These references to Geibel’s abilities are not without humour “a gentleman with a hollow inside who could…drink more lager than any three average German students put together, which is saying much” provides a light touch to offset the later horror of the story. This human element is reinforced by the reference to the “skeleton that, supported by an upright iron bar, would dance” which foreshadows the story’s eventual climax. Indeed, his list of accomplishments builds to suggest the likely outcome, moving from “rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage” to “cats that would wash their faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats”, increasingly more convincing regarding life-like detail until we have “dolls with phonographs concealed within them” making them capable of a kind of speech.
He tells us about Nicholaus Geibel whose “business was the making of mechanical toys” and so from as early as the third sentence we have some idea as to where this story is going to go. The tale begins in something of a traditional way, with named narrator MacShaugnassy telling the story to us as if it were an oral narrative, providing an element of distance reinforced by a foreign setting. Instead of the dancer’s mechanical identity providing the conclusion, it is the fate of poor Annette that gives us the story’s horrific finale. However, whereas Hoffman’s and Poe’s tales built towards their clockwork revelations, Jerome’s makes it clear quite early that the dancing partner is a manmade construction. There’s no ghost in this one but rather a sense of the uncanny via an automaton something akin to the one in Hoffman’s superb ‘The Sandman’ or Poe’s ‘The Man That Was Used Up’. Jerome is probably best known for his comic novel Three Men in a Boat, but he wrote a few ghost stories too. You can read it here first to avoid spoilers.
But here’s a new one, this time looking at ‘The Dancing Partner’ by Jerome K Jerome.
It’s been a while since my last column, sorry about that – various personal issues and horrors of my own.
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