The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Little People Stories (1895-1915)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Little People were created by Arthur Machen and appeared in The Three Impostors (1895), “The Shining Pyramid” (The Unknown World, May 115, 1895), “The Red Hand” (Chapman’s Magazine of Fiction, December 1895), “The White People” (Horlick’s Magazine, Jan. 1904), “Out of the Earth” (T.P.’s Weekly, Nov. 27, 1915), with references to them in a number of Machen’s other stories. Arthur Machen (née Arthur Llewellyn Jones, 1863-1947) was a Welsh novelist, short story writer, and translator. He is well-regarded by connoisseurs of horror and supernatural fiction but not as well-known outside the field as he deserves to be.

The Little People are primeval throwbacks, an atavistic race of beings who lurk underground and on the edges of society. They are bestial and subhuman and use primitive tools like flint arrows and knives. And they are malefic and worship ancient and terrible supernatural powers.

In “The Shining Pyramid” the Little People kidnap a beautiful teenage girl while she is out walking in the hills near the Wales border. Dyson and Phillipps, the men investigating the girl’s disappearance, discover that the Little People communicate with each other by leaving symbols, made up of old flint arrow-heads, in the grass along a wall on a centuries-old walkway. The symbols range from ordered lines to a “device of spokes”¹ to a bowl to a pyramid to a half moon. On the wall the Little People draw, in a red substance, an eye with a epicanthic fold, what Machen calls “the Mongolian eye.”² The Little People use the symbols to communicate with each other, in the case of “The Shining Pyramid” to plan a gathering. At that gathering the Little People come together and sacrifice a human, causing a pyramid of flame to erupt. The Little People are described as being three and a half to four feet tall, writhing and tossing in a great mass of vague and restless forms. They hiss in a venomous tongue, their “abominable yellow limbs, vague and yet too plainly seen, writhe and intertwine.”³ 

In “The Red Hand” the Little People are discovered by a man who after many years deciphers a black tablet of stone inscribed with writing in an alien language. The tablet leads him into the hills in the West, presumably the same hills along the Welsh border in which “The Shining Pyramid” takes place. The man brings away from the hills a flint knife, but he is forced to kill an old friend with it. When he returns to the hills, he sees “the keepers” of the Little People and is given or takes away gold, including “a small piece of curious gold-work...the Pain of the Goat,”⁴ which causes Dyson and his friend Phillipps to cry out “in horror at the revolting obscenity of the thing.”⁵ The man further says, “You do not wonder that I did not stay long in a place where those who live are a little higher than the beasts, and where what you have seen is surpassed a thousandfold?”⁶ 

In The Three Impostors Phillipps is told a story (which in the body of the story may be simply a lie) about a Professor who, using the black tablet from “The Red Hand” and the fact of the girl’s disappearance in “The Shining Pyramid,” goes to the hills along the Welsh border to seek out the Little People. A Latin text is quoted describing the Little People:

This folk dwell in remote and secret places, and celebrate foul mysteries on savage hills. Nothing have they in common with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak; their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. They boast of a certain stone, which they call Sixtystone; for they say that it displays sixty characters. And this stone has a secret unspeakable name; which is Ixaxar.⁷ 

A double of the black tablet from “The Red Hand” turns out to be Ixaxar. The Professor discovers Jervase, whose mother was raped by the Little People. As a result Jervase is a half-wit who goes into fits and speaks, in tongues, “the very speech of hell.”⁸  The Professor meets a Mr. Meyrick, likely a relative of the Arthur Meyrick who was a victim of Helen Vaughn in “The Great God Pan.” Mr. Meyrick mentions that the locals describe the fairies/Little People as the “Tylwydd Têg.” One of the Professor’s busts is mysteriously moved, leaving behind a snake-like smell and a “sticky and slimy” residue. The Professor refers to “the inimitable Holmes”⁹ (See: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries). And then the Professor disappears, leaving behind a long account of his investigations into the true source of the legends of fairies (the Little People themselves), how the Professor witnessed Jervase become possessed and manifest a slimy tentacle (which moved the aforementioned bust), and how the Professor used the writing on the Black Seal, the black tablet, to dispel Jervase’s possession.

In the remarkable “The White People,” arguably the best horror story of the twentieth century, a young girl first meets the Little People when she is only an infant (“the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle”¹⁰). When she is five or six, sees them dancing with her Nurse. When the girl is thirteen years old visits the Little People and sees their world in all its fantastic, evil glory, and she eventually becomes a part of that world, solving its mysteries, and dies.

Machen’s use of hostile atavisms—the Little People—ties in to a uniquely Victorian horror. “His fiction is haunted…not only by the new abysses of time disclosed by science, but by the prospect of a history (as history was coming to be defined in this period), or histories, coeval with these.”¹¹ As Aaron Worth writes, the Victorians, especially the Victorians who dealt publicly or privately with history, were particularly and peculiarly horrified by the vistas of “deep time” which contemporary developments and discoveries in geology, biology, and paleoanthropology had opened. The Victorians, especially historians, could not accept deep time, “’recoiling’ in panic from the ‘endless vista’ of deep temporality…anxiously ‘[unwilling] to contemplate the dark abyss of time.”¹² The Victorians constructed intellectual barriers around deep time, the concept of “prehistory…a kind of dodge meant to keep history itself safely quarantined in the shallow end of the disciplinary pool.”¹³ Machen’s fiction “works with similar conceptual material in order to generate quite different effects, disconcertingly straddling the very boundaries that nineteenth-century historiography had been at such anxious pains to erect.”¹⁴ 

Recommended Edition

Print: Arthur Machen and Aaron Worth, The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Online: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606971h.html