So I started watching Poldark this month. It’s got all the melodrama and escapist shots of the Cornish coastline that I need from my evening TV watch. And it also has mines! The mines usually serve as devices for other plot points - dramatic mining accidents, allusions to Cornwall’s wavering tin industry, the constant threat of economic ruin, and plenty of opportunities for Aidan Turner to lug rocks around with his shirt off. Many of these mines are now historical sites - and several claim to be haunted! So watching Poldark sent me into a few late-night rabbit holes reading about Cornish mining and the folklore around them.
Earlier this week, I came across a short story collection from the 19th century by an American writer, Joseph H. Pearce. The stories in this collection, Drolls from the Shadowland (New York, 1893), are based on various Cornish legends. The first story’s title caught my eye - ‘The Man Who Coined His Blood Into Gold’. In this tale, a Cornish miner bemoans his poverty whilst working deep in a mine. The wall he is working on collapses and behind it is a cavern with walls encrusted with silver. As the miner glances covetously inside, a squat, hump-backed figure emerges from the shadows. The creature has long, claw-like fingers adorned with rings and luminous eyes. It offers the miner a great sum of money before slitting the miner’s wrists. The creature tells the miner that if he utters the magic word “Wan”, every drop of blood will turn into a gold coin. The miner quickly bleeds himself to death, his body left surrounded by gold coins, and the strange creature takes his soul. In the last moments of his life, we’re told, the miner looks at the thing and ‘knew full well who and what he was’. The Evil One. The devil.
This eerie tale draws on the mining lore of ghosts, sprites, and so-called ‘knockers’ (named so because of the ‘knocking’ sound that occurred before cave-ins) that live deep in the Cornish mines, causing mischief to miners, or worse. Ronald M. James’ work on ‘knockers’ also suggests that they were often believed to be the spirits specifically of Jewish miners, which would add an anti-semitic undertone to Pearce’s story. And as deep underground spaces, associations between mines, hell, and the devil were popular too. Pearce’s fable of greed and a deal with the devil gone awry carries hints of contemporary anxieties surrounding the collapse of the Cornish mining industry. The mines, with mineral deposits named ‘veins’ for their likeness to the veins of the body, have been ‘bled dry’ (the Cornish mines had not, in fact, been ‘bled dry’, rather the import of foreign tin and copper had lowered prices, making Cornish mines less profitable). Gothic literary encounters in mines such as this offer a site to explore these anxieties through the lens of the area’s superstitions and folklore.
Exploring these stories further, I found Joan Passey’s excellent thesis on the ‘Cornish Gothic’, which dedicates a whole chapter to Cornish mining and gothic tales. Passey is co-editing an upcoming special edition in the Revenant journal, ‘Obscene Surfacings and the Subterranean Gothic’, which I’m very excited to read!
In the meantime, I’m keeping an eye out for early modern realisations of this uneasy relationship between subterranean spaces, mining, hell, and folklore. If I find anything cool, I’ll be sure to post it on here. If you enjoyed this post, please give it a like, share, and subscribe:
Sources
J. H. Pearce, ‘The Man Who Coined His Blood Into Gold’, Drolls from the Shadowland (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1893).
Ronald M. James, ‘Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines’, Western Folklore, 51:2 (1992), pp. 153-177.
Joan Passey, Corpses, Coasts, and Carriages: Gothic Cornwall, 1840-1913 (doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2019).