Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Henry Blackwood CBE (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951) was a British author, journalist, paranormal investigator and broadcaster. Blackwood wrote in a number of genres, including children’s fiction, but was best known as a writer of weird tales, horror, and ghost stories. The British press dubbed him ‘The Ghost Man’, and H.P. Lovecraft designated him one of the ‘Modern Masters’ of horror alongside Arthur Machen, M.R. James, and Blackwood’s close friend, Lord Dunsany. ‘Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute,’ wrote Lovecraft in 1927, calling him ‘inspired and prolific,’ and amidst whose work ‘may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age.’

Blackwood was born in Shooter’s Hill in southeast London, the family moving to Crayford Manor House in 1871. He was the son of senior civil servant Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood and Harriet Dobbs, the widow of the 6^th Duke of Manchester. He grew up in a strict evangelical household, but quietly rebelled when he read a Theosophist translation of The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali left by a visitor writing a tract about Satan disseminating dangerous Easter philosophy. As a young man, Blackwood was passionate about Nature, and was happiest throughout his life travelling to wild, deserted places like the great primordial forests of Canada and North America, the deserts of Egypt, and the Swiss Alps – all of which served as settings in many of his stories. Blackwood attended Wellington College in Berkshire but disliked the discipline and rote learning and did not perform well academically. After schooling in Switzerland and with the Moravian Brotherhood in Germany, Blackwood attended Edinburgh University to study Agriculture but left after a year, having spent most of his time focused on Theosophy and the Society for Psychical Research. In 1890, he went to Canada to seek his fortune, but lost his entire inheritance after two disastrous business ventures in dairy farming and hotel management. After an idyllic summer spent idling on the shore of Lake Rosseau, he moved to New York in 1892, working as a low-paid court reporter for the Evening Sun, eventually becoming homeless and briefly addicted to morphine. Having failed to get rich during the Ontario gold rush, Blackwood became a staff reporter for the New York Times and then private secretary to the banker James Speyer. He returned to England in 1899 and began writing prolifically for his own amusement, joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1900, ultimately reaching the Inner Order grade of ‘Adeptus Minor’.

Without Blackwood’s consent, his friend Angus Hamilton showed publisher Eveleigh Nash some of his stories, leading to the publication of The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906), and The Listener and Other Stories (1907). Promising early critical acclaim was followed by commercial success with the occult detective collection John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908), allowing Blackwood the financial freedom to give up his day job, and simply write and travel. In total, Blackwood wrote thirteen novels, ten children’s books, and twelve collections of short stories comprising weird, occult, supernatural, eco, mystical and occasionally humorous fiction, as well as seven plays, an autobiography, and numerous articles, magazine stories, and TV and radio talks. During the First World War, he was an undercover agent for British Military Intelligence in Switzerland and a Red Cross ‘Searcher’, helping families trace lost loved ones. He began telling stories on BBC radio in 1934, appearing two years later in the first British television broadcast on November 2, 1936, and on the famous BBC Halloween show of 1947 when viewers panicked after he seemingly disappeared before their eyes on live television. These broadcasts were immensely popular, leading to a resurgence of interest in his fiction, especially his ghost stories. Blackwood received a CBE in 1948 for his services to broadcasting, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature a few months before his death. He died of a stroke at his flat in Kensington aged 82, and his ashes were scattered at the Saanenmöser Pass in the Swiss Alps. He never married.

Blackwood’s fiction is structured around a unifying belief that ‘everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy,’ a similar theory to that of German scientist and philosopher Gustav Fechner (1801 – 1887). In synthesising Christianity and Paganism, Fechner viewed the universe as inwardly alive and consciously animated, a position Blackwood had similarly arrived at as a young man in tune with the natural world and active in esoteric circles such as the Golden Dawn. Throughout his life, Blackwood experimented in ‘expanding consciousness’ to access ‘the great spiritual forces that I believed lay behind all phenomena,’ and his stories validate and propagate this worldview. The experience can be visionary and awe-inspiring, but in his horror fiction life-threatening and terrifying. It is the nature of the interaction that determines the nature of the story. The animistic universe remains vast, unchanged and disinterested. As the divinity student ‘Simpson’ comes to realise in ‘The Wendigo’: ‘The beauty of the scene was strangely uplifting … Yet, ever at the back of his thoughts, lay that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man.’ So the elemental forces in ‘The Willows’, for example, the haunted houses, and the legendary Wendigo are not in themselves hostile, but if disturbed by human beings their response is powerful, unpredictable, frightening and dangerous. In many of Blackwood’s stories, the catalyst is invasion by man, into the wilderness, into the haunted space, and often all that can save them is their very insignificance. Blackwood was also fascinated by the psychology of fear, and his stories are often deep dives into the psyches of the haunted and the cursed.

Blackwood was a prolific and influential author of weird, occult and supernatural fiction. Beginning with ghost stories, his fiction evolved into an elegant exploration of unknown worlds that push against the boundaries of our own, of other dimensions, and higher states of consciousness. When he died in 1951, he was a TV celebrity and national treasure. Nowadays, Blackwood’s most recognisable legacy are the stories ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Wendigo’, both tales in which the boundaries between natural and supernatural fray and tear in a howling, untamed wilderness. Next to these, his most enduring work is probably the adventures of the occult detective ‘John Silence’ – who predates William Hope Hodgson’s ‘Thomas Carnacki – Ghost-finder’ and his many imitators – and the intense psychological thriller ‘Max Hensig – Bacteriologist and Murderer’, which draws heavily on Blackwood’s time as a New York court reporter when he interviewed axe-murderer Lizzie Borden. Though his work has been explored by a handful of literary critics, it is inexplicably largely overlooked by the academy and the wider horror community, with little of his writing filmed or currently in print.

Biography by Stephen Carver