Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 : The Import of Terror 9781107034068

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B ritain , F ran c e and the G othi c , 1 76 4 – 1 820

In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764) as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continuing connections between Gothic literature and France through the realms of translation, adaptation and unacknowledged borrowing led to strong suspicions of Gothic literature taking on a subversive role in diminishing British patriotism. Angela Wright explores the development of Gothic literature in Britain in the context of the fraught relationship between Britain and France, offering fresh perspectives on the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, ‘Monk’ Lewis and their contemporaries. A N G E L A W R I G H T is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Gothic Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2007).

C A M B R I D G E S T U D I E S I N RO M A N T I C I S M Founding editor Professor Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford General editor Professor James Chandler, University of Chicago Editorial Board John Barrell, University of York Paul Hamilton, University of London Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge Cl audia Johnson, Princeton University Al an Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia Susan Manning, University of Edinburgh David Simpson, University of California, Davis

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanisation, industrialisation, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of comment or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded.

The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

B ritain , F ran c e and the G othi c , 176 4 – 1820 The Import of Terror A ngela W right University of Sheffield

CA MBRIDG E UNIVERSITY P RESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge C B 2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107034068 © Angela Wright 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Wright, Angela, 1969 May 14– Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 : the import of terror / Angela Wright, University of Sheffield. pages  cm. – (Cambridge studies in Romanticism) Includes bibliographical references and index. IS BN 978-1-107-03406-8 (hardback) 1.  Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English – History and criticism.  2.  Romanticism – Great Britain.  3.  Romanticism – France.  4. Comparative literature – English and French.  5. Comparative literature – French and English.  6.  Gothic revival (Literature)  I.  Title. PR 830.T3W74 2013 823′.08729–dc23 2012043737 IS BN 978-1-107-03406-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of U R L s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents, Robert and Mary Wright

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

page x xi

Introduction

1

1 The mysterious author Horace Walpole

16

2 The translator cloak’d: Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith

33

3 Versions of Gothic and terror

64

4 The castle under threat: Ann Radcliffe’s system and the romance of Europe

88

5 ‘The order disorder’d’: French convents and British liberty

120

Afterlives

147

Notes Works cited Index

153 197 212

ix

Figures

1 William Hogarth, ‘The Invasion’, 1756. Plate One: France; Plate Two: England [author’s own collection].

x

page 4

Acknowledgements

It is tempting to claim that the genesis and production of this book was inspired by a dream, and written quickly in its aftermath, as the authors Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley claimed for their works. But this would be misleading. As their works were more firmly grounded in an enlightened, supportive exchange of ideas, so too is my work indebted to an international generosity of scholarship and editorial encouragement. First and foremost, I wish to thank Linda Bree and James Chandler for their patience and encouragement throughout the writing and editorial process. My book also benefited enormously from the constructive and supportive criticism of two anonymous readers. With their insights, I am confident that this book has been strengthened considerably. The School of English at the University of Sheffield was generous in granting me a period of study leave in order to work upon this book, and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sheffield offered assistance in meeting the costs of copyright for the cover image. I am grateful to both for their support. I also benefitted enormously from the collegiality and feedback of my colleagues at the University of Sheffield, most particularly Anna Barton, Joe Bray, Maddy Callaghan, Matthew Campbell (now at the University of York), Jane Hodson and Hamish Mathison in the School of English, and David McCallam in the School of Modern Languages. Beyond Sheffield, thanks are also due to Gillian Dow, Gavin Edwards, Jerrold E. Hogle, David Higgins, Robert Jones, Robert Miles and Dale Townshend for constructive and supportive discussions during the composition process. I am also grateful to Sean Casey, the curator of Special Collections at the Boston Public Library, for the help and guidance that was offered when I visited to examine Ann Radcliffe’s commonplace book. Chapter 4 contains some earlier material which was published in two essays: ‘How We Do Ape Thee, France! The Cult of Rousseau in Women’s Gothic Writing in the 1790s’ (published in Le Gothic, ed. Avril Horner xi

xii

Acknowledgements

and Sue Zlosnik (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 67–82) and ‘In Search of Arden: Ann Radcliffe’s William Shakespeare’ (Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (Routledge, 2008), pp. 111–30). This book has perhaps had a longer gestation than I at first anticipated, but the wit, grace and patience of Jessica and Antonia, who arrived during its composition, have considerably enriched the experience. I would also particularly like to thank Hamish Mathison for giving me the time and space to complete this, and for providing, as always, robust, humorous and insightful feedback. Last but perhaps most importantly, my parents have been constant in their support and encouragement of me, and it is to these two people that I dedicate the book.

Introduction

If this be a translation, for in this age of literary imposition we always doubt; but if it be really so, as from some internal evidence we have reason to suppose, it will only prove that our neighbours are equally craving after novelty with ourselves, and satisfied with the same unsubstantial fare. Is invention at so low an ebb in this island, that we must make every crudity, every trifling publication of the continent our own? (Review of Anon., The Misfortunes of Love, Critical Review, May 1785)

‘Translated from the French’: at first glance, these appear to be four transparent and courageous words for an author to use in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. In the half-century following the Seven Years War, a most brutal and ruthlessly acquisitive Anglo-French conflict, it was deeply problematic to look across the channel for literary inspiration. The translation and adaptation of French fiction was one of the most contested routes of literary commerce in late eighteenth-century Britain. We now know that in the 1770s and 1780s, some 9 per cent of all novels published in Great Britain had been translated from French sources. The figure dropped only slightly in the 1790s to some 8 per cent of the total domestic literary product.1 Within these statistics, however, there remains a great degree of ambivalence. For as the Critical Review observed of the questionable provenance of one so-called literary import, The Misfortunes of Love. A Novel. Translated from the French, ‘in this age of literary imposition we always doubt’.2 Temporally alert, this review provides a vivid snapshot of the literary paranoia, suspicion and open hostility that marked the 1780s. While for reviewers Britain’s cultural impoverishment  – embodied by the uninventive work of translation  – was grave enough, the less tangible threat from literary imposture was of more serious consequence. Novels that only masqueraded as ‘translations’ could cloak significant threats to the literary, political and religious 1

2

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

constitutions of Britain by infiltrating literary, philosophical and sentimental ideas from France. When seeking to confirm The Misfortunes of Love as a translation, the reviewer finds ‘internal evidence’. The language of detection here is far from accidental, as the three decades which immediately preceded this review (the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s) were formative in the incremental intrusion of such allegations. As both Linda Colley in Britons and Gerald Newman in The Rise of English Nationalism argue, many patriotic Britons considered such borrowings from France to be acts of ‘cultural treason’. Discussing the proliferation of societies to protect the discrete mercantile and cultural identities of Britain, Colley for example observes: ‘Allowing Frenchisms to infiltrate the English language, importing French manufactured goods, polishing themselves “into a refined insincerity” merely because it was fashionable were nothing less than cultural treason, a vicious squandering of true identity.’3 Manufactoring and inventiveness, explains Colley, were encouraged to remain within Britain. Newman tethers this impetus even more specifically to class, foregrounding the anti-aristocratic animus that was illustrated through a range of cultural referents. Aristocracy became connected irrevocably with effeminacy, foreignness, degeneracy and corruption. Analysing the history of Leonora in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, where a young and naive woman is stolen away from her plain and honest British lover by the dissipated, effeminised Francophile aristocrat Bellarmine, Newman argues that Fielding’s interpolated tale is symptomatic of a far wider attack upon moral pollution from France which was firmly aimed at the aristocracy: [The] inner logic was inherently anti-cosmpolitan, anti-aristocratic, and nativist. It exploited the energies attached to crude anti-French myth and joined these to ancient notions of aristocratic moral degeneracy. Although in fact it was not so much a logic as an illogical tribalistic jumble of beliefs and perceptions combining rude notions of national character, cultural invasion, moral pollution, social transmission, and collective spiritual disintegration, it nevertheless was the plastic material from which a great variety of protests were to be raised. Indeed it was more than that, for as time passed and circumstances invited, it was capable of being amalgamated with, and hence of lending a semblance of philosophical unity to, so many allied dissatisfactions that in the end it constituted no longer a protest but the base and vehicle of an entire countercultural programme of action.4

Newman traces this philosophical transformation to the decades between the mid 1740s and the mid 1780s, decades which, he argues, were crucial to the ‘launching of English nationalism’.5 Colley is even more specific

Introduction

3

in arguing that ‘economic and cultural nationalism’ in Britain becomes increasingly strident ‘with the outbreak of war in 1756’.6 This national stridency is something that, as Kathleen Wilson further explains, legitimated Britain’s ongoing imperial struggles in these decades: Imperial struggles were viewed at home as battles over the national character, and support and defence of the empire were privileged as national duties. It was in the context of these nationalistic struggles that the mercantile imperialist perspective justified both the right of Britons to trade freely with the world and their domination of it: They were freer than the French, less barbarous than the Spanish, more civilized than the savages. Empire was, in contemporary conceptualization, the means to becoming more independent and self-contained as a nation, rejecting foreign influences and introducing English virtue wherever the English dared to tread.7

English ‘virtue’ was juxtaposed to what Newman and Wilson have both identified as ‘Aristocratic “effeminacy”, foreignness and corruption’ that were deemed to be corrosive to ‘both national manners and political virtue’.8 This book will argue that the Seven Years War – responsible for sharpening the already fraught relationship that England held with France  – is in many ways responsible for the complex, ambivalent origins of the Gothic romance in 1764. While what Winston Churchill famously called the ‘first world war’ cemented new global alliances of commercial, religious and cultural interests between 1756 and 1763, it also confirmed a long-standing hostility between England and France.9 The hostility can of course be dated back as far as the Norman Conquest of 1066. The impact of the Norman invasion was ‘staggering’, and led to a protracted (and in many respects) ongoing anxiety about the infiltration of French culture in British life.10 After the outbreak of the Seven Years War in May 1756, the dominant topic of public debate in Britain was the possibility of an invasion by France. William Hogarth’s engravings entitled The Invasion luridly depicted the possible consequences. The Invasion imagines the infiltration of French culture into England as a consequence of the war. The first engraving (‘France’) shows a rapacious French monk sharpening the edge of an axe as he and some soldiers embark for England on a boat loaded with Catholic paraphernalia. Its companion piece (‘England’) illustrates the dire consequences of this imagined invasion, with drunk and carousing British soldiers laughing at a crudely caricatured drawing of the French king upon the wall of an inn. Hogarth worked consistently to foreground the fears of invasion in England during the Seven Years War, portraying the French as venal, lecherous, violent and (above all else)

4

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

1.  William Hogarth, ‘The Invasion’, 1756. Plate One: France; Plate Two: England [author’s own collection]

Introduction

5

Catholic.11 His engravings capture particularly well England’s recasting of France as its diabolically Catholic other. England, Hogarth’s art suggests, would be engulfed by this violent, acquisitive Catholic neighbour if it did not remain alert. James Gillray’s later engravings strike a similar chord. A Phantasmagoria – Scene  – Conjuring up an Armed Skeleton (1803), the cover image for my book, takes Hogarth’s image of the drunken, impotent British soldier in ‘England’ one step further.12 Gillray draws upon the modish appetite for all things Gothic by placing an armed skeleton version of Britannia at the heart of the image. It portrays the death of Britain’s martial vigour, the dire consequences of peace won through concession to the French in the Treaty of Amiens of 1802. The spectralisation of Britain is represented through the surrendered territory that is being fed to the fire by the three witches from Macbeth. Here, they are politicians Henry Addington (then prime minister), Lord Hawkesbury and Charles James Fox. A simian version of William Wilberforce crouches in the foreground singing a ‘Hymn of Peace’.13 The engraving’s synthesis of Anglo-French hostilities with Gothic imagery suggests that by 1803 the British audience for this engraving would be alert to the interconnections between the Gothic, cultural borrowings from France and Anglo-French hostilities. Such supple hostility as that exhibited by both Hogarth and Gillray was not of course one-sided. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, France’s most popular nomenclature for England was ‘perfidious Albion’.14 In 1759, for example, Robert-Martin Lesuire published a novel about the English entitled Les sauvages de l’Europe.15 Telling the story of a French couple travelling in England, the novel’s picaresque structure capitalised upon the French vogue for travel narrative.16 In this particular narrative, translated into English in 1764, the landscape explored was a nightmarish version of England that was characterised by riots, hangings, prisons, asylums and brutal Francophobia. The novel’s ‘hero’ Delouaville observes and experiences English prisons as spaces ‘where English ferocity overwhelms and intombs heroism’ and where he can only ‘curse the hour when they fell in the power of the English’.17 The novel illustrates that, for one French author at least, British nationalism was becoming increasingly unpalatable with, as Colley observes, Britons defining themselves ‘by reference to who and what they are not’.18 Combined with Britain’s particularly brutal military campaigns during the war, this sharp increase in aggressive cultural nationalism, captured so effectively by Lesuire’s Les sauvages de l’Europe, contributed to a general recalibration of French attitudes towards

6

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

England. France began to compare England to Carthage owing to the latter’s ruthless military protection of mercantile interests, and denounced it as a breeding ground of ‘pirates’, ‘assassins’, ‘usurpers’, ‘perjurers’, ‘vultures’, ‘brigands’ and ‘homicidal monsters’.19 With such an arsenal of insults available to the French and English media, it is not surprising that this hostility infiltrated the two nations’ cultural exchanges at every level. Whether all cultural exchanges were infected as well as affected by such aggressive hostility remains, however, open to question. Edmund Burke, for example, famous for his trenchant derision of the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), anonymously intervened on Anglo-French relations in the London Magazine in 1758, at the height of the Seven Years War. The equivocally titled ‘The humble REMONSTRANCE of the MOB of Great Britain, against the Importation of French Words, &c.’ curiously conjoins the adjectival ‘humble’ with ‘MOB’. This in turn implies that the ‘REMONSTRANCE’ ‘against the Importation of French Words, &c.’ is less straightforwardly tribalistic than it first appears. ‘It is with infinite concern that we behold an inundation of French words pouring in upon us,’ Burke begins, ‘and this at a time too, when there is some sort of merit in detesting every thing that is French.’20 If the first clause of this sentence straightforwardly participates in the decrying of cultural borrowings from France, then the latter clause makes one aware of the pragmatic lip service paid to denigrating such cultural inundation, that ‘there is some sort of merit’ in decrying French influence. And so the short article continues. On the one hand it foregrounds the unimaginative, unthinking annexation of French words into the English language; on the other, it laughs gently at these borrowings. One of many examples of the lexical importations that it light-heartedly chides remains commonplace in everyday speech in English: Je-ne-sçai-quoy, though of French extraction, we shall not presume to find fault with, because it has been naturalized, and productive of infinite good in England; it has helped many an unfortunate girl to a husband, has indeed sometimes parted man and wife, but has soon brought them together again; seldom fails of healing up the breaches it had made between friends; has fitted out fleets and armies, and brought them home again; has been a theme for orators, in velvet and in crape, and has furnished matter for many volumes.21

With a deft touch, Burke juggles the absurdity of the French phrase and British manners, morals, politics and literature. The strong emphasis upon draping (velvet and crape) both foregrounds and mocks the perceived

Introduction

7

effeminisation of British culture through French influence. Je-ne-sçai-quoy, an empty, meaningless phrase, exposes a vein of cyphers at the heart of British culture by its applicability to love entanglements and martial and political endeavours all at the same time. The conclusion of the piece returns us to the heart of the battlefield with the plea We therefore humbly pray, that French words, as well as French dress and French manners, may be laid aside, at least during the continuance of the present war; for we are apprehensive, should language and customs descend to us, we should be taught by their example, on the day of battle, to f – – te le camp. For these reasons we pray as above; and shall, as in duty bound, hold them in everlasting abhorrence.22

The elision of the French phrase glosses over one of the more rude lexical importations. ‘[F] –  – te le camp’, translated more politely as ‘abandon ship’, carries connotations of surrender. ‘Surrender’ should be unthinkable for the British patriot, but the author fears that it may become inevitable if the importation of French language and customs does not cease. The unstable compound of war, martial cowardice, linguistic and modish borrowings in this essay tells us much about the perceived pressures of ‘duty’ that authors felt to deride and repulse French customs and manners at this particular moment in history. The emphatic resolution to hold all things French in ‘everlasting abhorrence’ that concludes the piece rings increasingly hollow as one registers the anxiety that underscores the repetition of the verb ‘pray’ and the admission that the author is ‘apprehensive’ that French language and culture will ‘descend to us’. Nigel Leask has argued that whether or not authors of the Romantic period supported or decried imperialism is less pressing than exploring how they registered their anxiety. Such anxiety, Leask argues, ‘registered a sense of the internal dislocation of metropolitan culture … [and] could also lend support to its hegemonic programme’.23 This can ‘sometimes block or disable the positivities of power’ but is ‘just as often productive in furthering the imperial will’.24 At first glance, ‘The humble remonstrance of the MOB of Great Britain’ seems to participate in such a promotion of British nationalism, but one could argue that rather than ‘furthering’ British nationalism, the parody of British lexical borrowings from France in fact leans more towards a disabling of ‘the positivities of power’. In its exposure of the absurdities of harnessing military hostilities to cultural reciprocity between France and Britain, the article mobilises a healthy scepticism towards the escalating hysteria

8

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

over borrowing from France by blending the discourses of fashion and war quite seamlessly. The development of one particular literary hybrid in the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years War further crystallised and articulated national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature. The so-called ‘translation’ by William Marshal that Horace Walpole (MP) published on Christmas Day in 1764 as The Castle of Otranto duped its literary critics. Its precise chronological moment of emergence and its translational masquerade both contributed to the discursive frame of a literature that is strongly implicated in the consequences of the relationship between Britain and France. In the wake of Walpole’s literary subterfuge and one of the most significant wars of the eighteenth century, the range of generic signifiers that we now associate with the Gothic begins to cluster. The Castle of Otranto is linguistically and generically freighted with the effects of the Seven Years War. What W. S. Lewis characterised as Horace Walpole’s ‘erratic’ political career had consequences for Walpole’s artistry that he himself refused to admit.25 In 1756, for example, Walpole complained to George Montagu: ‘The cold and the wet have driven me back to London, empty London! where we are more afraid of the deluge than the invasion.’26 It is an observation which, as with so much of Walpole’s correspondence, reveals little about his own views upon the possibilities of invasion. The light evasiveness of this political reference is reproduced within Walpole’s gently performative dismissal of the significance of his own novel. At the time of the composition of The Castle of Otranto, for example, Walpole wrote to William Cole that he was ‘very glad to think of anything rather than politics’.27 To Madame du Deffand in 1767 he would argue that it was not ‘the book for the present age, which seeks only cold reason’.28 He would contradict this position later in 1784 by observing to Hannah More: ‘It was fit for nothing but the age in which it was written, an age in which much was known; that required only to be amused.’29 These positions, assumed in private correspondence, deny the hefty contexts to the composition of The Castle of Otranto. These correspondences are the private spaces where Walpole cultivates the aristocratic, Francophile persona that, during the escalating conflict, was connected with degeneracy and effeminacy by the clubs and societies which sprang up to protect national interests. Of these connections, Kathleen Wilson notes that in the propaganda which began to proliferate in Britain with the cause of protecting national interests, ‘“effeminacy” denoted a degenerate

Introduction

9

moral, political and social state that opposed and subverted the vaunted “manly” characteristics – courage, aggression, martial valour, discipline and strength – that constituted patriotic virtue’.30 While Horace Walpole felt free to exercise ‘effeminate’ subversion in some correspondence, publicly he assumed a different position. To defend his literary experimentation in The Castle of Otranto, Walpole aligned his novel with the works of William Shakespeare, and against French dramatic models, thereby appealing to the national mood in Britain. In the second edition of his novel, Walpole also confessed to the translational imposture that he assumed in the first edition, and attempted his novel’s recuperation under the more patriotic frame of a ‘Gothic Story’. While labelling one’s product ‘A Gothic Story’ may suggest a form of patriotism and Whig complacency about the past, the reasons underscoring Walpole’s choice of this subtitle are more complex. The novel seeks to reassure its English readership of its patriotism by tempering its continental origins with a nationalistic discourse. ‘Nationalism’, observes David A. Bell, ‘almost irresistibly calls forth images of immemorial pasts, of lengthy and unbroken lineages, of deep bonds between particular peoples and particular lands. New constructions therefore tend to be presented as acts of reconstruction, recovery and regeneration.’31 The recovery of a Gothic past was well under way in eighteenth-century Britain, with Viscount Henry Bolingbroke in his 1743 Remarks on the History of England, for example, tracing the origins of the English parliament back to the political structures of the Goths.32 Walpole’s invention of ‘A Gothic Story’ in the 1765 second edition of Otranto participates in this politicisation, pragmatically tethering his continental romance to the recovery of an ‘immemorial past’. We know from private correspondence that Walpole entertained scepticism towards the ‘national’ sense of the Gothic which was promoted in the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s by authors such as Bishop Richard Hurd and Thomas Warton. Of Warton’s History of English Poetry, for example, Walpole privately (and archly) observed to William Mason that he ‘never saw so many entertaining particulars crowded together with so little entertainment and vivacity’.33 Pragmatic, therefore, is the way in which I read Walpole’s belated annexation of the term ‘Gothic story’ to his literary excursion. This is a gesture, I argue in Chapter 1, that Walpole repeats in the nationalist paratextual material which he also appends to his drama The Mysterious Mother (1768). Although Horace Walpole’s literary work is heavily indebted to French writing, it is clear that he felt increasingly compelled to mask any French influence.

10

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

Sporting the sign of the other, argues Nigel Leask, can ‘inoculate’ an author and his or her culture from the threat of the foreign other.34 The converse of this position also holds true. Sporting the sign of an ancient ‘Gothic’ British lineage can also protect an author from the critical threat of his or her own nation, a nation which has become increasingly alien through its hostility to all things French. The embryonic Gothic genre of eighteenth-century Britain is consistently coy about its French inspiration. My research has demonstrated that despite this reserve, the Gothic provides a striking example of the literary respect that prevailed between France and England during military hostilities. While the formation of Britain occurred precisely because of the proximity of its ‘natural’ enemy France, the protean literature of terror exposed the tensions of this subject position.35 Although the literary works that are now characterised as ‘Gothic’ evince in places ambivalence about their French neighbour, they are nonetheless sprung from French sources, nurtured by French culture, and formative in their veiled, measured, contemplative, independent and often witty responses to Anglo-French hostilities. ‘Antagonism’, Robert and Isabelle Tombs acknowledge, ‘is not the sole key to Franco/British relations.’ ‘Self-criticism, discussion, admiration and emulation’ helped to construct the two nations’ identities.36 There is much evidence of mutual exchange between France and England throughout the eighteenth century, some positive, some sceptical and some negative. David Hume and Horace Walpole, for example, both enjoyed hospitality and civility during sojourns in Paris, and Voltaire experienced a similar welcome in England.37 Despite substantial hostility from periodicals, reviews and newspapers, there is much evidence to suggest that the literary genre of the Gothic played a covert part in maintaining this reciprocity between 1764 and 1820. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 suggests that while Gothic novelists in Britain were acutely aware of their country’s troubled relationship with its French neighbour, they all nonetheless dared to look across the Channel for inspiration, be it through the realms of translation, adaptation or unacknowledged plagiarism. The sources from which the Gothic romance develops are not necessarily, however, what we may now recognise as ‘Gothic’ sources. ‘The Import of Terror’, the punning subtitle of my study, is designed to capture two observations in particular: first, that the ‘import’ of Britain’s ‘literature of terror’ lies in its covert negotiation of the Anglo-French relationship; and second, that this literature of terror is developed from French importations more substantially than has hitherto been acknowledged. Whether these importations were, in their first French iteration, recognisably Gothic

Introduction

11

remains, however, open to question. For as critics such as Jean Fabre, and more recently Terry Hale, remind us, in France there was no such recognisably ‘Gothic’ genre during the eighteenth century.38 Writing in the 1810s, it was John Colin Dunlop who first made a connection between the sentimental tradition in French literature and the English Gothic novel.39 James R. Foster pursued this link much later in the first part of the twentieth century, arguing for the especial significance of Prévost d’Exiles in the formation of the Gothic.40 The diverse authorship of some of the most prominent and well-known French writers of the long eighteenth century  – Voltaire, Diderot, Prévost d’Exiles, Madame de Tencin, Baculard d’Arnaud, the Marquis de Sade, the Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Madame de Genlis – provided inspiration for the development of the Gothic tradition in England. To group these writers together under a collective literary tradition is a perilous enterprise, but one all-encompassing term which Dunlop, Foster and (most recently) Diane Long Hoeveler insist upon is the ‘sentimental’ tradition.41 The particular work from which any one particular English author drew inspiration is difficult to detect, for the reading patterns of many were hazardous at best.42 The Gothic genre’s very tangled origins come to reveal a long-standing reciprocity between England and France that belies military and political hostilities. Nonetheless, and perhaps in turn, the questions of how, when and why certain French authors were invoked by certain English Gothic novelists tells us much about the authors’ ambivalent responses to military tensions, and to the pressures which they came under (particularly in the 1790s) to lay aside their literary reciprocity. To untangle the literary origins of ‘Gothic’ we must, as Michael Gamer rightly argues, address the genre’s ‘rapid changes and instabilities at the end of the eighteenth century’.43 Responding to the ongoing Anglo-French hostilities, the rapid generic permutations of the ‘Gothic’ with its frequent translational impostures and its counterfeiting of a patriotic tradition tell us much about the nationalistic, febrile atmosphere in which it was conceived. In the 1790s, ‘Gothic’ emerges as an even more complex term. Its adjectival form is appended to a particularly French brand of terrorism and to a shackle which imprisons the national imaginations and political systems of both England and France. The very instability of the term ‘Gothic’ tells us much about the literary genre’s imbrication in the politics and nationalism of the period. Unearthing the relationship between France and England, Gothic and terrorism, tells us much about the conditions under which the genre came to be identified as a continuous tradition.44

12

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

The debates upon translation, cultural value, national language and war inaugurated by Walpole’s ‘Gothic’ story were formative for decades to come. They indicate the connections between ‘Gothic’s’ political, aesthetic and literary forms, and its symbiotic relationship with the Anglo-French conflict. In an essay entitled ‘The Enlightenment at War’, part of PMLA’s special issue upon War in 2009, Madeleine Dobie justifiably hesitated to identify a homogeneous body of writing connected with the Seven Years War.45 The appearance of the first Gothic story in the immediate aftermath of this conflict, however, guarantees that genre’s participation in its consequences. If the literary Gothic, as Terry Hale argues, is ‘forged in the crucible of translation’,46 it is also implicated in equal measure in what Fred Anderson calls the ‘crucible of war’.47 Exploiting anxieties surrounding translation, adaptation and literary imposture, ‘Gothic’ is characterised by its own anxious fascination with the series of wars that Britain fought with France. While Hale makes a convincing case that the Gothic is ‘substantially a product of the process of [translation]’, what yet remains to be explored is how ‘Gothic’ authors appropriated, exploited and analysed those discourses and anxieties surrounding translation, nationalism and terror between 1764 and 1820. Within the past fifteen years, a growing body of scholarship has begun to re-evaluate the European contexts of Romanticism and the Gothic, dispelling the myth that these are specifically English products.48 This scholarship situates this troublesome literary tradition within a continental and reciprocal tradition of writing. The most recent of these studies, Diane Long Hoeveler’s Gothic Riffs, makes a particularly compelling case that ‘the gothic imaginary in Western Europe told a repetitious and fairly simple tale of familial and blood sacrifice and ritualistic social, political, and religious transformation’.49 Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror narrows and sharpens the European focus of the studies by examining how the Gothic is moulded and nourished from the particularly fraught political and cultural relationship between Britain and France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It seeks to reappraise the genesis and growth of the Gothic in the context of both the pervasive hostilities and the literary cooperation that characterised the relationship. By uncovering the significance of this definitive period of conflict in the eighteenth century, we discover how deeply entrenched its formation was within this particular cross-channel relationship. The following chapters all argue that the work of the Gothic is specifically indebted to a French tradition of writing, and is often either appropriated, translated or adapted

Introduction

13

from French authors of the long eighteenth century. These sources went unacknowledged at the time of production, however, owing to the anxiety generated by the types of anti-French propaganda that I have described in this Introduction. France did not define itself in opposition to Britain.50 In Chapter 1 of my book, I examine a number of French works from the earlier part of the eighteenth century which testify to a vein of anglomania which persisted much later in the eighteenth century. Revisiting that foundational inaugural moment of the Gothic with Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764–5, it connects the impetus of the ‘Gothic’ to two works that emanate from the French epistolary travel genre much earlier in the eighteenth century. Responding to the earlier works’ exploration of tensions and similarities between England and France, Walpole’s careful arguments upon French language and literature in the two Prefaces to Otranto are examined in detail. A further examination of how his public role as a Member of Parliament affected his work leads to a discussion of his later drama The Mysterious Mother (1768), and how its suppression and then partial revelation tell us much about the author’s political anxieties. As I argue in Chapter 2, Clara Reeve, whose Gothic story The Old English Baron (1778) is viewed as an example of ‘loyalist Gothic’ by James Watt, went to extreme lengths to conceal the French provenance of her translation The Exiles because of a carefully cultivated literary reputation that relied in part upon a nationalistic discourse.51 Reeve’s literary imposture may well have been influenced by the critical onslaught endured by Charlotte Smith when she admitted to her translation of Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Sophia Lee also concealed her loose translation of Prévost in The Recess but, buoyed by her literary success, she went on to acknowledge her subsequent translations in surprisingly forthright terms. The works of these three authors, writinging in the late 1770s and 1780s, is revisited in order to determine the extent to which acknowledgement or concealment of a translation is important and in order to trace a vital link between their nervous translational endeavours and the development of the ‘Gothic’ in Britain. Chapter 3 charts the kinds of hysteria which engulfed the political and literary realms of the 1790s. Provoked in some measure by the level of translational activity in the 1780s, commentators on the Gothic in the 1790s came to view the literary hybrid as a ‘literature of terror’. This is the decade when ‘terror’ truly comes into play as a signifier of the Gothic, while ‘Gothic’ as a label is purged of its patriotic associations and abjected onto Britain’s enemy, France. As war broke out with France in 1793,

14

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

Gothic shed its ancient, nationalistic connotations, and instead became associated with Catholicism, superstition and violence. As its earlier signifiers disperse, the more politicised term ‘terrorist’ comes to be exploited as a derogatory label for the literature. Like Gothic, however, ‘terrorist’ too is pushed in opposite political and literary directions, and becomes a peculiarly ambiguous term. By 1797, I argue, in the wake of treason trials in Britain, the labels ‘Gothic’ and ‘terrorist’ have collapsed under the weight of their various meanings to such an extent that some of the principal authors associated with them abandon the literary practices associated with them. Chapter 4 examines the case of Ann Radcliffe. It reappraises the legacy of the most famous participant in the Gothic tradition. While Ann Radcliffe may not have translated works from French herself, her husband William did while pursuing his radical politics as the editor of the English Chronicle. As I argue, Radcliffe’s earlier works are not only indebted to French literary sources, but testify to a measured and frequently envious view of France. Her surviving commonplace book and the final posthumously published novel both reveal an enduring fascination not only with France, but with the historical circumstances of the Anglo-French conflict. The barometer of tensions between England and France, I argue, directly affects the trajectory of Radcliffe’s writing, leading her to adjust her ‘terrorist’ practices in her later works. It is interesting to note that the literary possibilities offered by this new romance hybrid appealed significantly to public figures. Although I do not discuss the career of William Beckford in this study, the author of Vathek composed his own oriental Gothic excursion in French, capitalising again upon a prevailing taste for oriental tales that came from France. The considerable flexibility that Beckford exercised in his literary pursuits was echoed in his public roles: in 1793, when war between France and England broke out again, he offered himself as a peace negotiator. This gesture of diplomacy by an author who chose to write in what we now recognise as Gothic is far from isolated. Instead, it appears to be emblematic of the Gothic genre’s careful, diplomatic and veiled negotiations of the Anglo-French conflict. As Chapter 5 of this book argues, Matthew Lewis, author of the controversial The Monk, which has frequently been decried as the exemplar of the anti-Catholic and xenophobic tendencies of the Gothic, was also a Member of Parliament, ambassador, talented translator and enthusiastic observer of and commentator on events in France. Lewis in fact took the seat in Parliament that William Beckford had vacated, and followed the examples of Beckford’s diplomacy and toleration in both the

Introduction

15

political and the literary arenas. His correspondence and other writings testify to Lewis as a far more tolerant, engaged and enthusiastic admirer of France than criticism has so far allowed. The problem for a twenty-first-century reader is our compulsion to underestimate the terrific charge of the term ‘Gothic’. During the eighteenth century, it moved gradually from reclaiming an ‘immemorial past’ in the 1760s and 1770s to evoking clear and direct connotations of terror in the 1790s, particularly as the Reign of Terror commenced in revolutionary France. The architecture of this new genre demanded that a reader’s heart be open and alert to the constantly evolving political and nationalistic resonances of the term and the genre. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, terror, translation and political tension come together in the multiplicity of meanings attached to the labels ‘Gothic’ and ‘terrorist’. It is as an indirect consequence of these intersections that the literary Gothic is born, with Horace Walpole’s early subterfuges guaranteeing the genre’s enduring national, political and literary ambivalences.

Ch apter 1

The mysterious author Horace Walpole

Well, are you ready to be invaded? for it seems invasions from France are coming into fashion again. (Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 16 May 1759)

When the English are challenged by the French to mention one of their letter-writers who can be ranked with Madame de Sevigné, Voltaire, and many others, they have but to mention Horace Walpole’s name in order to command respect. It would be strange, indeed, if Walpole’s writings in English did not give pleasure to a Frenchman who was acquainted with the language. His style is surcharged with Gallicisms. Walpole’s turn of mind was more French than English. Despite his faults of manner and diction, the English reader cannot help admire his writings. They are original, and that is a merit of the first class; they are most readable, and that covers a multitude of blemishes. Nearly everything may be pardoned to the writer who is always entertaining. When instructive in addition, as Walpole is very often, he has a title to absolution. (W. Fraser Rae, ‘Horace Walpole’s Letters’)

Writing almost a century after Horace Walpole’s death, W. Fraser Rae immediately confronts a vital and often overlooked characteristic of Walpole’s authorship. Rae argues that Walpole’s ‘turn of mind was more French than English’. This, for Rae, was reason enough to examine Walpole’s correspondence: he could be ranked alongside Madame de Sevigné and Voltaire. The fin-de-siècle moment (and comparatively liberal stance of Rae’s journalism) goes some way to explaining the complacency towards Walpole’s French dispositions. But still, Walpole’s combination of entertainment and instruction only allows him ‘a title to absolution’.1 ‘Absolution’ is an odd word for Rae to use, for it is not immediately clear why Walpole requires such spiritual or ethical pardon.2 If it really concerns Walpole’s ‘Gallicisms’, then perhaps it is because these are so 16

The mysterious author Horace Walpole

17

bound up with what Rae describes in the next paragraph as Walpole’s ‘complex character which … is easier to criticise than comprehend’. For Rae, Walpole offers a ‘strange compound of foppery and shrewdness, of excessive vanity and of indubitable good sense’.3 It is hard, but not impossible, to discern the ‘Gallicisms’ to which Rae refers in the two published literary works which made Walpole famous, The Castle of Otranto (1764–5) and The Mysterious Mother (1768). This ‘strange compound of foppery and shrewdness’, however, is found more easily in Walpole’s voluminous correspondence, which was assembled and edited so admirably by W. S. Lewis in the Yale edition. In the letter quoted in the epigraph above, for example, Walpole jests with George Montagu about the prospects of war in Britain, playfully combining military threat with fashion and superficially demonstrating no concern whatsoever about the prospects of an imminent invasion from France. This foppery is nevertheless undercut by the shrewdness of the observation upon the mounting anxiety concerning the prospect of the aforementioned invasion. And yet ‘foppery’ was derogatorily connected with ‘apeing’ French manners, as the dangerously effeminate French-English seducer Bellarmine in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews so amply demonstrates.4 For Michèle Cohen, the precise threat of the fop lies in his difference to ‘English’ men, ‘not because he had become foreign but because he had become not-English’.5 Walpole perhaps required ‘absolution’ in Rae’s view because of the cluster of non-English values that were associated with Frenchness: foppery, vanity, effeminacy and aristocracy. In 1757 the aghast Reverend John Brown of Newcastle warned that an effeminate nation is a ‘Nation which resembles Women’.6 Walpole’s voluminous correspondence with women is generously laced with French phrases, exhibiting no anxiety whatsoever concerning the need for ‘absolution’. However, Walpole is too fine a thinker, too keen an observer, not to be aware of the unstable connections between France, effeminacy and ‘cultural treason’ that were being fomented in the British press of the 1750s and 1760s. If his private correspondence allowed him to perform his French ‘effeminacy’ (which some critics go so far as to interpret as evidence of homosexuality) to its limits, then his public persona was far more anxious, dithering as to whether and how to publish The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother.7 The choice of paratexts that surrounds these works is of great significance for what they reveal and do not reveal about the provenance of the works themselves. Examined closely, Walpole’s use of Shakespeare and English literary forebears is not as national, and his paratextual derisions of France not as strident, as they appear at first glance.

