A clergyman’s son in London
Machen was born in 1863 near Caerleon. His father was a clergyman, and he grew up at the rectory at Llanddewi Fach before attending Hereford Cathedral School. In London he struggled for a livelihood, translating and cataloguing books. A period of inherited income gave him time to write some of the fiction on which his reputation rests.
He also joined F. R. Benson’s touring company as an actor and found regular work in journalism. In 1914 the Evening News printed The Bowmen, his story of supernatural archers coming to the aid of British soldiers. Readers repeated versions as testimony, helping give rise to the legend of the Angels of Mons. Machen found himself explaining that he had written a story.
A story assembled from witnesses
The Great God Pan opens with Dr Raymond preparing an experiment that he believes will let a human being perceive what ordinarily lies beyond the senses. The consequences reach the reader through conversations, scraps of writing and encounters spread across years. Lumitheca holds the novella on its own and in the 1922 House of Souls, where The White People and The Inmost Light offer other versions of a hidden world breaking through the familiar one.
