird, the Gothic and the Supernatural: Arthur Machen’s London

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Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was one of the great prose stylists and visionaries of English literature. A Welsh mystic adrift in the Imperial metropolis, he found in London a landscape of both spiritual terror and sudden transcendence. Best known for influential fin-de-siècle tales such as “The Great God Pan” and ‘The White People’, Machen’s work—fusing Gothic horror, pagan reverie, and Christian mysticism—was profoundly shaped by his encounter with the burgeoning, bewildering capital. He was also an actor, bohemian, and the author of “The London Adventure”—a piece of proto-psychogeography that remains one of the most evocative (and frustrating!) meditations on the city ever written.
 
From the railways and redbrick order of King’s Cross, we’ll pass through Bloomsbury and Holborn—districts with rich connections to Machen’s life and work—before reaching the still bustling Strand and Fleet Street, where Machen himself once became something of a local character. In his years as a jobbing journalist, he haunted its taverns and press offices, propping up bar counters and regaling fellow hacks with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of remarkable anecdotes, in which the mundane subtly yet inevitably transmuted into the mystical.
 

James Machin is a researcher, writer, and editor with a special interest in the weird, the Gothic, and the supernatural. He was the editor of “Faunus: the Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen” for over a decade (https://www.arthurmachen.org.uk). He is the author of “Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939” (Palgrave, 2018), and other recent books include “The Strange Stories of John Buchan”, for the British Library’s ‘Gilded Nightmares’ series.