18

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

The literary hybrid that Horace Walpole created in the synthesis of ‘the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’ was ground-breaking in several respects. Certainly, a substantial part of The Castle of Otranto’s ‘novelty’ (to use Walpole’s own word) lay in its combination of ancient and modern romance, with Walpole decorating the structure of an ancient tale of chivalry with peculiarly modern characters and a tale of forced marriage that would resonate with its contemporaneous audience.8 Samuel Richardson, Walpole observed in correspondence, had made the novel ‘insupportable’ and hence stronger fare was required. ‘[A] god, at least a ghost’, pleaded Walpole, was necessary for his own tale.9 The tale’s openly advertised hybridity and invocation of the supernatural were not its only innovations, however. Less conspicuous, but still tangible, is the tethering of this ‘Gothic story’ to an Anglo-French dialectic that was by turns hostile, admiring, critical and immeasurably reciprocal.10 The invocation of William Shakespeare through epigraphs and quotation in many Gothic works is a sign of the Gothic’s vital participation in a national literary tradition. Quoting from Shakespeare, the ‘figure of national authority’, observes Michael Dobson, carries with it ‘potential legitimating rewards’.11 During the 1760s, such literary homage to Shakespeare is always inevitably refracted through the lens of evolving relations between Britain and France and in consequence becomes more defensive in tone. If one looks back to a period earlier in the eighteenth century, however, cultural criticism of England, and of Shakespeare, assumes the form of a more intellectually curious, open debate between Britain and France. The paratexts surrounding Walpole’s 1764 ‘Gothic story’ share just as much affinity with this earlier form of cultural criticism. The Castle of Otranto’s two Prefaces most notably take their cue from two key continental texts which openly appraise the cultural and political differences between England and France. These two works, published in 1725 and 1733 respectively, took the form of a series of letters which broadly compared England favourably with France. Composed in a period of relative peace between Britain and France dating from the end of the War of Spanish Succession to the beginning of the Seven Years War, they were published during a period of French anglomania.12 They were instrumental in the formation of the English Whig Protestant conceptualisation of history that promoted England as the land of liberty and freedom of thought. The first, Letters describing the character and customs of the English and French nations by the Swiss-born Béat Louis de Muralt, was published in 1725, and anonymously translated into English in 1726.13 In the first English edition, the anonymous translator of Muralt’s Letters notes in the

The mysterious author Horace Walpole

19

Preface that the author ‘serv’d some time in the late king of France’s armies’ but that his position as a ‘Foreigner’ rendered him particularly suitable for this comparison of the two nations. ‘People are seldom disengag’d enough from Prepossession’, he observes, ‘to see the Faults of their own Nation; for which Reason that Task ought always to be reserv’d for others.’14 The translator thus promotes the neutrality of Muralt’s account on the basis of his lack of national partiality.15 Certainly, Muralt embarks upon a measured observation of England and France that exposes the flaws of both nations. His observations range from the trivial – comparing the beauty of both nations’ women – to the far more significant contrasts between the restrictiveness of the French governmental system and the liberties enjoyed in England. What most immediately characterises the English to the rest of the world, Muralt writes in Letter I, is ‘the Prosperity, the Magnificence of the Great, and the Plenty among the common People.’16 Among the ‘common people’ of England, ‘one may observe a Spirit of Liberty which is countenanced by the government: And if all I have heard of be true, it is in England that a Man is Master of his own, without the Oppressions of the Great, or ever knowing them, if he thinks fit’.17 The prominent approval on evidence in this opening letter establishes the tone for the rest of the letters on England, and defines England through what was to become the mainstay of English national pride: its personal liberty and democratic constitution. The flaws that Muralt observes in the English character are more cultural than political. He finds room for improvement, for example, in the Englishman’s overindulgent drinking habits, and the English tendency towards credulity ‘which I believe is the Reason that we hear so much talk of Apparitions in this Country’.18 For Muralt, over-indulgence and superstition are key characteristics of the Englishman and not, as many English writers would later argue, the Frenchman.19 Of crucial importance to subsequent cultural comparisons between the two nations, and to the formation of the Gothic, is Muralt’s critique of English drama in Letter ii: If the English could resolve to be more natural in their Tragedies, and to study the Language of Nature more than they do, they would, no doubt, excel all Europe. England is a Country that affords a large Scene of Passions, and Catastrophes, and Shakespear [sic], one of their best ancient Poets, has put a great part of their History into his Tragedies. Besides, the Genius of the Nation inclines to Seriousness; their Language is bold and concise, and such as is necessary to express the Passions. This is the Reason that their Tragedies excel in a great Number of fine Passages, but they have the same

20

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 Faults, if not more, in my Opinion, than their Comedies … The plays, as well as the Persons, are a Mixture of the Comic and the Serious; the most melancholy Events and the merriest Farce follow one another by turns; which, in my Opinion, is not only ill contriv’d, but entirely inconsistent with the end of Tragedy. In short, most of the Executions represented in the Play, are done on the Stage, which is sometimes cover’d with dead Bodies … [P]oets that have a great Genius, and know how to work the Passions, ought not to have recourse to Pincers.20

Muralt critiques two aspects of Shakespearean tragedy that were to become more collectively derided in France; the blending of ‘the Comic and the Serious’, and the overabundance of death upon the stage. For Muralt, the blending of humour and gravity in Shakespearean scenes is at odds with the natural temperament of the English. Of England, and the English, Muralt observes that ‘the Genius of the Nation inclines to Seriousness’. Muralt views the natural propensity of the English towards gravity, with their ‘bold and concise’ language, as positive attributes which are compromised in the works of Shakespeare and other poets of ‘Genius’. The persistent inability of England’s poets to study ‘Nature’ is inextricably linked, for Muralt, to their ‘constant Attacks on French authors, that do them no other ill than to excel them’.21 Muralt’s cultural criticism is light and humorous, and is seasoned with a generous and genuine tone of admiration for many aspects of English life. Even when he justly criticises francophobe tendencies in English authors, for example, he still finds space for wry observations upon the Frenchman’s tendency to discover compliment in the insult ‘French dog’: You must know, by the way, that no Abuse is so common, or outrageous in [the English] eyes, as that of French Dog; one may hear them say it both by Land and Water, and to all sorts of Strangers as well as the French, and I am persuaded they think to aggravate the Title of Dog, by coupling it with the Word French … while some of these Frenchmen, on the other Hand, may perhaps find in that very thing some Reparation for the Abuse, as valuing themselves at a high Rate, and looking on the French Name to be glorious: Thus Nations are posses’d with self-love, which is often as ridiculous as that of private People.22

Here the Frenchman’s optimistic tendency to convert an Englishman’s insult to a compliment upon the fame of the French nation is humorously caricatured. Rather than focusing upon an antagonistic vision of France and England, Muralt instead presents an endearing view of both nations’ foibles. His Letters were significant on four different levels. In first place, their open, humorous commentary upon the respective flaws and merits

The mysterious author Horace Walpole

21

of both England and France helped to construct a measured tradition of Anglo-French cultural criticism. Second, they were instrumental to the formation of England’s own subsequent narration of its liberty, freedom of thought and mind. Third, they served as inspiration and springboard for the French philosophe and poet Voltaire’s subsequent complex engagement with England. And most intriguingly of all, as I will go on to argue, the author may have inspired Horace Walpole’s first pseudonym, used in his first edition of The Castle of Otranto. François-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, followed closely in Muralt’s footsteps by comparing the French and English nations. Like Muralt, Voltaire was also a victim of the comparative lack of freedom of speech in France, his difficulties with the French judiciary and monarchical systems leading to an exile of two years in England.23 From the experiences of this enforced residency, he published his 1733 Letters concerning the English Nation, only later to be published in France as Lettres philosophiques.24 In Letter xix, Voltaire makes specific reference to Muralt’s earlier letters. Despite being sceptical of Muralt’s treatment of English drama, Voltaire takes his cues on the English political system from him. In Letter viii ‘On the Parliament’, for example, Voltaire notes that ‘[t]he English are the only people on earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them’ and that ‘[t]hey are not only jealous of their own liberty, but even of that of other nations’.25 Voltaire connects England’s governmental control of its monarch to its tolerance and freedom of thought, commenting that whereas the ‘French … may be moulded into such a Variety of Shapes … the English generally think, and Learning is had in greater Honour among them’.26 As with Muralt, however, Voltaire is not without criticism of English culture. In Letter xviii ‘On tragedy’, he famously embarks upon what was to become a life-long obsession with him, praising Shakespeare’s untutored genius as the epitome of everything that was good about England. Whereas Muralt earlier complained that English drama did not copy ‘Nature’ sufficiently, for Voltaire, Shakespeare is ‘natural and sublime’ to such an extent that he does not possess ‘so much as a single Spark of good Taste’.27 Shakespeare’s characters are ‘shining Monsters’;28 his ‘monstrous Farces’ are punctuated by ‘such beautiful, such noble, such dreadful scenes’.29 For Voltaire, the majority of England’s dramatic output is ‘barbarous and without decorum’.30 At this period, in 1733, sublimity, beauty, monstrosity and barbarity are allowed to coexist comfortably in the works of Shakespeare. Voltaire praises the boundless nature of Shakespeare just as he praises the tolerance and liberty of thought that he finds in England.

22

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

Nevertheless, even at this stage he attempts to ‘civilise’ Shakespeare by providing an idiomatic translation of one of Hamlet’s great soliloquies. Admitting first that ‘when you see a Version [translation], you see merely a faint Print of a beautiful Picture’, Voltaire eschews literal translation in favour of a more idiomatic rendition.31 His version of Hamlet essentially seeks to civilise and refine Shakespeare’s language, translating, for example, ‘The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune’ to a far less vibrant ‘Dieux cruels, s’il en est, éclairez mon courage’.32 This early impulse to modify the unshackled Shakespeare anticipates his more forceful later criticisms. Voltaire’s response to Shakespeare evolved as hostilities between England and France intensified. Through the course of the eighteenth century, as Robert and Isabelle Tombs observe, Shakespeare came to serve as a ‘weathervane for French attitudes to English culture’.33 In the wake of military hostilities, the protection of the French dramatic icons Racine and Corneille became far more important to Voltaire, and by 1750, he felt compelled to condemn Hamlet to Lord Lyttelton as a ‘coarse and barbarous piece which would not be tolerated by the lowest rabble of France or Italy’.34 Whereas Racine and Corneille took greater care of their audience by confining their characters to narrating barbarous deaths, Shakespeare, by contrast, did not hesitate to stage such violent and improper scenes. Whereas French drama observed particular conventions of time, place and action, Shakespeare’s plays, by contrast, were inchoate. Voltaire claimed that ‘All nations now begin to look upon those ages as barbarous, when this practice was entirely unknown to the greatest geniuses, such as … Shakespeare; they acknowledge their obligation to [the French] for awakening them from this Gothicism.’35 Voltaire’s vision of Gothicism is thus derived from opposing Shakespeare (representing England) to Racine and Corneille (representing France). In his flouting of dramatic convention, Shakespeare epitomises ‘barbarism’ and ‘Gothicism’; the neo-classical Racine and Corneille, by contrast, observe the unities of time, place and action with decorum, and thus embody cultural civilisation. ‘Gothicism’ now becomes secured in the service of a cultural war between England and France. While in mid-eighteenth-century England Shakespeare was becoming a national icon, in France he was receiving almost as much attention, with Pierre Antoine de la Place’s multi-volume French translation of him.36 Voltaire’s revision of his responses to Shakespeare reached its apogée in 1761, right in the middle of the Seven Years War. Although Voltaire argued strongly against the horrors of the Seven Years War in both his fictional and his non-fictional works, he was nonetheless unwillingly drawn

The mysterious author Horace Walpole

23

into the polemics of the campaign.37 Claiming to fight for ‘la patrie’ (the fatherland), Voltaire composed an appeal to the Nations of Europe. A pragmatic patriotism on his part cancelled out any admiration that he may have felt for Shakespeare and other English authors. In the ‘Appeal’, Shakespeare became the ‘village clown’, the ‘barbarous mountebank’, the ‘drunken savage’, and his translations of key passages  – again from Hamlet – presented a far cruder version of Shakespeare which could only entertain ‘porters, sailors, cabbies, shop-boys, butchers and clerks’.38 This derogation of Shakespeare was Voltaire’s reluctant declaration of war upon English culture.39 The balanced tone that marked the earlier series of Letters composed by Muralt and Voltaire were important foundations to Walpole’s construction of the first Preface to his ‘Gothic’ story. Voltaire’s 1761 ‘Appeal’, however, moved from that tradition of measured cultural criticism to outright attack upon England. The consequences of Voltaire’s transformed tone are important to the second Preface of The Castle of Otranto, where the ‘Gothic Story’ subtitle is first introduced. Here, Walpole constitutes the Gothic as a patriotic defence of England’s cultural traditions. However, such patriotism on the part of Walpole always appears to be belated, apologetic and compromised by ambivalence. This is because at heart Horace Walpole was a Francophile, who, like Voltaire, derived great intellectual pleasure and inspiration from celebrating his neighbouring nation’s literature and culture.40 From its first appearance on Christmas Day in 1764, only three years after Voltaire’s ‘Appeal’, the ‘Gothic story’ became freighted with the cultural consequences of the animosity between England and France. Voltaire’s 1761 ‘Appeal’ made it all but impossible to openly acknowledge, admire or emulate the language or literature of France in England. Conceived in the midst of this cultural war and inspired in no small part by French sources, the emergent genre of Gothic was thus obliged to distance itself from its true literary heritage. A potent mixture of diplomacy, political expediency and literary patriotism compelled the canny Horace Walpole to identify the second edition of his first ‘Gothic’ product as a particularly patriotic English creation, an example of English inventiveness which was at odds with the stale and rule-driven culture of French letters. While Walpole strived in both his private correspondence and his public life to stratify his divergent interests, his simultaneous pursuits of politician, translator, publisher and author guaranteed his formative work’s participation in the volatile Anglo-French relationship. To his close friend George Montagu, Walpole writes, for example, that he is ‘tranquil enough

24

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820

to write Castles of Otranto, in the midst of grave nonsense and foolish councils of war’, but this striation of his literary and political pursuits is deliberately disingenuous.41 It belies the turbulence that underscores his literary products. Walpole’s ‘Gothic story’ Otranto (1765) and Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother (1766) were indelibly marked by the increasingly francophobe climate in England. As his letter-writing during his two-year residence in France testifies, privately Walpole did not subscribe to the epidemic of francophobia in England. During his French sojourn, Walpole wrote dispassionately about the shortcomings and qualities of the French nation, following the rich tradition established by Muralt and Voltaire earlier in the century. In one letter, for example, Walpole complains to Montagu of the tendency among Frenchmen to ‘affect philosophy, literature and freethinking’, but notes that his own comparative gravity does ‘not unfit me for French company’.42 He plays upon the cultural stereotyping of the Englishman as more serious, less frivolous, that Muralt and Voltaire had been so instrumental in constructing. Overall, however, his correspondence from France is noteworthy because of his lack of prejudice towards his hosts. Walpole is admiring and censorious in almost equal measure. In public, as with Voltaire’s increasing animosity towards England and Shakespeare, Walpole chose to perform an increasingly francophobe justification of his texts which was at odds with his character. The francophobia is not, however, apparent in the first Christmas Day edition of The Castle of Otranto of 1764. There, unsure of the success of his literary experiment, Walpole posed as the putative translator of the text, William Marshal. Walpole’s position as a Member of Parliament influenced his decision to assume this alter ego (as it transpired, this was indeed a legitimate concern) but the imposture also enabled him to make certain bold claims for continental cultures and languages at a moment in time (1764) when British patriotism was peculiarly volatile. The ‘translator’ of Otranto claims that he finds its manuscript, composed by one ‘Onuphrio Muralto’, ‘in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England’.43 The contrived distance placed between the manuscript’s location and cosmopolitan Protestant London permits ‘William Marshal’ to tell a supernatural, Catholic tale ‘as a matter of entertainment’. The claims that lie beneath this fragile imposture are of even more interest. Just a year before the composition of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole had published his own continuation of George Vertue’s Anecdotes of painting in England with some account of the principal artists (1763).44 Included in this work is an entry upon the seventeenth-century

The mysterious author Horace Walpole

25

engraver of John Milton and Charles I, a certain William Marshal. This earlier William Marshal was in many ways just as inscrutable a figure as Walpole’s fictional translator William Marshal. William Marshal the engraver provided the famous frontispiece of Charles I’s book of meditations, Eikon Basilike (1649). In keeping with the staunch defence of the king that the book promoted, Marshal’s engraving portrayed Charles I as long-suffering and persecuted, bravely confronting his death. For John Milton, Marshal’s work was merely a ‘conceited portraiture before [Charles’s] Book … sett there to catch fools and silly gazers’.45 Milton’s disdain of Marshal’s craftsmanship did not end there, for he was also scornful of Marshal’s less than flattering engraving of himself, calling Marshal an ‘unskillful engraver’.46 It is this latter episode that Walpole explores in his entry upon William Marshal (the engraver) in the Anecdotes of Painting, stating that ‘Milton, who was handsome … seems to have been discontented’ with the portrait by Marshal who was ‘but a coarse engraver’.47 The disagreement between sitter and artist appears to have come about, Walpole records, from Milton’s vanity (Milton thought that Marshal made him look too old). Milton appears to have added a Greek epigram to the engraving which preceded his collected Poems in order to show up Marshal’s lack of skill and vocation, hinting that his straitened circumstances made him too quick, too eager to take on any commission. Walpole’s interpretation of this relationship is equivocal at best. He reproduces Vertue’s opinion that Marshal’s engraving of Milton was ‘authentic’, before moving on to enumerate Marshal’s exhaustive list of subjects, which (among many others) also included Shakespeare, Charles I and Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Towards the end, Walpole delivers his own view that ‘the best of [Marshal’s] works that I have seen, and that too probably one of his earliest, before employed in the drudgery of booksellers, is the head of a young author, without a name’, adding in a footnote that he believes that this is John Donne. And thus the name of William Marshal suggested itself to Walpole when he sought the name of his ‘translator’ in the first Preface to The Castle of Otranto. Walpole’s decision in the earlier Anecdotes of painting in England to focus his entry upon Marshal around Milton’s public disdain of his workmanship (as opposed to the equally renowned Eikon Basilike) suggests anxieties about representing, mediating, copying and authorship. We are not who we say we are, the vexation between Milton and Marshal tells us: we have little control over who we aspire to ‘be’. Just as Marshal ‘misrepresented’ Milton, so Milton forces his own interpretation of Marshal upon his engraving. As Elizabeth Penley Skerpan observes of

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Milton’s Greek criticism of Marshal’s engraving, ‘Placed as it is below the portrait, it intrudes into the engraver’s space, asserting the primacy of the writer over the engraver.’48 The connections to the subject of The Castle of Otranto are clear. Horace Walpole famously pinned to the wall above his own bed a copy of the Magna Carta and the execution warrant of Charles I. Such odd choices of bedchamber decoration indicate an anxious fascination with the extent and limitations of regal authority.49 The Castle of Otranto is a novel that is intimately concerned with legitimacy, with immoral acts of stealing titles and territories. These are concerns that place it perilously close to Britain’s own abrogation of moral authority during the territorial struggles of the Seven Years War. Whether ‘William Marshal’ has any right to translate and reproduce the work discovered ‘in the library of an ancient catholic family’ remains unconfirmed. Of further significance are the concerns of the first Preface about the ethics of representation. Marshal admits that he is ‘not blind to [his] author’s defects’, but then (in a gesture that was to become commonplace in so many later Gothic romances) he excuses his own narrative shortcomings by foregrounding the deficiencies of the English language. He compares English unfavourably with both the Italian and French languages, arguing that ‘It is difficult in English to relate without falling too low or rising too high, a fault obviously occasioned by the little care taken to speak pure language in common conversation. Every Italian or Frenchman of any rank piques himself on speaking his own tongue correctly and with choice.’50 The complaint initially concerns the lack of care taken with spoken English, and is a pedagogic argument that was rehearsed earlier by Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his Dictionary. Johnson’s argument from there on the contamination of the English language by the careless and modish use of romance languages in everyday conversation became a charged issue in the late eighteenth century, and one of which Walpole was acutely aware.51 The movement from ‘Marshal’s’ complaint about the contamination of English to the privileging of the contrastingly careful use of language by ‘any rank’ of Italian or Frenchman renders this all the more controversial in the charged atmosphere of the 1760s. The anxieties surrounding representation and authority are here inflected with a courageously open appraisal of the respective merits of national languages. Walpole’s imposture as a translator compounds the controversy, for if the ‘translator’ questions his own authority and ability, then the source that he claims to have ‘translated’ becomes increasingly ephemeral. ‘William Marshal’ claims to have translated this work from an ‘artful’ Catholic ‘Onuphrio Muralto’. The approximation of the name ‘Muralto’

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to the name of the non-partisan Béat de Muralt has to date gone unnoticed, but there is little doubt that Walpole had read and appreciated Muralt’s 1725 Letters on England and France. This is not only because, as I have already observed, Voltaire name-checks Muralt’s earlier Letters in his own arguments on English drama, and there is strong evidence that Walpole studied Voltaire’s arguments closely. More convincingly, Walpole’s (or ‘Marshal’s’) reflections upon the comparative deficiencies of the English language also rehearse the concerns of the anonymous translator of Muralt. In the Preface to Muralt’s work, the translator observed that ‘the Genius of the French language, and Manner of writing differ much from the English’, and that ‘the French language has a greater store of Phrases and significant Terms than any Living Languages whatever, and the English but few to correspond with them’.52 Hence, writes the translator, ‘it is not easy to imagine the task a translator must undergo’.53 The complaint is strikingly similar to ‘Marshal’s’ complaints about the English language’s comparative lack of ‘variety and harmony’ and his diffident disclaimer that ‘I cannot flatter myself with having done justice to my author in this respect.’54 Both observations somewhat controversially point up the impoverished state of the English language in contrast to its neighbouring languages. Through both the naming tribute and the argumentation, then, Walpole’s first edition of Otranto is linked to two differing sources (William Marshal the engraver and Muralt’s Letters). England’s first ‘Gothic’ excursion becomes sceptically entwined in an increasingly nationalised debate upon the relative merits of national languages, indebted to a tradition of debate upon the Anglo-French relationship that is neither partisan nor uncritical of England, and increasingly concerned with the ethics of representation. The distancing devices of ‘William Marshal’s’ translation of ‘Muralto’s’ much earlier text are not as distant as one may imagine. As I have demonstrated, Walpole was in fact engaging with far more contemporaneous considerations of representing the respective merits of England and France. Taking the significance of Walpole’s naming in a different direction, E. J. Clery observes that the name ‘Muralto’ is an ‘approximate translation of Walpole to Muralto’.55 ‘Approximate’ this certainly is, and surprisingly literal for an author who had himself translated French works with considerable facility, and wrote and spoke fluent French. Its witty crudeness is perhaps an observation upon the charged and nationally inflected debate upon literal and idiomatic translation in the mid to late eighteenth century in which Muralt and Voltaire both participated through their idiomatic, but ultimately lifeless, versions of Shakespeare.56

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Walpole’s humorous approximation of his own name went unnoticed by the book’s reviewers. As critics have argued, the particular transformation in John Langhorne’s reception of the first and second editions of The Castle of Otranto – where Walpole coyly admitted to his authorship by appending his initials ‘H.W.’  – was truly startling in its exposure of the limited criteria under which a romance of the supernatural could be digested in Britain.57 While Langhorne had pronounced the first ‘translation’ a ‘work of genius, evincing great dramatic powers’ composed by ‘no common pen’, Walpole’s timid profession of authorship in the second Preface was unpardonable.58 Langhorne found the supernatural apparatus of The Castle of Otranto ‘preposterous’, and permissible only when believed to be a ‘translation’ from a ‘gross and unenlightened age’.59 The centrality of translation to Walpole’s imposture and Langhorne’s outraged response is crucial to the construction of what is deemed acceptable in the Gothic. The Castle of Otranto was not itself a product of translation, but Walpole did choose to invoke the pedagogic debates upon national languages, culture and translation in his first edition’s imposture. This was in a bid to deflect patriotic anxieties, but not as a consequence of them. The legitimation of Otranto as a ‘translation’, as Langhorne observed, is precisely what ensured its acceptability to the palate of an increasingly nationalised audience in England. Spurred by the successful reception of the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Walpole had shrugged off the imposture of translation, and in so doing had to seek another mode of defending his Gothic product. In a new Preface, Walpole discarded ‘Marshal’s’ criticism of the English language, and appealed to the increasingly nationalised figure of Shakespeare. He justified his new hybrid creation from the ‘ancient and the modern’ romance by acknowledging his indebtedness to Shakespeare: The result of all I have said is to shelter my own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced. I might have pleaded, that having created a new species of romance, I was at liberty to lay down what rules I thought fit for the conduct of it: but I should be more proud of having imitated, however faintly, weakly, and at a distance, so masterly a pattern, than to enjoy the entire merit of invention, unless I could have marked my work with genius as well as originality.60

Walpole used Shakespeare as a literary defence against his own bold novelistic innovation. He celebrated his seemingly humble imitation of the bard, arguing that he gained more pleasure from imitating Shakespeare than from literary innovation. His disarming humility, however, masked a more ambivalent patriotic gesture. By taking ‘shelter’ under England’s

The mysterious author Horace Walpole

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greatest literary ‘genius’, he distanced himself from the continental origins of his romance, and seemingly participated in defending English literature against the advancing front of French ideas. It was with political and literary expedience in mind that Walpole launched an attack upon Voltaire’s increasingly negative version of Shakespeare in the second Preface to Otranto: The great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied. Let me ask if his tragedies of Hamlet and Julius Caesar would not lose a considerable share of the spirit and wonderful beauties, if the humour of the grave-diggers, the fooleries of Polonius, and the clumsy jests of the Roman citizens were omitted, or vested in heroics? … No, says Voltaire, in his edition of Corneille, this mixture of buffoonery and solemnity is intolerable – Voltaire is a genius – but not of Shakespeare’s magnitude. Without referring to indisputable authority, I appeal from Voltaire to himself. I shall not avail myself of his former encomiums on our mighty poet; though the French critic has twice translated the same speech in Hamlet, some years ago in admiration, latterly in derision; and I am sorry to find that his judgment grows weaker, when it ought to be farther matured.61

Walpole’s second Preface, partly addressed to Voltaire, contributed, as E. J. Clery observes, to ‘the war of words’ and ringing defence of one aspect of Shakespeare’s practice that remained controversial even in Britain: the inclusion of comic scenes in tragedies’.62 In part it was also ‘notable’, however, for the scholarly and measured tone which Walpole adopted in his extensive rebuttal of Voltaire. He referred to the gradual degradation of Voltaire’s views on Shakespeare with care and reference to many sources, revealing both a depth of objective knowledge and transparent disappointment with what he perceived to be Voltaire’s increasingly flawed judgement. To Madame du Deffand, for example, Walpole would write in 1767 that he did not seek to quarrel with Voltaire, but that he (Walpole) maintained that Shakespeare was superior to French dramatists.63 The second Preface of Otranto is both objective and subjective, interested and disinterested, for Walpole’s measured attack upon Voltaire is nowhere near as venomous as that of Voltaire upon Shakespeare. And as if to prove the point of ‘William Marshal’ in the first Preface, after quoting Voltaire in the original French, Walpole frequently, knowingly and foppishly interjects a French phrase of his own into his responses to Voltaire: ‘Surely,’ he writes, ‘if a Comedy may be toute serieuse [sic], Tragedy may now and then, soberly, be indulged in a smile. Who shall prescribe it? shall the critic, who in self-defence declares that no kind ought to be

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excluded from Comedy, give laws to Shakespeare?’64 Walpole’s recourse to French in his light-hearted yet serious rebuttal of Voltaire indicates a certain ‘non-Englishness’. He is able to sport the signs of both England and France within the second Preface, and in so doing demonstrate the illusory nature of the ideological distance between the two nations. While the body of the Preface may contain this serious cultural engagement with Voltaire, however, the Preface both begins and ends on a nationalist note, with the ‘Gothic Story’ commencing it, and Shakespeare concluding it. So Walpole plays upon cultural expectations of the time, appealing to the national palate. The faultlines of the Anglo-French conflict that underlie the ‘Gothic’s’ constitution are even more prominent in the laboured construction, suppression and subterfuge that Walpole deemed necessary for his Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother. Walpole began composing this blank verse drama in 1766. It was subsequently published at his home, Strawberry Hill, in a limited edition of fifty copies in 1768. Almost immediately after publication, however, Walpole suppressed the drama. In his correspondence with both the Reverend William Mason and Montagu, he expressed constant anxiety about its circulation. Shortly after his return from France in 1769, Walpole worried about Montagu’s friends having got hold of a copy of his play: ‘I am sorry those boys got at my tragedy,’ he frets; ‘I beg you would keep it under lock and key; it is not at all food for the public – at least not till I am food for worms, good Percy.’65 As various critics have speculated, Walpole’s ‘pathological’ anxiety may be due to the play’s controversial treatment of incest. Set in pre-Reformation Narbonne, the play dramatises the consequences of the unintentional double incest of a young man who has been seduced by his ‘mysterious mother’ (masquerading as a servant).66 Much later, returning home from a long banishment, the young nobleman unwittingly marries their incestuous daughter. The theme is doubly controversial, notes Clery, owing to the countess’s frank admission that the incestuous coupling is an intentional consequence of her frustrated desire.67 Walpole himself no doubt recognised how controversial this was, but he refused to alter the Countess’s full and frank admission of incest, as suggested by his friend William Mason, to one of accidental incest.68 Instead, he chose the partially successful strategy of suppressing his controversial drama. Walpole only planned for its full publication in the works that he gathered for what was to become his posthumously published collection. Here again, as with The Castle of Otranto, he elected to include some prefatory material to his work that could deflect attention from the controversial

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subject matter. In the posthumously published Prologue, Walpole again attacks Voltaire, and defends Shakespeare. This time, however, the material is more forthrightly aggressive towards the Frenchman than it had been with Otranto: From no French model breathes the muse to-night; The scene she draws is horrid, not polite. She dips her pen in terror. Will ye shrink? Shall foreign critics teach you how to think? Had Shakespeare’s magic dignified the stage, If timid laws had schooled th’insipid age? Had Hamlet’s spectre trod the midnight round? Or Banquo’s issue been in vision crowned? Free as your country, Britons, be your scene! BE Nature now, and now Invention, queen! BE Vice alone corrected and restrained. Can crimes be punished by a bard enchained? Shall the bold censor back be sent to school, And told, ‘This is not nice; That is not rule’? The French no crimes of magnitude admit; They seldom startle, just alarm the pit.69

With the plea that ‘Nature’ and ‘Invention’ should preside as the muses of English drama, Walpole cannily deflects accusations of imitation from his play. But his true target is Voltaire’s increasingly anglophobe prescription about dramatic rules at the expense of Shakespeare. Walpole presumes an easy knowledge of Shakespeare from his audience with his near-casual references to ‘Hamlet’s spectre’ and ‘Banquo’s issue’. By contrast, the ‘French model’ goes unnamed, insipidly anonymous owing to its preference for politesse, imitation and slavish rule-following. Walpole’s Prologue relates each nation’s literary characteristics to its political constitution. Britons are encouraged to be as ‘free’ and natural in their cultural activities as they are in their government, while in contrast the French are underhand, ‘admit[ting]’ to ‘no crimes of magnitude’. In contrast to the second Preface of Otranto, this Prologue is immediately offensive in its derisive reference to the ‘French muse’ in the first line. This is strong indeed for Walpole. The strength of this pre-emptive offensive may indicate his anxiety concerning the final publication of his drama. It was no doubt designed to act as a bulwark against the shocks which the play itself would cause. However, any patriotic bulwark that the Prologue may have provided is undermined by the fact that when it was finally published as part of his collected Works, it was published alongside Walpole’s poetry,

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and not the play itself. In the end, perhaps Walpole could not convince himself to justify his work through such openly antagonistic material. Why did Walpole hesitate about the publication of this Prologue? Why did he feel the need to justify his fictional and dramatic productions through such attacks on French drama and, more specifically, on Voltaire? After all, his Francophilia was well recognised. After the compositions of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, Walpole went on in 1772 to reprint in the original French the famous Anthony (Antoine) Hamilton’s Mémoires du comte de Grammont (1713), a picaresque history of Hamilton’s brother-in-law’s youthful adventures in France and restoration England.70 Even earlier than Muralt and Voltaire, Hamilton’s work had also favourably highlighted England’s comparative freedom of thought in contrast to that of France. Despite good existing translations of Hamilton’s text, Walpole decided to republish it at his Strawberry Hill press in the original French, and added his own (very well-written) editorial notes in French. Not only did he republish Hamilton in an increasingly francophobe climate, but so enamoured was he of Hamilton’s text that he decorated a room of Strawberry Hill with its illustrations.71 Clearly, Walpole’s ardent admiration for French importations was not diminished by Voltaire’s partisanship. Instead, I would argue that the political and literary expediency which underscores Walpole’s prefatory attacks on the French is not so much suggestive of loyalist patriotism, as of fear of the mounting francophobe atmosphere in England.72 Despite the claims that Walpole made in the Prologue to The Mysterious Mother, this antagonistic climate rendered the English author’s pen less free than ever before.

Ch apter 2

The translator cloak’d: Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith

There are, in this great city, a considerable number of industrious labourers, who maintain themselves, and perhaps a numerous family, by writing for the booksellers, by whom they are ranged in separate classes, according to their different abilities; and the very lowest class of all, is that of Translators. Now it cannot be supposed that such poor wretches as are deemed incapable of better employment, can be perfectly acquainted either with their own or with any other language: besides, were they ever so well qualified, it becomes their duty to execute as much work, in as little time, as possible; for, at all events, their children must have bread: therefore it were unreasonable to expect that they should spend their precious moments in poring over a difficult sentence in order to render their version the more elegant. This I take to be the true reason why our translations from the French are, in general, so extremely bad. Most of the translations which I have read, appear like a thin gause [sic] spread over the original: the French language appears through every paragraph; but it is entirely owing to the want of bread, the want of attention, or want of ability in the translator. (‘Preface by the Translator’ to Eloisa: or, a series of original letters collected and published by J. J. Rousseau)1

In the Preface to his anonymous translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse William Kenrick portrays his fellow translators as needy and untalented mercenaries with little or no interest in the craft of translation.2 His trenchant excoriation of other translators was not atypical. In the roles of critic, dramatist and sometime translator, Kenrick amassed a substantial number of enemies owing to his impolitic and wholly unreserved critique of his contemporaries.3 More, while Kenrick caricatured translators in such unflattering terms, he also exploited his influential position as a contributor to the Monthly Review to promote his own (anonymous) translations of Rousseau. He found his own work to be the exception to the translational norm. Amidst a growing appetite for 33

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Rousseau’s writing, Kenrick’s translations of Rousseau’s works found commission.4 For example, his translation of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse was puffed by the booksellers Becket and De Hondt fully three months before its appearance in 1761.5 His translation of Émile, ou de l’éducation for the same booksellers two years later was undertaken and promoted with similar expediency.6 Agenda in mind, Kenrick’s Preface to Eloisa offers a politic and pragmatic denigration of the French language. The French, he complains, ‘is frequently so vague and diffuse, that it must be entirely the fault of the English translator if he does not often improve upon his original; but this will never be the case, unless we sit down with a design to translate the ideas rather than the words of our author’.7 The Preface recalls Samuel Johnson’s attempts to maintain the character of the English language in the Preface to his Dictionary of the English Language. There, Johnson ‘warn[ed] others against the folly of naturalising useless foreigners to the injury of the natives’.8 Fashioning himself amidst a tradition established by such an august antecedent, Kenrick insists upon the Englishman’s duty to improve French authors by clothing them in a finer English garb. He scorned ‘servile, literal, translation’ and promoted his work as part of a strong translational heritage which sought to robe the impurities of other languages in a veil of English decency.9 This aim became even more explicit in the self-promoting review that he composed regarding his own translation of Rousseau’s Eloisa in the Monthly Review. Kenrick applauded there ‘the frequent instances where the Translator has, very judiciously, and with good taste, improved on his original, where it seemed rather defective; so that, upon the whole, we think that Mr Rousseau has no reason to complain, either of the dress in which his Eloisa has been arrayed, or the reception she has met with, in England’.10 Idiomatic translation as an act of national refashioning became a significant translation practice (one could argue, even, ideology) in the course of the Anglo-French conflict. This practice licensed translators fully to alter the original, with the more theoretically inclined able to draw untroubled attention to the wholesome ‘garb’ or ‘dress’ of their improved works. Refashioning a French original for the more sober tastes of an English audience became a patriotic enterprise in the late eighteenth century. This form of patriotic refashioning was, as Kathleen Wilson acknowledges, in no ways incompatible with radicalism during the decades of the Seven Years War and the American War of Independence, but the masculinity of the imperial project ‘both call[ed] on women’s participation in the public sphere and eras[ed] their presence there’.11 Refashioning French

The translator cloak’d

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originals guaranteed certain standards of ‘propriety of thought’ for the burgeoning female readership in England. It was a project in which Clara Reeve appeared to participate in The Progress of Romance (1785) and her unacknowledged translations which I discuss below. However, the very notion of refashioning, or reclothing a work contains subversive potential. As the preponderance of veils and cassocks which populate Gothic romances reminds us, clothes can disguise or indeed ‘cloak’ the true identity that lies just, and so tantalisingly, below. So, too, the ‘garb’ of translation: by altering a work in the alleged interests of propriety, a translator becomes an author with an indeterminate agenda. The assumption of the name of the author, belatedly in the act of translation, tokens a translation of intent that can be spun to the advantage of the translator and his (or, as we shall see with consistency, her) moral or political agenda. Well before Barthes, the assumptions and febrile truths that surround the idea of the author are key waypoints in a play of signification that surrounds questions of literary and literary-commercial value.12 Helpfully, in ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin enunciates the tensions and acts of evasion implicit in the act of translation: Even when all the surface content has been extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive. Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relationship between content and language is quite different in the original and the translation. While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien. This disjunction prevents translation and at the same time makes it superfluous.13

Benjamin’s cloth is metaphor: the translator’s act of concealment. The language of the translation is ‘a royal robe with ample folds’, concealing the ‘primary concern’ of the translator.14 A translation thus becomes a work in its own right, participating in the afterlife of a foreign work, performing an interpretation that has always already known the anxieties of its audience. Like Ann Radcliffe’s fictional monks, translations flatter to win favour, but in so doing they cloak their originating impulses. Kenrick warned, however, of the risk that less talented translations ran: the risk of leaving traces of the French language pulsing just beneath their ‘thin gause’. As the arguments for idiomatic translations burgeoned in a climate of ever-increasing hostility towards France, so too did English arguments for freedoms in translation. Kenrick’s case for refashioning Rousseau’s Julie into a more demure Eloisa was justified by its being part of a broader and

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long-standing defence of idiomatic translation. This position had long permitted a far wider, often unacknowledged, adaptation of French literature: one which more-or-less anxiously concealed varied and indeterminate aims.15 This is what I argue with regard to the three women authors examined below. Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee and Charlotte Smith all exhibit such anxieties, certainly tensions, in their adaptation of French works. At times they acknowledge them as translations; at others they contrive quite artfully to conceal their works’ original French provenance. The works of these authors in the 1780s are a direct influence upon the ‘Gothic’ romances of the 1790s, with Ann Radcliffe in particular taking inspiration from them, and in turn transmitting their influences to her numerous imitators. In the work of Reeve, Lee and Smith herein examined, translated from the sentimental tradition of France, the terms ‘Gothic’ and ‘terror’ are seldom invoked. Nevertheless, the ideas imported by them served to consolidate later (more recognisably ‘Gothic’) romance’s potential for subversion thanks to their skilled blending of sources and deeply selective acknowledgement of inspiration. Reeve, Lee and Smith translated works from the French during the 1780s. This was the decade which, as a consequence of Lord George Gordon’s petition to Parliament against the Catholic relief act, witnessed the outbreak of anti-Catholic rioting in 1780. The volatility of the rioters (the homes and business premises of many Catholics were burned in London and Bath, and around three hundred people were killed) created anxieties in authors who chose to look to a Catholic, continental country just across the sea for literary inspiration.16 The American War of Independence also deepened the rift between France and Britain, with France declaring war against Great Britain again in 1778 and signing an alliance with the American ‘Insurgents’. In part to compensate for its defeat during the Seven Years War, Robert Frail observes, France ‘was the single nation to embrace the democratic ideals of the American Revolution’.17 Between the years of 1776 and 1783 France was instrumental not only in prosecuting the American War of Independence, but also in furnishing the Americans with a ‘modern version of republicanism’ derived from the ideas of Montesquieu and other French political theorists.18 The political sharpening of Anglo-French animosity during the American War carried inevitable consequences.19 For although opposition to American Independence was by no means unanimous among the ruling Whig oligarchy, the French declaration of alliance with America ‘reignited the smouldering anti-Gallicanism of the English people’.20 ‘The strength

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of antagonism toward England’s ancient imperial rival,’ Wilson continues, ‘supported in some instances a defiantly positive hope for a replay of the Seven Years War.’21 This optimism proved to be unfounded, however, for the American War was, for Piers Mackesy and Wilson, ‘Britain’s only clear defeat in the long contest with France which began with the Revolution of 1688 and ended at Waterloo’.22 The smouldering anti-Catholicism that ignited the Gordon Riots was also connected with this war, for the Quebec Act that guaranteed the free continuation of Roman Catholicism in the colonies was widely denounced as being emblematic of popery and slavery in the British Empire. And as in the Seven Years War, popery, slavery and (now) the Quebec Act were associated with Britain’s arch-enemy, France.23 Writing during the decade in which these enmities sharpened around the themes of patriotism and Catholicism, Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee cloaked their first translational efforts as original pieces, with Reeve in particular going to extreme lengths to conceal the Gallic provenance of her work. Charlotte Smith, by contrast, acknowledged her translation, and bore the brunt of the critics’ ire as a consequence. Translating works from the most detested of Catholic nations, importing foreign sentiments, was a difficult enterprise to negotiate in the 1780s. Unacknowledged translations were less offensive to critics than those translations which did not significantly refashion their French source. Clara Reeve was the author of the ‘Gothic story’ The Old English Baron (1778), which sought to improve upon Walpole’s innovation in The Castle of Otranto. Borrowing Walpole’s careful patriotic terminology, she names her romance a ‘Gothic Story’, thereby aligning herself with a more indigenous English tradition. Her later essay The Progress of Romance (1785) further attempted to strike a careful balance in reconciling romance with national considerations. Reeve’s intervention formed part of a much broader promotion of an indigenous literary antiquity over the comparative values of French neoclassicism, already advocated by scholars such as Thomas Warton and Richard Hurd.24 In this she willingly participated, attempting to locate a role for the ‘feminine’ in constructions of patriotism and national character. In The Progress of Romance Reeve adopts the form of a Socratic dialogue between two female protagonists, Sophronia and Euphrasia, and a male protagonist, Hortensius. Hortensius embodies the masculine scepticism of romance that was pervasive in the middle of the eighteenth century. Ian Duncan notes of this, by way of example, that Henry Fielding promoted his own form of realist fiction against ‘those voluminous works called

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Romances’ which embodied the ideals and reading matter of France’s ancien régime.25 Reeve’s Euphrasia seeks to convince Hortensius of the limitations of his view that romance is a defunct and risible genre, arguing instead that it is of ‘much higher date’, and redefining it as ‘a fabulous Story of such actions as are commonly ascribed to heroes, or men of extraordinary courage and abilities.’26 The essay’s reappraisal of the romances of chivalry distances them from the ideologically controversial territory established by Fielding and Lennox in the name of realism. There, romance had become synonymous with France’s corrupt and decadent morals. Euphrasia’s argument that romance is ‘of very ancient, and I might say universal Origin’ by contrast withdraws it from the specifically Anglo-French dialectic that was so pervasive by the late eighteenth century.27 Her refusal to position romance within this relationship is strengthened further with her observation that ‘the French Romances of the sixteenth Century, [] had their foundation in real History; but the superstructure was pure fiction. I will not shelter myself under their authority.’28 Volume i of The Progress of Romance makes subtle but significant distinctions between ancient and more recent forms of romance. While contemporary critic Joan DeJean rightly situates the heyday of romance in seventeenth-century French court society, Reeve’s less accurate criticism of ‘French romances of the sixteenth Century’ views these narratives of chivalry and magic as relatively modern phenomena that are vastly inferior to their Saracen antecedents.29 While it was widely recognised both then and now that romance came to Britain through France, Reeve’s laboured attempts to separate ancient and more modern forms of romance focus upon rebranding romance as a less specifically French product. Volume ii of The Progress of Romance both consolidates and complicates the impression of Reeve’s patriotic position. Of Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 The Female Quixote, for example, Euphrasia comments: ‘In this ingenious work the passion for the French Romances of the last Century, and the effect of them upon the manners is finely exposed and ridiculed.’ Sophronia, the second female interlocutor, qualifies Euphrasia’s observation, however, by observing that Lennox’s novel and ideas are outmoded.30 Further on in Volume ii, while Hortensius praises ‘John James Rousseau’, Euphrasia cautions against his Héloïse, claiming that ‘It is a dangerous book to put into the hands of youth, it awakens and exercises those passions, which it is the Exercise of Reason, and of Religion also, to regulate, and to keep within their true limits.’31 Not only does Euphrasia criticise the questionable moral influence of Rousseau’s work, but she also expresses the wish that the first two

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volumes of the novel ‘could be abridged and altered’.32 Euphrasia advocates a wholesale alteration of the source text, involving the removal of the scenes of seduction from the first two volumes, arguing that ‘[t]hose who write only for depraved and corrupted minds dare appeal to Rousseau as a precedent.’33 Hortensius’s response is to encourage her to undertake the task of revamping Rousseau’s original in the name of national propriety. The pleasures and pitfalls of translation are thus laid out for the audience: the implications are various. While Hortensius encourages Euphrasia to undertake the corrective task on Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse that she herself has outlined, the essay promotes a suitable female modesty, with Euphrasia coyly refusing to undertake the task. Always, Euphrasia’s corrective task of improvement is framed as a duty to the service of the British reading public, but one that does not go unchallenged by her interlocutors Hortensius and Sophronia. During the course of her career, Reeve acquired considerable dexterity in her manipulation of sources and national origins. Three years after The Progress of Romance, she published a three-volume novel entitled The Exiles; or, Memoirs of the Count de Cronstadt (1788). An epistolary tale of a young nobleman (the eponymous Cronstadt) who commits bigamy, the work contained what we now recognise as Gothic tropes with its reliance upon melancholia, oppressive feudal castles and dreams which foreshadow disastrous outcomes for their protagonists. When Cronstadt, for example, is about to marry his first wife, the poor, uneducated but exquisitely beautiful Jacquelina, he dreams that On a sudden, her countenance changed, she turned pale as death; she was torn from me by invisible hands, but her head was turned towards me; she called after me, be constant, and we shall meet again when our trials are past. I was then transported to a frightful rock, which hung over the sea; the wind howled in mine ears; the waves roared, and rose all round me …34

This, at first glance, seems to be an episode which launched countless further Gothic scenarios. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for example, all contain such prophetic dreams of death at crucial junctures in their narratives when sexual transgression is about to occur. As the Monthly Review was quick to point out, ‘[t]he principal incidents appear to be borrowed from a novel of the justly admired M. D’Arnaud’.35 Surprisingly, perhaps, given Reeve’s lack of acknowledgement of her source, the Monthly’s observation was made without rancour or censure.

