Introduction: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, 1800–1900

Summary

This introductory chapter charts the major directions that the Gothic aesthetic took in Britain, America and Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. Commencing with an account of the critical formation and consolidation of the notion of ‘Gothic literature’ itself, it discusses the critical work of figures such as Nathan Drake, Walter Scott, George Stillman Hillard and Edmund Gosse. Showing the extent to which this literary-historical category was defined against, and in relation to, canonical British Romanticism, it surveys the anti-Gothic rhetoric of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt and others. Through consideration of the work of Thomas B. Shaw, William John Courthope and Edward Dowden, it tracks the persistence of such Romantic attitudes in the literary historiography of the nineteenth century. Exploring, in its final sections, the volume’s contents, the Introduction situates the chapters that follow in relation to some of the major developments in literary, historiographical and architectural Gothic culture across the nineteenth century.

Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her windy corridors, listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out, and leave me in darkness? People know the name of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’; They know that boys would say to Thackeray, at school, ‘Old fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition.’ But have they penetrated into the chill galleries of the Castle of Udolpho? Have they shuddered for Vivaldi in face [sic] of the sable-clad and masked Inquisition?

(Andrew Lang, ‘Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels’, 1900)¹

Literary History and the Invention of ‘Gothic Fiction’, 1800–1900.

The history of the Gothic in the nineteenth century is subtly yet legibly sketched out in some of the semantic changes that were effected in the period to the word ‘Gothic’ itself. A notoriously overdetermined noun and adjective in English since at least the early seventeenth century – the OED lists the King James Bible of 1611 as its earliest recorded use in print – ‘Gothic’ for much of the long eighteenth century signified that which concerned or pertained to the ancient Gothic tribes or their language; by extension, that which we now refer to as Teutonic or Germanic; that which belonged to, or was characteristic of, the Middle Ages; that which, in all its apparent opposition to the Classicism of ancient Greece and Rome, was perceived as barbarous, rude, unpolished or in generally bad taste; and the style of architecture that was prevalent in Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the chief characteristic of which was the pointed arch.² Though these significations often clustered together simultaneously, attempts to localise one or two more particular meanings of the word were not uncommon. Chapters 1–8 in the first volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic provide near-exhaustive coverage of the circulation of the term ‘Gothic’ in these and other related contexts in antiquity and throughout the period 1680–1800.

Within this range of discrete yet closely interrelated historical, political and architectural meanings, notions of the literary were somewhat eclipsed, although, as Nick Groom’s and Dale Townshend’s chapters in Volume I show, it is clear that, even if it was not always named as such, a very particular understanding of what we would now term a Gothic literary aesthetic was already beginning to take shape in the work of William Temple; John Dennis; Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury; John Dryden; Joseph Addison; and other writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What distinguished such early invocations of the ‘Gothic’ in these more narrowly literary senses, however, was that this was a descriptive category that was almost exclusively reserved for works of purportedly ‘ancient’ provenance, be they by writers such as Petrarch, Pierre de Ronsard, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso in the Continental tradition, or Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and other early modern dramatists and the poets in the English. The term ‘Gothic’, in this respect, was for the long eighteenth century as much a marker of a writer’s historical positioning – his perceived relations to the sometimes noble, sometimes barbaric Gothic past – as a means of describing any text’s particular formal and thematic properties. When, in February 1765, John Langhorne, with more than a modicum of scepticism, remarked in his review of the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (published 24 December 1764) that the text teemed with ‘the absurdities of Gothic fiction’, he was seemingly unaware of the fact that this was really a modern hoax that had issued from the pen of a contemporary writer; the term ‘Gothic’ that he employed here referred instead to the fiction’s purported origins in what Horace Walpole’s translator William Marshal in the first Preface described as ‘the darkest ages of christianity’, that is, the period somewhere between ‘1095, the æra of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last’.³ Langhorne was altogether less complimentary, however, when, with Walpole’s disclosure of authorship in the second edition in 1765, The Castle of Otranto was revealed to be no antique relic of ‘Gothic fiction’ at all, but a fabrication of disconcertingly modern origins:

