“Marjory” was written by “F. Anstey” and first appeared in “Marjorie” (Unwin’s Christmas Annual for 1886, 1885). "F. Anstey” was the pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), a popular British humorist and satirist.

Cameron is a sensitive and bookish child whose only company, until he was eleven, was his mother and one servant. He disliked other boys and was friends with none of them, and his only goal was to become a curate when he was grown and to live with his mother. But his mother dies and he is forced by his uncle to go to a boarding school. Once there he meets Marjory, a kind girl of his own age who makes an effort to befriend him and help him. Marjory is Cameron’s only friend at the school, for he is exactly the wrong personality–withdrawn, prone to tears, sensitive to slights, and socially awkward–to be left among boys just entering the teenage years, and they choose him as the class target and victim. Worse, one of the boys, Clarence Ormsby, takes a particular dislike for Cameron and picks on him unceasingly. Cameron’s victimization is not physical, for the school is good enough that the students are not complete brutes, but the taunting and tricks that Ormsby and the others play on Cameron are bad enough. Marjory tries to help Cameron, but he is too proud and stubborn to follow her suggestions, and eventually she gives up on him. Then, one day, Ormsby plays a particularly nasty trick on Cameron, and the latter looks so miserable that Marjory befriends him again and goes to Ormsby to fight for Cameron, who won’t do so on his own behalf. Cameron hears a scream and a thud, and sees Ormsby bending over Marjory’s prone body. Marjory dies that night. Ormsby and Cameron begin quarreling, and Ormsby blames Cameron for Marjory’s death. Cameron slugs Ormsby in the mouth, and Ormsby is about to club Cameron with a large T-square when Marjory’s ghost appears. She looks sad and grave, and she makes the terrified Ormsby confess that he had tied a string across the top of a stairs in an effort to trip Cameron. Marjory had fallen over it to her death. Marjory makes Cameron promise never to tell what happened, and “be brave, and take your own part now,”¹ and then makes Ormsby promise to be kinder to Cameron. She says goodbye and disappears. Ormsby acts better to Cameron, and Cameron’s life improves. Eventually Ormsby dies gallantly in the Sudan, and the adult Cameron looks forward to meeting Marjory in the next life. He does not anticipate seeing her in this one, but “for what may come after I am content to wait."²

“Marjory,” is an effective combination of the school story and the ghost story. (It is a mélange of the Salem House sequence in Dickens’ David Copperfield and Anstey’s personal history–a mélange that Anstey may not have fully been in control of).³ In Vice Versâ Anstey vividly described the pains of boarding school. In “Marjory” he does this again, quite well; only someone with a heart of stone or who was a bully in school will not feel large twinges of sympathy for poor, sensitive, withdrawn Cameron, a realistically-described and recognizable boy. Reading “Marjory” may provoke unpleasant flashbacks for some readers, but even those who never suffered in school will likely feel for Cameron. Marjory’s appearance is gratifying for that reason, but, even better, Anstey does not take the perhaps predictable route of having Marjory kill Ormsby. Instead, she simply tells Ormsby to behave. It is a sad and gentle approach quite fitting for this sad and wise story. “Marjory” is not flashy and is not horrifying, and harsh critics might dismiss it as “sentimental,” but it is a kind and almost moving story.

Print: F. Anstey, The Talking Horse And Other Tales. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1892.

^{^[1]} F. Anstey, “Marjory,” in The Talking Horse and Other Tales (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1892), 319.

^{^[2]} Anstey, “Marjory,” 320.

^{^[3]} Peter Merchant, “‘A Kind of Odour of Salem House,’ David Copperfield and Thomas Anstey Guthrie,” in Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters, eds., Dickens and the Imagined Child (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 135-137.