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Welcoming her work as an ‘interesting and well conducted story’, the critic saw no tension between her unacknowledged borrowing and her ‘story’.36 The Critical Review also seemed to detect Reeve’s adaptation, but made even less of it in its praise that ‘much is new; the whole is probable, correct and interesting’.37 What mattered more to both reviewers in the end was that Reeve’s interpretation of d’Arnaud’s original, what Benjamin calls the ‘afterlife’ of the original, exhibited propriety, probability and innovation. Both reviewers of The Exiles revealed comfortable familiarity with the Frenchman Baculard d’Arnaud’s original novel D’Almanzi. This novel formed part of a series of works that d’Arnaud had composed under the title Les Épreuves du Sentiment.38 Baculard d’Arnaud was the sentimental successor to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France.39 His Épreuves du Sentiment (1773) launched a series of sentimental tales that participated in the anglomania (that Voltaire’s and Muralt’s work had also promoted earlier in the eighteenth century) through a series of Histoires anglaises. These tales were craftily alternated with French tales of a more continental, sentimental and licentious nature. D’Almanzi formed part of the latter. Diane Long Hoeveler notes that the ‘gore and horror’ pervading these tales contributed significantly to the emergence of a Gothic sensibility in French literature. At the time, however, D’Arnaud’s works were recognised not as ‘Gothic’, but as a continuation of the still-popular sentimental tradition. The sentimentalism by which Baculard d’Arnaud’s Histoires were characterised, alongside his careful promotion of the English nation in his Histoires anglaises, may go some way to accounting for the relatively benign reception that he was awarded by Reeve’s reviewers. With this in mind, one is compelled to question why Reeve went to such lengths to conceal the relationship of her adaptation to d’Arnaud’s original. The Preface to The Exiles is ostentatious in its cloaking of any original, brazenly excoriating those who pirate texts without acknowledgement. At the beginning of the Preface, Reeve provides a pretext for her creation, claiming that a male friend, wishing to write a tale himself, encouraged her to write one at the same time as encouragement to him. The hypothesis of a mutually creative endeavour, with both male and female taking different nationalities and different threads of the tale, is particularly attractive and plausible after Reeve’s earlier arguments and gender characterisations in The Progress of Romance, and again foregrounds her attempt to revalorise the feminine as a vital part of Britain’s patriotic enterprise at this time. Reeve reports that she was given the German character to flesh out for the story, and thereby conceived the eponymous Count de Cronstadt.

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Sidestepping any further elaboration upon this creation, however, Reeve abruptly digresses to claim that she only had time to work upon this mutual endeavour because of the loss of a ghost story – Castle Connor, an Irish story – during a coach journey. The detailed narrative of this loss expresses anxieties about ownership and piracy, with Reeve warning her readership that if she discovers it printed elsewhere ‘she will lay claim to it; and if it lies within her power, will detect the piracy, and expose the pirates to view’.40 This digression makes it all the more bizarre that Reeve nowhere acknowledges the formative influence of Baculard d’Arnaud’s story. Indeed, the lost ghost story seems to cloak her own act of piracy as she warms to her theme and invokes Pope while denouncing literary theft: There ought to be made a distinction between original writers who draw from their own stock, and those servile imitators who, like caterpillars, prey on the young plants of genius, and meanly pilfer a momentary subsistence from the labours of others. This distinction is not made, nor do the critics sufficiently attend to it: formerly there was a proper one between a writer and a plagiary, between a liberal similitude and a servile copy. The art of book-making in these days is become extremely easy; any person who can compile with tolerable judgement, may, by the help of a new title-page, present to the public, ‘A patch’d, vamp’d, future, old, reviv’d, new piece; With less of reading than makes felons ’scape, And less of genius than God gives an ape.’ (POPE) Those who read indiscriminately all the new publications, must subscribe to the truth and justice of this remark – they are requested to judge and give sentence impartially, whether the seller of old clothes newly vamped has a right to demand the same price, the same merit, the same reward, as the fair trader, who has them newly woven, of good materials for their wear, and for his own credit.41

Reeve’s Preface draws immediate attention to the complexities of originality and translation. Although she did not appear to be speaking of translation in particular, her reprisal of the clothing metaphor and her appeal to Alexander Pope’s arguments against imitation in the Dunciad render this implicit. Pope’s satire speaks in particular of the aping of France immediately after the passage that Reeve quotes. The finger-pointing at France and Reeve’s complaint about those authors who pedal ‘old clothes newly vamped’ both hint at connections with contemporaneous creative translations from France. Seemingly, Reeve claims to be a ‘fair trader’, one who has the clothes ‘newly woven, of good materials for their wear’. This declaration is all the more surprising given The Progress of Romance’s earlier

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advocacy of adapting Rousseau for the more moderate and chaste tastes of the English audience. It is an audacious act of concealment, one which, perhaps, was deemed necessary as a consequence of the free and bold refashioning practised by her contemporaries Sophia Lee and Charlotte Smith. In The Exiles, Reeve ignored her fictional proposition Euphrasia’s suitably modest advice, taking a sentimental plot of bigamy and seduction from a French novelist (Baculard d’Arnaud), who clearly was one of ‘those who write only for depraved and corrupted minds’ and who in so doing ‘appeal to Rousseau as a precedent’.42 After previously arguing in such strong terms against these unscrupulous adaptations, she had little choice but to present her own adaptation as an original work. Her self-presentation as an innovative author, rather than translator, tells us much about the ideological distinctions between the two. To be an author in England is to be part of a specifically English literary tradition, while the task of the translator is less glorious, less patriotic and more mercenary. The translator is not a ‘fair trader’ in the literary marketplace, being prone to demand too much for her work in contrast to those who produce works for their ‘own credit’. Reeve’s reliance upon economic metaphor is consonant with Kenrick’s earlier caricature of greedy translators, but goes further in asserting authorship as more selfless, more reliable and of course more original. In the History of the Pre-romantic Novel in England, James R. Foster appraised Clara Reeve’s writing as ‘conservative’, while more recently James Watt has argued for her promotion of a form of ‘loyalist Gothic’ romance.43 Watt’s version of ‘loyalism’ is closer to the truth, I think, but Reeeve’s disguised incursion into the murky territories of translation and adaptation exposes the implicit tensions and connections between providing a moral version of what the British audience required, and catering to the self-same audience’s appetites for sentimental, seductive French narratives. A self-proclaimed dutiful refashioning of a French import might render a work more intellectually acceptable to literary critics, but its marketability to the British audience depended upon balancing its French allure with an acceptable moral.44 The fluctuation of the audience’s demands was inevitably driven by the unstable barometer of tensions between England and France, by the American War of Independence and by the outbreak of the Gordon Riots in 1780. E. J. Clery suggests that, for both Reeve and her contemporary Sophia Lee, ‘the resort to the relative safety of the translation business represents something of a retreat’.45 Imaginatively, this is quite possibly the case, although the extent of their textual refashioning renders these translational

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afterlives creations in their own rights. Whether these authors regarded the translation business as safe is also questionable. Terry Hale, for example, identifies the complex relationship between the doubtful financial rewards of translating novels for an ‘élite with little use for translation and a patriotic general public unsure of the moral value of foreign literature’.46 Added to this lack of certainty, for Reeve there was the further complication of having argued so strongly against the importation of the specifically French form of romance into England. The desire to innovate, to form part of an indigenous literary culture, was on an inevitable collision course with her unacknowledged adaptation of French works. And while Reeve was one of a growing body of authors who turned to unacknowledged translations of French works as a source of income, the ideological conflicts played out in her work make her more unique. The proudly patriotic annexation of The Old English Baron as a ‘Gothic Story’ in 1778 was later neglected for more translations and educational pamphlets. Reeve’s 1792 Plans of education; with remarks on the systems of other writers; in a series of letters between Mrs Darnford and her friends, for example, concealed beneath its covers praise of the principles of the Revolution in France, calling them ‘a warning to Kings, how they oppress and impoverish their people’.47 The ambiguities surrounding translation and patriotism in Reeve’s career, therefore, cannot merely be equated with conservatism. The presence of the second female interlocutor Sophronia in The Progress of Romance serves to qualify and complicate Euphrasia’s more forceful denigration of the ‘French manufactory’, and Reeve’s later works exhibit a confidence in applauding the reasons for revolution. What her literary decisions of the 1780s reveal, instead, are the anxieties and perceived pressures that female authors experienced when negotiating their own literary relationships with France. The swift detection of the gallic origins of Reeve’s The Exiles was by no means typical of the reviewing talents of the 1780s. In her first novelistic enterprise, Reeve’s contemporary Sophia Lee also chose not to acknowledge her adaptation of a French novel. Lee’s ‘cloaking’ of her work’s French original, however, was more successful, perhaps due to her surprisingly open juxtaposition of history and romance, and the wholescale adaptation of the French original. When the first volume of Lee’s fictional history The Recess, or a tale of other times was published in 1783, reviewers were surprisingly complacent about the volume’s uneasy oscillation between romance and history. Published prior to Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785), Lee’s opening volume draws upon a rumour that during her long imprisonment in England Mary, Queen of Scots carried twins. The Recess recounts the tale of two legitimate, but unrecognised, twin

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daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. Matilda and Ellinor are raised in an underground recess by a guardian, Mrs Marlowe, whom they initially accept as their mother, and by a priest called Father Anthony. When Mrs Marlowe reveals their true parentage to the two girls, they begin a quest to be reunited with their imprisoned mother. This brings them into immediate conflict with Mary’s gaoler, Elizabeth I. In Lee’s romance, Elizabeth becomes a guarded, vindictive and penetrating persecutor, who – while haunted by episodes of remorse – remains jealous of her favourites, Lord Leicester and the Earl of Essex. When Mary’s daughters fall for Elizabeth’s favourites (Matilda for Leicester and Ellinor for Essex), their persecution is guaranteed. Fleeing from the queen, Matilda’s paranoia endows Elizabeth’s penetration with superhuman qualities: ‘The eye of Elizabeth became yet more dreadful to me; I fancied every moment it dived into my heart, and death forever seemed to surround me in forms yet dearer to me than my own.’48 In contrast to her depiction of Elizabeth, Lee daringly portrays the Scottish queen in particularly sentimental terms. Represented only visually, one portrait of Mary suggests to her daughters ‘a lady in the flower of youth, dressed in mourning, and seeming in every feature to be marked by sorrow; a black veil half shaded a coronet she wept over’.49 The sectarian struggles of the early 1780s are controversially writ large in Lee’s novel. As Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson further indicate, Lee’s lament for Mary, Queen of Scots ‘excludes Elizabeth from any of the available sympathetically conflicted positions’ that were in circulation prior to the 1780s.50 Lee assured her readership in the Advertisement to The Recess that what she offered her public was ‘founded on fact’, but she simultaneously drew attention to the potential allure of romance by asserting that ‘the age of Elizabeth was that of romance’.51 Metaphor makes way for assertion here. The confident equation that Lee offers between the Elizabethan age and romance indicates the way in which, as Reeve was to argue later in The Progress of Romance, romance was problematically overwriting history. In her unique fusion of history and romance, Lee clearly capitalised upon what Reeve and many others before her had deemed to be the dubious legacy of French romance. The reviews which took notice of the first volume of Lee’s tale also identified this tendency. While the Critical Review applauded Lee’s skilled combination of romance and history, remarking that ‘Miss Lee properly observes’ the connections between the Elizabethan age and romance, Samuel Badcock, writing for the Monthly Review, was less comfortable with the way in which the narrative ‘sets us at once on fairy land’ while the Preface returns the reader

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to sobriety with its assurances that ‘what we took for a romance was only a history!’.52 Lee’s dexterous reorganisation of the comparative values of romance and history attracted both plaudits for innovation and criticism. Following in the footsteps of such reviews, Reeve’s later emphasis upon the proper division of history and romance in The Progress of Romance may have been a corrective response to the first volume of Lee’s romance. But in the years, decades and centuries to follow, the critical and literary responses to Lee’s reworking of this relationship in The Recess was applauded for its innovation.53 What went unrecognised by Lee’s immediate reviewers, and is mentioned too briefly by contemporary critics of the Gothic, is the unacknowledged debt that The Recess owes to Prévost’s earlier novelistic enterprise, Le Philosophe anglais ou Histoire de Monsieur Clèveland, fils naturel de Cromwell, écrite par lui-même, et traduit de l’anglais par l’auteur des Mémoires d’un homme de qualité (1731–9). Prévost’s work formed part of a burgeoning tradition of ‘pretender’ novels in France which took their cue from Queen Anne’s own use of the designation as ‘a tool of invective and insult’ towards the exiled Stuart claimant.54 Sophia Lee herself did not admit her novel’s relationship with Prévost, although others, including her sister Harriet Lee, acknowledged it later. Thematically, Lee’s percolation of history and romance owes much to her French predecessor. The eponymous recess, for one, is clearly based upon the ‘accès soutterain’ where the illegitimate son of the villainous Oliver Cromwell  – Clèveland  – is secreted by a benevolent protector called Madame Riding. The unwanted Cleveland’s constant melancholia prompts him to reflect that being hidden in the heart of the earth distances one from the persecutions on its surface. His morbid strain of sensibility is further revealed in his constant reflections about the greater merits of death. On seeing his brother Bridge die after a duel, for example, he exclaims, ‘Alas! How I envied him, seeing him take possession of eternal peace in the sanctuary of the tomb.’55 Such reflections are clear precursors to Matilda’s constant desire for the safety of asylum and death in The Recess. Lee’s heroine, for example, believes that the recess shared with her sister is ‘a hallowed circle to seclude us from the wicked’.56 Structurally, the form of Clèveland’s memoir, consisting of first-person narrative, exchanged letters, and interpolated narratives of persecution, also offered a new model of harnessing melancholic tragedy to the portrayal of personal passion. The melancholic over-indulgent sensibility so characteristic of Clèveland is directly transmitted to Lee’s two heroines, with Matilda inheriting his morbid desire for death, and Ellinor his madness.

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More important for the specific context of 1783 is the substitution of Prévost’s villainous Oliver Cromwell for Elizabeth I. While Prévost’s vilification of the republican Cromwell formed part of the earlier eighteenth-century French anglomania which supported England’s imposition of limitations upon a fundamentally benign sovereignty, in 1783 Lee chooses to ignore the Cromwellian narrative in favour of the earlier reign of Elizabeth I. For Lee, the Civil Wars are too historically and politically close for comfort, and the Golden Age of Elizabeth opened up further possibilities of ‘romance’. The struggle that she depicts between Elizabeth and the offspring of Mary, Queen of Scots, however, immediately precipitates the terms of her romance into debates upon religion, superior female sensibility, and versions of history and romance. Fiona Robertson, for example, describes Lee’s portrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots as the absent mother as a ‘symbol of a lost religio-political system’ and further draws attention to the novel’s veiled allusions to the oppression of Roman Catholics.57 While Lee selected Prévost’s Clèveland as the romance element of her tale, the historical impetus of her particular take on Mary and Elizabeth’s confrontation was drawn, to some extent, from two historical accounts by Scotsmen.58 In the History of England David Hume chose to portray Mary, Queen of Scots in pathetic and tragic terms, while his Elizabeth was prone to poor judgements of state thanks to her feminine weaknesses. William Robertson’s popular multi-edition History of Scotland (1759) gave further credence to the myth of Mary, Queen of Scots’ fictive twins.59 The ramifications of Lee’s unacknowledged appropriation of these three works were numerous. The uneasy combination of these generically different versions (romance and history) gave renewed legitimacy to the French lineage of romance. It is all but impossible to separate Lee’s sentimental account of the private subjectivity of these two sisters from the historical versions that she used from Hume and Robertson, and from the socio-religious contexts in which she reused this history. Romance is an unwieldy superstructure to the shaky foundations of differing historical versions used by Lee. After Lee’s innovative generic combination of Prévost, Hume and Robertson, the erosion of the boundaries between romance and history was inevitable, as was their exploitation for differing ideological ends. The version of history that The Recess provided was appropriated by an apparently pseudonymous Rosetta Ballin in 1790. Her novel The Statue Room portrayed another virtuous, sensitive heroine who is persecuted by Elizabeth I. Catherine of Aragon, the first wife to be discarded by Henry VIII, bears a daughter with the name of Adelfrida, but ‘justly fearing, that

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Anne Bullen, who was very powerful with the King, would make use of every insinuating artifice to destroy her’, Catherine conceals her pregnancy.60 Elizabeth I is aware of her legitimate sister Adelfrida but ‘conceived a settled dislike to [her] which was yet augmented by her beautiful appearance’.61 In her turn, Adelfrida gives birth to a daughter, Romelia. Romelia, the offspring of Adelfrida and the Duc d’Anjou, lives out her life an unknown victim of the persecution of Elizabeth, and her ensuing insanity reaches a dramatic climax when she commits suicide before Elizabeth’s eyes. The same epistolary framework deployed by Prévost and subsequently by Lee mediates this tale of insanity and excessive female sensibility. But what Ballin foregrounds in her Preface is its historical foundation: ‘To authenticate the tale, I need only refer my readers to history; with which many of the incidents perfectly coincide.’62 The links between history and romance are forged with increasing confidence here, with the use of romance being legitimised increasingly by its appeal to history. Like Lee’s earlier example, however, Ballin’s desire to authenticate her tale through appealing to history contains within itself the seed of doubt, an awareness of the fallibility of different versions of history. The afterlife of Prévost’s Clèveland became increasingly complex. Secured by Lee in the services of combining history and romance, it then became appropriated to Ballin’s The Statue Room, which, as Dobson and Watson speculate, was undoubtedly composed by a Catholic interested in promoting the cause of Catholic emancipation.63 In the wake of Lee’s romance, sympathy with the cause of the defenceless Mary, Queen of Scots became increasingly politicised as it came to be recognised as an acceptable literary subject. Diane Long Hoeveler, for example, notes that Gothic novels and plays of the time which treat of this struggle ‘actually seem to be mourning the loss of Catholicism as the state religion … Or at least they wanted to appear nostalgically to mourn the loss of their earlier religious history, associated as it was with “porous selves”, magic, superstition, and irrationality.’64 The final stanza and couplet of a sonnet composed ‘To a Lady, with The Recess, or a Tale of Other Times’ participated in such nostalgia. In it the Reverend John Whitehouse urged the sentimental reader to Mark! How the magic hand of Genius pours O’er hist’ry’s page her sympathetic stores. See royal Mary’s sorrow faded form Sink, not unwept, beneath the whelming storm; Her children blest with all their mother’s bloom Feel the chill gale, and wither at her tomb.65

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Lee’s careful combination of history and sentiment was welcomed as original genius by Whitehouse, with her ‘sympathetic stores’ reviving history’s poorer version of the ‘faded form’ of sorrow-laden Mary. But crucially, in the decade of the Gordon Riots, the Catholic Mary is ‘not unwept’, not unmourned. While she and her children may have perished at the hands of Elizabeth, the memory of ‘royal Mary’ lives on through Lee’s portrayal of the tale. It is more apparent in Whitehouse’s version than it was in Lee’s Recess that history is inadequate. Here, history is overwritten by Lee’s sympathy, and is clearly portrayed as the poorer neighbour of romance. Lee’s innovation proposed no such competition, however. While she seemed content with the uneasy cohabitation of history and romance in her work, it was the responses to her work (such as that of Whitehouse) which pitted its generic elements against each other. Tributes to Lee’s lament for Mary were numerous. Publishing under ‘Mrs Johnson’, in her two-volume romance Calista Anna Maria Mackenzie depicted a sentimental heroine who weeps at the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey: ‘At the receptacle, which contained the unfortunate queen of Scots, she stopped, paused, shed a tear, and felt even virtuous indignation arise against the woman who had pursued that unhappy beauty to disgrace and death.’66 While she weeps for Mary, Mackenzie’s heroine Calista is also mindful to pay ‘secret tribute to that elegant historian who has so pathetically described the miseries of her supposed offspring’.67 The use of the recent perfect tense suggests that the secret tribute is again offered up to Sophia Lee as the ‘elegant historian’, rather than to any more distant historical renditions of Mary’s tale. Lee becomes the more able historian, whose portrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots overshadows the inadequate historical accounts of her. This impression is further reinforced by Mackenzie’s later praise of Lee’s work in her Preface to her 1795 novel Mysteries Elucidated. There, in an attempt to defend her own literary example, Mackenzie embarked upon a criticism of the ‘many’ who had followed the comparatively restrained example of Walpole by dyeing ‘their walls in blood’ and disturbing ‘the inhabitants of the silent grave’.68 In contrast to such tales of terror, Mackenzie foregrounds the success of such romances as The Recess and Lee’s later historical romance Warbeck, which, ‘founded on particular periods in the history of this country, and one or two more, have proved the utility of the undertaking’.69 The list of examples of influence that The Recess provoked could be endless. What is important in these tributes to Lee’s version, I think, is the credence which the various accounts invest in the unjust persecution of the Catholic Scottish Queen Mary, and the consequent argument that history

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in and of itself has been inadequate in representing Mary’s cause. This even becomes evident in the travel writings of the famously proper and Protestant Ann Radcliffe. When visiting the Duke of Devonshire’s country seat in 1794, for example, where it was falsely rumoured that Mary had been imprisoned by Elizabeth’s gaoler Bess of Hardwick, Radcliffe’s thoughts turn to the plight of Mary, and of how she must have felt when entering the ‘solemn shade’ of her imprisonment.70 Mary’s portrait in Hardwick Hall shows the deep marks left by grief; and the room with its well-preserved black velvet chairs (reputedly embroidered by Mary) strikes Radcliffe by its grandeur, ‘before the veneration and tenderness arise, with its antiquities and the plainly told tale of the sufferings they witnessed’.71 By contrast, the portrait of Queen Elizabeth which dominates the grand room at Hardwick decides her character as ‘slyly proud and meanly violent’ for Radcliffe.72 Any awe that may have been created by the room’s grandeur and the pictorial presence of its powerful monarchical sponsor is usurped by private veneration and tenderness for her victim. Radcliffe’s observations here demonstrate all the more forcefully the increasing hold of the French model of romance that Reeve strived unconvincingly to demote in The Progress of Romance in 1785. Lee’s unacknowledged adaptation of Prévost’s earlier tale endorsed this model with such an appealing form that it gave rise to an even greater investment in French models of romance. Spurred on, perhaps, by the stupendous and unexpected impact that The Recess created after its publication in three volumes in 1785, Sophia Lee then went on to translate a further tale from France, but this time she acknowledged its provenance. The two-volume Warbeck: A Pathetic Tale (1786) was, Lee records, ‘written in French, by M. D’Arnaud, an author justly celebrated for his profound knowledge of the human heart’.73 Lee further ventures a modest suggestion that ‘the student in history may therefore expect to find some entertainment, and perhaps information, in a review of the transactions of so memorable an aera in the annals of this nation’.74 Modest this may appear, but Lee’s proposal that the student of history may learn from both Baculard’s original romance and her version of it is bold in its implications. Lee chooses for her subject the tale of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the English throne during the reign of Henry VII. Her Warbeck, however, becomes an instrument in an increasingly hostile battle of values between France and England. In his imposture as the first Duke of York, Warbeck is promoted, funded and encouraged by Margaret, the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy. In Lee’s account, Margaret conceives an ‘insatiable hatred’ against the House of

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Lancaster: ‘The Earl of Richmond, seated on the throne of the House of York, appeared to Margaret as an odious phantom which haunted her continually.’75 Here, on the very opening page of her adaptation, Lee elaborates upon a theme she had first developed in The Recess, with a politically powerful woman becoming haunted by her personal enmities. The young pretender Warbeck, the pawn of Margaret’s machinations, is by contrast endowed with sensibility and passion. Falling in love with a portrait of the Countess of Huntley, Warbeck addresses the portrait in the most passionate terms; he deposites it in his bosom, withdraws it every moment, and covers it with kisses; he invokes it as the tutelary genius that presides over his fate. He is no longer in the class of human beings; he is of another species, the creation of ambition and love. Neither the fabulous demi-gods of antiquity, nor the heroes of knight-errantry, ever possessed a soul so well prepared for the marvellous.76

As a victim of political manipulation, as Warbeck’s interest in policy diminishes, so does his passion for the Countess of Huntley increase. His characterisation is highly reminiscent of Lee’s earlier heroines Matilda and Ellinor. Again, a sentimental tale of tragic love becomes the superstructure to the historical events that underlie Lee’s adaptation, guaranteeing its appeal as a novel of sensibility to its core British readership. This is not to say, however, that history becomes in any way secondary to Lee’s sentimental concerns in Warbeck. On the contrary, her immediate and open acknowledgement of Baculard d’Arnaud’s original authorship is only one of many forthright and surprising manoeuvres that she offers in the preface and the work itself. The Preface indeed dares to suggest that the English politician may in fact learn some lessons from ‘an intelligent Frenchman on many important points of government’.77 The lessons are then unambiguously spelled out; they involve learning of the ‘just fate of the disturbers of public repose, the enemies to mild and legal government’ who gratify ‘a cruel resentment against their peacable neighbours, the friends of order and due subordination’.78 If the reader is left in any doubt as to the respective values conferred upon each nation, volume i resolves this. Here, England’s King Henry VII is portrayed as warmongering, and acquisitively ‘industrious in finding pretences to augment his treasures’.79 This unflattering portrait of England’s monarch then prompts a major reappraisal of the long history of Anglo-French conflict, with Lee reflecting that ‘the battles of Cressey, Poictiers [sic] and Agincourt, were not less fatal to our neighbours than to ourselves’.80 The Seven Years War and the American War of Independence are not named, but the portrayal of England’s acquisitive monarch forcefully reminds the readership

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of England’s more recent inglorious campaigns. While France may have been the loser in the Seven Years War, in Lee’s estimation England loses the moral victory. The venality of Henry VII is juxtaposed to the open generosity of France’s Charles VIII. In contrast to his English counterpart, Charles ‘possessed all the generosity and frankness of a French knight’ and reports of the ‘admiration, the powerful influence, the infatuation arising from an excess of generosity and compassion’ that he provokes swiftly reach England.81 Praise extends from the individual (Charles) to the attributes of his country. The ‘gallantry of the French nation, which piques itself on welcoming strangers’ receives further encomium in Lee’s adaptation. Warbeck becomes not so much ‘a pathetic tale’ of the ‘private subjectivity’ of the eponymous pretender as an analysis of the respective merits of France and England. And while it may have come originally from the pen of a French author, Lee’s paratextual revalorisation of France’s chivalry and pacific tendencies over the venal, warmongering characteristics of England’s monarch render this a bold reappraisal of history in an age of increasing patriotism. Perhaps this is the reason why, in this particular instance, Lee chose to acknowledge herself as the mere translator of Baculard d’Arnaud’s novel. While in many respects Warbeck was no less of a free adaptation than The Recess had been, its politicised francophilia and courageous historical didacticism rendered this publication a risky venture. The Critical complained of precisely these tendencies: ‘[T]he force is weakened by exclamations, by conversations, and reflections. Some parts are related with address; but the whole is not very interesting. English literature would have sustained little loss, if the French work had been still neglected.’82 In truth, however, English literature may well have sustained loss in the ensuing decades. As I chart in Chapter 4, for example, Ann Radcliffe’s interpolated narrative in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) also subtly reappraised French chivalry, portraying a French knight as caring and dutiful in his obligations to his English counterpart.83 In the 1780s, the cultural, moral and governmental hegemony held by England over what it preferred to perceive as a legally inferior, more bloodthirsty and less gallant neighbour was increasingly challenged by the translations and adaptations of France’s works. While in 1760 Kenrick advocated the refashioning of a French work to accord with the more proper sentiments of its English audience, Lee’s Warbeck provides a particularly striking example of how this could work in the opposite direction, with France’s morals and politics emerging as superior to those of England. The superiority of French sovereignty that Lee portrayed in Warbeck was possibly in consequence of France’s sole victory over Britain

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in the American War of Independence, a victory that many in Britain viewed as right. The level of the translations’ challenge of course depended upon whether they presented themselves covertly or openly, but their generic romance origins always guaranteed their position within debates upon history. In turn, the histories presented offered more demotic versions of England and France’s hostilities which were at odds with the rising tone of patriotism in England. The challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy which positioned France as an inferior neighbour was, if anything, further strengthened by Charlotte Smith’s translation venture of 1787. The Romance of Real Life was Smith’s second tentative excursion into the murky territory of translation. Prior to this, Smith in 1785 had undertaken the translation of another text, the 1731 novel L’histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by Prévost d’Exiles.84 Having perhaps recognised and appreciated Lee’s successful engagement with the French author, her choice may not have been as accidental as her sister, Catherine Dorset, suggested in her Memoir of Smith.85 As Loraine Fletcher, Terry Hale and Michael Gamer have so ably charted, Dorset had to defend her sister against charges of moral impropriety after Smith’s publisher Thomas Cadell ventured to send a copy of her Manon L’Escaut [sic] to George Steevens, a critic and translator who was by all accounts just as outspoken as William Kenrick.86 Steevens voiced such grave reservations about the moral tendency of Smith’s adaptation of Prévost’s tale of the wily seductress Manon that Cadell was forced to withdraw it from sale. Steevens pursued Smith’s work further, sending a letter signed from ‘Scourge’ to the Public Advertiser which accused Smith of ‘literary fraud’ owing to the prior publication of two different versions of Prévost’s tale. This is a far cry from the complacency with which Clara Reeve’s unacknowledged adaptation of Baculard d’Arnaud was received. As both Hale and Fletcher suggest, it was of course intimately bound up in Steevens’s self-interest, as he himself was one of the translators of the previous versions. Fletcher also implies that Steevens was further prejudiced because the version had been composed by a woman,87 an argument which Hale takes to its conclusion by arguing that Steevens ‘was seeking to marginalize not only Charlotte Smith as a competitor but women authors and translators as a class’.88 Smith’s adaptation was published in 1786, a year after the completion of Lee’s volumes of The Recess but two years prior to the benign reception awarded to Clara Reeve’s unacknowledged adaptation of Baculard d’Arnaud’s D’Almanzi in The Exiles of 1788. One is compelled to wonder, then, whether gender was in fact less of a factor in Steevens’s attack than what translators such as Smith chose to do with

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their materials. While Reeve later mounts a careful and possibly pragmatic excoriation of literary piracy in her Preface to The Exiles, Smith’s comparative honesty, the licence which she permitted herself in her translation of Prévost’s tale and the comparative lack of criticism of the French source were greater factors in the attack launched upon her than her gender.89 George Steevens’s calumniation of Smith’s Manon on the grounds of fraud and immorality deeply affected Smith’s attitude to her next translation venture. The shadow that he cast indeed looms so large that critics thus far  – with the recent exception of Michael Gamer  – have tended to overlook the import of her second translation venture, The Romance of Real Life. As early as 1928, James R. Foster’s article ‘Charlotte Smith, Pre-Romantic Novelist’ consigned a mention of this work to a bracketed aside that ‘([The Romance of Real Life] is clear evidence of the decline in which the literature of sentiment was beginning to sink in consequence of its inevitable search for still stronger stimuli)’.90 With the phrase ‘stronger stimuli’, Foster’s easy dismissal of it hints at its perceived participation in an emergent tradition of Gothic romance. But what might this mean, and why might this easy consignment of it be problematic? Two things emerge in the analysis below that contribute to my argument concerning the role of translation and adaptation both in confirming the specifically French branch of romance’s interconnections between romance and history, and in challenging the hegemony of England’s governmental, cultural and legal systems. Smith’s translation of François Gayot de Pitaval’s 1735 Les Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes as The Romance of Real Life was published in 1787. Her choice of title was taken from Pitaval’s prefatory remarks to the famous lawsuits that he presented to the public. In the ‘Avertissement’ to his voluminous compendium of lawsuits, Gayot de Pitaval argued that the pleasure that we gain from the strange and surprising facts which seize our imaginations in good stories is inevitably corrupted by the realisation that these are not true events: ‘Strange and surprising facts which seize our imaginations in agreeable stories contaminate our pleasure, let us say, by their fictional nature.’91 Gayot goes on to argue that a more unalloyed pleasure is gained when reality itself becomes marvellous in tales concerning the misadventures of everyday people. Smith takes inspiration for her title both from Gayot’s prefatorial arguments upon the advantages of using true tales, and from the debates on romance and history by contemporaries such as Reeve and Lee. In the Preface to her translation, Smith mentions that a literary friend persuaded her to select some of Gayot’s stories that ‘might prove as attractive as the most romantic fiction, and yet convey all

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the solid instruction of genuine history’.92 Following Pitaval’s lead, Smith uses the protection of historical fact in order to translate some tales which may otherwise be accused of the same immorality as Manon L’Escaut [sic]. Steevens’s vilification of her earlier translation made this subsequent translation more hesitant and apologetic in tone. As Michael Gamer has indicated, however, we have to remain relatively cautious about the extent of Smith’s apology here, for Smith’s discussion of romance and history in her Preface is not as straightforwardly quiescent to Gayot’s version as one may imagine. Gamer perceptively argues: Yet what is striking on closer inspection is how potentially contentious her account turns out to be. Calling forth the customary opposition of romance and history, Smith argues for the ultimate inadequacy of both. History may be ‘solid’, but it is not ‘attractive’; romance may teach ‘lessons of morality’, but not ones that carry the same interest that arises from ‘authenticated facts’. Most interesting of all is the potential dualism Smith denies. While setting romance and history in opposition to one another, she does not oppose romance to what she calls ‘authenticated facts’. Romance and fact, it turns out, can accommodate the other to mutual advantage and with interesting results. The implications of such claims, needless to say, are a far cry from traditional assumptions about romance being a tissue of impossible lies and history being a discourse of empirical truth … Smith opposes romance and history not on the basis of their differing truth-content but on the basis of their discursive shortcomings. In Smith’s formulation, historians could (and, by implication, should) render their factual narratives ‘attractive’ by attending to some of the conventions of romantic fiction  – what Smith means by ‘telling each story in my own way’.93

This repositioning of Smith usefully identifies how her arguments foreground the potential shortcomings of both romance and history. This is a distinction which both aligns her with Lee, and places her slightly apart from other commentators of the time. Whereas Lee’s literary commentators (such as Whitehouse) viewed history as falling well short of the greater truth potential of romance, Smith by contrast acknowledges the limitations of both discourses, and argues that both will be better served by mutually complementing each other. In its claims, this is very close to what Sophia Lee argued in her Preface to Warbeck – published just one year prior to The Romance of Real Life. For Lee, ‘the student of history’ and the politicians could learn from her accounts, with romance always emerging as the beneficiary of history. As we saw with Lee, however, history has the tendency to teach some uncomfortable lessons, and so it is with Pitaval’s legal cases that are selected by Smith.