When this book was published as a translation from an old Italian romance, we had the pleasure of distinguishing in it the marks of genius, and many beautiful characteristic paintings; we were dubious, however, concerning the antiquity of the work upon several considerations, but being willing to find some excuse for the absurd and monstrous fictions it contained, we wished to acquiesce in the declaration of the title-page, that it was really a translation from an ancient writer. While we considered it as such, we could readily excuse its preposterous phenomena, and consider them as sacrifices to a gross and unenlightened age.—But when, as in this edition, The Castle of Otranto is declared to be a modern performance, that indulgence we afforded to the foibles of a supposed antiquity, we can by no means extend to the singularity of a false taste in a cultivated period of learning.⁴

For Langhorne, the absurdity that was deemed appropriate to the dark ‘Gothic’ past was unconscionable in the England of the enlightened, modern present. Not even after Walpole added the subtitle of ‘A Gothic Story’ to the second edition of Otranto did ‘Gothic’ come to assume quite the same set of meanings that the word mobilises in literary studies today, and this despite the fact that several late eighteenth-century writers in Walpole’s wake, including Clara Reeve, Richard Warner, Isabella Kelly, Mary Tuck and Eliza Ratcliffe, had all employed variations on his ‘Gothic Story’ in the subtitles to their own fictions. Variously known instead as ‘modern romances’, the ‘German school or horror’ or the ‘terrorist system of novel writing’, and loosely grouped together in the fashion of those ‘horrid’ novels that Isabella Thorpe excitedly lists in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (written 1798–9; published late 1817; dated 1818), such fictions, though certainly perceived as belonging to a singular and recognisable literary type, were by no means marketed and read as ‘Gothic’.⁵ Indeed, as Austen’s novel so clearly illustrates, the devotees of the circulating libraries, those influential cultural establishments through which these ‘horrid romances’ were habitually disseminated and consumed, could never possibly have identified themselves as having particularly ‘Gothic’ literary tastes, since the word in the period, far from designating a literary genre, was primarily reserved for notions of the ‘ancestral’ or associated with what we would now term the ‘medieval’.⁶ As critics have frequently pointed out, it would not be until the early nineteenth century that ‘Gothic’ would lose many of its older historical and political meanings and come to serve as the name for the modern literature of horror and terror, wonder and supernatural enchantment, meanings that the OED added in a draft addition to its entry on the word as recently as December 2007: ‘Of or designating a genre of fiction characterized by suspenseful, sensational plots involving supernatural or macabre elements and often (esp. in early use) having a medieval theme or setting.’

Such changes to the meaning of ‘Gothic’, from a primarily historical category to a term of literary-critical description, are clearly evidenced in the work of the English essayist and surgeon, Nathan Drake. In the first edition of his Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative of 1798, Drake paid sustained attention to what he termed ‘Gothic superstition’, that imaginative literary strain that, for all the ‘polished’ tastes of the late eighteenth-century present, remains ‘yet alive to all the horrors of witchcraft, to all the solemn and terrible graces of the appalling spectre’.⁷ Characterised by wayward flights of fancy and tales of elves and fairies, this ‘vulgar Gothic’ tradition was internally divided for Drake between what he referred to as ‘sportive’ and ‘terrible’ varieties, yet both strains trading in the signature generation of horror and terror, and eliciting in those who consumed them the responses of ‘grateful astonishment’ and the ‘welcome sensation of fear’.⁸ Though it was said to be epitomised by the enchanted forest in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581), the ghostliness of The Lusiads (1572) by the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões and the spectres and sprites of some of Shakespeare’s plays, Drake in Literary Hours also pioneeringly extended this Gothic literary tradition into the work of a number of more recent and contemporary writers who, he argued, had all sought to emulate it, including, most notably, the poetry of William Collins, Thomas Gray and William Cooper; Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto; John Aikin’s ‘Sir Bertrand: A Fragment’ (1773); Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778); Gottfried August Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ (1773); Christoph Martin Wieland’s Oberon (1780–96); and the romances of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis.⁹ Here, at the very end of the eighteenth century, texts and writers that were hitherto otherwise not specifically referred to as such are drawn together into a distinctive literary category of the ‘Gothic’, the term thus serving as a generic marker of sorts for some of the popular literary productions of Drake’s own day. Albeit in a far more cautious and localised fashion, the otherwise largely anti-Gothic T. J. Mathias would achieve much the same when, in the one-volume reissue of the four-part The Pursuits of Literature of 1798, he paid tribute to ‘the mighty magician of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO, bred and nourished by the Florentine Muses amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition and in all the dreariness of Inchantment [sic]’, a rhetorical move that similarly forged an important connection between the word ‘Gothic’ and the fictions of Ann Radcliffe.¹⁰

