1 - The Strangely Mingled Monster: Gothic Invasions, Occupations, and Outgrowths in Fin de Siècle London

Summary

Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven's frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.

—Joseph Conrad, author's note in The Secret Agent

As the Victorian era progresses, literary texts increasingly imagine London as a Gothic space. With locales shifting away from castles, monasteries, mountains, and forests towards the labyrinthine, dark, and foggy streets of the metropolis, the stage is set for the explosion of urban Gothic narratives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that establish the capital as the central site of Gothic modernity. This chapter explores how the idea of London as a Gothic space develops in the fin de siècle period, building upon the associations previously established by figures such as Charles Dickens and Charles Maurice Davies to gain a new narrative, imagistic, and thematic complexity. In doing so, it acknowledges the wealth of existing secondary material on the topic, but also seeks to build upon this work by suggesting a set of broad imaginative structures that underpin the primary literature—structures that link metropolitan fin de siècle Gothic with the outgrowths and developments examined in the remaining chapters. The key primary texts analysed here have been chosen for their exemplification of these patterns. Firstly, representations of London's threshold spaces, through which the Gothic can symbolically (re)enter the imperial metropolis—and, correlatively, the society and culture with which it is associated—are considered. Secondly, this chapter analyses the dualistic imagining of London as a city divided between apparently ‘respectable’ and rationalized spaces and an internal Gothic threat, commonly associated with the East End; in these examples, the Gothic now inhabits London, but is still held at bay from the city’s imagined centres of wealth and respectability. The third section considers how literature explores the ultimate penetration and pollution of those supposedly secure central spaces, as attempts to maintain the Gothic as fundamentally separate and Other now become untenable.