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The subtle redistribution of the comparative values of romance and history that Smith pursues here is easy to miss. In part, this is due to Smith’s pressing need, at such a critical point in her career, to counterbalance her own creative impulses with the majority critical consensus upon careful and proper translation practice. Smith states that her selection of tales ‘might lead us to form awful ideas of the force and danger of the human passions’,94 a claim which prompts Fletcher to observe that ‘[Smith] was trying to cover herself against the charge of circulating immoral French literature again’.95 Taking shelter under moral enterprise and the greater authority of a male adviser, Smith claims that her ‘literary friend … wished me to consider myself as under no restriction, but that of adhering to authenticated facts; and, by telling each story in my own way, to render it as much as possible an interesting lesson of morality’.96 Throughout the preface, Smith steers a pragmatic and deferential course through the critical debates upon the pitfalls of translation. Her remarks are consonant with Kenrick’s plea that ‘we sit down with a design to translate the ideas rather than the words of our author’ and with Reeve’s later arguments upon rewriting Rousseau’s pernicious morals for the English audience.97 Both Kenrick’s and Reeve’s cautions against the intemperance and vagueness of French language are also writ large here. For Smith supplements her account of the moral purpose of her selection with a criticism of Gayot’s ‘affectation and bad taste’. Of this she complains that ‘[t]he style of the original is frequently obscure; the facts are often anticipated, and often repeated, in almost the same words, in different parts of the story: they are also often interrupted by remarks, or by relations wholly foreign to the subject’.98 She thus morally and stylistically exonerates her significant transformation of Les Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes through her adumbration of the original’s faults.99 Upon examination of Gayot’s original compendium, however, it is difficult to discern the repeated remarks, tangential facts and obscurity of style of which Smith complains in her Preface. As he was a professional eyewitness to the legal processes of the Parlement de Paris, Gayot’s tales are of course bound up with the legal details of the human complexities that he presents. But if anything, his narratives of the events leading up to the trials that he witnesses are less speculative and more economic than Smith’s rendition. Whereas Gayot presents his tales as legal cases, with the testimonies, disputes and final judgements set out clearly and consequentially, Smith assumes a more fluid narrative approach to the tales. In Gayot’s ‘The beggar of Vernon’, for example, a case concerning the mistaken identity of a lost boy, a mother’s affliction upon learning

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of the disappearance of her sons is described sparingly in the following manner: Upon her return, the mother learns of her children’s escape. She succumbs to the pain which takes hold of her, she vainly asks everyone of her children’s whereabouts, she parades her distress everywhere.100

Here, the mother’s immediate reaction to the loss of her sons is urgently active. The mother ‘learns’, she ‘succumbs to the pain’, she parades her distress. The repetition of ‘she’, immediately followed each time with a verb, maintains a level of objectivity while at the same time it suggests panicked activity on the part of the mother. Smith’s translation, however, amplifies upon this relatively sparse description and renders the mother’s pain more emotive and descriptive: The unhappy mother, overwhelmed with grief and consternation, flew from place to place, entreating every body she met to assist her in finding her children. Wherever she went, the idea of her lost boys followed her; and to find them appeared the first wish of her heart.101

In a fuller rendition of the mother’s grief, Smith’s adaptation of the original begins with the adjectives ‘unhappy’ and ‘overwhelmed’, adding imagery where there was none in Gayot’s original. She further adds a speculative second sentence, ascribing emotions and desires to the mother which are not present in the original. The image of the lost sons haunts the mother, and an unnecessary clause which describes the ‘first wish of her heart’ is added. As a victim of loss, the mother is endowed with a level of sensibility that the more objective original has omitted. This is indicative of a larger trend in Smith’s adaptation, where she identifies sympathetically with the female victims of these tales. One of the more well-known cases, ‘The Marchioness of Gange’, tells the tale of the marchioness’s unfortunate, loveless second marriage. The avaricious brothers of her new husband, eager to acquire her fortune, poison her and then pursue her through the countryside, eventually stabbing her to death. Smith of course cannot resist adding in extra sympathetic detail on the marchioness.102 We are told that Madame de Gange’s ‘heart was formed for affection and forgiveness’103 and her deathbed scene only serves to render her more interesting: Her eyes had sometimes all their dazzling lustre, at others, that soft languor which added to, rather than diminished their attractions. Her complexion retained all its delicacy; and her sentiments and conversation were calculated to inspire all who saw her with regret, that such an assemblage of perfections was sinking into an early grave!104

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Smith’s transformation of Gayot’s original character into a heroine of sensibility makes the marchioness an early prototype for the Radcliffean Gothic heroine.105 But at the same time it becomes increasingly difficult to agree with Smith’s prefatorial claim that she condenses the ‘extraneous matter’ of Gayot’s tales. It could be argued that the morals of these cases are highlighted in the sympathetic treatment that Smith awards specifically to her female victims. It is necessary, however, to qualify this argument because it is too general to apply to the cases that Smith chooses. Having noted that she endows the often female victims of the tales with a sensibility that was lacking in Gayot’s original narratives, it is important that we do not see this collection as becoming simply a collection of sentimental tales about female victims suffering at the hands of tyrannical husbands and fathers. While Lorraine Fletcher is correct in her identification of the anti-Catholic and anti-legal impetus of some of these narratives, arguing that ‘the stories evidently overlap with [Smith’s] own fantasies and feelings about marriage and the law’, there is, I think, a more persuasive case to be made about The Romance of Real Life’s larger significance in the import of terror.106 Not all the tales that Smith selects from Gayot are about wronged wives and mothers who become victims of an unfeeling legal system. The tales also concern daughters wronged by mothers, husbands wronged by wives, and poor people misjudged by communities. Smith also goes out of her way in some of her translated causes to defend the legal verdicts eventually delivered to the characters. ‘The Deserted Daughter’, for example, is taken from Gayot’s ‘Histoire de Marie Cognot, desavouée par son père et sa mère’, a moving case concerning a daughter who is disowned by avaricious parents. In Smith’s rendition, the mother’s venality stifles any residual maternal instinct that she has towards her daughter. She leaves her daughter to be raised by a wet nurse, and then denies knowledge of her when the nurse brings her back fourteen years later. Mary, the ‘deserted daughter’, must pursue her mother through the Parisian courts for her rightful inheritance. The judge finds in her favour, restoring her inheritance at the cost of her now-remarried mother. Smith truncates the fifty pages of Gayot’s legally precise account of the proceedings with this moralistic summary: By this equitable decision the unnatural parent was punished for her avarice and cruelty; the hitherto unhappy young woman reinstated in the rank to which she had an undoubted right; and the injury done her by the jealous suspicions of one of her parents, or the unguarded conduct of the other, was repaid by the justice of her country. (my emphasis)107

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The court in this case becomes an instrument of moral rectitude that is intimately associated with ‘the justice of [Mary’s] country’. Smith forges a connection between national legal probity and the duty of correcting an individual’s lack of morality. It is Mary’s native France which dutifully becomes the executor of this legal probity. In the subsequent tales that she chooses to translate, this connection is demonstrated more forcefully when poor judgments given by provincial magistrates in France must then be rectified by the ‘Parlement de Paris’. The case of ‘The beggar of Vernon’ (to which I have already referred) concerns a runaway son who is missing for many years, presumed dead by his heartbroken mother. The son of the eponymous beggar of Vernon is mistaken for the mother’s missing son. Despite the mother’s protests that this is not her son, the local magistrate of Vernon persists in pursuing a legal suit against the beggar for abducting the boy. The only way in which the mother can stop the town from restoring a boy to her who is not her son is by appealing to the Parlement of Paris. Smith describes in detail the legal complications of the case, commenting on the contest between the different jurisdictions of authority.108 The local magistrate in ‘The Beggar of Vernon’ is found to carry a grudge against the mother at the heart of the case, because she refused to sell him some land. He is subsequently reprimanded by a superior court, which finds in favour of the wronged mother and the beggar. Likewise, in a case entitled ‘La Pivardière’, where an unfaithful wife is wrongly accused of murdering her husband, the local judge inexplicably persists in prosecuting the case despite the appearance of the allegedly murdered husband to defend his wife. Again, the wrongly accused woman must appeal to the Parlement de Paris to intervene. In the majority of the cases that Smith selects, it is not the law per se that is portrayed as corrupt, but the provincial magistrates who exploit it. In his own original ‘Avertissement’, Gayot de Pitaval, a lawyer himself, admitted that his chosen Causes Célèbres demonstrated that the flame of justice did not always shine consistently upon all legal judgments. Smith clearly identifies with Gayot’s qualification. Rather than straightforwardly portraying the legal system as corrupt in The Romance of Real Life, she instead indemnifies some of its practitioners. This, I think, becomes a crucial distinction for Smith not only for The Romance of Real Life, but also for her own subsequent fictional enterprises. In the immediate wake of The Romance of Real Life, Charlotte Smith published Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1789). Their titles certainly spawned a number

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of Gothic imitations in their wake, although, as Mary Wollstonecraft observed of the latter in the Analytical, Smith’s female characters ‘are transcribed from life, and not the sickly offspring of a distempered imagination’.109 The optimism that marked the happy resolutions in both of these ‘courtship novels’ belies their serious themes which include (among others) the threat of rape and the abuse of property. Although they are in fact less recognisably ‘Gothic’ than their titles suggest, the buildings portrayed in Ethelinde in particular mark one of the Gothic’s central concerns. Castles, as Ann Radcliffe would later also demonstrate in The Mysteries of Udolpho with the Castle of Udolpho’s juxtaposition to Château-Le-Blanc, can either be places of tyranny or places of refuge. Smith juxtaposes buildings in much the same way in Ethelinde in particular, with Grasmere Abbey being the harbour of security that is in tune with its natural environs, and Abersley, the castle owned by Lord Hawkhurst, being a space of secrets and entrapment. Inspired on one hand by Smith’s own experiences, and on the other by the tales that she translated in The Romance of Real Life, legal tyranny and places of entrapment become central preoccupations in all of Smith’s fiction. This is certainly the case with Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Banished Man (1794) and the pervasive pessimism of the Gothic tale ‘The Story of Edouarda’ in the post-revolutionary The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. Desmond was perhaps the most overt in its criticism of legal corruption, portraying in epistolary form the personal terrors of the indissoluble marriage between Geraldine Verney and her wastrel husband. Complementing this personal story of legal entrapment is the larger and unfolding story of the Revolution in France, with Smith defending the events through the eyes of a sympathetic Englishman, Desmond, and a French nobleman. The publication of Desmond, immediately prior to the unfolding of the Terror in France, represents for Nicola J. Watson the final moment in fiction where revolutionary politics could be combined positively with sentimental letters.110 Smith then appears to return reluctantly to ‘the immediate taste’ in the form of the ‘Gothic’ with The Banished Man of 1794. The Preface to Volume i of The Banished Man focuses precisely upon Smith’s own real legal quagmire, with the ‘injustice and evasion on the part of those who have detained the property of my children from them’.111 Volume ii, however, smuggles in a more intriguing ‘Avis au lecteur’ where Smith ponders in a measured tone of cultural critique upon the relationship between politics and literature. Interspersing French phrases through her ‘Avis’, Smith reflects upon her seemingly reluctant resort to Gothic motifs:

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‘For my part,’ she observes, ‘who can now no longer build chateaux even en Espagne, I find that … I have hardly a watch tower, a Gothic arch; a cedar parlour, or a long gallery, an illuminated window, or a ruined chapel, left to help myself.’112 Smith simultaneously proves her credentials within the Gothic through her prior portrayal of castles in Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde, or the recluse of the lake (1789) and The Old Manor House (1793) and denigrates the imitative practices of those who have followed her. But this is beside the point. As Amy Garnai argues, ‘the treatment of the novel’s political topicality appears all the more anxious’ as Smith rather artfully and misleadingly wonders whether it is possible to ‘adhere to le vrai in a work like this’.113 The meditation upon verisimilitude here is undercut by the jovial, foppish interjections of French phraseology. These French interjections render the ‘Avis’ falsely light-hearted (a symptom perhaps of its underlying anxiety) and undermine the first volume’s serious purpose to recount events ‘which have happened, and all of which might have happened’.114 Here we return to the central tension of The Romance of Real Life with the insight that the legal discrepancies and revolutionary events of 1794 provide, in spite of Smith’s apparent misgivings, many opportunities for Gothic narratives to unfold. In other words, 1794, with its treason trials in Britain and revolutionary Terror in France, provides far too many episodes of fanciful ‘Gothic’ romance. This is something that Smith pursues all the more forcefully in the Gothic narrative ‘The Story of Edouarda’ from the later The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1802). The tale depicts a young heroine as the prey of a tyrannous father who has been manipulated by scheming monks. It contains no happy ending, unlike other Gothic romances of the time, and seems even more forcefully to suggest that ‘le vrai’ lay in dangerously misguided and manipulated laws in Britain which did not impede husbands’ cruelty to wives. It was in The Romance of Real Life that Smith began to explore the cases of characters who become entrapped by tyrannical versions of the law. There, a lifelong concern with imagining what a fair jurisdiction might represent began to emerge. One could in fact describe her translations of these bizarre, complex and unjustified lawsuits as cautiously optimistic (a sentiment that would not prevail in her later fictions) owing to the faith they portrayed that correct judgments would prevail. The victims that she embellishes with sensibility do not always survive; the villains are not always punished with death, but the legal decisions that are finally handed down are perceived as correct, if at times ineffective.

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A review of The Romance of Real Life which appeared in the Critical Review for October 1787 identified the legal quagmires that Smith explains effectively, but ignored Smith’s measured praise of the legal decisions: These causes will also contribute to reconcile us to our own judicial proceedings, however attended with delay or expense, and we hope they will not be unprofitable to their ingenious translator, who has selected them with great propriety, and told the several stories with great clearness and judgment.115

The reviewer questionably believed that these tales could reconcile the Englishman to the superiority of his ‘own judicial proceedings’. If anything, however, Smith’s selection of tales from Gayot praises the checks and balances available within the French justice system which eventually corrects misguided judgments handed down by provincial courts. The perceived propriety and clarity of Smith’s adaptation bears testament to the efficacy of her preface in dispelling the critical clouds gathered around her earlier translating venture Manon L’Escaut [sic]. Equally well, however, these attributes could refer to her judicious portrayal of the legal complexities in The Romance of Real Life. Both Sophia Lee and Charlotte Smith, in their free adaptations of French works, offered not only a fairer portrayal of France, but also an impression that France’s legal system, governance and hospitality were in many ways superior to those of England. Smith’s early translations also paved the way for an intimate, cosmopolitan preoccupation with France in her later novelistic enterprises. Both authors, furthermore, transmitted a measured and often admiring view of France to female authors who followed them.116 In his General Introduction to The Works of Charlotte Smith, Stuart Curran rightly locates Smith’s literary models in France. He goes further to suggest that ‘one of Smith’s major credits as a novelist was to secure [them] a central place in an expanding fictional repertory in English’. While Lee’s innovative use of Prévost preceded Smith’s engagement with him, Lee’s lack of acknowledgement of her source diminished the visibility of Prévost in her work. This is something that Lee corrected, of course, as she gained the confidence for her following translation venture, Warbeck, but Smith’s open and vulnerable adaptation of Prévost, and latterly Gayot, broadened the appeal of their literature in England. The decade of the 1780s was the decade when free translation came out of the closet. The results were of course mixed. While the work of Reeve,

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Lee and Smith secured an enduring place for the works of Prévost, Baculard d’Arnaud and Gayot de Pitaval in the history of the English novel, their mode of engaging with their material pointed to some of the contradictions of the times. While Lee did not at first acknowledge her debt to Prévost, the warm reception which The Recess received was a clear factor in her decision to acknowledge her second translation Warbeck as such. But there was another factor; acknowledging oneself as the translator of a tale, even if it detracted from the originality of one’s creation, also placed the adaptor at a remove from the pernicious sentiments that were being imported. Smith’s first translation fell foul of this rule as a consequence of rivalry, but she was careful in her second venture to appear to adhere to the rules of idiomatic translation that Kenrick and Reeve had so strongly advocated. Clara Reeve’s own unacknowledged translation of The Exiles is perhaps the most revealing case from the three authors studied here; her arguments on piracy, and the moral advantages of original genius in its Preface, bespeaks an author who was deeply conflicted about her venture into the arena of translation. Anxious to revalorise the role of the woman of letters in a decade in which this had been rendered culturally unpalatable, Reeve had to pay lip service to the anti-French sentiments. Choosing to translate an author who was famed as being the inheritor of Rousseau’s ‘corrupt’ morality without acknowledging the source exhibits the anxieties of the female author and translator during this decade. Clara Reeve’s public patriotism was clearly at odds with her adaptation of Baculard’s tale of seduction, and Charlotte Smith’s carefully correct negotiation of the translational standards of the time cleverly concealed the positive portrayals of France in her tales. Translations always cloak the intentions of their authors, and do so for a range of reasons. For these authors, one, perhaps two of these reasons were ideological; the others came down to negotiating financial success in a volatile literary marketplace. The renegotiations of romance and history which Reeve, Lee and Smith took on participated (whether they approved it or not) in the validation of the French synthesis of history and romance that comes from the seventeenth century. While reviews of these works in the 1780s were relatively complacent about these renegotiations, by 1795 the translation of Louis-Augustin Liomin’s 1792 La bergère d’Aranville testifies to the disdain with which these French importations were viewed. The translation of Liomin’s pastoral tale into English bore the subtitle ‘A Romance’, and attracted the scorn of this particular reviewer owing to its subtitle and French subject matter:

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In some of the glass shops in town, our readers may have observed a lack-lustre piece of French manufacture, whose clumsy workmanship forms a striking contrast to the elegance and brilliancy of the brittle ware which surrounds it; and which stands there to convince the world of the superiority of the British artist. Upon the same patriotic principle do we suppose the Shepherdess of Aranville to have been translated into English. And it must be confessed, that if this is the intention of the translator, it has been amply fulfilled; for though the stuff produced by our English manufacturers of novels is sometimes poor enough, it is seldom so very flimsy and despicable as is this nonsense of French extraction.117

The discursive frames of this reviewer were remarkably similar to those of Kenrick in 1760. Kenrick, if we recall, had argued that the French language was ‘flimsy’, made of ‘gause’. These claims reverberate even more forcefully in 1795 when the adjectival ‘flimsy’ is harnessed to ‘despicable’. This reviewer further suggests that the French product is only serviceable as a reminder to ‘the world of the superiority of the British artist’. Such perceptions of a cross-channel battle of literary superiority became increasingly endorsed in the 1790s. The defence of Britain’s cultural and political hegemony, placed under greater strain by the unfolding of the French Revolution, came to be viewed increasingly as a patriotic duty. If translation seemed to work against this patriotic duty, then the next best measure was to enlist it as an example of England’s greater literary superiority. The following chapter demonstrates that as events unfolded in revolutionary France, so too the atmosphere of the literary marketplace became increasingly febrile and subject to even heavier policing. Where contemporaneous reviewers detected the French origins of these cloaked translations, there remained a degree of complacency about them in the 1780s. With the further entrenchment of hostilities in the midst of the French Revolution, and the temporary suspension of the import of texts in 1793, critical opinion of French influence became increasingly damning. As French models of romance propagated with such remarkable fecundity in Britain, the sources of these tales, and their English afterlives, came under further scrutiny. These textual afterlives were viewed as infiltrations from the enemy nation, unpatriotic in their sources, inferior in their imitational tendencies, and scornful of an indigenous English literary tradition. Where French origins were suspected, romances were rounded up as ‘terrorist’ texts.

Ch apter 3

Versions of Gothic and terror

This work, which is said to be drawn from the French, is one of the most useless captures which has occurred during the present literary hostilities. (From a review of The Innocent Rivals, A Novel, Taken from the French in the Critical Review, August 1786)

When in 1791 Alexander Tytler first sought to ‘unfold [the] principles’ of translation, he did so in a spirit of tempered optimism. In his 1791 Essay on the Principles of Translation he praised translation for its creation of ‘a free intercourse of science and of literature between all modern nations’.1 Judge-advocate, professor of history, and now theorist of translation, Tytler the polymath initially adopted a modestly cosmopolitan tone that was markedly different from that of William Kenrick. Tytler exercised the breadth of his expertise by arguing that a good translator should always respect the intentions of the original author. ‘If a translator wants … discernment, let him be ever so thoroughly master of the sense of his author, he will present him through a distorting medium, or exhibit him often in a garb that is unsuitable to his character.’2 Discernment, Tytler argued, was particularly important in the translation of prose where the ‘liberty of adding or retrenching’ was far less permissible.3 By 1797, however, in spite of his enduring admiration of the craft of translation, Tytler perceived the need to reiterate some well-established rules for the practice itself in the ‘considerably enlarged’ second edition of his work. There, he argued that ‘mean and mercenary hands’ who thought that translation could ‘be exercised with a very small portion of genius or abilities’ had compromised its noble practice by a combination of free adaptation and unacknowledged plundering.4 The differences in tone between the editions of Tytler’s work are revealing. The escalation in violence of the French Revolution, the renewal of war against France in 1793, the temporary ban upon the importation of texts from that same country in 1793, and the proliferation 64

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of treason trials and anti-Jacobin hysteria in the intervening years all contributed to the muting of Tytler’s cosmopolitan enthusiasm of the first edition.5 As this chapter will argue, the ‘Gothic’ romance, which came to be recognised as the ‘literature of terror’ during the 1790s, came to occupy a particularly ambivalent position in the Anglo-French relationship during the Romantic period. Despite its best patriotic gestures, it was increasingly perceived as the translational container in which French sentiments and ideals were imported into British fiction. As a consequence of this, the cargo of terror was strongly challenged by a domestic periodical press willing and able to voice its anxiety about the contamination of British learning, British patriotism and British liberty. But like the Gothic itself – which, as David Punter argues, reveals a ‘very intense, if displaced, engagement with political and social problems, the difficulty of negotiating those problems being precisely reflected in the Gothic’s central stylistic conventions’ – contemporaneous critical accounts of the Gothic also frequently displaced domestic political anxiety onto the literary genre.6 This chapter launches the exploration of these tensions, and how they manifested themselves particularly in the decade of the 1790s, by first examining the connections between Britain’s marshalling of literary defences against the importation of French ideas, and the perception of the Gothic’s culpability in this importation. It then goes on to qualify this reading by examining some periodical articles that in fact exploited French terror as a veil to conceal critiques of the Pitt régime in Britain. At times seemingly conservative articles on the Gothicisation of literature ‘smuggled in’ anxious critiques of the political climate in Britain, and thus mimicked the practices of the romances that they were, ostensibly, criticising. The periodical press believed that the British nation was not only menaced by military invasion, but was about to be swamped by eighteenth-century French philosophy and fiction. In Britons, Linda Colley aptly describes the constant vigilance under which Britain and France held each other in the eighteenth century as ‘a manic obsessiveness that betrayed their mutual antagonism and anxiety’.7 British anxiety indeed mounted to such a fever pitch that the manic obsession with France almost in itself resembled a Gothic narrative of persecution in the periodical press. Such anxieties were not allayed by the mass exodus of French clergy to the shores of England during the French Revolution. One particularly provocative member of that body, the Jesuit priest Abbé Augustin Barruel, sought to ingratiate himself with his new hosts by

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dedicating his work The History of the Clergy During the French Revolution to the English Nation.8 In his dedication, Barruel claimed that his ‘history’ was written to provide the hospitable English nation with an accurate account of revolutionary events in France. His claim to factual objectivity, however, was immediately undermined by the Preface that he composed specifically for the English edition of his work. There, in relation to the atrocities committed against the clergy in France, Barruel spoke of a preternatural ‘Egyptian darkness’ which surrounded the election of the usurping Bishop d’Expilly, and of the remarkable fact that ‘it did not cease to thunder and lighten during the whole time that the election of the intruder continued’.9 Such potent symbolism did not go unremarked by the periodical press in Britain. Reviewing this particular edition of Barruel’s History in 1796, the Critical Review took issue with its ‘numerous gallicisms’, and warned that ‘it ought to be read with great caution’ for the author’s anecdotes ‘are only fit to embellish such stories as Blue-beard, and disgrace any account that calls itself history’.10 The Critical’s comparison of Barruel’s work to the tale of Blue-beard was particularly significant, for it indicated an escalating anxiety about the erosion of the distinctions between history and romance. Helen Maria Williams compared witnessing at first hand the revolutionary events in France to ‘living in a region of romance’.11 Wordsworth himself commented upon the era’s erosion in The Prelude, observing how the ‘forbidding ways / Of custom, law, and statute, took at once / The attraction of a country in romance!’.12 This was symbolic of a broader concern about the merging of such categories during the years of the French Revolution. ‘If from 1789 onward, Gothic terror often reflects revolutionary terror,’ observes Patrick Brantlinger, ‘nonfictional accounts of the events in France often read like Gothic romances.’13 Mary Wollstonecraft’s swift rebuke to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was formative in the political and literary modifications of the term ‘Gothic’ in England. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) Wollstonecraft scorned Burke’s ‘gothic notions of beauty’ and ‘Gothic materials’, tethering his idolatry of the fallen French queen Marie Antoinette and denigration of the unfolding events in France to what she perceived to be an outmoded aesthetic.14 The erosion of the bournes between the historical, political and literary categories of Gothic and ‘romance’ were, as Chapter 2 argued, already in play in the 1780s, but the revolutionary events in France led to the complete collapse of their meanings. Periodicals of course participated in this confusion, and began to exploit the terms’ ambiguities in their own renditions of the connections

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between France’s revolutionary terrors and the burgeoning literature of terror. Editors of British periodicals in the late eighteenth century became especially proficient in drawing comparisons between the frigates of French military adventure and the print of French literary endeavour. In reviewing one particular literary borrowing (quoted as the epigraph to this chapter), the Critical Review referred to a cross-Channel battle, each side capturing the other’s modish texts through the processes of adaptation and translation. The Critical’s review of The Innocent Rivals is far from atypical; by the 1790s concern about the ‘moral pollution’ of the British readership escalated to such heights that a spate of articles such as ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ (1797) and ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ (1798) repeatedly seemed to attack the perceived import of terror from France.15 While execrating novels ‘deeply tinctured with the spirit of democracy’, many reviewers argued that the abuse of the liberty of the press in England by Gothic novelists amounted to an abuse of much-cherished British liberties.16 Linda Colley rightly indicates that such perceptions were strengthened by the long series of wars fought between England and France throughout the century. The wars led the British ‘into confrontation with an obviously hostile Other and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it. They defined themselves as Protestants struggling for survival against the world’s foremost Catholic power.’17 Colley’s observation is certainly borne out by many periodicals and reviews of the 1780s, 1790s and 1800s which forge a specific link between French military endeavour and the free circulation of print. The material discussed in the first section of this chapter bears witness to the increasingly hostile British reception of the perceived import of French literature. The extent of this hostile reception, I argue, explains why authors who deployed the conventions associated with Gothic romance were particularly keen to conceal the extent of their imaginative engagement with France. In 1793, while congratulating Britons on their ‘native force’ and ‘native courage’, the Gentleman’s Magazine expressed a concern that Britons were too intellectually generous to be alert to the ‘venom of poison mysteriously prepared, and communicated by the malignant silence of assassins’.18 The allusions here to ‘poison’ and ‘assassins’ in themselves invoke paranoiac images, and support Robert Hole’s observation that by the end of the year 1793 public outcry against the French Revolution was moving away from ‘political, constitutional, philosophical arguments to predominantly social ones of control and social

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cohesion, or morality, individual belief and restraint’.19 The Gentleman’s Magazine seems to epitomise this shift; the anxiety that Britons were not adequately armed against French ‘venom’ was further reinforced by its subsequent issue in January 1794. There, a poem was printed in apparent honour of the magazine’s author, ‘Sylvanus Urban’, ‘on Completing the sixty-fourth volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine’.20 Why this particular anniversary needed marking is difficult to establish, but as Jon Klancher reminds us, we cannot take readerly participation – in the form of congratulatory letters – at face value.21 What is interesting about this particular poem is its very specific association of French hostilities with ‘Gothic rage’: But, while Bellona’s ensigns are unfurl’d, And thunder with incessant rage is hurl’d; While countless hordes from Gallia spread alarms, Ever renewed, enthusiasts in arms; While discord’s to each different purpose borne, And aged systems from their roots are torn, While Gothic rage destroys fair Learning’s seats, And drives Religion from its calm retreats, How should we prize the blessings we enjoy! May no vain wish for change the same annoy! No speculations idle brains produce, Defying wisdom to apply to use!22

Elsewhere this particular poem promotes pastoral walks ‘Where Taste conducts us and where Judgement guides!’ as ‘Science, improvement, taste and learned leisure’, emphasising the didactic nature of the magazine’s long-standing and august intervention in literature and learning.23 The later allusions to the ‘sylvan paths’ of active learning are juxtaposed to the ‘Gothic rage’ described in this section. As a signifier, ‘Gothic rage’ is freighted with images of war (Bellona’s ensigns), Catholicism (‘enthusiasts in arms’), revolution and the destruction of learning. ‘Gothic rage’ stood in direct opposition to the types of improving Literature that the Gentleman’s Magazine promoted. The word ‘rage’ is used as a double-edged sword to suggest the symbiosis of war and fashion from which ‘Gothic’ was conceived.24 This hint is strengthened by the allusions to the ‘wish for change’ induced by ‘idle brains’. The phrase ‘idle brains’ symbolises everything which the Gentleman’s Magazine stood against. Those with leisure and no serious pursuits (for example, young, unmarried women) are the ones who dream and write of political change. ‘Vain wish[es]’ and ‘speculations’ are metonymically linked with ‘Defying wisdom’, and all

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three fruitless pursuits are linked to what Marilyn Butler identifies as the ‘feminine sphere of leisure’.25 As we saw in the Introduction, the term ‘Gothic’ was not in common circulation during the 1790s as a description of the type of fiction this book explores. Bearing this in mind, the use of ‘Gothic’ in the Gentleman’s is extremely significant, as it gestures towards how ‘Gothic’ came to be used more heavily in 1790s Britain as a hostile symbol of all things French: Catholicism, fashion and enthusiasm.26 While this cluster of values was already associated with France in the 1750s, as William Hogarth’s ‘The Invasion’ illustrates, in the 1790s they frequently seemed to converge under the convenient umbrella of ‘Gothic’ for a range of literary and political reasons. ‘Gothic’ as a signifier came to act as a host to both warfare and aesthetics far more forcefully in the final years of the eighteenth century. In the realms of both politics and aesthetics, Voltaire’s provocative critique of Shakespeare’s ‘Gothicism’ also reverberated across France. In 1792, the republican American poet Joel Barlow optimistically anticipated France liberating itself from the shackles of Gothicism, writing that the ‘epoch of light and liberty has freed one quarter of the world from this miserable appendage of Gothicism; and France has now begun to break the shackles from another quarter, where they were more strongly riveted’.27 By 1795, however, another observer of France was given a further insight into the French nation’s perceived struggle with Gothicism. Major Watkin Tench, captured as a prisoner of war in France, recorded in a letter from Quimper that ‘[t]here has been a report presented to the convention, on the Gothicism which has overspread the land, and exterminated in its fury more than two thirds of the works of art and taste, which ennobled France’.28 Like the Gentleman’s Magazine’s synthesis of ‘Gothic rage’ with both war and fashion in 1794, Tench’s 1795 reference to France’s anxiety with the infiltration of ‘Gothicism’ synthesises cultural and military connotations. The ‘extermination’ of works of art by the ‘fury’ of Gothicism is remarkably similar to the violent imagery in the poem dedicated to Sylvanus Urban. From Tench’s viewpoint in France, however, this time we see that it is France that is on guard against the invasion of ‘Gothicism’. In both Britain and France, Gothic and Gothicism become indefinable, sublime, abject enemies whose threatened infiltration must be checked. The subsequent annexation of ‘the terrorist novel’ to describe the ‘Gothic’ is an inevitable consequence of this charged exchange upon the national attribution of Gothicism. As we saw with Walpole’s foundational example, and Reeve’s, Smith’s and Lee’s crucial contributions through the inseparable practices of adaptation and translation, the

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genre’s deliberate ambivalence about national origin is due to the fact that it derives from both English and French cultures in equal measure. Where this dual heritage was recognised in the press, the literature of terror was charged with literary, political and national subversion. The Pursuits of Literature, composed by the Reverend Thomas James Mathias in four separate dialogues between 1794 and 1797, serves as an appropriate weathervane by which to gauge the increasing hysteria provoked by the rise of the Gothic in the 1790s. It continued in the same vein as the 1794 poem from the Gentleman’s Magazine, but became increasingly vehement as the events of the 1790s unfolded. In The Pursuits of Literature Mathias sustained the comparison of the political revolution and military threat in France with the invasion of French literary tastes in Britain.29 Mathias invoked military terminology in his invective against all things French, appealing to patriotic authors to use their pens as ‘instruments of war, able to break down the strong holds of anarchy, impiety and rebellion, and to vindicate the powers of legitimate authority’.30 Thus marshalled, his literary militia faced up to Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald and Mary Robinson, who stood accused in the First Dialogue of ‘frequently whining or frisking in novels, till our girls’ heads turn wild with impossible adventures, and now and then are tainted with democracy’.31 This First Dialogue adopted a relatively light tone towards these authors, however. ‘Whining’ and ‘frisking’, more suggestive of the leisured pursuit of equestrianism than penmanship, could only taint girls’ heads ‘now and then’. By the final (Fourth) Dialogue of The Pursuits, the level of threat from such authorship had been significantly raised. Smith, Inchbald and Robinson (Smith in particular was by then branded as the immoral translator of Manon L’Escaut [sic]) were again in Mathias’s sights when he argued in this final dialogue that ‘[o]ur unsexed female writers now instruct, or confuse, us and themselves in the labyrinths of politics, or turn us wild with Gallic frenzy’.32 As Mathias couples ‘labyrinths of politics’ with ‘Gallic frenzy’, so he connects female authors with the threat of a particularly French brand of democracy, and reinforces his premise that novel-writing and revolution maintain a symbiotic relationship. Smith’s Desmond (1792), as I noted in the previous chapter, had used the epistolary format in order to present sympathetic first-hand views of the unfolding revolution in France through both French and English observers. Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac (1796) used the full range of Gothic signifiers (feudal castles, manipulative monks, murder and mystery) against the contemporaneous backdrop of the French Revolution, with her heroine

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Sabina de Sevrac coming to embrace actively the principles of the French Revolution.33 ‘Gallic frenzy’ may have been an overstatement of the case, but both Smith’s and Robinson’s cosmopolitan enthusiasm for the principles of the Revolution in France were prominent in their fiction. The progressive escalation of Mathias’s levels of hysteria concerning Britain’s literary revolution in the 1790s indicated the contingent escalation of political anxiety in Britain as Anglo-French hostilities became progressively entrenched. Perhaps in direct response to the Abbé Barruel’s cloying Preface to History of the French Clergy, Mathias chose to lambast the hospitality offered to the French clergy by the British government in the Third Dialogue. Resorting to particularly Gothic imagery himself, Mathias criticised the luxurious indulgences of the emigrant body of French clergy, metaphorising them as ‘permitted fiends of darkness’.34 The misguided hospitality of the British government in harbouring these ‘fiends’, for Mathias, justified his plea for literature to take up the arms laid down by the government in order to preserve social order in Britain. Thus did Mathias justify his continued attacks on French literature and its propagation in British Gothic fiction, arguing: ‘LITERATURE, well or ill-conducted, is THE GREAT ENGINE, by which all civilized states must ultimately be supported or overthrown.’35 It was certainly not the first time that an author had deployed a mechanistic metaphor to describe the function of literature, but the central position that Mathias awarded to literature as the ‘engine’ hinted that literature must supplant Britain’s ineffectual governance in staving off invasion from France.36 By 1797, as E. P. Thompson records, the threat of invasion from France was escalating in Britain. Fears of French invasion seemed to be confirmed in the February of 1797 when ‘the French actually made a small landing near Fishguard, on the Pembrokeshire coast’. Armed loyal associations and volunteer corps were formed, as Thompson notes, ‘as much against internal conspiracy as against the French’.37 A further publication by the Abbé Barruel, Memoirs, Illuminating the History of Jacobinism (1797), further stoked English paranoia, for Barruel argued with characteristic exuberant overstatement that the French Revolution was a secret plot concerted by the Bavarian Illuminati and Jacobins. The consequence of such interventions, as Robert Miles observes, was that ‘The [British] populace was gripped by the idea of living in a society riddled with conspirators, spies and informers.’38 While habeas corpus had been suspended already in 1794, permitting the detention without bail or trial of any individual suspected of treason, in the wake of the invasion fears of 1797 it was once more suspended, between 1798 and 1801.

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The epic proportions of hysteria and paranoia which gripped England are of course reflected in the Fourth Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature, published in July 1797. For in this particular dialogue, Mathias takes especial issue with literary importation. Choosing to ignore Alexander Tytler’s measured attempts to regulate the art of translation for the benefit of a ‘free intercourse’ among nations, Mathias instead pursues an earlier lead from Samuel Johnson. In the Preface to his famous Dictionary, Johnson had complained: ‘The great pest of speech is frequency of translation.’ The consequence of this, for Johnson, was that ‘[o]ur language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been … deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it’.39 Johnson was uncomfortable with this Gallicisation of the English language, and criticised the central role that translation had played in this process. More concerned with the political consequences, Mathias nonetheless builds upon Johnson’s mild metaphorisation of translation as pest, but goes further in implicating the works of particular writers: Now when Translation to a pest is grown, And Holcroft to French treason adds his own; When Gallic Diderot in vain we shun, His blasted pencil, Fatalist, and Nun40

The association of the pestilential effect of translation with one of its practitioners, Thomas Holcroft, who also happened to be closely identified with a new importation, ‘Gothic’ melodrama, and to have been tried (and acquitted) for treason at the Old Bailey in 1794, was illustrative of Mathias’s intention to demonstrate that ‘Government and Literature are now more than ever intimately connected’.41 Mathias urged patriotic British writers to use pens as ‘instruments of war’, recognising that any attack upon Diderot’s ‘blasted pencil’ was, in effect, too late. Even the more liberally directed Monthly Magazine noted the translation of the same two novels by Diderot with considerable alarm, remarking: ‘Two novels have been translated from the French of Diderot, with considerable vivacity, “The Nun” and “James the Fatalist”: in each of these works there are some masterly delineations of character, but the pen of Diderot is not remarkable for its chastity.’42 Although Diderot had written both these novels some time before in French, the fact that these were being translated, published and read in England in 1797 provided even greater cause for alarm.43 If anything, Anglo-French hostilities seemed to provoke further translation of more contentious material.

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The shared central concern was with the dissemination of Diderot and other eighteenth-century French writers by means of translation and adaptation. While the Monthly Magazine remarked that Diderot’s pen was ‘unchaste’, the Critical Review complained of one translator’s endeavours in the 1790s – Catherine Lara – that ‘French sentiment … is too fanatical and too artificial for plain English common sense’.44 In other words, to translate or to adapt from the French language was also to smuggle into Britain the fanatical, foppish and superficial sentiments associated with France. This opinion became increasingly commonplace in Anglo-French antagonisms throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, when reviewing Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, the Monthly Review criticised what it viewed as Burke’s descent into French rhetorical embellishments: ‘he no sooner crosses the Channel, than he throws off the brown bob, and plain broad-cloth of British argument, to array himself in the powdered bag, and embroidered silk, of French declamation’.45 This earlier example illustrates the longevity of the association of the French language with artifice and luxury, in contrast to the more demure ‘garb’ of the English language. The move towards associating the French language with ‘fanaticism’, however, is quite particular to the later 1790s. ‘Fanatical’ is more ideologically charged; it connotes not only extravagance, but also some form of demonic possession. In the eyes of many, this frenzy contaminated not only the circulating library, but also the British stage in the 1790s. On the subject of British drama in the 1790s, ‘Academicus’ complained of the ‘turrets and gloomy Gothic corridors haunted by ghosts’, urging ‘honest John Bull, from the one shilling gallery’ to ‘call out for Rule Britannia, in the heart of the representation’.46 The contamination – or potential ‘possession’ – of the English language, English literature and the British stage by French language and literature also carried the potential for other, more political, imitations. The lamentation in Mathias’s Fourth Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature that ‘Sooner to France Thames roll his current strong / Than men love verse, high fancy, or the song’ combined the political threat of surrender with the denigration of Britain’s republic of literature.47 Appealing to an Augustan ideal, Mathias bemoaned the fact that men no longer read and appreciated verse, imagination or song. Again here, Mathias seemed to return to Johnson’s earlier complaint that the ‘gallicisation’ of English was due to the fact that ancient verse texts were no longer read in England. Mathias went further in his Fourth Dialogue to emphasise precisely how the thirst for Gothic narrative was responsible for the expulsion of both learning and martial vigour

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from Britain. Placing Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto on trial for having ‘initiated’ this discourse, the lines pleaded: Speak then, the hour demands; Is learning fled? Spent all her vigour, all her spirit dead? Have Gallic arms and unrelenting war Borne all her trophies from Britannia far? Shall nought but ghosts and trinkets be display’d, Since Walpole play’d the virtuoso’s trade, Bade sober truth revers’d for fiction pass, And mus’d o’er Gothic toys through Gothic glass? Since states, and words, and volumes, all are new, Armies have skeletons, and sermons too …48

For Mathias, ‘Gallic arms’ and ‘unrelenting war’ deprived Britain of true learning and literature, leaving Walpole’s Gothic ‘trinkets’ and ‘toys’ as shadowy substitutes for Britain’s rightful literary trophies. Instead of being a seat of learning and gravity, Britain is here recast as a museum of phantoms, with Walpole and his imitators poring over displays of ghosts, trinkets and Gothic toys through ‘Gothic glass’. Mathias’s allusions to Walpole’s reversal of fiction and truth with his first counterfeit Preface to The Castle of Otranto, his ‘toying’ with a ‘virtuoso’s trade’, strongly suggest that this type of literary experimentation was unwelcome, unmanly and dangerously complacent.49 It is here that Mathias’s critiques of France and Gothic become truly united, and we see the evolving merger of the literature of terror with French hostilities. While ‘states’ and ‘volumes’ may be falsely fashionable, in Mathias’s vision, the bastions of Britain’s physical and moral defences (armies and sermons) have endured an anonymous and prolonged death. Of course, the troublesome conjunction between Catholicism, Revolution and British literary delight in terrors and spectres was not unique to Mathias.50 Gillray’s engraving ‘A Phantasmagoria’ (as I argued in the Introduction) would later reinforce the connections between the death of Britannia and relationships with France. With Mathias, though, the links between despotic Catholicism, visuality and display were strengthened to re-emphasise how the ‘spirit’ of learning had been supplanted by a much more troublesome phantom. The Oxford English Dictionary records that the word ‘spirit’ was commonly used in phrases denoting or implying diminution or cessation of the vital power, or the recovery of this. If Britain’s literary spirit has expired, then all that remains in Mathias’s view is the ghostly skeleton of the Gothic. The ‘state’ of learning is beyond recovery.51 The question posed three lines later, ‘Where is Invention?’ stands out in

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splendid metrical isolation as the lone voice of cultural reason in Britain.52 Gothic here becomes the consequence of ‘Gallic arms and unrelenting war’: according to Mathias, the white flag of literary surrender has already been raised in Britain. At the beginning of the Fourth Dialogue, Mathias specifically accused ‘chief Equality’s vain priest, Rousseau, / A sage in sorrow nurs’d, and gaunt with woe, / By persecution train’d and popish zeal’ of being the architect of France’s political carnage.53 Ignoring Rousseau’s Swiss origins, Mathias extended upon this in an explanatory footnote, calling The Social Contract Rousseau’s ‘fatal present’ to the world.54 Mathias’s accusation was symptomatic of a more widespread anti-Jacobin animus towards Rousseau, one whose counter-revolutionary impulse, Kevin Gilmartin observes, was ‘the critical parsing of subversion’.55 This was occasioned by the unfavourable impression of Rousseau that was made by his sojourn in England in 1766 on the one hand, and on the other by the ‘stupendous’ influence which his writings inspired in England.56 George Canning went even further in this condemnation of Rousseau in a satirical poem entitled ‘New Morality’ for the Anti-Jacobin Magazine in 1798. Simultaneously referring to Rousseau’s period of exile in England and his enormous impact in England, Canning personified sensibility as a sickly child taken against her will from France: Sweet child of sickly Fancy! – her of yore From her loved France ROUSSEAU to exile bore; And, while midst lakes and mountains wild he ran, Full of himself, and shunn’d the haunts of man, Taught her o’er each lone vale and Alpine steep To lisp the story of his wrongs, and weep; Taught her to cherish still in either eye, Of tender tears a plentiful supply, And pour them in the brooks that babbled by …57

Canning here depicts Rousseau as self-obsessed, vain and manipulative. He has taken the ‘sweet child’ sensibility to England against her will, snatching her from her beloved France. The poem implies that Rousseau has prostituted sensibility by unthinkingly importing her to England where she has been groomed to cultivate and perform lachrymose narratives of Rousseau’s wrongs. Of itself, ‘Sensibility’ is a ‘sweet, innocent child’, but its parent, ‘sickly Fancy’, has already been corrupted by French morals. Canning’s poem vilifies Rousseau, but does not condemn sensibility in and of itself. Rather, Canning believes that sensibility’s rightful domicile remains in France, and that its reluctant transportation to England has distorted its true sense.