After Drake and Mathias, and throughout the course of the nineteenth century, such generic uses of the term became increasingly commonplace. In his discussion of the work of Horace Walpole in his Lives of the Novelists of 1825, for example, a compilation of the Prefaces that he had written earlier for the reprints of several eighteenth-century novels and romances in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library series, Walter Scott repeated his by-now familiar tendency to distinguish between the unabashed supernaturalism of writers such as Walpole and the explained supernatural of Radcliffe through the use of the term ‘Gothic’ in a notably modern, literary sense:

Romantic narrative is of two kinds—that which, being in itself possible, may be matter [sic] of belief at any period; and that which, though held impossible by more enlightened ages, was yet consonant with the faith of earlier times. The subject of The Castle of Otranto is of the latter class. Mrs. Radcliffe, a name not to be mentioned without the high respect due to genius, has endeavoured to effect a compromise between those different styles of narrative, by referring her prodigies to an explanation founded on natural causes, in the latter chapters of her romances. To this improvement upon the gothic romance there are so many objections that we own ourselves inclined to prefer, as more simple and impressive, the narrative of Walpole, which details supernatural incidents as they would have been readily believed and received in the eleventh or twelfth century.¹¹

Though, as of old, ‘Gothic’ in this extract continues to signify that which is ‘of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’, it also serves for Scott as a means of identifying and naming a specific and recognisable strand in modern literature, one that is said to be distinguished by its supernatural contents and exemplified by the romances of Walpole and Radcliffe. There is evidence of such usages in circulation across the Atlantic, too. In his Six Months in Italy of 1853, the Massachusetts-based lawyer and author George Stillman Hillard invoked a distinct category of ‘Gothic fiction’ in order to comment on the altogether more sanguine literary tastes of the Italian people:

They have no liking for dark and supernatural terrors which make the flesh creep. Their facile and impressible nature demands gay, airy, and smiling fancies. The shapes and conceptions of Gothic fiction—the sheeted ghost gliding from the churchyard—the midnight bell struck by airy hands—the groan mingling with the wind that sweeps through the aisles of a ruined chapel—the damp vault, and the bloody shroud—have no charm for these children of the sun. The gloomy and spectral shadows which flit through Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian romances, are of Northern, not Italian origin.¹²

Though the word as Hillard employs it continues to suggest Britain’s mythical northern European ancestors, the Goths, ‘Gothic’, perhaps with greater insistence, also signifies the fictional tradition comprising many of the characteristics that are most often associated with the mode today: darkness and death, gloom and mystery, and the host of supernatural terrors, from sheeted ghosts to spectral shadows, that ‘make the flesh creep’. The ‘Gothic’ literary tradition that eighteenth-century writers such as Richard Hurd and Thomas Percy had identified and located in the ‘antique’ poems and dramas of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had, by the mid nineteenth century, been transposed and applied generically to modern or more recent horrid fictions. Thus, by 1889, Edmund Gosse in A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1660–1780), could describe Horace Walpole as the ‘father’ of the modern British Gothic strain, noting of The Castle of Otranto that ‘This Gothic novel positively frightened grown-up people to the extent of making them unwilling to seek their beds.’¹³ Though it was not without its literary implications in earlier periods, ‘Gothic’ over the course of the nineteenth century forfeited many of its older political and historical meanings in order to serve with greater clarity and precision as the name for a modern literary genre or type, one accompanied, as such, by canonical or iconically ‘Gothic’ writers the likes of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis.

The Gothic and the Romantic in Nineteenth-Century Literary Historiography

This critical construction of ‘Gothic literature’ in the nineteenth century largely occurred against and in relation to the formation of canonical British ‘Romanticism’, that other retrospectively applied category of literary periodisation with which it has remained in constant tension ever since. The distaste of the poets whom we now refer to as ‘Romantic’ for the ‘Gothic’ writers and texts with whom they were contemporary are well known, and include Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s censorious review of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) in The Critical Review in February 1797; William Wordsworth’s claims to have ‘counteracted’ the taste for ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ in the Preface to the second, two-volume edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800;¹⁴ Coleridge’s dismissal of the lurid popular fictions of the circulating library in a footnote to chapter three of Biographia Literaria (1817); and the various indictments and anti-Gothic pronouncements of figures such as Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.¹⁵ William Hazlitt’s Lecture VIII ‘On the Living Poets’ (1818) gives some indication of how the Romantic literati perceived the popular taste for the Gothic that prevailed among many readers of their own day. Here, Hazlitt argued that if the Lyrical Ballads (1798) of Wordsworth and Coleridge could be said to have had one major advantage for contemporary letters, it was that it rejuvenated a simple, native tradition in English verse by retrieving the nation’s literature from the clutches of the extravagant and marvellous ‘German’ Gothic strain:

