A friend’s reminiscences* include examples of what I would call pretty unusual behavior for a little boy:
He also appears to have been a keen antiquarian from childhood. James was the son of a clergyman, and his stories depict a society in which the unassailable centrality of the Anglican church is assumed (rather like Trollope). Being an antiquarian ( enthusiastic does not begin to describe it), he enjoyed featuring ancient manuscripts, artifacts, or monsters, and his protagonists are often scholarly gentlemen, like himself. He knew much of the Gothic tradition, and both drew upon it and departed from it, bringing new ideas to the scene I think we can fairly call him a bridge from Gothic literature to the beginnings of modern horror. Montague Rhodes James (1862 – 1936) spent his life as a scholar and medievalist, working at Cambridge and Eton, and he also wrote ghost stories on the side, for fun.
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