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As I discussed in Chapter 2, William Kenrick, who was the first English translator of Rousseau in the eighteenth century, was commissioned to translate his works from French quickly. Despite the availability of these quick and relatively authoritative translations, pirated translations and loose adaptations of Rousseau engulfed the market in Britain. The most interesting of these was an anonymous sequel to La Nouvelle Héloïse, which appeared as late as 1790 from the Minerva Press. Laura; or, Original Letters. A sequel to the Eloisa of J. J. Rousseau. From the French in fact bore little resemblance to Rousseau’s original work. It does not appear to come from any original French work, but it nonetheless boldly transforms the friendship of Lord Bomston and St Preux into a confessional libertine narrative with a particularly Gothic ambience.58 The self-aggrandising affiliations to Rousseau claimed in the title of this work misleadingly guaranteed certain sentimental credentials to its readership. This was an astute form of marketing, and one seized upon by the many anonymous authors who chose to capitalise upon Rousseau’s fame.59 Laura; or, Original Letters is just one example of many complex tales of unauthorised adaptations and translations of the work of Rousseau that traded upon his popularity, but it does help to clarify the connections between Rousseau and the anxieties surrounding the Gothic in the 1790s. Canning’s reactionary personification of sensibility’s vulnerable status plays upon anxieties concerning the young, female and unsupervised readership of Gothic versions of Rousseau in Britain. On both a literal and a figurative level, Rousseau’s covert import of sensibility into Britain became a source of continental corruption for Britain’s young female readers. Hannah More, for example, viewed Rousseau’s considerable literary agility solely in terms of this corruption, stating that ‘there never was a net of such exquisite art and inextricable workmanship, spread to entangle innocence and ensnare experience as the writings of Rousseau’.60 Similarly to Mathias, Canning further lamented Britain’s lack of invention. Recasting Britain as a servile nation in thrall to France, in his conclusion to ‘New Morality’ Canning apostrophised France thus: O! nurse of crimes and fashions! Which in vain Our colder servile spirits would attain, How do we ape thee, France! But, blundering still, Disgrace the pattern by our want of skill … How do we ape thee, France! – nor claim alone Thy arts, thy tastes, thy morals, for our own … Statesmen and heroines whom this age adores, Though plainer times would call them rogues and whores.61

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Canning’s linkage of ‘crimes and fashions’ and ‘tastes’ with ‘morals’ re-emphasised the growing concern among commentators that the British reading and writing public had become enthralled by France’s own confusion of the proper boundaries between these categories. The underlining of Britain’s attempt to ‘attain’ France’s violence as well as its fashions, and its lack of ‘skill’ therein, was a far cry from the Gentleman’s Magazine’s complacency in 1794 regarding Britain’s literary defences. It is clear that, for Canning, ‘Gothic rage’ had reached Britain’s shores, and had remodelled what patriotic and discerning Britons would deem ‘rogues and whores’ into ‘Statesmen and heroines’. The seemingly odd association of ‘Statesmen’ with ‘heroines’ highlighted yet again the linkage between literature and government that Mathias had previously insisted upon, and demonstrates what Nicola J. Watson views as the ‘centrality of Rousseau’s fiction to the interpretation of contemporary politics in the 1790s’.62 That ‘heroines’ can be coupled with ‘statesmen’ suggests the confusion that literary revolution in the 1790s was seen to create in Britain. The ‘rage’ for French sentimental narratives of seduction that were repackaged in the form of the ‘Gothic’ in Britain became a persistent target of counter-revolutionary satire. Despite their protestations, both Mathias and Canning borrowed from the Gothic’s store-cupboard of literary props. In spite of his best efforts to denigrate the Gothic for its lack of invention, Mathias’s allusions to Walpole’s ‘Gothic trinkets’, and (as I go on to explore in Chapter 5) his further lambasting of Matthew Lewis, borrowed a particularly Gothic vocabulary. In the Anti-Jacobin, Canning published a further heavily Gothicised poem in the same year as ‘New Morality’ (1798). ‘Brissot’s Ghost’ portrayed the ‘unpatriotic’ Charles James Fox and his circle dining at (where else but) the Shakespeare Tavern in London when ‘A grim train of Ghosts appear’d / Each a head with anguish gasping’.63 The grizzly beheaded spectres, clearly inspired by the model of Shakespeare’s Banquo, are sent to Fox and his crew as a troubling reminder of the consequences of Jacobinism: See, these helpless headless Spectres Wandering through the midnight gloom: Mark their Jacobinic Lectures Echoing from the silent Tomb. These, thy soul with terror filling, Once were Patriots fierce and bold – (Each his head with gore distilling Shakes, the whilst his tale is told.)64

The apostrophising commands to the reader to heed the examples of the assassinated Brissot and Marat, Condorcet, Roland and Garat, borrow

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literary devices more commonly associated with the Gothic. The device, for example, of the wandering ghost issuing warnings was a Shakespearean device readily seized upon by Gothic authors, with Matthew Lewis’s spectral evocations of the Bleeding Nun and Antonia’s mother Elvira in The Monk (1796) being some of the most prominent examples. Whereas Canning’s anti-Jacobin borrowings may have been explicit in their cautioning against radical reform, other versions chose to critique the political atmosphere far more covertly in the paranoiac atmosphere of the treason trials and suspensions of habeas corpus that characterised the late 1790s in Britain. While France and the dire consequences of its revolution provided easy target practice, to critique Pitt and his régime required a deft sleight of hand. Where else could this be effected more easily than by seemingly borrowing complaints about Gothic imitation and its denigration of the British reading republic from Mathias and Canning? By sporting the critical markers that had become by then commonplace in counter-revolutionary criticism, a number of critical articles upon the literature of terror in fact smuggled into the periodical press more anxiously subversive political criticism. As the examples from Mathias and Canning indicate, Gothic became a mode of writing perceived by many of its critics to disorder and corrupt the vulnerable minds of its reputedly large female readership. It was, as Sue Chaplin observes, ‘textually anarchic’, circulating promiscuously through the circulating library and undermining domestic harmony by causing, in Mathias’s words, young leisured girls’ heads to ‘run wild with impossible adventures’.65 While in 1791 the Monthly Review had evinced pride in ‘that grand palladium of British liberty, the FREEDOM OF THE PRESS’,66 by 1806 the European Magazine openly lamented its abuse: The liberty of the press is what an Englishman is particularly jealous of, and forms a part of that glorious system of liberty enjoyed only by the English; but never, perhaps, was that liberty more abused by some than at the present time … there is no species of books which is more employed in this practice than Novels; and their numbers as much increase as their immorality.67

The ‘liberty of the press’ gave rise to less-cherished consequences such as the free circulation of Gothic fiction within the literary marketplace. For the European Magazine, the glorious constitution of England – so praised by Muralt and Voltaire  – was at risk of exploitation from literature. By 1806, the uneasy relationship between the French Revolution and the mass circulation of literary texts meant that the Gothic romance posed a particular threat to the constitution of England.

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Invectives against the Gothic romance in the 1790s and 1800s seem to spread across the political spectrum of the periodicals of the day. Some periodicals, such as the counter-revolutionary Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Anti-Jacobin Review were, as Gilmartin observes, ‘brought into being by a dynamic interplay of antagonisms and affiliations, of critical and reconstructive aims’.68 Generated with a view to resist and rebut more subversive influences, such periodicals could be more or less transparent in their anti-Jacobin targets. Among these targets were periodicals such as the Monthly Magazine and the Monthly Review where, as Gilmartin also observes, ‘subversion’ was conceived ‘as a conspiracy of authors and reviewers’.69 Such conspiracies, however, were not always evident, particularly when these periodicals also commenced satirical campaigns against Gothic romances, linking them specifically to the French Revolution.70 At first glance, the consistency of satirical responses to Gothic romance across the political spectrum of periodicals suggests that concern over the increasing availability of Gothic fiction through circulating libraries was also imported to those sections of the writing republic which were, initially at least, sympathetically disposed towards the ideals of the French Revolution. Paul Keen has rightly argued that the ‘excesses generated by the French Revolution, on the one hand, and by the information revolution, on the other, converged in an antagonism towards those new readerships who, critics argued, could not be trusted to resist either the inflammatory effects of seditious writings or the vagaries of literary fashion’.71 While this argument is certainly correct for the counter-revolutionary periodicals, I would like to suggest that some criticism of the Gothic’s effect upon these new readerships that came from the more liberal end of the periodical spectrum cloaked a further politicised anxiety under Gothic metaphor. Ann Radcliffe was one of the best-selling authors of the 1790s. Famously regarded by Michel Foucault as the founder of the Gothic tradition, Radcliffe’s dominion as the head of the school of Gothic romance was undisputed.72 Nathan Drake, in Literary Hours, for example, approvingly referred to her as ‘The Shak[e]speare of Romance Writers’ because of her epigraphs from Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson and Gray.73 Radcliffe’s careful invocation of a specifically English literary tradition achieved two things: it both secured her reputation as a recognisably English author, and exonerated her from the charges of literary sedition that many of her ‘Gothic’ contemporaries attracted. But reviewers complained vigorously about her imitators. In 1799, for example, the New London Review excoriated the unknown author Anne Ker’s first romance, The Heiress di

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Montalde; or, the Castle of Bezanto, noting that it was ‘a wretched imitation of Mrs Radcliffe’s manner, but … not brightened by a single ray of that lady’s genius’.74 When reviewing Radcliffe’s penultimate romance The Italian, the Critical Review went beyond particular examples of poor imitations of Radcliffe to predict pessimistically that ‘the constitution’ of ‘modern romance would degenerate into repetition, and would disappoint curiosity’.75 Invoking the word ‘constitution’ in relation to romance, however, gestures towards an acceptance of a new set of rules governing the novel on the part of the Critical. On the one hand ‘constitution’ suggests some sort of legislature able to enunciate a legislative authority; on the other, the reviewer unconsciously endorsed the modern romance’s credentials by suggesting some sort of agreement, on the part of romance writers, concerning how their specific genre was constituted.76 In the Rights of Man in 1790, Thomas Paine had urged the invention of a new political order, provocatively arguing that there was no ancient and free constitution to reform in Britain.77 Paine’s championing of a new system over monarchical rights prefigured the decade’s later arguments on literature. By extension, the modern romance’s ‘constitution’ assumed an ascendancy over more entrenched and patriotically identified forms of literature, such as the ‘verse, high fancy, or the song’ that Mathias cited, and became the new ‘system’ of literature. The ‘constitution of modern romance’ suggests innovation, agreement and system on the part of its practitioners, even if, as the Critical predicts, that constitution will eventually degenerate. The Critical ’s observation about Radcliffe’s imitators reproduced a commonplace observation that much ‘Gothic’ fiction in the circulating libraries of the 1790s was repetitive.78 Alongside the criticism of authors such as Mathias and Canning in the 1790s, a number of seemingly satirical open ‘letters to the editor’ appeared in literary periodicals. They appeared to follow the ‘collective’ armouring against the rise of the ‘Gothic’ and French military invasion, arguing that a ‘system’ of terror was invading the rational realms of British print culture. To drive home their point about the establishment of a recognised ‘system’, ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ (1797), ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ (1798) and ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’ (1798) all provided light-hearted recipes on how to concoct a Gothic tale, or a tale of terror.79 They emphasised how the apparatus of terror was not only unoriginal, but easily consumed, with both ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ and ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’ specifically using the word ‘recipe’ to describe their reductio ad absurdum of the literary product.80 The lack of instruction in

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Gothic romances was lamented in all three articles. In ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ the complainant reminded the journal that ‘[a] novel, if at all useful, ought to be a representation of human life and manners, with a view to direct the conduct in the most important duties of life, and to correct its follies’.81 It also expressed concern about the increasing availability of Gothic texts in circulating libraries: I allude, Sir, to the great quantity of novels with which our circulating libraries are filled, and our parlour tables covered, in which it has been the fashion to make terror the order of the day, by confining the heroes and heroines in old gloomy castles, full of spectres, apparitions, ghosts and dead men’s bones.82

This writer evinced anxiety that newspapers  – the legitimate carriers of political news from France  – had been supplanted on the parlour table by Gothic fiction. The article reproduces the concern about fashion that is also present in Canning’s and Mathias’s contemporaneous satires, and again combines fashion with the French Revolution in the same breath by claiming that these novels make ‘terror the order of the day’. Two of these three satirical letters specifically allude to a ‘system’ of terror invading the rational realms of British print culture. ‘Anti-Ghost’, author of ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’, specifically links this ‘system’ to Radcliffe, speculating: ‘Doubtless the elegant pen of Mrs Ratcliffe [sic] is the innocent cause of this revolution in the system of novel-making.’83 Yet again, Radcliffe is exonerated here as the ‘innocent’ unwitting catalyst of this revolution. The most notable allusion to this system, however, comes from ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ in the Monthly Magazine in 1797, which was self-consciously signed by ‘A Jacobin Novelist’. This particular piece is by far the most important of these satirical interventions, although to date it remains infrequently discussed. ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ begins by discussing the effects of the French Revolution upon the novel. It warns that ‘it is not always possible to disregard the passing events of Europe’. The ‘Jacobin Novelist’, as the writer signs himself, continues thus: Happy, sir, would it be, if we could contemplate barbarity without adopting it, if we could meditate upon cruelty without learning it; and if we could paint a man without a head, without supposing what would be the case if some of our friends were without heads. But, alas! so prone are we to imitation, that we have exactly and faithfully copied the SYSTEM OF TERROR, if not in our streets, and in our fields, at least in our circulating libraries, and in our closets.84

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The writer then expands upon the metaphor for two further pages by comparing the ‘system of terror’ in France to the ‘system of terror’ that is invading British novels; the ‘revolution in France’ to the ‘revolution in novel-writing’: Perhaps necessity, the plea for all revolutions, may have occasioned the present … It was high time, therefore, to contrive some other way of interesting these numerous readers, to whom the stationers and trunk-makers are so deeply indebted, and just at the time when we were threatened with a stagnation of fancy, arose Maximilien Robespierre, with his system of terror, and taught our novelists that fear is the only passion they ought to cultivate, that to frighten and to instruct were one and the same thing, and that none of the productions of genius could be compared to the production of an ague.85

At face value, this expresses a complaint about the subject matter of modern novels that was to be taken up by almost all of the magazines which wrote upon this subject. To associate the revolution in novel-writing with the French Revolution and to complain vigorously of imitative fictional practices became well-recognised critical strategies in the 1790s. The critical paraphernalia invoked in this particular ‘systematic’ open letter anxiously conceals a more pressing concern, however. If the Gothic genre itself displaces ‘engagement with political and social problems’ (to borrow David Punter’s phrase) to a continental and distant past, then so too can some of the many criticisms that it spawned displace political anxieties about 1790s Britain. ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ in particular drew upon a contemporaneous sign of political anxiety, the ‘Terrorist System’, in order to disguise a more covert political agenda. The proudly self-styled ‘Jacobin Novelist’ qualifies his accusation of literary imitation by observing that ‘we have exactly and faithfully copied the SYSTEM OF TERROR, if not in our streets, and in our fields, at least in our circulating libraries, and in our closets’ (my emphasis). The addition of ‘if not’ implies an element of doubt which is further compounded by the opening of the sentence which follows. It begins, ‘Need I say that I am adverting to the wonderful revolution that has taken place in the art of novel-writing.’86 To even imply that this requires corroboration introduces a strong element of doubt, as do the article’s casual references to habeas corpus. Of the wind, for example, the author observes that in the Terrorist System Sometimes it rushes, and then there is reason to believe the Baron’s great grandfather does not lie quiet in his grave; and sometimes it howls, and, if accompanied with rain, generally induces some weary traveller, perhaps a robber, and perhaps a lover, or both, to take up their residence in this very

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same castle where virgins, and virtuous wives, were locked up before the invention of a habeus corpus. It is, indeed, not wonderful, that so much use is made of the wind, for it is the principal ingredient in that sentimentality of constitution, to which romances are admirabl[y] adapted.87

If we trace carefully the laboured, labyrinthine references to wind in this particular excerpt, we are led to an unexpected conclusion. The author’s fanciful digressions take the reader past a Gothic castle which imprisons virtuous wives and the invention of habeas corpus, the cornerstone of British rights which came under repeated pressure during the 1790s. With such convolutions, it is easy to overlook the target here. The wind ‘is the principal ingredient in that sentimentality of constitution, to which romances are admirabl[y] adapted’. It is the constitution of Britain, which has generated so much hot air, that renders the British character so hospitable to Gothic romance. This is an observation that is perilously close to Mary Wollstonecraft’s criticisms of Burke’s response to the French Revolution: ‘Why was it a duty to repair an ancient castle, built in barbarous ages, of Gothic materials?’ Wollstonecraft reproached Burke’s defence of the English constitution: ‘Why were the legislators obliged to rake amongst heterogeneous ruins; to rebuild old walls, whose foundations could scarcely be explored … ?’88 For Wollstonecraft, Burke’s defence of the constitution was mawkishly sentimental, a complaint echoed in this article’s easily overlooked observation that ‘romances’ are ‘adapted’ to such sentimentality. The most pressing concern of the ‘Jacobin Novelist’ may well have been Britain’s contemporaneous ‘system of terror’ which William Pitt’s government had inaugurated in the ‘treason trials’ aimed at the London Corresponding Society of 1795.89 The Morning Chronicle carried an article entitled ‘The System of Terror’ in September of 1795 upon the trials in which it specifically connected the ‘system of terror’ to those trials, while still suggesting that ‘Associations, or Jacobin clubs, forged plots, spies, informers, and false witnesses’ were to blame for the government’s brutal response.90 A small note, placed unobtrusively in the advertisement section of 29 October 1795, followed up this earlier piece. Entitled ‘Trial by Jury’, it observed: Recent events having proved this glorious institution to be the best, if not the only remaining security for our liberties, the friends to the Free Administration of Justice are invited to celebrate, by a Public dinner on Thursday, the 5th November next, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, the downfall of the SYSTEM of TERROR (supported by Spies and Informers) destroyed by the verdict of an English Jury, on the 5th November, 1794.91

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The Morning Chronicle’s direct linkage of the system of terror to the Pitt régime is unusual, for other papers in the 1790s used the phrase ‘system of terror’ exclusively in relation to Maximilien Robespierre’s governance in Paris. The Chronicle’s relocation of the ‘System of Terror’ to the shores of England thus offers some clues as to what the later ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ may concern. Here, the author’s self-conscious signature as ‘A Jacobin Novelist’ suggests a knowledge of the Morning Chronicle’s earlier critical political reports of the government’s heavy-handed attempts to suppress British Jacobinism. The speculation conveyed in the sentence ‘Perhaps necessity, the plea for all revolutions may have occasioned the present’ (my emphasis) is at best equivocal. While following the now-established critical convention of linking political revolutions with literary revolutions, this letter is able to smuggle in caveats surrounding the issue of precisely when and why revolutions are required. Its political provenance, shared title with the news report, and indebtedness all suggest that its author used a commonplace critique of literary terror as a veil to conceal critiques of the Pitt régime in Britain. It is strong and compelling evidence of what Jerrold E. Hogle has valuably identified as ‘the ghost of the counterfeit’ in the Gothic – that is, ‘as part of a surface, itself a set of deceptions, covering what turns out to be an even deeper and more hidden deception’.92 Anxiety surrounding the treason trials in the late 1790s was articulated in many different ways in the press; one was the surreptitious and unobtrusive placing of small notes in Advertisement sections of papers, such as the one used by the Morning Chronicle above. Another way was to sport the sign of the anti-Jacobin cultural regulator, denigrating the British readership’s modish appetite for ‘modern romance’. By reproducing such a stable set of criticisms upon a form of literature, an author could also cast doubt upon the dangerous staleness of the British constitution. In 1796, reviewing a novel entitled Austenburn Castle by an ‘unpatronized female’, one reviewer of the Critical had noted with despair: ‘Since Mrs Radcliffe’s justly admired and successful romances, the press has teemed with stories of haunted castles and visionary terrors; the incidents of which are so little diversified, that criticism is at a loss to vary its remarks.’93 Here, the liberally directed Critical Review displayed a trajectory of anxieties similar to Thomas Mathias’s recasting of Britain as a Gothic display cabinet. It was not only Britain’s circulating libraries that teemed with these stories, but the press in the broadest sense of the word. This statement of surrender from the Critical pinpoints the interrelations between the imitational nature of Gothic fiction, the French Revolution

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and the plagiaristic tendencies of criticism. The corruption that had been hitherto externalised – confidently enough – as ‘Gallic’ was beginning to spread internally across the political spectrum of the British periodical press, and for a range of interesting aims. Fred Botting has convincingly demonstrated that Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature itself unwittingly participates in ‘Gallic frenzy’, arguing that ‘[Mathias’s] convulsive horror borders on the confusion and Gallic frenzy produced by unsexed female writers’.94 The same can be said of the three satirical recipes for Gothic fiction which I have just discussed. Whether they embrace Gothic tropes consciously or not for their own political motives, ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ and ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’ are anxious in their attempts to negotiate relationships between France, the French Revolution, British politics and the threat of literary revolution. In the broadest of senses, they negotiate, regulate and attempt to come to terms with the import of terror. One particular periodical, the little-known and relatively short-lived The Ghost, noted the critical tendency to conflate French cultural and political imports in the British periodical press. Appearing in Edinburgh in 1796, The Ghost, edited by one ‘Felix Phantom’, appeared to capitalise upon the public’s appetite for spirits.95 Yet readers in search of ‘truly horrid’ tales would have been disappointed; The Ghost instead intelligently used its four-page issues from ‘Fairyland’ to explore the pressing literary debates of the 1790s. Issues addressed topics such as tragedy, puffing, female education and, of course, the most ubiquitous of all subjects, the state of the novel. The small amount of notice that the periodical attracted was not favourable; the Critical Review dismissed it with one sentence, observing: ‘Most of the papers are of a very flimsy texture, – the wit very thinly scattered, and the sentiments trite and common.’96 Such dismissal, however, belied the nuances of The Ghost’s intervention in the debate surrounding the novel. In issue number twenty-three, The Ghost initiated a thoughtful defence of the novel which began by summarising the state of the current debate: ‘It has long been a question, whether [novels] tend to improve or corrupt the mind. Most writers who have canvassed the question have mistaken the point of controversy.’97 ‘Felix Phantom’ then went on to critique the current debate, stating that ‘at least I hope I shall not dazzle the reader, by wandering from the main object into enthusiastic eulogium, or bombastic declamation’. By contrast, he declared, ‘We here define Novels as they ought to be written, not the common productions of needy authors, or the effusions of a disordered imagination.’98 While

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this statement seems to dismiss specifically the Gothic romance, where authors frequently pleaded their fiscal exigency for writing in prefaces and critics often consequently dismissed their offerings as symptoms of a ‘disordered imagination’, The Ghost proceeded to defend the genre against the charge of corruption which so many periodicals carried:99 It is evident, then, that any history may be the subject of Romance; and if knowledge of the world be really an acquirement, it is impossible that a connected series of probable incidents, having a tendency to impress upon the mind youthful precepts, or to touch the heart with emotions of virtue, can corrupt either the judgment or the morals … It is in vain to pretend, that the excesses of passion, which often must enter into Romance, are apt to excite phrenzy; that the schemes of the knave, the arts of the wanton, or the cheats of all classes of society, may induce the cautious to follow the footsteps of the characters of the fable. Upon these grounds, many men of abilities have not hesitated to declare novels the most pernicious kind of writings: these critics shut their eyes against the beautiful strokes of a Rousseau … They exclaim, that their daughters read nothing else than Novels; that, allured by the engaging tale, they forget their duties, and will rather deprive themselves of their meals, than be interrupted in the catastrophe of an affecting story.100

Despite its fanciful title, The Ghost administered a strong dose of common sense regarding the corrupting potential of the romance. By alluding to the frequent critical troping of the potentially pernicious effect on writers’ daughters, it foregrounded the tired state of criticism on the debate. It also launched a vigorous defence of Rousseau in particular, reversing the contemporaneous tendency of authors such as Clara Reeve, Thomas Mathias and George Canning to recast Rousseau as the villainous originator of the novel’s malady. Maintaining the imagery of poison that had by then become a critical commonplace in the 1790s, The Ghost argued that ‘[t]o get at the venom, without imbibing somewhat of the greatness of Jean Jacques, is a secret which none possess but the unfeeling and debauched’.101 Terminologically, his argument was almost precisely the reverse of Reeve’s argument in The Progress of Romance. Here, corruption became the exceptional, rather than the normal, result of reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A reader would have to be unfeeling or debauched not to benefit from reading Rousseau, rather than becoming so as a consequence of reading Rousseau. This was a particularly refreshing critical position to assume in the 1790s, given that the mounting hysteria surrounding the importation of literature and political subversion from France often pointed the finger at Rousseau as one of the key contaminators of literary Britain’s pure streams.

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Notwithstanding the Critical ’s condemnation of the ‘trite and common’ sentiments of The Ghost, as a periodical it occupies an unusual and interesting position in the debate surrounding the import of novelistic terror in the 1790s. The fatigued satire that its title and its author’s nom de plume both suggest belies the careful attention that it bestows upon the distinctions between romance and novel, good and bad writing. That the defence of Rousseau is included in the same issue that redefines romance draws attention to the significance of Rousseau in the development of the ‘modern’ and ‘terrorist’ romance in 1790s England. In a nutshell, The Ghost practises something akin to the Gothic romance itself. Its ‘counterfeit’ ghosts who live in ‘Fairyland’ presided over by Felix Phantom disarm the reader prior to its stringent defence of the continental origins of the novel. Like the Gothic itself, and its critical detractors, the trinkets which adorn The Ghost mask its political anxieties. As we shall see in the following chapter, Ann Radcliffe, whose critical reputation as a patriotic British author was almost unblemished, practised similar subterfuges. Her careful invocation of a British literary tradition through the use of epigraphs and approving quotation cloaked her own investment in literary importation from France very effectively. It was a necessary strategy during the 1790s, which, as this chapter has argued, was the most volatile and interesting of decades in which to write ‘Gothic’ or ‘terrorist’ novels.

Ch apter 4

The castle under threat: Ann Radcliffe’s system and the romance of Europe

It is easy to see that the satire of this letter is particularly levelled at a lady of considerable talents, who has presented the world with three novels, in which she has found out the secret of making us ‘fall in love with what we fear to look on.’ – The system of terror which she has adopted is not the only reproach to which she is liable. Besides the tedious monotony of her descriptions, she affects in the most disgusting manner a knowledge of languages, countries, customs, and objects of art of which she is lamentably ignorant … She covers the kingdom of Naples with India figs because St Pierre has introduced these tropical plants in his tales, of which the scene is laid in Italy – and she makes a convent of monks a necessary appendage to a monastery of nuns. This lady’s husband told a friend that he was going to Germany with his wife, the object of whose journey was to pick up materials for a novel. I think in that case, answered his friend, that you had better let her go alone!

(‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, 1798)

The anonymously composed ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, discussed in Chapter 3, was qualified by an editorial footnote which launched a striking and exceptional invective against Ann Ward Radcliffe, ‘a lady of considerable talents’.1 The footnote’s scorn is particularly noteworthy for its accusation that Radcliffe regurgitated French fiction uncritically in her own compositions. Complaining in particular about her apparent ignorance of the languages, customs and botany of the countries that she portrayed, it implied that Radcliffe had not only plundered Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s best-selling novel Paul et Virginie (1788), but had also slavishly ‘adopted’ a ‘system of terror’. Here, Radcliffe received no credit for what James Watt describes as her ‘mastery of the techniques of delay and suspense’.2 Listing only three novels that she had composed, the accuser’s charge that Radcliffe had ‘adopted’ a ‘system of terror’ seemed prejudiced and inaccurate. But the 88

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anonymous ‘editor’ was not far off the mark in his exceptional location of Radcliffe’s fiction within a French literary tradition that was decried more for its revolutionary, Rousseauvian credentials than for its support of the status quo. Published in 1788, immediately prior to the revolution in France, Paul et Virginie’s pastoral portrayal of its eponymous lovers reared in innocent isolation was a Rousseauvian indictment of the corruption of modern Europe. It was translated and retranslated into English for a seemingly receptive audience.3 Most notable among these many translations was Helen Maria Williams’s Paul and Virginia of 1795, which appeared two years before Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’. In the Preface to her translation, Williams drew attention to the fact that she executed it ‘amidst the horrors of Robespierre’s tyranny’ and ‘minute vexations of Jacobinical despotism’ in Paris.4 Her immediate criticism of the excesses of the French Revolution, however, was in part an astute political manoeuvre given the date of her translation. For, as Peter Mortensen notes, the novel was ‘frequently listed … on the list of British officialdom’s forbidden romances’ and was subject to frequent ‘antithetical rewriting’ by anti-Jacobin writers.5 Both Williams’s translation of it, and Radcliffe’s possible use of it in her fifth novel The Italian, therefore, had to be negotiated with care and subterfuge. As I argued in Chapter 3, the phrase ‘system of terror’, used in relation to the Gothic, carried a weighty political charge between 1795 and 1798. Its occasional invocation, as seen in the ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ in the Monthly Magazine and the articles in the Morning Chronicle, synthesised the fictional practice with either Robespierre’s ‘system of terror’ in France, or – more subversively – William Pitt’s system of terror in England. Within these particular contexts, then, the exceptional location of Radcliffe’s work within a ‘system of terror’ in ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ played upon the fraught interconnections between political and literary connotations. The editor pinpointed her considerable and hitherto underestimated inspiration from France, while hinting at some form of subversive political engagement on her part. As this chapter will argue, while this editor’s complaint about Radcliffe’s fictional technique was perhaps unduly critical, his hints at her work’s formation in a specifically French tradition were perceptive and accurate. The more prevalent critical tendency then and now equates Radcliffe’s use of a pastoral tradition with a conservatively nostalgic impulse that had little to do with France or political engagement. As the first part of this chapter shows, this tendency certainly formed the majority consensus upon Radcliffe’s fiction during her own lifetime, and it has persisted to a lesser

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extent in contemporaneous critical accounts of her work. While more recent critics such as Robert Miles, Deborah D. Rogers and Rictor Norton have recovered the dissenting heritage in Radcliffe’s family background which informed the political position of her work, this chapter instead focuses upon her hitherto underestimated continental literary heritage, the nationalist self-fashioning that she undertook to mask this heritage, and the particular implications of her sustained romance with France both for reading her romances, and for judging her ‘imitators’ such as Maria Regina Roche and Eleanor Sleath.6 Radcliffe’s engagement with France and with the politics provoked by the escalation of war between Britain and France was, I argue, the catalyst behind her works’ dynamic transformation of the genre of romance. As anti-French sentiment increased in Britain, so too did her increasing engagement with romance. This, as we shall see, culminated in her re-engagement with the supernatural in her final posthumously published romance, Gaston de Blondeville. In contrast to the accusations of plundering by the editor of ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, Radcliffe’s work demonstrates a discerning, sceptical and sustained engagement with the works of continental authors such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Genlis. Her reading of literature from France was shared, and perhaps guided, by her husband William Radcliffe. Although there is no definitive evidence that Radcliffe read French works in the original like her predecessors Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee and Charlotte Smith, her husband William did, working in the first instance as a translator of French works. William’s translational career was brief, and consisted of translating only two works from French in 1790, one a travelogue of a journey to Sweden, and the second The natural history of East Tartary published by the Academy of Sciences.7 These early excursions into the territory of translating from French into English suggest that William held a wider knowledge of French literature and philosophy, and a willingness and ability to read French works. When William was later appointed as editor-in-chief to the republican newspaper the Gazetteer, as Rictor Norton also observes, his linguistic facility would no doubt have assisted his cause, as a key duty of the editor was ‘to translate from the French newspapers and pamphlets’ during the Revolution.8 William would have been able to advise his wife upon which English translations of French works to read. Radcliffe’s work offers small but nonetheless discernible clues as to her readings of certain translations of French works by Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee and Charlotte Smith in particular. It is perfectly plausible that she had further chosen to read Helen Maria Williams’s Paul and Virginia of

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1795, and that it inspired certain key themes and locations in The Italian, as the footnote of ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ suggests. The traces of her sustained engagement with France and French culture, through translations of texts that were themselves heavily refracted and adapted, suggest that her romances were more firmly focused upon the Anglo-French relationship than anyone during her lifetime or since has acknowledged. As I will further argue, this impression is only confirmed by her other non-fictional writing. The reputation that Radcliffe enjoyed during her lifetime offers few insights into the depths of her political and literary heritage. Contemporaneous reviewers and authors generally sought to promote her as the originator of the Gothic romance’s constitution, accusing other less able authors of plundering her legacy. Radcliffe was crowned by Walter Scott as the ‘first poetess of romance’, and in his History of Prose Fiction John Colin Dunlop praised the ‘very powerful interest’ that Radcliffe’s works evoked in contrast to the ‘servility’ which characterised her imitators.9 Owing to the unique combination of her careful negotiation of suspense and continental adventure, her acknowledgement of English literary inspiration in chapter epigraphs and a strong sense of female propriety, Radcliffe became Britain’s most financially successful and critically acclaimed female author in the 1790s. In total, she composed six novels (one of which was published posthumously), a substantial body of poetry, a successful travelogue and a theoretical essay upon terror. Of these endeavours her posthumous biographer Thomas Noon Talfourd proudly recorded in his Memoir that The pecuniary advantages, which she derived from her works, though they have been exaggerated, were considerable, according to the fashion of the times. For ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ she received from Messrs. Robinson £500; a sum then so unusually large for a work of fiction, that Mr. Cadell, who had great experience in such matters, on hearing the statement, offered a wager of £10. that it was untrue. By the Italian, although considerably shorter, she acquired the sum of £800.10

It was perhaps careful understatement that led Talfourd to assess Radcliffe’s payments as ‘considerable’ in comparison with those of her contemporaries. Clery, Franklin and Garside, for example, observe that Radcliffe’s ‘extraordinary contract’ of £500 for The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794 ‘exactly doubled the previous highest copyright fee for novels known to us’.11 Talfourd situated the reasons for her success in ‘the fashion of the times’, but this rationalisation is misleadingly appeasing. The enormity of Radcliffe’s success surprised readers, authors and publishers, but it is less astonishing

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when one appreciates the extent to which her works were admired and commented upon by contemporaneous Romantic authors. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of Radcliffe’s fourth romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, described it as ‘the most interesting novel in the English language’, strong praise indeed from the author who went on to excoriate Matthew Lewis’s homage to Radcliffe in The Monk.12 Later, in 1818, John Keats playfully alluded to the fashionable ubiquity of Radcliffean troping when he warned a friend, ‘Buy a girdle, put a pebble in your mouth, loosen your braces – for I am going among Scenery whence I intend to tip you the Damosel Radcliffe. I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you.’13 Even if Keats’s humorous verbiage indicates a slight slippage in Radcliffe’s literary reputation by 1818, the intimate knowledge of Radcliffe presumed by this reference testifies to her enduring readership. As may be expected from the high levels of financial remuneration that accompanied her success, Radcliffe’s list of devotees was impressive. While enumerating accolades to Radcliffe from noted figures such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Charles James Fox, Talfourd also took care to note how The author of the Pursuits of Literature, not much given to commend, describes her as ‘The mighty magician of The Mysteries of Udolpho, bred and nourished by the Florentine muses, in their sacred, solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness of enchantment.’14

Here, of course, Talfourd referred to Mathias, whose satirical poem The Pursuits of Literature was composed over the course of the 1790s. Mathias wrote his poem’s four dialogues between 1794 and 1797, the very years which witnessed the apogée of Radcliffe’s literary success with the publications of The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794 and The Italian in 1797. In the First Dialogue of The Pursuits, Mathias took especial care to exonerate Radcliffe from the charge-sheet of female literary subversives who ‘taint[]’ female heads ‘with democracy’.15 As he chose to accuse by name Charlotte Smith and others as literary subversives, his unique exemption of ‘Mrs Ann[e] Radcliffe’ was rendered all the more conspicuous. His claim – that Radcliffe was nourished ‘amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition’ – records possibly the earliest usage of the adjective ‘Gothic’ in relation to Radcliffe. Its accompanying qualified noun of ‘paler shrines’, however, suggests that for Mathias, Radcliffe’s experimentation with ‘Gothic’ was nowhere near as profound or disturbing as were some

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other women writers’ incursions into the genre. Clearly Mathias did not hold Radcliffe’s ‘Gothic’ experimentation as a threat to England’s literary and political constitution. At a critical moment for the romance genre and its female practitioners in the 1790s, then, Radcliffe’s reputation stood unblemished in contrast to those of many of her fellow female authors. This was due in large part to Radcliffe’s intelligent adoption of Walpole’s literary strategy in the second Preface to The Castle of Otranto. There Walpole had justified his new hybrid romance by ‘shelter[ing] [his] own daring under the canon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced’.16 Walpole used Shakespeare as a literary defence against his own bold novelistic innovation, invoking his ‘genius’ to distance himself from the continental inspiration of his ‘Gothic Story’. His disarming humility, however, formed part and parcel of a pragmatic nationalistic gesture: the defence of English literature against the advancing front of French ideas. Following Walpole’s lead, Radcliffe also took considerable care to highlight the impressive array of literary sources from which she drew inspiration in the poetic and dramatic epigraphs that she used for The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. While Radcliffe did not use epigraphs for her first two romances, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790), more allusive tributes to Shakespeare are discernable, with the servants’ debates upon possible sightings of ghosts taking their cue from Walpole’s own Shakespearean model in Otranto. In addition to this plot characteristic, Alison Milbanke also notes the nascent tribute to Shakespeare through Radcliffe’s early use of interspersed poetry throughout her narratives. In The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, for example, the three poems offered all pay tribute to fancy. Milbanke rightly argues that the theme of fancy, chosen by Radcliffe for the poems, is ‘a favourite poetic theme from the sixteenth century onwards, and one that is directly associated with Shakespeare in the eighteenth’.17 With The Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe’s third novel, published in 1791, these thematic tributes to Shakespeare were enhanced by the inauguration of her epigraphic practice – a practice which E. J. Clery describes as a ‘form of textual kidnapping quite new to the novel’.18 Of the fourteen chapters which composed the first two volumes of The Romance of the Forest, eight of them quoted Shakespeare in their epigraphs, with Macbeth’s supernatural tale of ambition providing clear inspiration for the first volume in particular. Besides quoting liberally from Shakespeare in this, Radcliffe also demonstrated the eclectic nature of her sources of English inspiration, quoting from Thomas Warton, Walpole’s The Mysterious

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Mother, William Collins, James Beattie and Anna Seward, among others. Shakespeare co-existed comfortably beside other more contemporaneous British authors in Radcliffe’s epigraphic usage, and continued to do so in her following novels The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian.19 The liberal amounts of Shakespeare, Milton, Gray and Thomson that Radcliffe quoted were, arguably, her attempt to secure a position in a national literary heritage that was specifically English. As a technique, this was largely successful. Nathan Drake famously called Radcliffe ‘the Shakspeare of Romance writers’ [sic], thereby synthesising her recognisably English literary inspiration with her undisputed position as England’s most successful author of Romance.20 The phraseology of Drake’s approval of Radcliffe suggested that a careful emulation of England’s bard was the pinnacle of achievement in the creation of Gothic Romance. It appears that Drake concurred with Walpole’s overwriting of the specifically continental origins of the Romance genre, instead reinventing it as an English literary tradition presided over by Radcliffe. Radcliffe’s careful cultivation of a seemingly English tradition thus achieved two important tasks: it both secured her reputation as a recognisably English author for the likes of more conservatively inclined figures such as Drake, and exonerated her from the charges of literary sedition that many of her ‘Gothic’ contemporaries attracted. To an extent, Radcliffe’s astute patriotic manoeuvre also seduced some twentieth-century critics into a misguided appraisal of her work as ‘conservative’. J. M. S. Tompkins, for one, grounded the popularity of Radcliffe’s fiction in her ‘ample provision for the romantic mood, so pure in quality and so respectable in form’. Here, Tompkins proclaimed, ‘was romance that could be enjoyed by statesmen and head-masters without embarrassment’.21 Tompkins’s intriguing concern about proper reading for ‘statesmen and head-masters’ becomes clearer with this less ambiguous assessment of Radcliffe: ‘She was a Conservative, staunchly clinging to old ideals in the turbulent flood of new ones.’22 For Tompkins, Radcliffe ‘testif[ied] a disapproval’ of ‘the liberal speculations that accompanied the French Revolution’, and instead exhibited ‘a loyalty to ancient values which must have conciliated many readers’.23 In this account, Radcliffe’s political conservatism becomes implicitly connected with Burke’s adherence to chivalric codes in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and her evocations of chivalry and feudalism are read as endorsements of these values. Tompkins’s formative evaluation of Radcliffe’s conservatism from 1932 has haunted studies of her work until relatively recently. David Durant’s

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1982 essay ‘Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic’, for example, maintains that Radcliffe is not so terrified by ‘the black veils and spooky passages for which she is famous, but the winds of change, dissolution, and chaos which they represented’.24 Durant confidently asserts that Radcliffe was ‘not a forerunner of the romantic movement, but the staunch foe of its most salient characteristics’, and argues that her narratives exhibited a nostalgia for a disintegrating culture.25 This nostalgia, he maintains, is explicitly connected to the reworking of the pastoral tradition throughout her fiction. For Durant, Radcliffe departs from the eighteenth-century sentimental novel’s engagement with pastoral because her heroine ‘enter[s] the fallen world simply because her protectors disappear’.26 This deviation in Radcliffe’s fictional strategy, Durant argues, is symptomatic of her dismay at the changing world around her. Hence what he reads as her archly conservative endings, where her heroines find refuge and consolation at last in an explicit return to the pastoral environment. The persistent readings of Radcliffe’s invocation of the pastoral mode as conservative are misleading. They are too indebted to Raymond Williams’s critique of the pastoral in The Country and the City – where he connected authors’ frequent use of it with a failure of the imagination. For Raymond Williams, this failure was explicitly connected to their resistance to modernisation.27 To argue that Radcliffe participates in this failure does not do justice to her subtlety. In the first place, it fails to take into account Radcliffe’s constant problematisation of these pastoral spaces throughout her work. The education offered to Emily St Aubert by her father St Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho’s pastoral retreat La Vallée, for example, is portrayed as being decidedly deficient as the novel becomes darker and more violent. Furthermore, the pastoral idylls which conclude both this 1794 romance and the later The Italian (1797) are self-consciously construed as impossible paradises. Radcliffe’s imitators were perhaps less engaged with the philosophical complexities of these pastoral retreats than she was. For example, both Maria Regina Roche’s The Children of the Abbey and her Clermont commence with their heroines, Amanda and Madeline, celebrating what the former terms the ‘sweet asylum of my infancy’.28 They are both reared in pastoral spaces which clearly celebrate the pastoral influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile before the darker episodes of the novels demonstrate its deficiencies. Eleanor Sleath’s 1798 romance The Orphan of the Rhine went further in its pastoral homage. Sleath christened her heroine ‘Julie de Roubigne’, foregrounding her participation in a pastoral legacy that took in Henry Mackenzie as well

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as Rousseau.29 This lineage afforded Sleath little reward, for her work was characterised by the Critical Review as one of many ‘vapid and servile imitations’ of ‘the creative genius and descriptive powers of Mrs Radcliffe’.30 Both Roche and Sleath were accused of being pale imitations of Radcliffe’s originating style, and their works certainly do not exhibit the same level of originality, nuance or close reading of the original continental texts as did Radcliffe’s. In contrast to Roche and Sleath’s valorisation of the Rousseauvian pastoral, Radcliffe exhibits what Marilyn Butler has identified as a particular Anglo-American Jacobinical scepticism of Rousseauvian primitivism.31 But this tendency was not regurgitated uncritically within her fiction. Her work instead exhibits a relationship with Rousseau and other continental authors that is every bit as ambivalent as that of Mary Wollstonecraft’s embarrassed confession in a letter to her husband William Godwin that she was ‘half in love’ with Rousseau.32 There is no evidence that Radcliffe read Rousseau’s writing in the original French. It is more likely that she would either have read William Kenrick’s authoritative and swift translations of Rousseau’s work, or relied upon her husband William to translate Rousseau.33 The influence of Rousseau’s most famous sentimental novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1760) and his educational text Émile (1762) upon Radcliffe’s work has been recognised in part. In his critical biography Mistress of Udolpho, for example, Rictor Norton notes how Radcliffe’s second novel, A Sicilian Romance (1790), bears a possible tribute to Rousseau through its heroines’ names. The names of Julia and Emilia, the sisters who embody the different attributes of sensibility, are indebted to the characters of both Émile and Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse.34 More remains to be said, however, about the reasons for Radcliffe’s explicit evocations of Rousseau and other continental writers’ work. Amidst the escalation of francophobia in England, Radcliffe’s particular fascination with France led her to set two of her works from the 1790s in that country. What’s more, contrary to popular belief, both The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) portray the French nation and many of its inhabitants as enlightened and benevolent just as much, if not more, than they portray France as a Gothic space. The reasons for such a benevolent view of France during the years which see military tensions between Britain and France escalate to outright war may be several; it suggests, first, that Radcliffe herself had a benevolent view of that country despite never having travelled there, and that this benevolent view was confirmed and transmitted to her fiction by her readings of works which came from France, or which

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were adapted from France. This is certainly the case with Radcliffe’s third work. In spite of its weighty epigraphic tributes to Shakespeare, Radcliffe’s third novel, The Romance of the Forest, set in France, commences with a surprisingly warm view of the French judiciary system. While this benign view of the system could be qualified by the romance’s remote temporal setting, The Romance of the Forest is, in many other ways, the most modern of Radcliffe’s works. Published during the height of the revolution in France, it is saturated with references to well-known continental publications from the eighteenth century. This commences almost immediately on the third page of her tale, when Radcliffe makes a rare direct reference to a legal work from the early eighteenth century: Whoever has read Guyot de Pitaval, the most faithful of those writers who record the proceedings in the Parliamentary Courts of Paris, during the seventeenth century, must surely remember the striking story of Pierre de la Motte, and the Marquis Philippe de Montalt: let all such, therefore, be informed, that the person here introduced to their notice was that individual Pierre de La Motte.35

Referring to the author that Charlotte Smith also chose to adapt for her Romance of Real Life, Radcliffe claims that she bases the legal history that inaugurates this particular romance upon one of the court cases that the French lawyer François Gayot de Pitaval selected for his Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes. But whether from ignorance or from a desire to align this temporally with her story, the dates given in the narrative for Pitaval’s lifetime and work are inaccurate, as is Radcliffe’s spelling ‘Guyot’, which reproduces precisely Charlotte Smith’s mis-spelling of his name.36 Even if the precise nature of the connection between Radcliffe and Pitaval has since proved hard to trace, this direct (if careless) allusion to a continental author is unique within Radcliffe’s fiction. The indeterminable nature of the precise connection between Radcliffe and Pitaval did not, however, seem apparent to a contemporary audience. John Colin Dunlop, for example, confidently asserted a direct connection between Pitaval’s Causes Célèbres and Radcliffe’s third romance, and seemed to connect its success with its foundation in a real-life event. ‘Of the three great works of Mrs Radcliffe,’ Dunlop observed, ‘the Romance of the Forest, which was suggested by one of the Causes Célèbres, is perhaps on the whole … the most interesting and perfect in its fable … the story is more naturally conducted, and is clogged with fewer improbabilities.’37 The tale’s movement away from the more improbable elements of the romance genre and

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towards what Smith had earlier christened The Romance of Real Life thus afforded it a more credible status for Dunlop. However insubstantial the links remain between Radcliffe and Pitaval, or Radcliffe and Smith’s translation of Pitaval, the significance of the themes that connect these authorial threads demands further interrogation. Whether there is a direct connection to a real case or not is beside the point; Radcliffe’s decision to commence her tale within a juridical frame is interesting first and foremost because the opening words come from a French advocate: When once sordid interest seizes on the heart, it freezes up the source of every warm and liberal feeling; it is an enemy alike to virtue and to taste – this it perverts, and that it annihilates. The time may come, my friend, when death shall dissolve the sinews of Avarice, and Justice be permitted to resume her rights.38

Nemours delivers this homily to his silent interlocutor, Pierre de la Motte, who has just been charged, we learn, with extortion. The sentence for this is his permanent exile from Paris. The immediate, and almost premature, moral establishment of the novel’s message through the words of a French advocate is suggestive of a possible early admiration of French justice, an admiration which Smith also shared in The Romance of Real Life. The exhortation of the advocate Nemours illustrates that virtue, compassion and justice can be exercised from a juridical base in France, if not in England. Furthermore, the words that Radcliffe places in the mouth of the advocate immediately precipitate us into this novel’s protracted and complex engagement with the thorny issue of self-interest, and with the treatment of that term by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and its reprisal by Madame de Genlis. The Romance of the Forest transforms Radcliffe’s Rousseauvian tribute from mere naming to the less certain realm of ideas and thematics. This is immediately apparent in the opening words of the advocate Nemours, which instantaneously attune our focus to the issues of self-interest. His warning to La Motte adds little to the narrative, and only defers its commencement. Its very deferral of the narrative, however, indicates Radcliffe’s quasi-obsession with this particular theme. Chloë Chard’s excellent edition of The Romance of the Forest also charts the novel’s indebtedness to Rousseau’s Émile primarily through the father of the hero Theodore, who only appears in the third volume of the novel. Theodore’s father La Luc is clearly modelled on the benevolent ‘vicaire savoyard’ of Rousseau’s Émile.39 For example, at one point in a long conversation with the secondary

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character M. Verneuil, La Luc argues that: ‘“Vicious inclinations not only corrupt the heart, but the understanding, and thus lead to false reasoning. Virtue only is on the side of truth.”’40 This debate between the two men also adds nothing to the narrative, but it rehearses some of Rousseau’s key thinking in Émile. One of the central arguments of Émile centres around self-love (or l’amour de soi). Rousseau argues that ‘the source of our passions, the origin and chief of every other, that which alone is born with man, and never leaves him while he lives, is SELF-LOVE’.41 However, perhaps against the grain of expectation, self-love is not presented by Rousseau as a negative characteristic. On the contrary, it is described as ‘always right’, an emotion which ‘regards our own personal good only’.42 As a concept, self-love for Rousseau stands in contrast to self-interest (l’amour propre) which itself competes with the good of others. ‘Thus’, says Rousseau, ‘we see how the soft and affectionate passions arise from self-love, and the hateful and irascible ones from self-interest.’43 The Romance of the Forest is intimately concerned with the moral construction of the self. In many ways it is a dramatisation of the key Rousseauvian distinction between self-love and self-interest. Its plot is driven by villains who act purely from motives of self-interest against a young, embattled, isolated heroine who must acquire the right qualities of self-love. Exceptionally in Radcliffe’s oeuvre, the romance all but begins from the perspective of a criminal, Monsieur de la Motte. Ignoring Nemours’s warning about his character, he continues to act from motives of self-interest (preserving his own life) when he becomes the unwilling rescuer and guardian of the heroine, Adeline. After his questionable rescue of her, the next threat that she confronts occurs when this unwilling guardian trades her to the libertine Marquis de Montalt in exchange for the latter’s silence on his whereabouts. During the two villains’ commercial exchange of the heroine, the Marquis freely confesses to La Motte: ‘“I will not pretend that my desire of serving you is unalloyed by any degree of self-interest. I will not affect to be more than man, and trust me those who do are less.”’44 Montalt believes that self-interest is at the foundation of human nature, and that those who profess otherwise are ‘less than men’. His positioning is one on which Rousseau had elaborated at length throughout his writing. In his earlier 1755 Discours sur l’inégalité, Rousseau argued that the development of civil society had brought with it conditions of economic inequality. These conditions had served to alienate man from his state of mutual respect and equality. Rousseau contended here that as social conditions began to reshape man’s self-perception, man’s

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behaviour became oriented towards competing jealousy with his fellow men. Selfishness, or amour propre, began to replace self-respect. This is precisely the posturing adopted by Radcliffe’s villains La Motte and Montalt. The conditions of economic inequality that exist between the two villains (La Motte being a financially disgraced gentleman, Montalt a propertied aristocrat) immediately serve to ground their transactions upon self-interest. This in turn replaces any self-respect that the lesser of the two villains, La Motte, may still entertain. The Romance of the Forest fleshes out these Rousseauvian arguments. In pitching the benevolent, pastoral environment of La Luc’s Switzerland against the shady, entangled forest setting of the Marquis’s French abode, Radcliffe establishes a dialogue with Rousseau’s theories of virtue and vice, or self-love and self-interest. However, The Romance of the Forest’s dramatisation of Rousseau’s arguments does not necessarily imply its complete endorsement of them.45 Radcliffe adds one crucial qualification to Rousseau’s arguments on self-love in her portrayal of her heroine, Adeline. Left under the protection of the penniless Monsieur and Madame de la Motte, Adeline becomes their surrogate daughter in their makeshift accommodation in an abbey in the forest. The affectionate familial relationships initially assumed by the three, however, do not withstand the test of a long, enforced seclusion. There comes a point in the story when Adeline’s guardian Madame de la Motte unfairly suspects her young surrogate daughter of having an affair with M. de la Motte. Instead of challenging Adeline on this misplaced belief, Madame de la Motte chooses to neglect her. During this unconvincing narrative interlude, there is a scene where the unfairly suspected Adeline continues with a piece of sewing work she is doing for Madame de la Motte, not, as the narrative strives to explain, to reconcile Madame de la Motte to her, but because it is not in her nature to resent: For many hours [Adeline] busied herself upon a piece of work, which she had undertaken for Madame de la Motte; and this she did, without the least intention of conciliating her favour, but because she felt there was something in thus repaying unkindness, which was suitable to her own temper, her sentiments, and her pride. Self-love may be the center, round which the human affections move, for whatever motive conduces to self-gratification may be resolved into self-love; yet some of these affections are in their nature so refined – that though we cannot deny their origin, they almost deserve the name of virtue. Of this species was that of Adeline.46

If we recall, Rousseau’s argument in Émile posits that self-love ‘regards our own personal good only’. Radcliffe’s narrative description here modifies this position. Suddenly there is a dramatic shift in the novel from the

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past tense retelling the story (‘[Adeline] busied herself ’), to a modal verb in the present tense (‘self-love may’). The narrative qualifies Rousseau’s argument on self-love as if it were carrying on an internal argument with him with the emphasis placed on the crucial word ‘may’, and the accompanying shift in tense. This tense transition swiftly transports the reader from the plot of the ‘Romance’ to a more universal, philosophical statement on self-love. Like the opening moral from the advocate Nemours, the transition between the universal statement and the resumption of the narrative is not entirely comfortable. It is so sudden that it can take the reader by surprise, but it presumes a knowledge of these philosophical debates in its eighteenth-century readership. Radcliffe’s heroine Adeline thus functions both as the narrative subject in the past tense, and as a philosophical proposition through which Radcliffe rehearses her revisions of Rousseau. In direct contrast to Rousseau’s careful distinctions in Émile, the narrator cautiously suggests that Adeline does not act from self-love at all, but instead from ‘affections’ that ‘almost deserve the name of virtue’ (emphasis added). For Adeline, the concept of self-love is intertwined with self-gratification, and does not correspond to her selflessness. Adeline acts purely from altruistic duty, and never considers her self. To her cost, Adeline is probably the most selfless of Radcliffe’s heroines. This is precisely because Radcliffe uses Adeline, in E. J. Clery’s term, as an ‘everyman’ in order to disagree with Rousseau’s distinctions between self-love and self-interest.47 Radcliffe instead argues that self-love is all but indistinguishable from self-gratification, a concept more akin to Rousseau’s concept of self-interest. As if to drive her disagreement home, further on in The Romance of the Forest Radcliffe offers another critique of Rousseau’s unambiguous championing of self-love, again through the characterisation of Adeline. When her suitor Theodore fails to turn up in the forest for a pre-appointed meeting, Adeline examines her own past conduct to discover the reasons. She decides that she has betrayed her partiality for Theodore – the gravest sin that a heroine can possibly commit – and that as a consequence Theodore is now neglecting her. Adeline’s self-accusation, believing that only she can be the possible reason for Theodore’s absence, is described by the narrative thus: ‘When these emotions subsided, and reason resumed its influence, she blushed for what she termed this childish effervescence of self-love.’48 Here again Radcliffe provides a clear indication of her disagreement with Rousseau’s distinctions between self-love and self-interest. Whereas for Rousseau self-love is akin to self-respect, and entirely distinct from self-interest, for Radcliffe self-love is far more self-interested, and

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blends into the egotistical interests of its Rousseauvian counterpart. The narrator, nonetheless, is careful to provide this critique from Adeline’s perspective alone: Adeline ‘term[s]’ self-love as childish. However, as I have argued above, Adeline acts as the conduit for Radcliffe’s disagreements with Rousseau, the hypothesis through which one of Rousseau’s core educational theories in Émile are tested and found wanting.49 In his ground-breaking 1995 study Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress, Robert Miles notes Radcliffe’s indebtedness to Rousseau throughout her fiction. He argues that The Romance of the Forest in particular ‘stood four-square behind Rousseau and sensibility’.50 On the level of language and terminology, however, it is possible to argue that Radcliffe uses Adeline to distinguish her arguments from those of Rousseau. While Radcliffe does indeed pay homage to Rousseau’s thinking throughout The Romance of the Forest, she does not whole-heartedly endorse his philosophies. Instead, she complements Rousseau’s thinking in part by turning to an influential French thinker who challenged Rousseau in another educational text. The philosophical arguments that permeate The Romance of the Forest were equally as influenced by the 1782 educational work Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation by Madame de Genlis as they were by Émile. Like Rousseau’s work, Madame de Genlis’s educational fiction was swiftly translated into English, with Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education being published in 1783. The translation of this three-volume educational work was well received in Britain, with the Critical Review deeming it ‘much superior to the usual novels, in the general strictness and purity of its precepts’.51 The novel concerns a mother’s education of her two children, Adelaide and Theodore. On a superficial level, the names of the children influenced Radcliffe’s naming of her couple Adeline and Theodore in The Romance of the Forest.52 Through a series of letters, a mother writes in great detail about the upbringing of her children, an education that she has undertaken far from the corrupting temptations of Paris. Throughout these letters, de Genlis, through the mouthpiece of the mother, frequently corrects Rousseau’s insights on education from Émile. Of more immediate significance to Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, however, is de Genlis’s writing upon the issue of self-love. The children’s mother, the Baroness d’Almane, writes to her more dissipated Parisian friend: The pleasures of self-love, as transient as vain cannot leave deep impressions: they are only produced by the imagination, whose flame is soon

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extinguished, if the allurement of novelty does not rekindle it. The pleasures of the heart, less tumultuous, but milder and more lasting, can alone ensure our felicity.53

Self-love for de Genlis is ‘transient’ and ‘vain’, more consonant with the themes of self-interest that Rousseau outlined in Émile. As we have seen, Radcliffe similarly does not view self-love as a good characteristic in her heroine, deriding its appearance as a ‘childish effervescence’. Radcliffe’s nuancing of Rousseau’s position on self-love was informed by de Genlis’s work. Both female writers view self-love as a transient entity with no lasting, permanent value. Radcliffe’s reproving attitude to her heroines, which is particularly prominent in her third and fourth novels, The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho (in the latter Emily St Aubert and her father wage war against her over-indulgence in sensibility), is inspired by the educational thinking of Rousseau, but the nuances of her portrayals come from Madame de Genlis. She uses the latter’s arguments on education in Adelaide and Theodore most particularly to qualify her engagement with Rousseau’s Émile in The Romance of the Forest. Whether Radcliffe’s modification of Rousseau’s position would have been noted by an eighteenth-century readership is difficult to discern. Writing for the Monthly Review, William Enfield only paid lip service to those aspects of it which participated firmly within the tradition of romance. Opening with a lamentation, he observed: The days of chivalry and romance being (ALAS! as Mr. Burke says,) for ever past, we must hear no more of enchanted forests and castles, giants, dragons, walls of fire, and other ‘monstrous and prodigious things;’ – yet still forests and castles remain, and it is still within the province of fiction, without overstepping the limits of nature, to make use of them for the purpose of creating surprise. By the aid of an inventive genius it may still be done, even in this philosophical age, to fill the fancy with marvellous images, and to ‘quell the soul with grateful terrors’. In this way, the authoress of the Romance of the Forest is no mean performer …54

Enfield’s reduction of The Romance of the Forest to the sum of its Gothic parts alone transformed Radcliffe’s most philosophical work into little more than escapism. His review is symptomatic of the contemporaneous critical consensus. The Critical Review fared only marginally better with its commendation of ‘the general style of the whole, as well as the reflections’.55 ‘Reflections’, at least, hints at the general philosophising tendency of The Romance of the Forest, where the heroine’s route towards a lasting

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model of virtuous happiness takes her through the enticing arguments of Rousseau. Having negotiated these arguments, Adeline achieves a more nuanced appreciation of the transient perils of self-love. This route is also more implicitly pursued by Radcliffe’s next heroine, Emily St Aubert, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In order to achieve the utopian pastoral serenity that awaits them at the conclusion to each novel, both heroines must negotiate a well-trodden, hotly debated path upon the relative merits of self-love. The perils that this path offers are potentially just as dangerous to the heroine as any physical threat that she suffers from the villain. The complex, philosophical arguments that Radcliffe rehearsed in her fiction demonstrate just how widely read in continental thinking she was. Her novels are equally as embedded within philosophical educational arguments emerging from France as they are in the English literary heritage that she flagged up with so much care through her choice of epigraphs. Her own judiciously balanced approach to both literary cultures is best summarised by Adeline’s views on literature in The Romance of the Forest: Adeline found that no species of writing had power so effectually to withdraw her mind from the contemplation of its own misery as the higher kinds of poetry, and in these her taste soon taught her to distinguish the superiority of the English from that of the French. The genius of the language, more perhaps than the genius of the people, if indeed the distinction may be allowed, occasioned this.56

Radcliffe here draws attention to the ‘genius’ of Britain’s literary culture. She nonetheless sees fit to qualify this position when she distinguishes between the ‘genius of the [English] language’ and the ‘genius of the [English] people’. In both cases, the definition of ‘genius’ appears to be what the Oxford English Dictionary terms the ‘distinctive character or spirit’ of a nation.57 Radcliffe’s differentiation here offers us a vital clue to her considered literary approach. The character of the language of England has produced literature which is superior to that of France. By contrast, on the platform of ideas and beliefs, ‘the genius of the people’ renders the legacy of England’s inhabitants less certain. Radcliffe makes this slight qualification palatable to her British audience through the hesitantly apologetic ‘if indeed the distinction may be allowed’, but the criticism that the ‘genius’ of England’s people is perhaps not superior to that of the French nonetheless remains. This subtle distinction confirms that her opening philosophical proposition in The Romance of the Forest, delivered by the French advocate Nemours, is not merely symbolic of justice per se. Instead, the foregrounding of Gayot de Pitaval’s Causes valorises a particularly French

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representation of justice. Nemours advocates Radcliffe’s own modification of a Rousseauvian view to illustrate the interpenetration of the genius of France’s language with the genius of France’s people. The Romance of the Forest privileges an optimistically integrated vision of the role of language and political agency. It advances the proposition that the ‘language’ of a nation, reflected through its cultural embodiments, can provide agency for change. Such optimistic integration does not, however, persist as a constant in Radcliffe’s work. The combined escalation of military and literary hostilities towards France in the 1790s undoubtedly took its toll upon her optimism in justice and integration, and, ever careful not to be tarnished with ‘gallic frenzy’ as Smith and other female writers had been, her negotiation of the Anglo-French relationship became both more covert and more sceptical. Even so, Radcliffe’s next romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794 only a year after the outbreak of war with France, continues to valorise France and the ‘genius’ of some of its inhabitants, at least. For example, St Aubert, the benevolent and moral father of the heroine, Emily, is referred to quite specifically as a ‘Frenchman’.58 Following St Aubert’s death, Emily’s particularly Gothic terrifying experiences only begin when she is taken to Italy by Montoni. When she is imprisoned in the Appenines, the narrator again takes pains to convey Emily’s attachment to France: Emily, as she looked upon the ocean, thought of France and of past times, and she wished, Oh! how ardently, and vainly  – wished! that its waves would bear her to her distant, native home! ‘Ah! That vessel,’ said she, ‘that vessel, which glides along so stately, with its tall sails reflected in the water is, perhaps, bound for France! Happy – happy bark!’ She continued to gaze upon it, with warm emotion, till the gray of twilight obscured the distance, and veiled it from her view.59

It is possible to argue that in The Mysteries of Udolpho the idealised portrayal of France as a utopian space of ‘pastoral simplicity’, where the benevolent St Aubert all but weeps in anticipation of the felling of ‘two old larches’ that shade the prospect of his home, and where the heroine explicitly mourns for France, is in fact an elegy for England’s lost relationship with that country.60 The outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1793 not only rendered francophilia dangerous, but it also led to a legal suspension on the import of any literary material from France. As a consequence, The Mysteries of Udolopho’s ardent engagement with France is tempered with a balanced reassertion of English literary values. St Aubert, the novel informs us almost immediately, ‘taught [Emily] Latin and English,

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chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. She discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was St. Aubert’s principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness.’61 Shakespeare in particular appears to be a pervasive influence throughout The Mysteries of Udolpho but it is interesting that his works are invoked only twice in epigraphs to volume i. The opening volume of the romance contains a more heterogeneous range of English literary references, with epigraphs taken from James Thomson, James Beattie, John Milton and William Collins. In addition to these, Radcliffe also chooses one epigraph from Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants, indicating a shared interest between both authors in the themes of exile and alienation. Crucially, Shakespeare is invoked far more frequently in volume ii of the novel when the romance moves from France to Italy, from enlightenment to Gothic territory. The increased relevance of Shakespeare for the middle of the tale is possibly symptomatic of Radcliffe’s imaginative and ever-nuanced engagement with Shakespeare, for in Udolpho her invocation of Shakespeare aligns him particularly with the scenes of terror in the novel. The soldiers tramping the ramparts of Montoni’s castle of Udolpho recall quite specifically the opening scenes of Hamlet, for example, and Emily’s temporary loss of reason within the castle clearly makes use of Ophelia’s insanity within Hamlet. The Mysteries of Udolpho makes a subtle but clear distinction between the invocation and performance of Shakespearean scene, and a careful and imaginative reading of his works. For example, when Emily is imprisoned in her turret at Udolpho, at one point the narrative tells us that she sought to lose herself ‘in the visionary scenes of the poet; but she had again to lament the irresistible force of circumstances over the taste and powers of the mind; and that it requires a spirit at ease to be sensible even to the abstract pleasures of pure intellect. The enthusiasm of genius, with all its pictured scenes, now appeared cold, and dim.’62 The ‘force of circumstances over the taste and powers of the mind’ are clearly very different in the castle of Udolpho to what they are in the pastoral serenity of Emily’s Gascony home La Vallée. Radcliffe seems to suggest that, when overcome by such circumstances, the calm contemplation of England’s literary genius cannot help. The protracted nature of this explanation for Emily’s inability to read and appreciate Shakespeare implies a broader significance to this passage. England’s national literary treasure Shakespeare cannot console, and cannot compensate for the escalation of Anglo-French hostilities and the political paranoia in England. Emily goes on to wonder:

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‘Are these, indeed, the passages, that have so often given me exquisite delight? Where did the charm exist? – Was it in my mind, or in the imagination of the poet? It lived in each,’ said she, pausing. ‘But the fire of the poet is vain, if the mind of his reader is not tempered like his own, however it may be inferior to his power.’63

To appreciate the ‘fire of the poet’, the reader of Shakespeare must experience an appropriately tranquil set of circumstances. For Emily, there is a dramatic deficiency of such circumstances in her Italian prison. But here Emily also serves as Radcliffe’s spokeswoman in a fashion similar to Adeline’s function in the previous romance. Through Emily, Radcliffe makes a nuanced but noticeable point about the invocation of Shakespeare as England’s national icon. His inspiration is ‘in vain’ if ‘the force of circumstances’ is inappropriate. War, revolutionary paranoia and the pending suspension of habeas corpus in England all undermined Shakespeare’s ability to enchant. Although habeas corpus was only suspended by the Pitt administration in May of 1794, in the very month that The Mysteries of Udolpho was published, its suspension had been contemplated in England as early as 1792. This was the year when Thomas Hardy and John Thelwall first established the London Corresponding Society which, as John Barrell observes, was ‘exceptionally busy and visible’ during its first four years of existence.64 As a consequence of this, Radcliffe would have been fully aware of the government’s responsive circumscription of English liberty at the time of Udolpho’s publication, particularly so given her husband William’s editorial career in the arena of news. While Radcliffe as ever took great care to exonerate herself from any charge of literary sedition, Emily’s allusions to the inefficacy of Shakespeare to console are particularly suggestive when one considers the formative role that Shakespeare plays in the foundational myth of the ‘Gothic’ or the novel of terror as an English product. If, as Walpole suggested, Shakespeare provided him with the example and defence for his ‘Gothic story’, Radcliffe later suggests that circumstances render Shakespeare’s protection and inspiration alike impotent. The Mysteries of Udolpho, published at the apogée of political paranoia in England, in fact finds almost all types of reading deficient, and the pastoral scenes which frame this novel, clearly inspired by Rousseau’s Julie and Émile, are also rendered impermanent, frail and unconvincing. Nevertheless, Radcliffe attempts one further intriguing and final representation of reading in the final volume of Udolpho. It is perhaps the least convincing section of the tale, set in the Château-Le-Blanc in France. There, the ebullient servant Ludovico attempts to settle an argument

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between the Count de Villeroy and his friend the Baron St Foix by spending a night in an apartment that is reputed to be haunted. To while away his solitary hours, Ludovico begins to read an ancient, discarded volume of Provençal tales. The physical disintegration of this volume is described in detail, as is the background of the tales’ anonymised composition: The damp corner into which it had fallen, had caused the cover to be disfigured and mouldy, and the leaves to be so discoloured with spots, that it was not without difficulty the letters could be traced. The fictions of the provencal writers, whether drawn from the Arabian legends, brought by the Saracens into Spain, or recounting the chivalric exploits performed by the crusaders, whom the Troubadors accompanied to the east, were generally splendid and always marvellous, both in scenery and incident; and it is not wonderful, that Dorothée and Ludovico should be fascinated by inventions, which had captivated the careless imagination in every rank of society, in a former age. Some of the tales, however, in the book now before Ludovico, were of simple structure, and exhibited nothing of the magnificent machinery and heroic manners, which usually characterized the fables of the twelfth century …65

The volume’s decrepitude becomes a metaphor for the neglect of the international origins of the romance genre. Following Clara Reeve’s cue from The Progress of Romance, Radcliffe here takes pains to tease out the complex Saracen origins of romance which have been transmitted gradually through Europe. Radcliffe both supports Reeve’s correction of the lineage of romance and extends upon it in terms of class implication when she argues that the tales ‘captivated the careless imagination in every rank of society, in a former age’. These romances, she emphasises, appealed to everyone regardless of class in an age which was more ‘careless’ or, in other words, ‘carefree’. Ludovico’s ‘careless’ reading of this volume of romances epitomises a yearning for the simplicity of such tales, and the circumstances in which they were told (armchair, fire and glass of wine). Besides the simplicity of reading and pleasure that they offer, they also clearly come from a time where nationalism in literature held less significance. Perhaps constrained by her own covert negotiation of continental literature, Radcliffe awards significant textual space in her narrative (six pages in total) to this ‘Provençal Tale’. The supernatural tale’s central protagonist is a French baron who pays homage to ‘feats of chivalry’.66 One night, he encounters the spectre of a murdered English knight who leads the baron to his corpse, and demands that he be properly interred and honoured. The French baron acquiesces without question, and inters the knight in his

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own chapel ‘with the honours of knighthood’.67 When Sir Walter Scott complained of Radcliffe’s exhaustive use of the explained supernatural, he clearly overlooked this unrationalised tale.68 Whether or not Radcliffe composed this tale herself is unclear, but its lengthy exposition in The Mysteries of Udolpho indicates its importance to her. Compositionally, the tale is clearly derived from a reciprocal and unashamed tradition of romance that did not participate in any quest for national origins. Thematically, the tale further exhibits unquestioning loyalty between French and English protagonists who are strangers to each other, and is unembarrassed in its use of the supernatural to pursue this goal. ‘The Provençal Tale’ further reprivileges the chivalric as a feudal code of honour. It lingers indulgently over a sumptuous portrayal of the Baron’s household: Eight minstrels were retained in his service, who used to sing to their harps romantic fictions, taken from the Arabians, or adventures of chivalry, that befell knights during the crusades, or the martial deeds of the Baron, their lord; – while he, surrounded by his knights and ladies, banqueted in the great hall of his castle, where the costly tapestry, that adorned the walls with pictured exploits of his ancestors, the casements of painted glass, enriched with armorial bearings, the gorgeous banners, that waved along the roof, the sumptuous canopies, the profusion of gold and silver, that glittered on the sideboards, the numerous dishes, that covered the tables, the number and gay liveries of the attendants, with the chivalric and splendid attire of the guests, united to form a scene of magnificence, such as we may not hope to see in these degenerate days.69

The attention to the precise celebration of chivalry here is only qualified by the narrative’s comparison of the scene with present ‘degenerate days’. Tempting though it is to read this as a Burkean lament for the ‘age of chivalry’, I think that Radcliffe’s position is more complex, for her re-engagement here with a less national form of romance, and its contingent appraisal of chivalry, is something that becomes more pronounced in her final works. While the villain Montoni can sneer at Emily, ‘You speak like a heroine … we shall see whether you can suffer like one’70 and the father of Vincentio di Vivaldi in The Italian reprimands his son for his ‘paradoxical morality’, ‘romantic language’ and ‘chivalric air’,71 Radcliffe’s work evolved progressively to reclaim a form of chivalry that had less to do with Burkean nostalgia for the feudal era than a reassertion of the equal rights of all men.72 Perhaps her subsequent hero Vivaldi best epitomises this when he dares to defy his birth-obsessed father, asserting, ‘[B]e the event what it may, I will defend the oppressed, and glory in the

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virtue, which teaches me, that it is the first duty of humanity to do so.’73 ‘Humanity’ and ‘duty’ also seem the best terms to describe the French baron’s unquestioning acceptance of the spectre’s request in ‘The Provençal Tale’ in Udolpho. It is not my intention in the remainder of this chapter to interrogate the potential connections between The Italian and Radcliffe’s continental heritage, simply because with The Italian any inspiration which she may have taken from the continent is even more covert. While perceptively observing that The Italian contains a ‘strain of purer romance’ than Radcliffe’s previous works, Robert Miles’s ‘Introduction’ to his edition of this novel also charts the tale’s possible connection to the treason trials occurring in England from 1794 onwards, and to Pitt’s ‘system of terror’. The less remote temporal setting of The Italian in 1758, in the middle of the Seven Years War, further suggests a preoccupation with that particularly fraught moment in the Anglo-French relationship that the more remote setting of Italy veils. Radcliffe was possibly influenced by the very recent example of Hubert de Sevrac, the 1796 Gothic romance from the pen of Mary Robinson. Although criticism at the time held that Robinson’s romance was a pale imitation of Radcliffe in its movement between France and Italy, Robinson’s contemporaneous setting of her Gothic fiction during the immediacies of the French Revolution, and the independence of her heroine Sabina de Sevrac, foreshadow some of the transformations that Radcliffe brought to The Italian.74 Like Radcliffe’s Ellena di Rosalba, Sabina de Sevrac is confronted by a corrupt perversion of Catholicism in the Abbot di Palerma, who accuses her of a crime ‘that almost sets mercy at defiance’ (in wishing to marry against her father’s wishes), and exacts a penance from her on the flimsy pretext of the ‘profanation of that sacred sanctuary, where religion builds her barrier, to keep aloof those monsters, who would violate her laws’.75 The Abbot’s accusation of Sabina’s ‘profanation of that sacred sanctuary’ is verbally echoed by Radcliffe’s later Ellena, who reproaches the Abbess of San Stefano for her mistreatment with the observation that ‘[t]he sanctuary is prophaned’.76 Robinson and Radcliffe both focused strongly in these particular romances upon the right of women to marry freely and to challenge arbitrary authority which might tell them otherwise. Although Radcliffe’s heroine Julia in A Sicilian Romance of 1790 had also challenged tyrannical monastic authority, the more confident enunciation of this theme in the 1797 The Italian is possibly inspired by Robinson’s more politically forthright form of Gothic romance.

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The fact that Radcliffe herself was connected to a ‘system of terror’ in 1798 in ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, only one year after the publication of The Italian, could indicate that her reputation as the benign guardian of British literary propriety was under threat. When this is taken into account, it becomes difficult to read The Italian, as Cannon Schmitt has done, as a ‘negotiation of English nationalism’ that resides upon a binary of English self versus foreign other.77 When one further considers the evidence provided in Radcliffe’s travel journal, this nationalistic binary opposition becomes even more problematic. Radcliffe’s only physical exploration of continental Europe was undertaken immediately after the completion of Udolpho. The title of her successful travelogue A Journey made in the summer of 1794 through Holland and the western frontier of Germany immediately foregrounds the military conflicts that she witnesses in Germany with the use of the term ‘frontier’. Throughout the journal, one gains the impression that Radcliffe prefers the clean, peaceful and orderly society of commercial Holland to that of Germany. What she condemns in the latter, however, is not so much the prominent Catholicism of the country, as the ravages effected by the ongoing war. In the town of Goodesberg, for example, Radcliffe witnesses a group of badly wounded young French prisoners of war lying by the wayside, passed by carriages carrying revellers to a nearby ridotto. She observes that ‘[m]isery and festivity could scarcely be brought into closer contrast. We thought of Johnson’s “many coloured life” and of his picture, in the Preface to Shakespeare, of contemporary wretchedness and joy, when “the reveller is hastening to his wine, and the mourner is burying his friend”.’78 In the Preface Radcliffe excused her transparent tendency to compare situations and conflicts that she witnessed to English events and literature. She defended her practice, however, by arguing that ‘one of the best modes of describing to any class of readers what they may not know, is by comparing it with what they do’.79 Thus, the Shakespearean association that springs to her mind through Johnson’s Preface is justified by the knowledge of the English audience. It is not a gesture of nationalism, but a way for her to compassionate the French victims of war that populate Germany, and to convey that sympathy to her readership. Clearly, Radcliffe does not regard the French people that she encounters in Germany with any particular hostility. Learning that in France, for example, the younger generation was in favour of the Republic, Radcliffe yet thinks that the former system would never have been overthrown if it had been administered by such mild and benevolent characters as

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the two French emigrants that she and William encounter in Bingen. Contemporary reviews of Radcliffe’s Journey resolutely overlooked her numerous interventions upon national policies, preferring instead to merely praise her skill in describing ‘the effect produced by natural scenery’, but the journal illustrates in equal measure that she is neither francophobic nor particularly nationalistic. Instead, it exhibits a profound discomfort with the effects of war.80 Radcliffe’s anxieties concerning the Anglo-French conflict also permeated her more intimate journal notes, from which Thomas Noon Talfourd provided extracts in his Memoir of Mrs Radcliffe. In 1797, for example, Radcliffe undertook an excursion to Kent with her husband. During this, she recorded her impressions of the military scenes along the coast in her journal: Afternoon.  – Walked towards Shakespeare’s Cliff; the fleet still in view. Looked down from the edge of the cliffs on the fine red gravel margin of the sea. Many vessels on the horizon and in mid-channel. The French coast, white and high, and clear in the evening gleam. Evening upon the sea becoming melancholy, silent and pale. A leaden-coloured vapour rising upon the horizon, without confounding the line of separation; the ocean whiter, till the last deep twilight falls, when all is one gradual, inseparable, undistinguishable, grey.81

At first, Radcliffe’s rendition of the scenes of military preparation may seem more immediately picturesque than anxiety-laden, but the movement in her prose from mere note-recording to the ‘leaden-coloured vapour’ suggests otherwise. The accretion of adjectives as she describes the descent of evening, the ‘leaden-coloured’ mist which poses some indistinguishable threat ‘upon the horizon’, and the flat final emphasis upon the monosyllabic word ‘grey’, taken together, hint at despair with the ever-worsening conflict that Radcliffe finds difficult to articulate. Whether Radcliffe’s near-silence upon the Anglo-French conflict was due to propriety or political pragmatism, or a combination of both, is difficult to discern. I would now like to argue, however, that there was a subtle but noticeable transition in her works’ generic and thematic engagement towards the end of her career that could in fact be read as a representation of her views of the Anglo-French conflict, and the political state of Britain. Her final posthumously published work Gaston de Blondeville, with its accompanying prefatory dialogue between Willoughton and Simpson, suggests that Radcliffe suffered a crisis of imagination, but it is a crisis, I would argue, of which she was fully aware and which she exploited in this novel. It was a crisis which no doubt was grounded in the political disappointment of the early 1800s.

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Many present-day critics have judged Gaston de Blondeville unfavourably, with Rictor Norton even going so far as to speculate that she did not write it as ‘it possesses not a single hallmark of the author’s hand’.82 This assessment, I think, is unjust, for the seed for Gaston de Blondeville was sown much earlier in Radcliffe’s career, with ‘The Provençal Tale’ of The Mysteries of Udolpho. There, as I have argued, Radcliffe used this simple tale to provide a starkly drawn contrast between the glorious age of chivalry where a French baron can help to honour a murdered English knight, and what the narrator self-consciously refers to as these ‘degenerate days’. In The Mysteries of Udolopho, Radcliffe carefully forged a distinction between the form of romance that characterised the ‘Provençal Tale’ and the rest of her narrative, but this distinction in no way privileged her own practice of the explained supernatural over the ghostly romance that Ludovico reads. Instead, Radcliffe’s protracted insertion of this tale seems in many ways to be nostalgic for the simplicity of the romance fable. As a consequence of this, it is the plot of the ‘Provençal Tale’ that she revisits in Gaston de Blondeville. The tale is fundamentally the same as the abbreviated version in Udolpho, but this time the ghost of the murdered English knight is compelled to point out his murderer to a king who is unwilling to listen. Radcliffe may have changed the details  – the English accuser Woodreve and the Provençal murderer Gaston did not exist in the first iteration of the tale – but the supernatural manifestation is fundamentally the same. Gaston de Blondeville, speculates Talfourd, was probably composed at some point between 1802 and 1803, but we do not know why it was not published at its time of composition.83 The polemical Introduction that eventually preceded its publication in 1826 was, according to Norton, written ‘sometime between 1811 and 1815’.84 Although the published Introduction to Gaston and the New Monthly Magazine’s 1826 ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ were published separately, the two essays were clearly originally part of the same piece, and in fact both contain separate parts of the argument. The excerpt in the New Monthly Magazine summarises Radcliffe’s views on terror and the supernatural, while the remainder of the Introduction which is prefaced to Gaston provides us with the imaginative and moral impetus to the tale to follow. The Introduction begins thus: ‘Well! Now are we in Arden,’ said an English traveller to his companion, as they passed between Coventry and Warwick, over ground, which his dear Shakspeare had made classic. As he uttered this exclamation of Rosalind, he looked forward with somewhat of the surprise and curiosity, which

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Here, Radcliffe’s imaginative traveller Willoughton anticipates with relish his journey through the Forest of Arden precisely because of the fame that Shakespeare has awarded it. Willoughton, like his creator Radcliffe, is able to summon Shakespeare at will, and in this particular statement, as Frances Chiu has also noted, Willoughton quotes imperfectly from As You Like It, conflating two distinct lines uttered by Rosalind and Touchstone.86 A potentially nationalist note creeps into Willoughton’s anticipation, however, with the observation that he ‘was not, it appears, one of those critics, who think that the Arden of Shakespeare, lay in France’. This qualification came from the anti-revolutionary Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition of Shakespeare, when in his notes for As You Like It he maintains that the location of Shakespeare’s Arden comes from the pen of an English author, Thomas Lodge.87 Radcliffe’s use of this corrective note by Malone, however, is at best equivocal with the addition of the caveat ‘it appears’. If this first impression of Willoughton leads us to think that he is safeguarding a national literary treasure against French encroachment, then our belief in the worth of this ‘treasure’ comes to be sorely tested in what follows immediately after Willoughton’s first transport of anticipation: But [Willoughton] looked in vain for the thick and gloomy woods, which, in a former age, were the home of the doubtful fugitive, and so much the terror of the traveller, that it had been found necessary, on this very road, to clear the ground, for a breadth of six acres on each side, in order to protect the way-faring part of his Majesty’s liege subjects. Now, albeit the landscape was still wild and woody, he could not any where espy a forest scene of dignity sufficient to call up before his fancy the exiled duke and his court, at their hunter-feast, beneath the twilight of the boughs; nor a single beech, under the grandeur of whose shade the melancholy Jacques, might ‘lose and neglect the creeping hours of time,’ while he sadly sympathized with the poor stag, that, escaped from the pursuit of man, came to drop his tears into the running brook, and to die in quiet. Not even a grove appeared, through whose deep vista the traveller might fancy that he caught, in the gayer light, a glimpse of the wandering Rosalind and her companions, the wearied princess and the motley fool, or the figure of Orlando, leaning against an oak, and listening to her song, in a scene so different from the one his fancy had represented to him for the forest of Arden.88

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This is contemporary rural England, and it disappoints the ardent Willoughton. It is a country where the pragmatics of commercial travel ‘to protect the way-faring part of his Majesty’s liege subjects’ has led to the deforestation of one of its most treasured and dignified cultural icons. Arden does not just stand for a contested English location; it also represents an aspiration that has been lost in what Willoughton later calls ‘the plain reality of this work-a-day world’.89 Radcliffe’s Willoughton deplores the intrusion of ‘stern necessity’ into this imaginative realm of pastoral tranquillity. The unwelcome intrusion of state necessities, Radcliffe suggests, disturbs the organic relationship between location and imagination. Willoughton looks in vain for ‘a forest scene of sufficient dignity’ that may correspond to the picture that his ‘fancy’ has painted for him. Radcliffe laments the loss of the pastoral, and the diminution of the imagination that attends such a loss in this Introduction to Gaston de Blondeville. It is a theme which permeates Gaston, and which may be suggestive of why Radcliffe for the first time chose to invoke a ghost in her final work. For the disappointment that Willoughton experiences with this mutilated image of Arden leads to a surprising privileging of the artificial: ‘Alas!’ said he, ‘that enchanting vision is no more found, except in the very heart of a populous city, and then neither by the glimmering of dawn, nor by the glow of evening, but by the paltry light of stage lamps. Yet there, surrounded by a noisy multitude, whose cat-calls often piped instead of the black-bird, I have found myself transported into the wildest region of poetry and solitude; while here, on the very spot where Shakspeare drew, I am suddenly let down …’90

Here, Willoughton is forced to concede the superiority of ‘the paltry light of stage lamps’ to the England now before his eyes. Whereas once England itself could inspire ‘fancy’, now only performance can draw him into ‘the wildest region of poetry and solitude’. This sentiment is also emphasised in the excerpt of this Introduction reproduced in ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’. There, more plaintively, ‘W’ demands: ‘Where is now the undying spirit … that could so exquisitely perceive and feel? that could inspire itself with the various characters of this world, and create worlds of its own; to which the grand and the beautiful, the gloomy and the sublime of visible Nature, up-called not only corresponding feelings, but passions; which seemed to perceive a soul in everything: and thus, in the secret workings of its own characters, and in the combinations of its incidents, kept the elements and local scenery always in unison with them, heightening their effect.’91

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This part of the essay forcefully illustrates that ‘Visible Nature’ is no longer capable of inspiring sublimity in an England where Nature has been disturbed by the intrusions of State demands. In such an altered location, performance is now the only method of conjuring imagination. The prefatory material to Gaston de Blondeville is suggestive of Radcliffe’s own anxiety about her diminishing imagination. This diminution is clearly and radically connected to her increasing disillusionment with England’s governance, a disillusionment to which Frances Chiu also draws attention in her Introduction to her edition of Gaston when she observes that ‘perhaps [Radcliffe’s] frustration with contemporary crises led her consciously to seek the Britain of Henry III as a means of oblique criticism’.92 The Treaty of Amiens with France in 1802 was (as Gillray’s ‘A Phantasmagoria’ illustrates) viewed by many as a servile compromise with Napoleon Bonaparte. To the minds of many British observers, Bonaparte was not to be trusted, and in consequence of the pressing weight of this opinion, hostilities with France resumed in 1803. Composed between the years of 1802 and 1803, the manifestation of Radcliffe’s second real spectre in Gaston de Blondeville (the first being in ‘The Provençal Tale’) can be interpreted as Radcliffe’s own response to England’s unspirited leadership under Prime Minister Henry Addington. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke recast France itself as a stage, deploring the French Revolution as ‘this monstrous, tragic-comic scene’.93 Radcliffe’s Gaston can be read as an indirect rebuke of Burke. Here she responds by casting England as a stage on which a particular tragedy is played out. The tragedy narrated in Gaston is a simple story of injustice, where a humble merchant, Woodreeve, rightly accuses King Henry III’s favourite, the eponymous Provençal Gaston, of murdering his kinsman, a knight who, like the Knight in the ‘The Provençal Tale’ has fought in the Holy Wars. While it is tempting to read this, as James Watt and latterly Sue Chaplin do, as a ‘loyalist romance’ with anti-French sentiments, the character who seems to be most at fault in the romance is the English king who does not listen seriously enough to the concerns of his subject Hugh Woodreve.94 Gaston de Blondeville is neither a straightforward condemnation of Frenchmen, nor an unambiguous championing of English values. Both its Introduction and the romance itself attest to an increasing disillusionment with the vacillating governance of England. King Henry III is portrayed as a malleable leader, who is all too prone to persuasion from his closest counsellors. By contrast, his wife, the French Eleanor of Aquitaine, is portrayed as a kind, if somewhat vain, consort. The anti-French sentiments that Eleanor’s presence inspires within the

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English crowd is not something that Radcliffe applauds. Instead, she portrays Eleanor’s puzzlement at her mistreatment alongside her unflinching acceptance of the crowd’s insults. The characterisations of King Henry and Queen Eleanor are, I think, the most significant in the romance, but they are not the most important element. E. J. Clery and Sue Chaplin correctly foreground the ‘distancing devices’ which surround this work, with Chaplin reading the textual preamble as a ‘mark of an unstable (in)authentic Gothic textuality’.95 It is possible, however, to view these devices as an integral part of the novel’s argument. Gaston de Blondeville is a romance which revels in its strangeness and remoteness in a conscious attempt to defamiliarise the reader’s expectations of what constitutes a ‘Radcliffean’ romance. Gaston de Blondeville is entirely staged, with the tableaux that serve as epigraphs to each chapter serving to establish acts and scenes. This is because in many ways Gaston blurs the generic distinctions of romance and drama in an attempt to reconfigure the values of Radcliffe’s own literary intervention. When Willoughton in the Introduction regretfully privileges the imaginative force of dramatic performance over the now ‘humbled’ present scene, his tangible sadness becomes a lament for a lost England. Radcliffe’s romance tells the story of a fallen country, fallen not because of French encroachment, but because of a loss of dignity in the role of kingship. Henry III allows himself to be guided by self-interested advisers, and the trial that he stages becomes, after Burke, a ‘monstrous, tragic-comic scene’. While Frances Chiu has correctly perceived the novel’s connections to the Norman Conquest of 1066, with the imposition of a foreign aristocracy upon England being suggested through the aristocratic, vain, effeminate Frenchman Gaston, the immediate circumstances of the novel’s composition could suggest a more pressing concern which again has everything to do with the Anglo-French relationship.96 By 1803, Henry Addington’s decision to blow upon the embers of a hostile relationship with France may have bought the applause of the anti-Jacobins, but for many others the presumption of militarised hostility was viewed with dismay.97 In Gaston de Blondeville exiled justice can only find a location through the means of performance. It is no coincidence that this novel abounds with the pageantry and festival characteristic of chivalry and romance. It is up to the travelling minstrels, the performers who serve the court, to narrate this particular tale of injustice. A Provençal minstrel sings the tale of the foul murder to which Woodreve bore witness, and a group of miming actors re-enact the crime. Combined, these re-enactments suggest

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that performativity and artifice have become more ‘authentic’ conveyors of truth than justice itself. And then there is Radcliffe’s novel use of a real ghost in Gaston de Blondeville. In the Introduction, Willoughton responds to Simpson’s teasing of his belief in ghosts by protesting: ‘“I am not so fond of ghosts in general, as you seem to think. It is only for a few of particular excellence, that I feel a friendship; for them, indeed, I am willing to own even an affection.”’98 We know from Radcliffe’s own edited journal extracts (detailing a visit to Warwick Castle) that she felt a particular ‘friendship’ for the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is the ghost from Shakespeare that she clearly attempts to resurrect in Gaston de Blondeville, a ghost of a murdered knight who, because of the failures of justice, is forced to confront his own murderer. A silent and shadowy presence who lurks in the borders of the tale, he is nowhere near as magisterial as Shakespeare’s original. His impotence is indicative of Radcliffe’s reluctant invocation of him. The spectre serves more as a troubling reminder of the crisis of imagination in England’s governance than as an instrument of revenge upon France. The realism of the setting that Dunlop so praised in Radcliffe’s 1791 The Romance of the Forest, and the philosophical propositions that she there advanced as a consequence of her continental reading, are emphatically abandoned towards the end of her writing career. In their place, Radcliffe returns to what Miles calls ‘a purer strain of romance’. As the return to ‘The Provençal Tale’ towards the end of Radcliffe’s writing career suggests, however, the purer form of romance, transmitted from the Saracens into Spain and France, permits Radcliffe to make greater distinctions between a bygone age characterised by benevolent chivalric actions between strangers, and the ‘degenerate days’ which she lived through in England. The opening pages of the only surviving commonplace book of Ann Radcliffe, which was taken over towards the end of her life by details of medical prescriptions for her asthma, offer interesting and hitherto neglected clues on her enduring engagement with the Anglo-French conflict. Prior to Radcliffe’s catalogue of medicines, there are large amounts of notes taken about the Duke of Marlborough’s campaign against the French in the War of Spanish Succession. Described by Voltaire as ‘the most fatal man for the greatness of France that had been seen for several centuries’, John Churchill, the Earl then Duke of Marlborough, erased the French army in Germany at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.99 Intriguing, then, that Radcliffe should revisit the scourge of the French towards the end of her life, but what is even more fascinating about the notes that she takes on Marlborough are that they only select observations from

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him that reflect less favourably upon the English government. In 1710, for example, as England made moves towards brokering peace with Louis XIV, Marlborough, Radcliffe records, confided to a correspondent, ‘Our enemies will not be in good earnest for peace, when they see us so busy in doing their business for them.’100 Marlborough’s clear disapproval of the covert peace negotiations initiated by Robert Harley and Henry St John is part of a larger body of critical observations that Radcliffe chose to note. Radcliffe’s detailed recording of Marlborough’s thoughts and correspondence shed new light upon her enduring fascination with the Anglo-French conflict. Her fascination was in no way francophobe, but reflected more upon England’s increasingly paranoiac and poor governance throughout the 1790s and early 1800s. Its impact upon her fiction was enduring. Her covert negotiation of the Anglo-French relationship transformed the trajectory of her Gothic romances from a continentally blended contemplation of the two nations’ cultural and political values to a return to a purer and older form of romance in Gaston de Blondeville. As I have argued, however, this return was in no way escapist; instead, it attempted to recoup a more reciprocal relationship between Britain and France. Radcliffe’s enterprise is best encapsulated in her own commentary upon the lack of correspondence between political systems and their subjects. In A Journey she observed: To extend their arms is the flagitious ambition of warriors; to enlarge their systems is the ambition of writers, especially of political writers. A juster effort of understanding would aim at rendering the application of principles more exact, rather than more extensive, and would produce enquiries into the circumstances of national character and condition, that should regulate that application.101

Although Radcliffe did not perceive her role to lie in the constitution of systems, she did view her own literary enterprise as an investigation of ‘national character and condition’. The aim that is concealed so carefully throughout her fiction is, implicitly, the interrogation and enlargement of political systems. This is an ambition which connected her far more closely to the ‘gallic frenzy’ of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson than her contemporaneous admirers realised.

Ch apter 5

‘The order disorder’d’: French convents and British liberty

At length, wearied with my reverie, I looked around me. What was my astonishment! The music was no longer heard; the croud had disappeared; the lights were extinguished, except alone the flame of a lamp which trembled before the altar, and threw its pale rays into the sacred night of the temple. I arose precipitately; the doors were fastened. I was compelled to abandon myself to all the awfulness of this majestic darkness. I had long wished to enjoy this spectacle, and it was so much more soothing to my mind, as the cause which led to it had been delightful. I yielded intirely to its melancholy impressions. The statues of saints and heroes, placed around, caught my wandering looks; and the solemn sleep, which reigned throughout, marked, by its terrible silence, the end of human greatness: But the gentle hope which smiles at this sorrowful destiny, approached to sooth my dejected imagination … Suddenly, an unexpected noise struck upon my ear, and a door of the temple was opened. I beheld a capuchin enter; then, a second leading a woman by the hand; and then, a third, who shut the door after them. I withdrew to a distance. They advanced toward the great altar, dragging the trembling female, who was covered by a long veil. When she was near the altar, Ah, God! She cried – and instantly I recognized Laura. – Why am I brought, she continued, at this hour to this place! The midnight Bell has already sounded; but you smile, and appear so tranquil! Can you impart to me something of that peace which constitutes your happiness? I advanced in silence, and filled with astonishment. We will do yet more, answered one of them. – May God return you, said Laura, an hundred fold! – Fall on your knees, said the man. (She prostrated herself.) Pray: – Say seven Pater Nosters, before you die. – Is it, then, to put me to death that you have led me here? – Do you not merit death? – Ah, indeed I do! (Laura; or, Original Letters. A sequel to the Eloisa of J. J. Rousseau. From the French. 2 vols., 1790)

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Readers already familiar with the literary conventions of the Gothic may be forgiven for thinking that the excerpt cited above comes from Matthew Lewis’s notorious romance The Monk (1796). The monastic setting decorated by ‘statues of saints and heroes’, the midnight hour, the benign masculine spectator, and the unwilling female convert dragged into view by a Capuchin monk, combined, constitute the ingredients of one of the most memorable scenes of The Monk, when Agnes di Medina’s attempt to escape is discovered by the Prioress and Abbott Ambrosio of the Capuchin order in Madrid. The extract in fact comes from an epistolary novel translated from French. In Chapter 3 I first alluded to this novel’s astute self-promotion as ‘A sequel to the Eloisa of J. J. Rousseau’, which capitalised upon the prevailing vogue for all things Rousseauvian. The tale reprised La Nouvelle Héloïse’s thread of correspondence between the virtuous English aristocrat, Lord Bomston, and the penniless lover of Julie, St Preux. Instead of focusing upon their philosophical debates on virtue, though, the sequel’s author oscillated uneasily between promoting the rewards of benevolent virtue and narrating a visually erotic tale. By current critical understanding, indeed, Laura can be read in terms of what Robert Miles describes as ‘male Gothic’ owing to its fascination with strongly sexualised visual scenarios.1 Laura, the eponymous heroine, is a courtesan who is tasked with seducing Lord Bomston, but he later rescues her from the clutches of the Capuchins when she falls into their hands, and she then reforms her behaviour. Reader, he eventually marries her, but this happy conclusion is only reached after many trials, tribulations and abductions that are worthy of any Gothic plot. The Critical Review exhibited surprising complacency in its review of this sequel. It remarked: Though the language of these volumes is occasionally warm, we perceive no passage which can excite a blush, or pain the most innocent mind. The author is well acquainted with the human heart, and traces the finest emotions with much skill: he is in every respect a pleasing and animated writer; but, alas! he is not a Rousseau.2

While the sequel suffered by comparison with Rousseau’s original work, the reviewer discovered nothing objectionable to deter him from recommending it. The comparatively early dating of this publication and its review go some way to explaining its benign reception in England. Although by 1790 Rousseau’s widespread popularity was already a source of anxiety for author/translators such as William Kenrick and Clara Reeve, the specific

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wave of anti-revolutionary hysteria surrounding the ‘venom’ of Rousseau’s work that I charted in Chapter 3 had not yet reached Britain’s shores. Besides being unconcerned about the questionable content of the novel, the Critical’s reviewer also showed no anxiety over the complex chain of authorship of this sequel. Reviewing what he thought to be the original French version of this tale, he observed casually that ‘[t]hough this volume appears in French, the author is a German; yet it is not clear, from the equivocal style of the dedication, that the work was ever printed in that language’.3 As the British Library’s catalogue notes, this novel was first published in German, and composed by a German author. Friedrich August Clemens’s original work was entitled Die Begenbenheiten Bomstons in Italien. It was subsequently translated into French by the Swiss author Gabriel Seigneux de Correvon, but judging from the Critical’s uncertainty, Correvon clearly made no acknowledgement of the German original. Inspired, then, by Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, this sequel was composed and published in Germany by a German author, and then translated into French by a Swiss author prior to its translation and importation into England. The sheer cosmopolitanism and complexity of this Rousseauvian sequel illustrates the ease with which literature and ideas continued to be traded across the continent in 1790. James Raven has ably charted how, up until 1795, the large majority of novelistic translations in England came from the French, with six titles in 1790 coming from French and only one from German.4 What the readership would assume to be a French original was not always so in fact, however. Texts which claimed to be French, associated with the prestige of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau or a Bernardin Saint-Pierre, would be considerably more marketable to the English public in 1790 than a sequel from the pen of an unrecognised German author. Laura’s complex lineage is a good barometer by which to gauge the extent, reciprocity and obscurity involved in continental literary relationships. In an age characterised by its import and censure of ideas, Laura illustrates the difficulties of ascribing definitive influences to certain texts. Any textual influence which was acknowledged was inevitably mediated through considerations of what might be acceptable politically at a particular moment in the 1790s and, more pragmatically, what might be saleable at that time. As Raven further observes, ‘As the fashion for French, and then German, novels increased, along with an interest in ancient British or exotic Eastern tales, novels were falsely ascribed as translations, much in the way that so many mysterious old manuscripts were also uncovered.’5 These forms of literary counterfeiting lie at the heart of the Gothic project: Walpole’s claims that The Castle of Otranto is a translation of a

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mysterious manuscript; Reeve’s, Lee’s and Smith’s creative ‘translations’, and Radcliffe’s use of discovered manuscripts in A Sicilian Romance; The Italian and Gaston de Blondeville all illustrate how deeply entrenched the Gothic is within counterfeit textual practices that might distract attention from its Gallic origins or inspiration. When we come to Matthew Lewis, this particular problem becomes all the more marked, for the blend of national and continental sources that he did acknowledge in his infamous novel The Monk were not the most important ones. This combination of sources was instead selected more for its appeal to his imagined readership than for its foundations in his tale. One is tempted to take Lewis’s initial textual acknowledgements in his ‘Advertisement’ to The Monk relatively lightly. Although the sources that he cites sound plausible enough, they are by no means complete, as he himself hints towards the end: The first idea of this Romance was suggested by the story of the Santon Barsisa, related in The Guardian. – The Bleeding Nun is a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany … The Water-King, from the third to the twelfth stanza, is the fragment of an original Danish ballad – And Belerma and Durandarte is translated from some stanzas to be found in a collection of old Spanish poetry, which contains also the popular song of Gayferos and Melesindra, mentioned in Don Quixote. – I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself; but I doubt not, many more may be found, of which I am at present totally unconscious.6

Lewis’s immediate acknowledgement of these sources helped in some measure to deflect criticism from the profound intertextuality of The Monk. Citing ancient ballads, romance and legend, his acknowledgements were both cosmopolitan and temporally remote. This strategy was in part successful. The Monthly Review, for example, took note of Lewis’s acknowledgements, observing: ‘This may be called plagiarism, yet it deserves some praise. The great art of writing consists in selecting what is most stimulant from the works of our predecessors, and in uniting the gathered beauties into a new whole, more interesting than the tributary models.’7 The sources that Lewis did cite were (or so he thought) carefully selected for the political climate in England in 1796, for he avoided any direct reference to France. The story of Santon Barsisa that Lewis claims is his first source, for example, is traced back to Addison and Steele’s use of it in The Guardian in 1714, and not to the Frenchman François Pétis de la Croix’s Turkish tales (1707–8).8 The Guardian’s adaptation of Santon Barsisa secured de la Croix’s version of a saintly monk being tempted into rape and murder by the devil in the service of a Protestant and patriotic

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British reading audience. It prefaced the narrative of diabolical temptation with the observations that it would appeal to ‘a great many People of plain and virtuous minds’ as ‘[t]he Moral to be drawn from it is entirely Christian’.9 Lewis’s tracing of his source to the Guardian demonstrated a degree of caution in pleasing his audience, for there were many more recent editions of the tale. But his omission in naming the original and well-recognised French author-translator of these tales was undoubtedly calculated. Whereas in 1714, the year when the War of Spanish Succession concluded, Addison and Steele had no qualms about acknowledging the authorship of François Pétis de la Croix, by 1796, in the context of another war which pitted the English against the French, Lewis deemed it unwise to acknowledge the Frenchman’s influence. In an astute negotiation of primary material, what is conspicuous by its absence in the ‘Advertisement’ to The Monk is the acknowledgement of any French source. There is no mention of Laura, and of the numerous French authors whose work influenced Lewis’s creation. The Monthly Review, however, immediately identified the tale’s proximity to Jacques Cazotte’s erotically charged tale of diabolical temptation, Le Diable Amoureux. This was first published in Naples in 1772, but came into vogue in England in the first part of the 1790s through two different translations.10 As I will go on to illustrate, Lewis is also understandably silent upon the pervasive influences of the revolutionary French authors Jacques-Marie Boutet de Monvel and the Marquis de Sade in his work. Such textual aporia are indicative of the change in perceptions of French texts by 1796. Whereas Laura was received as a French text with a degree of complacency in 1790, by 1796, three years after the outbreak of war with France, translations or adaptations from French sources were becoming more widely criticised in the British periodical press. Criticism was more frequently couched in nationalistic language too, with the Monthly Review, for example, complaining of the translation of Madame de Genlis’s The Knights of the Swan that ‘the painting is frequently too indelicate and luxuriant for the sober taste of this country’.11 Through the realms of reviewing in particular, Britain’s reputation as a nation which privileged sobriety and plainness, foregrounded far earlier by Muralt and Voltaire, was being consolidated against French culture. To openly acknowledge French inspiration in 1796 was to risk critical condemnation for the ‘indelicate’ sentiments that the original would import to a more ‘sober’ British audience. If we accept the remarkable thematic proximity that Laura shares with Lewis’s The Monk, however, then we must wonder how and why it, and other revolutionary French sources,

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came to be renegotiated in his work. While acknowledging some sources garnered him admiration in certain quarters, Lewis’s silence upon the more revolutionary sources of his literary inspiration in no way deflected criticism from his romance. The disproportionate condemnation of Lewis’s first novelistic endeavour in 1796, to which I will later refer, has already been well debated.12 Rather than rehearsing this ground in too much detail, the remainder of this chapter will situate this condemnation within Lewis’s ongoing fascination with the events and literature of the French Revolution and France. As well as examining The Monk’s importation of French ideas, I will look beyond this to assess how Lewis’s engagement with France and French sources became more transparent in the wake of the controversy surrounding The Monk. I do not seek merely to retrace an exhaustive list of all possible French sources of influence upon the body of Lewis’s work, but to measure how Lewis’s knowledge of, and fascination with, France affected the formation, reception and literary consequences of The Monk. In looking at Lewis’s career under the lens of his engagement with France, I will also interrogate prevalent critical claims that Lewis was consistently patriotic and anti-Catholic in his literature and commentary. Lewis’s first recorded biographer, Margaret Baron-Wilson, anonymously published The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis in 1839. She began her Preface by claiming: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the subject of them was more talked of, than any other man of his day. Byron himself was not so striking an example of a young gentleman “waking up one morning and finding himself famous”, and this without the slightest anticipation of such a destiny.’13 She notes that Lewis was the ‘friend and associate of nearly all the most celebrated men of his day’ and records among his intimate acquaintance the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Clarence, the Sheridans, Canning, and Lords Holland and Byron.14 Byron cast Lewis in self-consciously romantic terms in English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, pronouncing that ‘Even Satan’s self with thee might dread to dwell, / And in thy skull discern a deeper hell.’15 Lewis was well known in his time both as an author and as a translator. He translated Goethe on the spot for Byron and Shelley in Italy, read and translated both French and German with fluency and ease, and managed to incorporate the literary traditions of both countries into his fiction and drama. While he was relatively sanguine about acknowledging his German sources, however, the silence that Lewis maintained about the significance of French literary, cultural and political influence upon him in the 1790s suggests a profound and justified anxiety upon his part.

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As a seventeen-year-old student of Oxford University, Lewis spent the summer vacation of 1791 in Paris. While he was in Paris, the king and queen attempted their ill-fated escape to join the counter-revolutionary forces in Germany, and political clubs debated the impossibility of the king remaining as the head of state in France. The extant correspondence from Lewis to his mother from his time in Paris is scanty, and tells us nothing of his views upon the unfolding events of the French Revolution. Instead, he tells his mother about his own compositions, and we gain the impression of an industrious and studious scholar who is working hard to assist his needy mother.16 He writes to his mother of composing a novel, forwards her a play, and discusses composing songs for at least two further dramatic productions.17 It is easy to imagine that Lewis’s silence upon what he did and saw in Paris conceals a rather hedonistic time in his life, but the volume of his work during this vacation in fact suggests a high level of industry. Louis F. Peck speculates that Lewis’s attitude towards Paris is reflected in the opinion that he later assigned to the character of Raymond de las Cisternas in The Monk.18 Of Paris and Parisians Raymond observes: For some time I was enchanted with it, as indeed must be every Man, who is young, rich, and fond of pleasure. Yet among all its gaities, I felt that something was wanting in my heart. I grew sick of dissipation: I discovered that the people among whom I lived, and whose exterior was so polished and seducing, were at bottom frivolous, unfeeling and insincere. I turned from the Inhabitants of Paris with disgust, and quitted that Theatre of Luxury without heaving one sigh of regret.19

Although Lewis’s character expresses distaste for the Parisian circles in which he moves, it is important to bear in mind that this is a condemnation of society in Paris, and not of France itself. It is reminiscent of Walpole’s observations on the frivolity of Paris in his correspondence. Neither author was particularly francophobe in his observations, despite expressing disillusionment with Parisian society. In 1792, Lewis was sent to Weimar by his father in order to hone his linguistic skills for a diplomatic posting. There, he learned German, translated a considerable amount of poetry, met Goethe, and began to compose the first sketches of a romance ‘in the style of the Castle of Otranto’. In the letter where he describes this to his mother, however, Lewis specifically links the genesis of his romance to his sojourn in Paris, confessing that ‘though I have been ever since my return from Paris employed about it … I have not yet finished the first volume.’20 Critics have since seen much in The Monk to connect it quite specifically with the events of the French Revolution. André Parreaux, for example, suggests that the

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destruction of the convent of the Capuchins in The Monk offers ‘an echo of the French September Massacres’ of 1792.21 And while careful not to impute any propaganda to Lewis’s romance, Ronald Paulson further reads the breaking of Ambrosio’s sexual bonds as the revolutionary emblem of self-liberation.22 Both of these readings are persuasive, for The Monk’s Parisian genesis further supports the argument concerning its thematisation of the Revolution in its representation of liberation and mob scenes. Besides Lewis’s first-hand experiences of the escalating Revolution in France, it is clear that he also read a lot of contemporaneous French literature and attended the theatre frequently during his time there. One of the many sources of his inspiration was a number of revolutionary convent plays that were staged during and beyond his time in Paris. Although plays and novels exploring the hidden space of the convent had been staged prior to the revolutionary years in France, the convent as a space of libertine oppression was given renewed force with the Revolution. Pierre Laujon’s comedy Le Couvent of 1790 was the first of a large contingency of such plays that started to unfurl across a range of dramatic genres in Paris. As a method of critiquing the ancien régime’s abuses of institutional – and particularly clerical  – power, the increasingly popular plot of a young woman forced to take vows against her will provided considerable inspiration. Titles ranged from the serious Les Rigueurs du cloître in 1790 to the more self-deprecating Encore des Moines of 1792.23 It is clear that Lewis saw several of these types of plays during his summer in Paris, for in a later letter to his mother, he refers quite specifically to two: There is an Opera called Le Soutterain where a Woman is hid in a cavern in her jealous Husband’s house and afterwards by accident her Child is shut up there also without food and are not released till they are perishing with hunger. [T]he situations of the characters the Tragic of the Principal Characters the Gaiety of the under pa[rts,] and romantic turn of the Story make it one of the prettiest and most affecting things I ever saw but I shall not throw away any more time till I have got one of the things I have already finished upon the Stage. Les Victimes Cloitrees of which I spoke to you is another which would undoubtedly succeed [sic].24

The first drama that Lewis refers to was Benoît Joseph Marsollier’s Camille, ou le souterrain which was first staged in March of 1791.25 The underground narrative of a mother and child starving influenced Lewis’s portrayal of Agnes di Medina’s horrific punishment in the convent in The Monk. Jacques-Marie Boutet de Monvel’s 1791 anti-clerical drama Les Victimes cloitrées is the second one mentioned by Lewis, and the most enduringly important in the context of his career. It was first staged at the Théâtre

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de la Nation in Paris in 1791, during the time of Lewis’s sojourn in Paris. The play portrays the Capuchin Père Laurent as an elderly libertine who has imprisoned a young bride-to-be, Eugénie, within the entrails of the adjoining convent. He dupes her lover Dorval into believing that she is dead, and is on the point of securing Dorval’s fortune by persuading him to take vows. The final act of the play involves the young hero Dorval, disabused of his belief in the prior’s honesty, literally breaking down the wall which separates Père Laurent’s monastery from the convent where Eugénie is imprisoned. He then liberates his lover, and they consummate their passion. This is not a chaste reunion, but one that relies upon atmospheric suggestiveness (the wall being broken down between the two lovers) to imply sexual consummation. Monvel’s dramatisation of a libertine priest immuring a young woman in a convent for his eventual pleasure inspired The Monk’s portrayal of Ambrosio’s secretion and subsequent rape of Antonia in the vaults of the convent, as well as the convent’s institutional prevention of Raymond and Agnes’s romance. Peter Mortensen argues that Lewis’s reappropriation of Monvel’s ‘sexualized tropology typical of French Revolutionary discourse in its initial, optimistic phase’ is sceptical, as Lewis does not endorse the rebellion of Agnes in his retelling of this tale.26 This is debatable, however, as Lewis’s decision to allow Agnes to survive, appropriate the role of the heroine, and tell her tale herself, is, I think, of considerable significance. Besides the ‘sexualized tropology’ of the revolution, there are other important factors in this original play’s composition that have hitherto been overlooked in terms of influence upon Lewis. In Act ii of Monvel’s play, the republican mayor Monsieur de Francheville challenges the libertine Father Laurent quite specifically about the values of the ancien régime: FATHER L AURENT: General order, count? When everything is laid waste, when the majesty of kings, the sanctity of tribunals, worship itself, when religion … M.DE FRANCHEVILLE: Nothing is destroyed, Father; everything is revered, everything remains, the king has lost none of his power because he has maintained that of doing good. New Judges arise and their ministry will no longer be blackened by that vile self-interest which compromised its capacity for so long. The cult is still the same, and the abuses from which we extricate ourselves have no part at all in religion.27

Here the republican M. de Francheville defends the actions of the revolution to the libertine priest, arguing (as was the case at the time of staging in 1791) that the King of France has not lost his power since he has conserved

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the ability to do good. The revolutionary argument  – that nothing has been annihilated, and everything has been respected – is unambiguously promoted for the play’s audience. Its interruption of the drama’s libertine plot moves the audience from salacious voyeurism to philosophical debate in the middle of the play. The centrality of this discursive modification would have secured the attention of the audience of 1791. In a comment that is more widely representative of studies on Lewis, in Representations of Revolution Ronald Paulson is careful (like Mortensen later) not to impute any political factionalism to Lewis’s portrayal of revolution.28 This position is no doubt informed by Lewis’s own covert position at the time of the publication of The Monk (1796), but it is certainly open to question when one considers the context and literary allusions in Lewis’s work beyond The Monk. In the extra material that accompanies their excellent edition of The Monk, D. L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf unearthed and reprinted a poem from manuscript that further interrogates the neutrality of Lewis’s position. At first glance, Lewis’s early unpublished poem ‘France and England in 1793’ suggests that as the revolutionary excesses unfolded in Paris, Lewis lamented them in a manner similar to Edmund Burke’s tragic view in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The poem is too long to quote in full, but the following excerpts juxtapose the angel Freedom’s dismay at the revolutionary events in France with her love of England. It reveals some interesting connections to Monvel’s revolutionary play: Now for awhile [Freedom] bends her loathing sight, Where rear the Temple’s Walls their massy height, Whose threatening horrors, scowling o’er the scene, Hold in their embrace a Captive Queen. Amidst these glooms profound, these frowning Towers, Sad Antoinette consumes the fearful hours, And mourns the day, She left the Austrian climes, To hear her thoughtless errors taxed as crimes. Scorned as a Sovereign, Slandered as a Wife, Almost debarred the coarse support of life, Wasted with agony, with sickness weak, On her fair hand she rests her faded cheek, While her stern Jailors gaze with eyes of stone, And taunting mock the tear, or chide the groan. . . . Touched, yet disgusted at the mournful sight, The Angel turned, and saw with true delight, Dear to her heart and pleasant to her eyes,

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Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 The glittering Cliffs of sea-girt Albion rise. With love maternal o’er the Isle she hung; The burst of fondness faltered on her tongue; And in her eyes while rapture’s sun-beam played, In sounds melodious thus at length She said. – ‘Flourish, fair Island, long my favourite State, Parent of all that’s good, of all that’s great, Where Liberty’s true Fire its light displays; But not that fatal, that deluding Blaze, Which, like the gleams by Lamps in Churches shed, Shine but to show the reliques of the Dead: . . . Here every subject’s free; Here Kings possess No power to hurt, and every power to bless; And Liberty herself is forced to say, ’Tis sweet to rule, who willingly obey.’29

In this poem, Lewis seemingly juxtaposes a sentimental lamentation for France’s ‘Captive Queen’ Marie Antoinette to ‘sea-girt Albion’, ‘Where Liberty’s true Fire its light displays’. England becomes the enlightened preserver of freedom, whereas France is transformed into an extended cemetery. The ‘slaughtered Myriads’ thronging ‘the court of Death’ provide particularly Gothic images of Lewis’s view of the unfolding events in France. Whereas in 1791 Boutet de Monvel could yet promote an optimistic view of the King of France’s future, by 1793, the execution of the king in January and the imprisonment of Marie Antoinette in the Temple Prison (until her later execution in October of that year) linked Paris with particularly Gothic scenes of carnage. Lewis clearly deplored the bloodshed. Amidst the sepulchral imagery of France that haunts ‘France and England in 1793’, however, Lewis does find the space to criticise Marie Antoinette’s ‘thoughtless errors’, later reflecting that in Britain by contrast ‘Kings possess / No power to hurt’. A closer look at the precise phraseology of Lewis’s rendition of Britain’s own limitation of sovereign power reveals, in fact, some interesting connections to Monvel’s earlier definition of the new role of kingship. If we recall, in Les Victimes cloîtrées M. de Francheville asserts that the King of France has conserved the ability to ‘faire le bien’ and thus has retained his power. In ‘France and England in 1793’ Lewis qualifies his own insights upon the limitations of British sovereignty by asserting that kings possess ‘every power to bless’. ‘Liberty’ is further ‘forced’ to admit that ‘’Tis sweet to rule, who willingly obey’. In Lewis’s vision, then, Liberty becomes compelled to qualify the sentimental lamentation for the Queen of France, and is ‘forced to say’ that ruling

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must always be tempered with obeisance. Of course, this celebration of Britain’s limitation of sovereignty accords with the Whiggish view of liberty in England, and had been rehearsed far earlier by Muralt and Voltaire in particular, but the terminological parallels between Monvel’s 1791 celebration of revolutionary ideals and Lewis’s qualified view of British liberty are too striking to ignore. It suggests that Lewis borrowed Monvel’s revolutionary defence in order to justify the King of England’s rightful limitations. As I shall further argue later in this chapter, Lewis’s reprisal of Boutet de Monvel’s play in his own drama Venoni also suggests an ongoing preoccupation not so much with the sexual potential of the play as with its rational promotion of moderate revolution. We cannot argue that Lewis’s private and cautious celebration of British liberty in ‘France and England in 1793’ remained constant. During his posting as Ambassador to the Hague in 1794, where he completed The Monk, it is possible to detect early signs of disillusionment with the aggressive military stance adopted by his own nation. There Lewis befriended many French émigrés, and conversed with them frequently upon the political situation. Writing again to his mother, he noted: ‘The French are adored wherever they go, while the allied forces are execrated and detested. In truth, I am sorry to confess that no ravages more wanton and unjustifiable were ever committed in the annals of war, than have been perpetrated by all the combined army, and more particularly by the English.’30 Lewis admitted this, and composed his poem ‘France and England in 1793’ just as the War of the First Coalition (1793–7) was unfurling. French armies were drumming up opposition to Britain on the continent, with Austria and Britain eventually being forced out of the Low Countries, and Holland finally declaring war on Britain. William Pitt would later justify Britain’s brutal campaign by admitting that he ‘had hopes of our being able to put together the scattered fragments of that great and venerable edifice [the French monarchy] in the stead of that mad system which threatened the destruction of Europe’.31 His ideological justification of this War of the First Coalition did not, however, convince witnesses who had first-hand experience of the ravages that it caused. These witnesses included Ann Radcliffe, who, as I discussed in the previous chapter, observed the brutal consequences of the British campaign during her Journey along ‘the western frontier of Germany’, and Lewis himself, during his posting in the Hague. The evidence of Lewis’s unpublished poem and letter in particular complicate Markman Ellis’s argument that Lewis’s view of revolutionary France was ‘that of a loyal Briton, to some extent distanced from, and critical of, unfolding events’.32 As I shall later argue, the view of Lewis’s loyalty

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and his objective distance from the revolution becomes all the more difficult to sustain if we consider Lewis’s career beyond his 1796 publication of The Monk. Lewis’s sources of French inspiration in The Monk are predominantly contemporaneous, and composed in the contexts of the French Revolution. While anti-clerical French drama exerted a continued fascination over him, the same also holds true for his engagement in The Monk with the Marquis de Sade’s tale Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu. This, as I have charted elsewhere, was a second reprisal of the monastic theme by Sade.33 In Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, Sade transformed what had been a short philosophical tale in its first unpublished form, Les Infortunes de la Vertu, into what Béatrice Didier rightly views as Gothic owing to its addition of underground cells, macabre settings and dreams.34 In the Gothic transformation of his tale, Sade himself was inspired by the explosion of anti-monastical plays upon the French stage. Besides the titles that I have already listed above, more overtly critical titles such as Thiémets’s Les Moines gourmands of 1791 competed for attention against overtly sentimentalised titles such as Dubois-Fontanelle’s Ericie ou la Vestale and Baculard d’Arnaud’s Euphémie ou Le Triomphe de la Religion.35 Sade’s brutal attack upon the institutional abuses of religion – and more particularly the ancien régime’s blind eye towards the abusive and gluttonous liberties of the Catholic Church  – produced an uncomfortable generic blend of Gothic, comedic and sentimentalised elements that were also a dietary staple of the revolutionary anti-clerical plays. The Gothic enhancement of Sade’s tale, with underground cells and grotesque corpses, also bears parallels with some of Lewis’s own scenarios, with the sepulchral location of Antonia’s rape by Ambrosio resembling the underground seraglio in Saint Marie-des-Bois, the monastery where Sade’s heroine Justine is raped and tortured. Playing upon the sentimentalisation of the heroine, Sade further extended the title of his second iteration to Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu. By yoking the heroine’s name to the misfortunes of virtue he produced an uneasy equation between heroinism and misfortune. While virtue in distress was not a theme that was by any means new to Sade in 1791, the cynicism that underscored his symbiosis of heroinism and misfortune was.36 Lewis too was influenced by Sade’s cynicism in his destabilisation of the reader’s expectations of the heroine Antonia. The first chapter of The Monk, for example, which introduces her as the heroine of the romance, concludes with a prophecy of her demise. The ‘Gypsy’s Song’ counsels Antonia, ‘Rather, with submission bending, Calmly wait

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distress impending, / And expect eternal bliss / In a better world than this.’37 Although Antonia immediately forgets the gypsy’s words, ‘submission’ quite precisely characterises her disposition throughout the novel, linking her closely with the naivety and unquestioning belief in virtue that proves the undoing of Sade’s heroine Justine. Despite both authors’ obsession with the libertine potential of monasteries, it is important, I think, to forge a distinction between their hostility to institutionalised forms of religion and the anti-Catholicism of which Lewis in particular so often stands accused.38 For one of the most striking elements which link the works of Sade and Lewis is their destabilisation of religious iconography. The uncomfortable visual connections that they forge between their heroines and the Madonna seek to upset the assumptions of their readership, rather than criticise Catholic devotion per se. Lewis’s The Monk signals its participation in a complicit spectat­ orial discourse on the very opening page where an audience is gathered at the Church of the Capuchins to hear Ambrosio preach: Scarcely had the Abbey-Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled from motives of piety or thirst of information … The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women: Some were attracted by curiosity to hear an Orator so celebrated; Some came because they had no better means of employing their time till the play began; Some, from being assured that it would be impossible to find places in the Church; and one half of Madrid was brought thither by expecting to see the other half.39