It was a time of promise, a renewal of the world of letters; and the Deucalions, who were to perform this feat of regeneration, were the present poet-laureat [sic] [Robert Southey] and the authors of the Lyrical Ballads. The Germans, who made heroes of robbers, and honest women of cast-off mistresses, had already exhausted the extravagant and marvellous in sentiment and situation: our native writers adopted a wonderful simplicity of style and matter.¹⁶

While the Romantic imagination was native, original, organic and visionary, the Gothic was a foreign and debased association-driven formula that barely aspired even to the lowly realms of fancy. Using the extraordinary fictions, poetic and otherwise, that were conceived during the Summer of 1816 in Switzerland as a particular, localised example, Madeleine Callaghan and Angela Wright’s chapter in this volume explores the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic further, showing that the relationship between the two was far more complex, and by no means as absolute and clear-cut as the comments of Hazlitt and other Romantic writers suggest. Maximiliaan van Woudenberg’s chapter, in turn, reveals the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; 1831), today lauded as a central text of both Gothic literature and canonical British Romanticism, drew upon the ‘cosmopolitan’ Gothic conventions of early nineteenth-century Germany and France, particularly as these were realised in actual and literary manifestations of the phantasmagoria or magic-lantern show.

And yet, taking Romantic writers at their word, and overlooking the extent to which they too often made recourse to some of the characteristics of the Gothic aesthetic, literary historians of the nineteenth century routinely installed a sense of ‘Romanticism’ on the basis of its perceived differences from what was simultaneously being constructed as the genre of ‘Gothic fiction’. In A History of English Literature (1864), for example, Thomas B. Shaw, a graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, and eventually tutor and Professor of English to the Grand Dukes of Russia, ambitiously sought to write for his students a history of English letters that stretched from the Anglo-Saxon period through to the reigns of Kings George I and II. His account of the ‘Dawn of Romantic Poetry’ – a section of his history that surveys such earlier poets as William Collins, Mark Akenside, Thomas Gray and William Cowper, before going on to consider the more familiarly ‘Romantic’ figures of Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Thomas Moore, P. B. Shelley, Keats, Byron and Thomas Campbell – sets in place many of the assumptions about so-called ‘Big-Six’ Romanticism that are still prevalent today:

The great revolution in popular taste and sentiment which substituted what is called the romantic type in literature for the cold and clear-cut artificial spirit of that classicism which is exhibited in its highest form in the writings of [Alexander] Pope was, like all powerful and desirable movements, whether in politics or in letters, gradual.¹⁷

Though slow to take effect, Romanticism by this reckoning was a revolutionary and resolutely anti-Classical literary ‘movement’ that demonstrated a perceptible tendency ‘to seek for subjects and forms of expressions in a wider, more passionate, and more natural sphere of nature and emotion’.¹⁸ But what is particularly notable about Shaw’s construction of the category of the ‘Romantic’ in A History of English Literature is the way in which he cautiously negotiates the Gothic qualities of the literature that he includes within it, be that the ‘necromantic agency’ and the ‘midnight expedition of Deloraine to the wizard’s tomb in Melrose Abbey’ in Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805); the ‘tragic and gloomy’ tone of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819); the ‘atmosphere of mystical and supernatural influences’ and the ‘superhuman purity and unearthliness of the characters’ in Wordsworth’s The White Doe of Rylstone (1815); or the ‘wild, mystical phantasmagoric narrative’ that is Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798).¹⁹ Although, as these phrases suggest, Shaw at least countenances the poignantly Gothic moments in some of the best-known novels and poems of the Romantic canon, he tends either to condemn them as examples of aesthetic failure, or to apologise for their existence as merely the necessary paraphernalia of the writer’s quest for antiquarian authenticity. The supernaturalism of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (1816), for example, he deems too unrealistic, dream-like and ultimately ‘fatal to the poem as a work of art’, while the fantastic elements in Wordsworth are said to lend to the poetry a ‘somewhat affected air’; the Gothicism of Scott, for its part, is modestly commended as an example of the ‘completeness with which the poet throws himself back into past ages’ in order to ‘speak and think’ like ‘a minstrel of the fourteenth century’.²⁰ As in Langhorne’s review of Walpole a century earlier, Gothic could only be excused if it were explained as a deliberate echo or trace of the ancient Gothic past.

