Gothic Romances

Much is written about Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Jane Austen’s ‘Horrid Novels’.  But the Gothic was not restricted to these tales or indeed to the format of the novel.

Walpole wrote a tragedy, The Mysterious Mother, four years after Castle.  The Town and Country Magazine, or, Universal Repository if Knowledge, Instruction and Entertainment (October 1788) reviewed this play which like Castle of Otranto also introduced a first – on this occasion the first evil monk in English literature.  The magazine reports that Walpole stated

“I had heard, when very young that a gentlewoman, had waited on Archbishop Tillotson, and besought his counsel.  A damsel that served her many years before, acquainted her that she was importuned by the gentlewoman’s son to grant him a private meeting.  The mother ordered the maiden to make the assignation, when she said she would discover herself, and reprimand him for his criminal passion;  but being hurried away by a much more criminal passion herself, she kept the assignation without discovering herself.  The fruit of this horrid artifice was a daughter whom the gentlewoman caused to be educated very privately in the country;  but proving very lovely, and being accidently met by her father-brother, who never had the slightest suspicion of the truth, he had fallen in love with and had actually married her.  The wretched guilty mother learning what had happened, and distracted with the consequence of her crime, had now resorted to the archbishop to know in what manner she should act.  The prelate charged her never to let her son and daughter know what had passed as they were innocent of any criminal intention.  For herself he bade her almost despair” (p459).

 

The theme was not new and even Walpole had to admit that the subject was “so horrid, that I thought it would shock rather than give satisfaction to an audience.  Still I found it so truly tragic in the two essential springs of terror and pity, that I could not resist the impulse of adapting it to the scene.”

As a result of Walpole identifying the “two essential springs of terror and pity” as fundamental to Gothic tales it is interesting to consider what other stories (whether as novels, short stories, poems or plays) should be included in a study of the genre.

The list below is just a few of the tales that were written between 1780s and 1830s:

The Abbess, A Romance (1799) W H Ireland

A Hermit’sTale (1788) Sophia Lee

Almago and Claude or the Monastic Murder (1805) Anon

Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene (1799) Matthew Lewis

The Animated Skeleton (1798) Anon

Anzoletta Zadoski (1796) Mrs Howell

An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript with Notes Critical and Explanatory (1786) William Beckford

Arther Mervyn or Memories of the Year 1793 Charles Brockden Brown

Brougham Castle, A Novel (1816) Jane Harvey

The Castle of Mowbray, an English Romance (1788) Mrs Harley

Castle of Wolfenbach, A German Story (1793) Mrs Parsons

The Children of the Abbey, A Tale (1796) Regina Maria Roche

Clermont, A Tale (1798) Regina Marie Roche

The Gothic Story of Courville Castle, of the Illegitimate Son, a Victim of Prejudice and Passion (1801) Anon

Don Pelayo, or the Ambitious Spaniard (1820) Anon

Edmond; Orphan of the Castle, a Tragedy in Five Acts (1799) John Broster

Edwy and Edilda, a Tale in Five Part (1794) Rev Thomas Sedgwick Whalley

Eliza or the Unhappy Nun (1803) George Barrington

Ellesmere, A Novel (1799) Mrs Meeke

Emma, A Tale (1820) Anon

Ethelwina, A Romance (1799) T J Horsley

Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio, A Romance (1807) Dennis Jasper Murphy

Fragment of a Novel (1816) Lord Byron

Fountainville Forest, A Play in Five Acts (1794) James Boaden

Gothic Stories including Sir Bertrand’s Adventure in a Ruinous Castle, The Story of Fitzallan and The Story of Raymond Castle (1800) Anon

History of the Duchess C*** (1813) Anon

The Haunted Priory, or the Fortunes of the House of Rayo (1794) Anon

The Iron Shroud (1830) William Mudford

The Italian Monk, A Play in Three Acts (1797) James Boaden

Midnight Bell, A German Story (1798) Anon

Montrose or the Gothic Ruin (1799) Anon

Mortal Immortal (1833) Mary Shelley

Robber’s Tower (1828) Anon

St Leon (1831) William Godwin

The Subterranean Cavern (1798) Anon

Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream (1823) Horace Smith

The Vampyre (1819) John William Polidori

Zastrozzi, A Romance (1810) Percy Bysshe Shelley

Many of these tales were published in magazines – for instance The Iron Shroud was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine – this meant that these works of the fantastic could appear next to genuine academic studies, new stories, agricultural prices and lists of bankruptcies.  As such they were a part of standard reading material and quite possibly had a greater reading audience then some of the full length novels we usually associate with Gothic Romances of this period.

Whatever the medium all the stories revolved around the same basic elements

1.    Removed from the here and now – stories were set in a different time and even a more ‘romantic’ location

2.    Violence to the individual – this often meant physical and mental torture and could be inflicted by anyone from a member of a religious order to a member of the court

3.    Theft – loss of title, position, inheritance

Other elements which could be presented for the excitement of the reading public included hauntings and dense forests.

In essence, as Walpole said in the Second Edition to the Castle of Otranto there was a mixing of the old with the new.  There clearly were levels of criticism of certain groups in society and of the modern world (the concerns around the notion of Man as God such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) but there was also the incorporation of the popular Romantic elements of the sublime.

Although we are unlikely to feel the same frisson of fear which would have accompanied the reading of some of these stories  when they were first published, and we are probably not wanting to get as caught-up in the tales as Catherine Moreland, it is still possible to be entertained by many of these stories on websites such as Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive