It was commissioned by Queen Mary, wife of George V, as a miniature book for her famous Dolls' House, which can still be seen in Windsor Castle.
They agree that the man in black was a lawyer bringing a draft will, and Chittenden says he thinks the dolls' house originated somewhere not very distant, prompting Dillet to investigate.
He finds that the Merewether family of nearby Ilbridge House had lost two children in the mid-18th century, and their father was a promising architect, who had made at least one architectural model.
Queen Mary's Dolls' House, conceived in 1920 and built between 1921 and 1924 for display in Windsor Castle, included a library for which miniature books were commissioned from the leading writers of the day, including Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy and M. R. James, at that time Provost of the nearby Eton College.
In both, as Rosemary Pardoe writes, "the action is observed secondhand by an unconnected witness, and ... the plot concerns supernatural vengeance wrought on innocent offspring for the sins of the parents".
[4] In these stories, and in "A View from a Hill", the temporal viewpoint is uncertain: one cannot tell whether the crimes presented are happening in the past or the future, or whether the protagonist can change them.
[12] Julia Briggs has pointed out that beds are especially deadly in this and others of James's stories, and there is also what has been called a "comic Gothicisation of domestic drudgery" apparent in "The Haunted Dolls' House", "Oh, Whistle", "The Diary of Mr Poynter", and "The Malice of Inanimate Objects".
[16] The story has been adapted as a short film by Stephen Gray[17] and as a play by Karen Henson, which has been produced by the Rumpus Theatre Company.