The depth of Shaw’s anti-Gothic biases becomes especially apparent when, in a section of A History of English Literature entitled ‘Modern Novelists’, he turns to discuss the romances of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Mary Shelley and Charles Robert Maturin. Though aspects of his appraisal of these writers are surprisingly positive – the ‘wonderful fictions’ of Radcliffe, he maintains, ‘exhibit a surprising power (perhaps never equalled) over the emotions of fear and undefined mysterious suspense’ – Shaw for the most part rehearses the opprobrium that earlier nineteenth-century critics had levied against the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic romance.²¹ Of Otranto, for instance, he claims that ‘The manners are totally absurd and unnatural, the heroine being one of those inconsistent portraits in which the sentimental languor of the eighteenth century is superadded to the female character of the Middle Ages—in short, one of those incongruous contradictions which we meet in all the romantic fictions before Scott.’²² Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), by the same token, is said to contain ‘the same defects’ as Walpole’s haunted castle, while, for all her powers of narrative suspense, Radcliffe is said to be a poor portrayer of literary character whose fictional repertoire remains, in the end, decidedly limited.²³ Writing about Lewis, Shaw cuttingly claims that The Monk ‘owes its continued popularity (though, we are happy to say, only among half-educated men and ecstatic milliners) chiefly to the licentious warmth of its scenes’, and while Maturin’s imagination was often vivid, his works in general ‘are full of the most outrageous absurdities’, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in particular a ‘farrago of impossible and inconceivable adventures, without plan or coherence’.²⁴ Even Shaw’s comments on Frankenstein are, at best, ambivalent: some of the scenes in this otherwise ‘powerful tale’ are ‘managed with a striking and breathless effect’ that ‘makes us for a moment forget the childish improbability and melodramatic extravagance of the tale’.²⁵ Perhaps the key to Shaw’s disapproval lies in his revealing observation concerning the use of the explained supernatural in the work of Ann Radcliffe: ‘after all, pure fear—sensual, not moral, fear—is by no means a legitimate object of high art’.²⁶ For the nineteenth century, the Gothic was tasteless, formulaic, tawdry, immature and resolutely popular, the Romantic imagination, by contrast, the inspired and inspirational preserve of higher aesthetic realms.

Similar assumptions were written into literary historiography throughout the Victorian period. In William John Courthope’s The Liberal Movement in English Literature (1885), for example, the Gothic was described as little more than a strain of proto-Romanticism, a markedly undeveloped mode that would only later develop into the ‘mature’ aesthetic visions of a Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Keats or P. B. Shelley:

Towards the close of the eighteenth century the taste for the supernatural and the marvellous was quickened by German influences, which inspired the fictions of Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe; and the stream of romance added to its volume the French Revolutionary ethics advocated in the imaginative and philosophical works of William Godwin. In all these writers two leading characteristics are manifest; a Conservative adherence to classical form, and a Liberal tendency to encourage romantic feeling; a tendency which, it is evident, may be either so chastened by judgment and reflection as simply to intensify the pleasures of the imagination, or, if unchecked by reason, may ripen into revolt against the whole order of existing society.²⁷

In Edward Dowden’s later study The French Revolution and English Literature (1897) too, ‘the Romantic movement’ is figured as an exclusively masculine category that includes William Blake, Robert Burns, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and P. B. Shelley, and which strenuously excludes as such all intimations of the feminised Gothic tradition. Even as it formulated a modern sense of ‘Gothic fiction’, the nineteenth century habitually subordinated it to the tradition of high poetic Romanticism.

Even so, there is evidence to suggest that, dismissed and undervalued though it was, the Gothic remained a secret and somewhat illicit source of readerly pleasure and enjoyment throughout much of the Victorian period. One such Gothic reader was none other than Wilkie Collins, a writer who, as Tamar Heller’s chapter in this volume elaborates, himself made innovative use of the Gothic aesthetic in his short stories and sensation novels of the 1850s and 1860s. As Collins, recounting his regaling of members of his family with a selection of Gothic stories, wrote to his father in August 1842,

It turned (it generally somehow does whenever I am in her company) upon literature, and I sat with my back to the window, and my hand in my pocket, freezing my horrified auditors by a varied recital of the most terrible portions of the Monk and Frankenstein. Every sentence that fell from my lips was followed in rapid succession by – ‘Lor!’ – ‘oh!’ ‘ah!’ ‘He! He!’ ‘Good gracious!’ etc etc. None of our country relations I am sure ever encountered in their whole lives before such a hash of diablerie, demonology, massacre, with their [?] and bread and butter. I intend to give them another course, comprising, The Ancient Mariner, Jack the Giant Killer, the Mysteries of Udolpho and an inquiry into the life and actions (when they were little girls) of the witches of Macbeth.²⁸

Returning a number of eighteenth-century Gothic fictions and Romantic poems to their roots in the oral tradition of storytelling, Collins entertains his enraptured audience with tales of the ghastly and the supernatural. Others remained powerfully drawn to the Gothic romances published towards the end of the previous century. In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), for instance, a novel set in Yorkshire during the industrial depression of 1811–12, the narrator at one point describes the young Rose Yorke as being deeply engrossed in a reading of Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796–7). As the dialogue between Rose and Caroline Helstone develops, so we gain some insight into the ways in which Radcliffe and her works were largely associated with the reading habits of children and inexperienced young women in the period:

Caroline stole a quiet gaze towards [Rose], dwelling on her young, absorbed countenance, and observing a certain unconscious movement of the mouth as she read, – a movement full of character. Caroline had tact, and she had fine instinct: she felt that Rose Yorke was a peculiar child, – one of the unique: she knew how to treat her. Approaching quietly, she knelt on the carpet at her side, and looked over her little shoulder at her book. It was a romance of Mrs. Radcliffe’s – ‘The Italian’.

Caroline read on with her, making no remark: presently Rose showed her the attention of asking, ere she turned a leaf,–

‘Are you ready?’

Caroline only nodded.

‘Do you like it?’ inquired Rose, ere long.

‘Long since, when I read it as a child, I was wonderfully taken with it.’

‘Why?’

‘It seemed to open with such promise, – such foreboding of a most strange tale to be unfolded.’

‘And in reading it, you feel as if you were far away from England, – really in Italy, – under another sort of sky, – that blue sky of the south which travellers describe.’

‘You are sensible of that, Rose?’

‘It makes me long to travel, Miss Helstone.’²⁹

This coupling of Gothic with the tastes of younger female readers, however, was not without exception. We know, for example, that the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray read The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian as a schoolboy, and remained particularly delighted by Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).³⁰ Moreover, Montague Summers, the early twentieth century’s greatest Gothic champion, looked back fondly on his late-Victorian childhood of the 1880s to conjure up in the opening paragraph of The Gothic Quest (1938) a powerful scene of literary enchantment, evocatively describing how he, a young but precocious reader, came to access, and fall under the spell of, the works of Ann Radcliffe:

My love for the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe dates from my very first years. Among my earliest recollections is an edition of her Works in one rather formidable fat volume, double-coloured—which offered no difficulties then—and embellished with woodcuts that were a perpetual delight, not least because of their close affinity to the plays of Webb and Pollock of which one was giving nightly performances. Bound in dull black morocco, gilt-tooled, Mrs. Radcliffe lived on the summit of the highest shelves in a sombre and shadowy but by no means large old library, where the books stood ranged [sic] in very neat rows in tall mahogany cases behind heavy glass doors. Most sections were locked and keyless, but the particular bookcase whence Mrs. Radcliffe could be reached by mounting upon a chair and stretching rather far was always left unfastened, as I suppose containing standard literature and works approved for general and uncensored perusal, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Lingard, Miss Strickland, Prescott, and the more sober historians. Tom Jones, I remember, was banished to the remotest altitudes, and jailed beyond all hope of release. What a day it was—diem numera meliore lapillo, as old Persius bids—that day when I discovered how an alien key would fit the bookcase locks!³¹

What is notable, here, is that Summers recalls Radcliffe’s works being kept in an almost inaccessible yet unlocked bookcase alongside such other legitimate, canonical or ‘uncensored’ nineteenth-century British and American writers as Scott, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, James Fenimore Cooper and Florence Marryat. Nonetheless, she remained somewhat of an antiquarian curiosity, albeit one that was no less desirable for being so. Although, in the extract from his essay on Ann Radcliffe that I cited as the epigraph to this Introduction, the Scottish poet, critic, anthropologist and ‘psychical researcher’ Andrew Lang in 1900 had rhetorically enquired whether ‘any one now read[s] Mrs Radcliffe’, it is quite clear that she and those writers of the Gothic school remained popular if somewhat unorthodox literary fare throughout the nineteenth century: the volume of her novels that Lang reads in the public library is the ‘dirtiest, greasiest, most dog’s-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection’, all sufficient proof for him that the Great Enchantress has, indeed, ‘been read diligently, and copiously annotated’.³²

The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century British, American and European Culture

The great irony of Gothic in the nineteenth century, of course, is that, generically localised in, and restricted to, the Gothic romances of Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis and other writers of the previous century, it was not a term that was generally applied to any of the later fictions of the period 1800–1900 that we now readily describe as ‘Gothic’ or ‘Gothic-inflected’. The point is made clear when we survey contemporary responses to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; 1831) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the two influential and subsequently mythologised texts of Gothic monstrosity that loom large over the century so as almost to book-end it. Of the several early reviews of Shelley’s novel that were published in 1818 and 1831, not one of them made use of the term ‘Gothic’ in order to describe or generically classify it.³³ That ‘Gothic’ as a specifically literary concept remained for much of the Victorian period restricted primarily to works of the previous century is similarly attested to by responses to Stoker’s iconic vampire fiction in the late 1890s: of the reviews that were published in The Athenaeum (June 1897), The Spectator (July 1897) and Punch (June 1897), not one made reference to the text as ‘Gothic’, and nor, as the interview with the author that was published in British Weekly in July of the same year indicates, did Stoker think of himself as writing within a Gothic literary tradition.³⁴ Across the Atlantic, the works of Edgar Allan Poe in the middle of the century largely escaped this label too, one notable exception being John Moncure Daniel’s altogether dismissive reference to Poe’s oeuvre as ‘unequal and uneven, gothic and grotesque’ in a review that was published in The Southern Literary Messenger in March 1850.³⁵ Even in the American context, though, the term continued to function in its older sense as a marker of the unruly, the uncivilised and the barbaric. Consequently, though Lang’s 1900 essay on Radcliffe persuasively traced her influence in the works of a number of nineteenth-century British and American writers – Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); the novels of Walter Scott; Byron’s poetry; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886); Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860); the historical romances of Stanley John Weyman – not once did he feel it necessary or appropriate to designate this post-Radcliffean literary tradition as ‘Gothic’. The significance of such linguistic suspensions is twofold. First, and as Jarlath Killeen has claimed, the Gothic nineteenth century is largely the construct of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the monstrous ‘Mr Hyde’ that all too conveniently serves as the dark double to the ‘Dr Jekyll’ of modern progress and sexual liberation.³⁶ ‘Nineteenth-century Gothic’ is as much a retrospective construct as ‘Victorianism’ or the ‘Victorian period’ itself. Second, it is during the nineteenth century that the literary Gothic, as Julian Wolfreys has pointed out, loses much of its formal and generic stability, fragmenting and dissolving instead into a mercurial mode that stealthily works its way into the most unsuspecting and unlikely of cultural forms: ‘The gothic’ in this period, Wolfreys writes, ‘becomes truly haunting in that it can never be pinned down as a single identity, while it returns through various apparitions and manifestations, seemingly everywhere’, from comic discourse and photographic images and into the social construction of childhood, sexuality and the modern technologies of the uncanny.³⁷ Though, even in the earlier period, the Gothic had always been more a fluid ‘mode’ of cultural expression than a fixed and static literary ‘genre’, it is during the nineteenth century that, as Peter J. Kitson has argued, this shift from genre to mode became especially pronounced.³⁸

The essays assembled here all variously attest to the acuity of such critical claims. Joe Kember’s chapter, for example, pays welcome attention to the ways in which the Gothic mode influenced the popular entertainment industry in nineteenth-century Britain, while Anthony Mandal shows how it was absorbed into the chapbooks, shilling shockers and penny bloods of the so-called ‘trade Gothic’. As Scott Brewster’s chapter shows, it was in the ghost stories of the Victorian period that the Gothic tradition in fiction most securely anchored itself. But the Gothic worked its way into more self-consciously realist modes of representation, too: John Bowen, for instance, discusses how Charles Dickens put Gothic to the service of writing what Sigmund Freud would later describe as ‘the Uncanny’, while Serena Trowbridge shows how Gothic enriched and nourished the work of several nineteenth-century poets, both canonical and lesser known. Corinna Wagner provides a fresh and searching account of the ways in which several Victorian Gothic fictions responded to the writings of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary scientists of the nineteenth century, while Jerrold E. Hogle’s chapter advances a rigorous history of the vampire, perhaps the period’s most characteristic monster, from Romanticism to the century’s end. Andrew Smith closes the volume with an account of the complex and often ambivalent role that the Gothic fictions of writers such as Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle played in the project of British imperialism at the very end of the period. Together, these scholars, in the critical tradition inaugurated by Robert Mighall in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (2003), all continue the work of revising the once-prominent assumption that, after its belated expression in fictions such as Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the Gothic went ‘underground’ for much of the Victorian era in Britain, only later to be ‘resurrected’ in the popular fictions of Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Stoker at the fin de siècle.

This volume moves well beyond received critical notions of the ‘Victorian Gothic’ in other respects, too, particularly in its inclusion of a suite of chapters devoted to exploring different national manifestations of the mode beyond nineteenth-century England.³⁹ Xavier Aldana Reyes and Rocío Rødtjer, for instance, consider the Gothic in nineteenth-century Spanish literature, providing a fascinating counterpoint to the Gothic depictions of Spain found in many late eighteenth-century British fictions. Revising the opinions of those who, like George Stillman Hillard in 1853, held that Italian culture showed no natural penchant for Gothic imaginings, Francesca Saggini shows the extent to which nineteenth-century Italian literature engaged with the Gothic mode, both in translation and in the vernacular Italian. The chapters by Suzanne Gilbert and Christina Morin respectively deal with the Gothic literature of nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland, while Charles L. Crow provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging account of nineteenth-century American Gothic. As in Volume I of The Cambridge History of the Gothic, though, we remain attuned in this volume to the ways in which the Gothic registered, and participated within, some of the important historical events of the period 1800–1900. Maisha Wester’s chapter, in this regard, reads a selection of British and American nineteenth-century Gothic texts in relation to the history of slavery on both continents, while William Hughes provides a pioneering account of the ways in which Gothic was used to express the perceived ramifications of, and anxieties pertaining to, the rise of the British railway system from the mid-1820s onwards.

Literature, of course, was the only realm to have witnessed a new sense of ‘Gothic’ in the nineteenth century, and as the chapters brought together here demonstrate, the word underwent equally significant changes in the field of historiography. Following the coinage of the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘renaissance’ in 1817 and 1836 respectively, the ‘Gothic’ past, that once capacious period of British antiquity that stretched from the fifth century right up to the sixteenth and beyond, fractured into two discrete historical epochs. Though not without exception, the ‘Gothic’ became the ‘medieval’, and with this suspension of what had long been an injurious term connoting savagery and violence, darkness and superstition, so perceptions of the past changed radically too. Tom Duggett’s chapter explores some of the literary and historical ramifications of the shift from the ‘Romantic Gothic’ to ‘Victorian medievalism’, its argument pivoting on the years 1817 and 1877. One area in which ‘Gothic’ retained its currency, though, was in architectural theory and practice, an important aspect of the interdisciplinary nature of Gothic culture in nineteenth-century Britain that is explored by Alexandra Warwick. But even here, the Revivalist Gothic architecture of A. C. and A. W. N Pugin, Charles Barry, John Ruskin, William Morris and others was wilfully and self-consciously different from the whimsical and irresponsible ‘Gothick’ confections of Walpole, Beckford and other amateur architects and patrons of the previous century. Indeed, the architectural style that, in earlier periods, was often denounced as ‘Gothic’ in the barbarous sense of that word became from Charles Locke Eastlake’s A History of the Gothic Revival (1872) onwards designated by the term ‘Gothick’, the intentional linguistic archaism signifying the frivolousness, sentimental antiquarianism and misplaced archaeological rigour that the Gothic Revivalists of the late nineteenth century identified in the work of earlier practitioners.⁴⁰