By foregrounding at the very beginning of the romance heady, unstable connections between female beauty, male desire and religion, Lewis’s tale immediately establishes the themes that it wishes to interrogate. The narrator’s stark honesty at such an early juncture in the novel provides a sharp contrast to the characters’ own dissemblance about the reasons for their devotion. It also forces the reader into a passive position where there is no mystery to be discovered. Everything is on display in The Monk: sexual desire, hypocrisy and naivety are all handed to the reader on a plate, forcing the reader into a spectatorial position. If ‘male Gothic’, as Robert Miles argues, is defined through its obsession with the visual, then this surely must be the epitome of it.40 Lewis’s position here, however, goes further than merely making his audience uncomfortable voyeurs. Despite his novel’s deliberate self-description as ‘A Romance’, his immediate strategy of stark honesty makes this anything but one. He participates in Sade’s project of ‘revealing all’ and taking revelatory desire

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to its extreme and brutal conclusions. This is quite the opposite of the chivalric re-endorsement of romance which the work of Clara Reeve and the later works of Radcliffe promoted; the audience is instead told not to ‘encourage the idea’ that anyone would attend this sermon through piety or the desire to learn. The Monk’s revelatory opening bears comparison with Sade’s second edition, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu of 1791. Justine as first-person narrator is coaxed by her otherwise silent auditors at one point in the narrative to continue her story of all the horrors that have been forced upon her. Her heroine’s delicacy forces her to pause and consider the effects of the story upon her audience. However, the audience, comprising her libertine sister Juliette and her lover de Corville, urges her to tell all: But how can I abuse your patience by relating these new horrors? Have I not already more than soiled your imagination with infamous recitations? Dare I hazard additional ones? ‘Yes …’ Monsieur de Corville put in, ‘yes, we insist upon these details, you veil them with a decency that removes their edge of horror.’41

Each minute detail of libertinism, horror and misfortune must be recounted in Sade’s novel and, contrary to de Corville’s praise, Justine’s narrative does not gloss over the horror of the repeated violations. Although Justine has reservations about revealing everything, in contrast to Lewis’s later anonymous narrator, the reader of both tales is nonetheless compelled to adopt the same prurient role, having been duly warned by the narrators of the horrors that will be unveiled. In relation to The Monk, David Punter has demonstrated how Lewis ‘tries constantly to challenge his audience, to upset its security, to give the reader a moment of doubt about whether he may not himself be guilty of the complicated faults attributed to Ambrosio’.42 Punter’s argument is just as relevant to Sade’s Justine, where complacency is never allowed to settle before another brutally voyeuristic narrative is laid before us. The techniques of both the French and the English author go against the grain of the sentimental and romance traditions, and do, I think, distinguish their works from the atmospherically similar tale Laura. While the earlier epistolary tale was published only one year earlier than Sade’s Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, it continues to rely upon the sentimentalisation of its heroine in a manner that is distinct from that of Sade’s and Lewis’s attacks upon the very status of heroinism. Lewis’s suspicion of heroines, furthermore, makes it all the more difficult to read the sentimental lamentation for Marie Antoinette in his poem ‘France and England in 1793’ in any straightforward way. Exactly contemporaneous with his composition of

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The Monk, this poem may instead have sought to parody Burke’s chivalrous idolatry of Marie Antoinette. If Sade and Lewis’s narrative techniques are both brutally revelatory, then their portrayal of their heroines is similarly so. At the beginning of both works, Lewis and Sade immediately create pictorial images of their heroines which establish them as modest, virginal, religiously devout and naive. Such textual characterisations are of course knowingly situated within the eighteenth-century literary tradition which equated feminine beauty and distress. In Les Malheurs de la vertu, Justine’s first-person narrative is deliberately too aware of the effect that her distress has on her male persecutors. In one place, for example, she describes the effect that her distress has on the monk Antonin: ‘The violence of my movements had disturbed what veiled my breast, it was naked, my dishevelled hair fell in cascades upon it, it was wetted thoroughly by my tears; I quicken desires in the dishonest man.’43 Justine’s self-diagnosis creates a tableau of distressed beauty which is knowingly eroticised. The knowing eroticisation of Sade’s tableau reveals the tale’s extensive French literary heritage. Denis Diderot, for example, had been satirising convents throughout his writing career. He compared convents with prisons as early as 1746 in his Pensées philosophiques, and published La Religieuse in serial instalments between 1780 and 1782.44 Its readership at the time of its initial serial publication would have been relatively small, but when it was finally published as a full work in October of 1796, it was an instant sensation. If not Lewis, then at the least Sade would have been aware of its early serialised form. Like Sade’s later Justine, Diderot’s nun Suzanne Simonin is aware of the effect that she has on her male persecutors. She even admits to some complicity upon her part, stating, ‘Je suis une femme, peut-être un peu coquette, que sais-je?’45 In her knowing admission of the desire that she inspires in her persecutors, Suzanne appears in many ways to be the literary precursor to Sade’s Justine, and, by literary consequence, to Lewis’s characterisations of Antonia and Matilda. She provides the model for the critique of institutionalised religion which haunt both Sade and Lewis’s portrayals of the depraved conventual space. Reviewing the English translation of Diderot’s work – The Nun – in 1797, William Taylor caustically observed: ‘This original and impressive novel will probably have a great effect in rendering it disreputable for catholic parents to immure their children in convents.’46 Lewis’s novel could not and did not escape so lightly as the translation of the French author’s work. While a translation of a French work might be praised for its originality at the same time that it was chastised for its lack

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of ‘chastity’, an English work that conveyed similar scenarios could not. If by any measure Lewis was a ‘loyal Briton’ up until 1796, then surely his loyalty must have been tested by the sensational reaction to The Monk. Buoyed by the relatively benign and well-disposed reception of such periodicals as the Monthly Review, from the second edition onwards, Lewis signed himself as ‘M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P.’ As Michael Gamer notes, it was ‘[t]he small flourish of these two final letters’ that ‘cost Lewis so dearly’.47 Writing for the Critical Review, Samuel Taylor Coleridge tempered his absolute censure of Lewis’s biblical blasphemy in The Monk with praise for his management of the parallel narratives. Coleridge objected to the ‘blending, with an irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion with all that is most ridiculously absurd in superstition’, as well as to the text’s ‘libidinous minuteness’. Clara Tuite has argued that the fear lying behind Coleridge’s interpretation ‘attests to the fear that nominal Anglicanism, the awfully true … religion,’ cannot be distinguished from Catholicism, identified with ‘superstition’.48 Certainly, this holds true for the wider anxieties surrounding the Gothic, or the literature of terror, where the exodus of priests from France, such as the Jesuit Abbé Augustin Barruel (to whom I referred in Chapter 3), were linked to a particular rhetoric of Gothicism and superstition. While Diderot’s novel condemned the gallic practice of ‘parents immuring their offspring in convents’ unambiguously from a French perspective, the Englishman Lewis’s perceived conflation of biblical morality and superstition were deemed unacceptable. Clearly, any contamination of England’s Protestant values by the rhetoric of superstition was viewed with considerable hostility, not only by Coleridge, but also by periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine, and satirists such as Thomas Mathias and George Canning. Lewis’s acknowledged authorship of The Monk illustrated that superstition had not only contaminated English compositions, but that it had also contaminated the body politic. Coleridge reserved his coup de grâce until the very end of his review, where he made specific reference to Lewis’s parliamentary status: ‘Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a Legislator! We stare and tremble.’49 His rebuke of Lewis’s position as ‘legislator’ was swiftly augmented by Thomas James Mathias. In the Preface to his fourth volume of The Pursuits of Literature, produced in July 1797, Mathias compounded the attack: But there is one publication of the time too peculiar, and too important to be passed over in a general reprehension. There is nothing with which it may be compared. A legislator in our own parliament, a member of the House of Commons of Great Britain, an elected guardian and defender of the laws, the religion, and the good manners of the country, has neither

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scrupled nor blushed to depict, and to publish to the world, the arts of lewd and systematick seduction, and to thrust upon the nation the most open and unqualified blasphemy against the very code and volume of our religion. And all this, with his name, style, and title, prefixed to the novel or romance called ‘THE MONK’.50

By prefacing his condemnation of Lewis with his own protracted definition of the duties of an MP, Mathias carefully crafted his invective. The accreted definitions of the correct composition of the body politic  – as both guardian and defender of Britain’s legal and cultural statutes – paved the way for the following daring challenge: Who does not know, that he is a member of Parliament? … we can feel that it is an object of moral and of national reprehension, when a Senator openly and daringly violates his first duty to his country. There are wounds, and obstructions, and diseases in the political, as well as in the natural, body, for which the removal of the part affected is alone efficacious.51

Mathias then went on to accuse Lewis of ‘state parricide’, and to suggest that he should be brought to trial for his publication on the charge of obscenity. Some speculation remains as to whether Mathias’s encouragement of the Attorney General Sir John Scott succeeded. As Michael Gamer notes, Margaret Baron-Wilson (Lewis’s first biographer) recorded that ‘[t]he Attorney-general was actually instructed’ whereas his more recent biographers Louis F. Peck and André Parreaux are more cautious on the matter. The consensus, however, is that there must have been some relatively direct threat to Lewis’s position for him to have bowdlerised the fourth edition of his novel so extensively.52 This is further supported by Mathias’s later direct reference in a footnote to ‘the third Edition of The Monk. Three editions of this novel have been circulated through the kingdom, without any alteration whatsoever. This must never be forgotten.’53 While Mathias’s ominous warning may have provoked the changes that Lewis decided to make, it is equally possible that the seeds for the transformation were already planted in the second edition of Lewis’s romance. Mathias was not quite correct in his assertion that Lewis had altered nothing, for as early as the second edition of The Monk, still published in 1796, Lewis appended a curious passage to the end of his tale. Rather than finishing upon the sensational vision of the damned monk Ambrosio being torn to death, the emended conclusion shifted the emphasis to a more abstract message about tolerance: Haughty Lady, why shrunk you back when yon poor frail one drew near? Was the air infected by her errors? Was your purity soiled by her passing

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Composed prior to the published condemnations of Coleridge and Mathias, this appended conclusion moves the reader from the final visceral contemplation of Ambrosio’s mangled corpse to a homily upon mercy and toleration. The allusions to ‘infected’ air and ‘soiled’ purity are immediately suggestive of two things. First, the suffering, scorned lady could be the figure of Agnes di Medina, who has transgressed within the romance, but who is offered ‘mercy’ at the end of the romance. This defence of her suggests that Lewis the author was more compassionate towards her than critics such as Mortensen allow.55 On a more symbolic level, however, the adjectival references to infection and soiling bring to mind the increasingly hysterical lexis of contamination that accompanied fears of cultural and military invasion from France.56 Mathias’s rhetorical challenge, ‘Is this a time to poison the waters of our land in their springs and fountains?’, is entirely symptomatic of this increasing hysteria.57 Although Mathias’s condemnation came after Lewis had appended this passage, it was perhaps in anticipation of such condemnation, and as a reflection upon the increasingly judgemental discourse surrounding French imports, that Lewis chose to add what is both a plea for tolerance and a censure of severe judgement. The ‘state parricide’ of which Lewis stood accused in 1797 was a far cry from his earlier youthful encomium of Britain’s cherished liberty. The mounting critical frenzy surrounding the publication of The Monk severely compromised his literary and political careers. In letters to his father, Lewis pleaded that he could not be aware of the furore that would erupt. He tried to plead for paternal clemency, highlighting the substantial cuts that he made to later editions of his tale. Lewis’s own annotations to the third edition bitterly record his feelings; beside a footnote to his ‘Imitation of Horace’, he remarks of his work with considerable acerbity, ‘Neglected it has not been, but criticised enough of all conscience.’58 He also revisits the issue of undeserved censure in the Preface to his 1801 drama Adelmorn, the outlaw, where he refers to his ‘apprenticeship to patience, under the attacks of the most uncandid criticism, unmitigated censure, and exaggerating misrepresentation’.59 It is in the context of this critical furore that we must read Lewis’s later literary output, and the changes that are detectable in his patriotic

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position. In his work upon Gothic and genre, Michael Gamer perceptively argues that the legal threat of prosecution for the publication of The Monk affected not only Lewis, but ‘the gothic’s cultural status and trajectory for most of the nineteenth century’.60 The Gothic’s numerous counterfeiting strategies had been partially exposed by Mathias, for what lay barely articulated at the heart of his outraged response to The Monk was not so much the obscenity itself, but the gallic origins of that obscenity. Descending from a particularly French tradition which combined sexual desire so potently with revolutionary anti-monasticism, The Monk’s authorship by a Member of Parliament at the height of the Anglo-French crisis could not be sanctioned. Lewis had commenced The Monk prior to the outbreak of war in 1793, but its prolonged incubation cost him dearly in terms of his reputation and future career as an author. It affected both Lewis’s writing career, influencing his decision to experiment more with different forms of writing, such as drama and translation, and other authors’ engagements with the Gothic. While writing in the Gothic mode persisted, and was relatively successful, with Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell and Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine both being published in 1798, the level of satire and invective against the Gothic rose significantly. ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ and ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’ were both composed in 1797, to be published in 1798. These were soon joined by publications such as The Scots Magazine’s ‘On Romances and Novels, and the proper employment of the time of the fair sex’, and its later targeted excoriation of The Monk, ‘On Novels and Romances’.61 An Epistle in Rhyme, to M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P. sought in 1798 to calm the critical storm that had erupted so quickly. Its first edition was anonymised, but its author was Henry Soame who, as Parreaux notes, chose to reveal his authorship in subsequent editions.62 Published after Lewis’s bowdlerisation of his romance and the diversion of his career into play-writing with The Castle Spectre, the overt aim of these verses was the critical resurrection of Lewis’s literary career. The Castle Spectre had not been received any better than The Monk, with the Analytical Review considering it ‘humiliating to the pride of our national taste’.63 As early as line five, Soame praised the escapist merits of The Monk: Thanks for a respite from Affliction’s pow’r, And many a sorrow hush’d for many an hour! Oft has my sick’ning fancy found relief From nearer woes in fair Antonia’s grief; And trac’d, forgetful of my own the while, Ambrosio’s wand’rings and the tempter’s guile.64

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The opening panegyric to romance’s consolatory potential was emphatic, if relatively brief. This was quickly succeeded by an encomium of Lewis’s youthful, studious and cosmopolitan talents that took the poem in a more immediately political direction. Lewis’s talents, significantly, were drawn in stark contrast to the dissipation that characterised other young British men who had travelled as extensively as the young author: Well hast thou travell’d, to redeem our youth From random censure, past in scorn of truth; That Britain’s affluent sons, to all her foes, Where’er they roam, their native soil expose; In thriftless rambles dissipate their time, And ev’ry folly cull of ev’ry clime. To this effect, how many an apt remark, (Pronounc’d by layman shrewd or learned clerk) Of candour and profound research the fruit, Thine age, thy talents, and thy hopes refute! For thou, throughout thy various course, hast caught Each striking feature, each impressive thought; From dark Teutonic lore, terrific grace; An easy stile, from Gallia’s lively race; Hast sought in Boccace a reprieve from care, Or learnt to dote, with Petrarch, on despair.65

While the comportment of ‘Britain’s affluent sons’ abroad exposed their nation to ridicule by its enemies, Lewis by contrast was praised for his industry and ability to ‘capture’ the best literary and linguistic characteristics from France and Italy. The poet thus transformed Lewis’s continental borrowings into a patriotic enterprise, implying through the use of the verb ‘caught’ that Lewis had all but taken as literary hostage the best attributes from France, Italy and Teutonic lore. For this, he was praised as the perfect epitome of the young British statesman. The discernment and dexterity with which Lewis exploited his continental sources, suggested Soame, was also in stark contrast to the ‘mongrel phrase’, ‘tri-coloured language’ and attempt to ‘revolutionize our parts of speech’ by unspecified journalists with revolutionary inclinations. In a Byzantine footnote worthy of Thomas Mathias himself, Soame deplored the numerous Gallicisms that were contaminating Britain’s newspapers. The corruption of ‘plain English’ was firmly laid at the door of ‘the ignorance or haste of translators’, with the following example offered: ‘John Bull was heretofore accustomed to hear of troops marching to the sea side, but he is now informed that armies destined for his annihilation are ordered

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to the coasts of the ocean, and so on ad infinitum.’66 A lack of economy in prose-writing, he argued, was symptomatic of contamination by French bombast. This ‘barbarism of expression’, in its turn, becomes inseparable from its root cause, ‘Jacobin barbarity of sentiment’.67 What, then, commenced as a laudatory apostrophe to Lewis’s dexterous manipulation of numerous continental sources soon transformed into a crusade against Jacobin journalists’ importation of French politics and language. Although the epistle explicitly attempted to counteract that ‘violent outcry raised against the immorality of The Monk’, it borrowed the terms of its argument against translators and journalists from anti-Jacobin commentators such as Mathias and Canning.68 Up until this point, Matthew Lewis had transformed and reworked continental sources within his work. Clearly, this was seen as being quite distinct from the translation of other continental authors’ work. This was the crux of Soame’s defence of Lewis. While Lewis was employed in adapting and ‘capturing’ what was best from continental literature, he was in fact exercising his patriotic duty as a Briton. His industry and discernment were qualities to be admired in an Englishman. What Lewis had done, in Soame’s eyes, was quite distinct from the anonymous translational impostures and the undiscerning, literal translations of certain journalists who were contaminating the literary and political realms of Britain. The subtle distinction forged between the discerning appropriation of continental sources and the translation of them in Soame’s Epistle in Rhyme did not deter Lewis from later becoming more open about the French sources of his works. Furthermore, as his literary career progressed, his textual practices transformed. They became less covert both through their acknowledgement of specific textual sources and their frank acknowledgements that they were translations. Thematically, there was a further transformation in Lewis’s practice. Whereas ‘France and England in 1793’ was written as a private contemplation upon the rightful bournes of sovereignty, and the more revolutionary themes of The Monk were carefully encoded, bitter experience taught Lewis to care far less about what critics thought of him. What emerges instead from Lewis’s later work is a more prominent and outspoken engagement with the merits of mercy and toleration. By the 1800s, as his Preface to Adelmorn illustrates, Lewis was able to break his silence upon his treatment at the hands of England’s critics. It is within these contexts that he chose to revisit Les Victimes cloîtrées, the revolutionary French play that he had first read while in Paris in 1791. Why might Lewis choose to revisit Boutet de Monvel’s play Les Victimes cloîtrées and translate a version of it for his 1809 Venoni; or, The Novice of

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St Mark’s? We know from his letters that Lewis contemplated translating it as early as 1791, but he put it aside in favour of other projects at that early stage in his career. Upon revisiting it in 1809, Lewis chose to transpose the scene from France to Sicily, removing the portrayal of extreme Catholicism from post-revolutionary France to a more marked feudal, Catholic location. This geographical and religious remoteness, however, did not transmute the play into an attack upon anti-Catholicism, or an attack upon the democratic ideals of the French Revolution. The reasons for Lewis’s decision to transform the location and some characterisations are explained quite clearly. In the Preface to Venoni, Lewis for once admitted his indebtedness to a French source, stating: This Drama is in a great measure translated from a French play in four acts, called ‘Les Victimes cloitrees’. The principal alteration consisted in the Viceroy’s character, who in the original was a Republican Mayor, whose sentiments and conduct were by no means adapted to the present times or to the British taste; this character, therefore, I was obliged to new-model entirely.69

Lewis’s reasons for new-modelling the republican mayor are tailored to what he believes are the present ‘British taste’, a British taste which had condemned his work for blasphemy, and which was even more hostile by 1809 to the ideals of the French Revolution. By 1809, the short-lived 1802 Treaty of Amiens was already a distant memory, and the level of anti-French sentiment had escalated quite considerably. As discussed earlier, whereas Monvel’s republican mayor Monsieur de Francheville challenges the libertine Father Laurent quite specifically about the values of the ancien régime in Act ii scene 4, in his version Lewis diplomatically substitutes an aristocratic viceroy, who urges the grief-stricken Venoni not to take vows and surrender his wealth to the church. Lewis’s viceroy tries to persuade Venoni that ‘[y]our country has a right to your services’. In place of religion, his speech argues that there is virtue in civic activity, and in using one’s wealth for the benefit of others. Lewis’s characterisation of the viceroy endorses an ethic of civic virtue, but again, this emphasis upon ‘doing good’ or what Monvel called ‘faire le bien’ is not so far removed from the original as one may initially imagine. This is not the only modification that Lewis made to Monvel’s original. At the very end of the play, when the two young lovers are reunited, Lewis adds a crucial argument between the good father Michael (who assists Venoni in escaping from the clutches of the evil prior), the Viceroy and Venoni himself. Upon the safe liberation of the two young

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lovers, the Viceroy is incredulous at Father Michael’s intention to persist with monastic life in some more ‘virtuous fraternity’: FATHER MICHAEL: – Ah! forbear, my Lord, nor brand a whole profession with disgrace, because some few of its professors have been faulty … ’tis not the habit but the heart, ’tis not the name he bears but the principles he has imbibed, which make men the blessing or reproach of human-nature.  – Virtue and Vice reside equally in Courts and Convents, and a heart may beat as purely and as nobly beneath the Monk’s scapulary, as beneath the ermine of the judge, or the breast-plate of the warrior. VENONI: The good Friar says right, my friend – then let us scorn to bow beneath the force of vulgar prejudice, and fold to our hearts as brethren in one large embrace men of all ranks, all faiths, and all professions. The monk and the Soldier, the Protestant and the Papist, the Mendicant and the Prince, let us believe them all alike to be virtuous till we know them to be criminal, and engrave on our hearts, and the first and noblest rule of moral duty and of human justice, those blessed words, ‘BE TOLERANT!’70

The inclusion of this final exchange moves Lewis’s Venoni beyond the confines of the anti-monastic revolutionary play. It does not involve the lovers at all, but the two characters who represent Protestant and Catholic values. Father Laurent, the evil prior, becomes the corrupt representative, of what can, in the hands of morally good practitioners such as Father Michael, be a fundamentally sound institution – the Catholic church. The hierarchy that Father Michael establishes in his defence privileges principles over names, virtuous intent over religion. Rather pointedly, one suspects, courts and convents are placed upon a level playing field in matters of ‘virtue and vice’. Father Michael’s repeated allusion to the symbols of justice – courts and ‘the ermine of the judge’ – makes this final play of Lewis carry a particularly strong ideological message. Lewis’s experience at the hands of Mathias, and possibly the British legal system, made him loath to award any hierarchical privilege to British justice. In this conclusion to the play, the previously apathetic, disinterested Venoni becomes the benign Protestant who extends his tolerance beyond the issues of religious faith alone to men of ‘all ranks, all faiths, all professions’. ‘Moral duty’ and ‘human justice’ supplant any juridical or clerical base in his final exhortation to the audience to ‘BE TOLERANT!’ Lewis’s modification to Monvel’s original play undermines a rich and persistent vein of criticism which focuses upon Matthew Lewis’s anti-Catholicism.71 This vein of criticism has recently been challenged by Maria Purves, who describes the ending of Venoni as ‘less Jacobin, more sympathetic towards Catholicism’.72 The ‘tolerance’ which the Viceroy and

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Father Michael conclude by embracing together, however, applies both to religious faiths and, crucially, courts of justice. Lewis’s reprisal of Monvel’s 1791 drama in 1809 illustrated how the extremes of any belief, Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise, the exploitation of any system – clerical or juridical  – were fundamentally against the grain of ‘human duty’. Lewis resurrected his own modified version of Les Victimes cloitrées to explore his own fall from critical grace in England, precipitated by the forces of anti-Jacobin extremism. In so doing, he also sharpened a latent theme in his writing, that the individual must bear responsibility towards the institution that he represents. Thomas Mathias’s hyperbolic Protestant attack upon Lewis had been misplaced; Mathias exploited religious and literary differences in order to manipulate the English justice system to try Lewis for obscenity. Lewis’s most open response to Mathias’s assault came in Venoni. While he had exhibited a preference for the marketable and moral potential of drama in his compositions since The Monk, Venoni offered him the opportunity to crystallise his political, religious and moral positions as well as his condemnation of Mathias. Theatre held the potential for melodramatic didacticism. In order to show the evils attendant upon an individual’s manipulation of the institution, Lewis could invoke what Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination calls ‘moral absolutes’.73 Lewis’s movement away from the form of the romance was not limited to his many successful dramatic excursions. In his collection Romantic Tales of 1808 Lewis finally decided to publish his translation of one of Count Anthony Hamilton’s fairy tales, Les Quatre Facardins, which Hamilton had written in the style of Oriental tales. Louis F. Peck notes that ‘Lewis had made the translation years before and had originally intended it for publication by Bell’, but is unable to offer a reason as to why Lewis chose not to publish it.74 The hostile climate for translational ventures in the 1790s may have been one reason; another reason may have lain in an attempt to maintain distance both from the gallic wit of Anthony Hamilton, and from his ‘Gothic’ predecessor Walpole, who had also republished Hamilton. Lewis’s Preface to Romantic Tales showed evidence of increasing indifference to critical opinion. He freely admitted that he found it ‘difficult to point out exactly, what portion of the following work is my individual property’.75 His version of The Four Facardins was certainly creative, for he added a new conclusion to Hamilton’s tale, but otherwise his translation remained relatively true to the spirit of the original.76 Despite Lewis’s due care, the Critical Review derided The Four Facardins as a ‘farrago of nonsense’.77 A much later invitation to participate in reprinting and composing a sequel

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to Hamilton’s tale in the Hamilton collection Fairy Tales and Romances, however, also offered Lewis the opportunity to defend Hamilton’s original compositions, and to theorise himself about the potential of romance. This opportunity in fact firmed up a latent theme in Lewis’s own novelistic practice. In a Preface to his sequel, Lewis wrote: It has been asserted that Hamilton’s tales were written with the intention of turning the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ into ridicule, they having been just published, and in the highest possible favour at court; but this I do not for one moment believe. The Arabian Nights unquestionably gave rise to the ‘Four Facardins’ … but that their author wished to undervalue a production which had for many ages formed the delight of a nation more witty than civilised, and the very incorrect version of which holds an honourable place in the libraries of every European nation, is by no means probable. Hamilton had too much good taste not to appreciate the merit of a work in which we find all the luxuriance of the Eastern imagination, so much more fervid than our own, with the striking simplicity of the early ages. I know no person who has not read, and read again with pleasure, the ‘Wonderful Lamp’ and the ‘Three Hunchbacks of Baghdad’. This, however, would not prevent Hamilton from ridiculing the infatuation of the ladies of the court, who, with their usual exaggeration, unquestionably preferred the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ to all books past, present and to come; but far from vilipending this work, he has sought to imitate it; and the close study of his tales proves, that the object of his pleasantry was not the fictions of Asia, but our own western inventions, monstrous romances of chivalry, and the great romances which followed them.78

This Preface confirms Lewis’s scepticism of tales of chivalry, and more generally of the western origins of romance. Here he argues that Anthony Hamilton was in fact imitating the Oriental example of the Arabian Nights and not, as commentators believed, lampooning them. Lewis contends that Hamilton was satirising European romances of chivalry, and working in a similar vein to Cervantes’s satirisation of romance’s conventions of knights and damsels in Don Quixote. He argues that in Don Quixote, ‘the shafts of ridicule are principally directed against the chimerical prowess of knights and giants; and our author has rather sought to produce ridicule from the stilted sentiments which our romance writers attributed to their illustrious personages, and the prodigious power they assigned to the charms of their ladies’.79 His analysis of Hamilton’s literary aims bears parallels, I think, with what The Monk itself was aiming to do. Despite its parodic self-labelling as ‘A Romance’, Lewis’s The Monk aimed to interrogate the ‘stilted sentiments’ ascribed to ‘knights’ and ‘the charms of their

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ladies’ by overturning on its first page the reader’s expectations of the conventions of romance. Like his fellow authors Walpole, Reeve, Smith, Lee and Radcliffe, then, Lewis exhibited a strong interest both in events in France and in the contingent values of romance to reflect those events. These he engaged with through the works of French authors such as Hamilton, Sade and Boutet de Monvel. In spite of the different authors and experiences that Lewis encountered and explored, the conclusions that he reached about the form of the romance were not so dramatically different from those of his predecessors. Whereas Lewis’s bitter experiences enabled him to become more transparent about the sources of his French inspiration, his translational practices, opinions upon tolerance, and views on the limitations of chivalry and the European form of romance bear remarkable similarities to Radcliffe’s reluctant recourse to pure romance in Gaston de Blondeville. There, Radcliffe could not offer a positive model of chivalry, nor a heroine of ‘prodigious power’. Perhaps both authors concluded that the potential of European romance was fading in what the Marquis de Sade infamously referred to as ‘this age of iron’.

Afterlives

We made these strangers our bosom friends, our confidential servants; we borrowed their artists and their arts, and despised the honest simplicity and hardihood with which our brave ancestors supported themselves, and we became enervated by Norman arts long ere we fell under Norman arms. Far better was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror! (Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 1820)

In 1964, Maurice Lévy prefaced his study of French influence upon Ann Radcliffe’s fiction with the following apologia: It is not without some scruple that we propose to add the small novel by Madame de Tencin to the already well-established list of sources which Ann Radcliffe exploited in the course of her brief, but prolific literary career. Research on literary antecedents for so slight a work as A Sicilian Romance (1790) may appear vain and devoid of interest: who reads nowadays one or the other of these sentimental tales? Besides, with copyright in the 18th century bearing no resemblance to what it is today, we’re no closer to finishing the game of tracking down memories or borrowings to their source.1

Lévy’s admirably frank interrogation of the value of studies of influence draws attention to the eighteenth century as a particularly fecund century of cross-channel exchange. His argument, that the fluidity of literary ownership means that it is almost impossible to chart the course of Anglo-French influence, surprises nonetheless. From the 1790s to the present day, criticism by and large has ignored the formative influence of French works upon Radcliffe, instead insisting upon her properly patriotic position as ‘the Shak[]spear of Romance writers’.2 On the whole, Radcliffe escaped the type of literary censure that so vituperatively pursued her imitators. But if influences only truly ‘awaken’ what is there already, as André Gide argued in his important lecture ‘Concerning Influence in Literature’, 147

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what we detect from Radcliffe’s influences tells us much about her attitude towards France in an atmosphere of increasing francophobia.3 Her increasing unwillingness to acknowledge her sources, as the 1790s progressed, guaranteed her ongoing success in a periodical press whose escalating nationalism increasingly scorned anything borrowed from France. Writers during the Romantic period were more proficient in both recognising and appreciating the perils of national attribution. Although William Wordsworth named only Germany as a source of literary contamination in Britain in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the spectre of France’s legacy loomed large. The threat to ‘the discriminating powers of the mind’ had reached Britain’s shores in the cargo of ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’, Wordsworth argued.4 ‘Frantic’, however, morphs into France as Wordsworth’s amphibian lexis shifts us from adjective to nation state. Wordsworth’s reluctance to name France indicates the uncharted nature of its threat. We can now see that Lévy is right to argue that the gallic tributaries of inspiration for the authors discussed in Britain, France and the Gothic are too numerous to navigate with any certainty. Much earlier, in his 1814 History of Prose Fiction, John Colin Dunlop had also commented on the ‘prodigious currency’ of the fiction of Prévost d’Exiles, and hinted at the impossibility of detecting every influence that he exerted upon English fiction when his work was so ‘spuriously imitated on both sides’.5 Those authors and critics who ignored the futility of the enterprise of attribution did so with a particular agenda in mind. When, for example, the Anti-Jacobin Review chose to attack at some length the second novelistic production of Anne Ker, tracing sources as diverse as Whaley, Cervantes and Lewis and derisively branding her ‘a kind of journeywoman manufacturer of ghosts, secret doors, &c. &c.’, she responded at some length in the Preface to her following novel.6 Emmeline; or, the happy discovery offered in its first volume a notice ‘To the Public’: I return my sincere thanks to those malevolent Reviewers, who have thought it worth their notice to speak on my little performances in the manner they have. – And though bad, not least in my estimation, the Conductors of the Anti-Jacobin Review, whose principles, to a civilized nation, are a well-known shame; to confute them as such, I beg to say, that Adeline St Julian was written full four years past, and put into the hands of a bookseller in August, 1799; consequently, could not be extracted from the works they have thought proper to state; but it appears to me, and every person who, to oblige me, have perused their astonishing criticism, that they are

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racking their imagination to find out a somebody that has wrote somehow or somewhere similar in some respect, to this wonderful, absurd, improbable, romantic something which I have written.7

While keen to defend her fiction from the specific charges of attribution that the Anti-Jacobin Review brought, Ker expressed exasperation at the periodical’s obsession with tracing influences. She mocked the periodical’s futile and pedantic attempts to trace the ‘somehows’ and ‘somewheres’ of the ‘something’ which she had composed, deeming these unimportant and irrelevant. By the time that Ker composed this, in 1801, Gothic fiction was renowned above all for its reciprocal, imitative, mechanistic characteristics.8 If, indeed, anyone was interested in the sources of Ker’s romance, then it is highly likely that the Anti-Jacobin had not identified its correct influences. The poorly composed, syntactically confused opening pages of Adeline St Julian are in fact immediately suggestive of a literal translation from some French source. But more importantly, Ker’s choice of fictional titles (Adeline and Emmeline) signal them as ‘romantic somethings’ that are transparently indebted to the considerable successes of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith.9 Despite the best efforts of a reactionary periodical press, the import of terror proved itself increasingly capable of sustaining and surviving criticism. ‘I write in conformity to the pleasure of the times’, Ker concluded, placing her fiction securely with consumer demand. As David Richter has argued, the Gothic novel, or ‘modern romance’, was able to develop as a genre because of the ready-made presence of an audience already prepared by authors such as Prévost d’Exiles to read for imaginative play and escape.10 France and its eighteenth-century authors were formative in the creation of the Gothic in England. The inestimable extent of their influence in Britain indicates a deep current of reciprocity between Britain and France that moved against the nationalised tide of insularity that Linda Colley and Gerald Newman have identified. Damned by its critics as a terrorist import, in many ways the Gothic was sustained by a war of attrition with the hostile periodical press. While some of its formative contributors, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, abandoned the genre in the wake of the anti-Jacobin backlash against their fiction, their later literary outputs suggest that they did not lose faith or interest in France, but in the ‘war of words’ upon the Gothic. Anne Ker was less repentant, and is one example among many of how the import of terror continued in the 1800s.11 In the decades which followed the rupture of the fragile peace that France and Britain negotiated in the Treaty of Amiens of 1802, the survival

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of the two nations’ literary reciprocity was tested. One way in which it endured was through the countless translations and imitations of Radcliffe, Lewis and others that found their way into French libraries and onto the French stage.12 Another way in which the import of terror survived was through the Gothic parodies that began to proliferate in the 1810s. Viewed too often merely as reactionary criticisms of the Gothic moulded from anti-Jacobin satires of the 1790s, the parodies that began to proliferate in the 1810s consumed the history of the Gothic genre by absorbing, reproducing and passing comment upon those anti-Jacobin satires. When, for example, a character from Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine (1813) connects the sentimental tradition of novel-writing in France with the later advent of the French Revolution, we must remember that this is a character who regurgitates commonplace anti-Jacobin aphorisms. Parodies such as Barrett’s The Heroine, Sarah Green’s Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810)13 and the anonymously published The Corinna of England (1809)14 exploited the prevailing francophobic literary atmosphere. But this does not always suggest that their authors subscribed to the tenets of that atmosphere. These parodies criticised the febrile nationalist atmosphere of Britain just as much as they did the Gothic romance, bringing to mind Linda Hutcheon’s characterisation of parody as ‘a form of repetition with ironic critical difference’.15 Returning again to Walter Benjamin’s metaphorisation of the work of translation, the Gothic parody can also be viewed as a further layer of the ‘royal cloak with ample folds’. In its attempt to fashion the history and novels of France in a palatable ‘garb’ for patriotic Britons, the Gothic’s emergent form between 1764 and 1820 is deeply entrenched in the consequences of British and French hostility. To mediate and expose the contradictions, reciprocations and hostilities of the Anglo-French relationship is onerous to say the least, and the pressures are writ large in the increasing number of generic mutations of Gothic. In the wake of the Allied Powers’ victory at Waterloo in 1815, the Gothic became more dispersed, ever more fragmented. The vacuum created by Lewis’s and Radcliffe’s abandonment of the genre offered up a new range of possibilities for the exploration of domestic concerns in the United Kingdom. Publishing Waverley anonymously in 1814, Walter Scott self-consciously distanced himself from Gothic tropes in his introductory chapter. As critics have since recognised, however, Scott’s fictions foreground even more pointedly than those of his predecessors a synthesis of history, Gothic and conflict.16 Scott’s visit to Paris and to the site of Waterloo in 1815 sharpened up the theme of Anglo-French conflict in his fiction. The Antiquary

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(1816), for example, examines divergences and confluences between the rational scepticism of Jonathan Oldbuck and the Gothic superstitions of those who surround him. One of the issues around which the scepticism and superstition of characters comically converge is the threat of French invasion: ‘The French coming to murder us, Monkbarns!’ screamed Miss Griselda. ‘The beacon, the beacon! – the French, the French! – murder, murder! And waur than murder!’ cried the two handmaidens like the chorus of an opera. ‘The French?’ said Oldbuck, starting up, ‘ – get out of the room, womankind that you are, till I get my things on  – And, hark ye, bring me my sword.’17

Antagonisms are momentarily resolved in the concerted effort to repulse the common enemy, the French. Scott’s narrator neatly undercuts the potential gravity of this, however, by foregrounding the collective hysteria. With a connoisseur’s eye, he observes that the two maids sounded ‘like the chorus of an opera’: a seemingly innocent observation, perhaps, but one where it is important to bear in mind the continental origins of that popular form. So it is, too, with Ivanhoe of 1820. The epigraph to my conclusion comes from the mouthpiece of Cedric the Saxon, who echoes a commonplace and widely held view of what Christopher Hill vividly described in his essay ‘The Norman Yoke’.18 For Cedric, England’s cultural borrowings of ‘luxurious dainties’ from France were crucial precursors to England’s military defeat at the hands of the Normans. The ‘homely diet’ has been corrupted by French luxuries. Cedric’s jester Wamba articulates this perceived corruption of the plain English palate perfectly when he observes: ‘Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau … he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.’19 The consequences of such Norman enervating luxury are writ large in Ivanhoe, with the peculiarly Gothic episodes occurring in the labyrinthine passages of the Saxon castle usurped by the Norman Reginald de Front-De-Boeuf. There, Cedric encounters a Saxon, Ulrica, who has abandoned her principles along with her chastity to the Norman conquerors. Ulrica begs Cedric to trace and acknowledge her Saxon features. Cedric can only observe of these Saxon traces in Ulrica’s countenance that they ‘form such a resemblance as arises from the grave of the dead, when a fiend has animated the lifeless corpse’.20 The ‘fiend’ for Cedric is collaboration with the Norman, which has momentarily resurrected the lifeless Saxon. The Gothic imagery which pervades this dark episode in Ivanhoe

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draws clearly from the compromised, spectral women who haunt the margins of Radcliffe’s and Lewis’s fiction, but Scott goes further in his vampiric portrayal of Ulrica. She has become part of the Norman parasite that feeds upon the lifeless Saxon corpse, a parasite that must be belatedly expulsed. Ivanhoe portrays the futility of Cedric’s aspirations for Norman expulsion, however; the novel concludes with the conciliating marriage of Ivanhoe with Rowena, articulated as ‘a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races’. The differences between the two races, the narrator observes, are now ‘wholly invisible’.21 Richard the Lion-heart, grudgingly acknowledged even by Cedric to be ‘the best and the noblest of his race’, becomes the mysterious hero who returns from the Crusades to rectify Norman crimes that have occurred during his absence.22 A ‘rash and romantic monarch’, his imperfections are acknowledged upon the final page of the novel. The concluding vision of Ivanhoe is one of flawed, inevitable compromise. This compromise has been reached, however, only after the novel has investigated the darkest, Gothic, most extreme bournes of Anglo-French antagonisms. The Norman ‘fiend’ that animates the ‘lifeless Saxon corse’ in the Gothic dungeons of Ivanhoe reminds us that there are several ways of transforming a nation. One is through military invasion. This is the anxiety that haunts The Antiquary as a real possibility. The other way lies in the less chartable realm of cultural influence, the ‘enervation’ of Norman arts, as Cedric the Saxon calls it. Britain’s ‘Gothic’ emerged in consequence of both of these anxieties, anxieties that revolved around the Anglo-French relationship. The fissures from Britain’s dialectically created identity that began to be exposed towards the end of the eighteenth century in the works of Walpole, Reeve, Lee, Smith, Radcliffe and Lewis were probed further by authors such as Charles Maturin, Walter Scott and Mary Shelley. Gothic palimpsests, the works of these and countless others resume debates upon history and romance, nationhood and alterity. The traces of the crucible of war are there to uncover.

Notes

Introduction 1 James Raven, ‘The Novel Comes of Age’, in The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, vol. 1, ed. Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 58. 2 Critical Review, 59 (May 1785), p. 395. In the London Chronicle, the novel was advertised as being taken ‘From a Paris edition’. London Chronicle, 57(162), 15–17 February 1785. 3 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 90. Here Colley discusses the societies that were established around Britain in the eighteenth century in order to protect the discrete mercantile and cultural identities of Britain. In relation to these, she argues that ‘[a]llowing Frenchisms to infiltrate the English language, importing French manufactured goods, polishing themselves “into a refined insincerity” merely because it was fashionable were nothing less than cultural treason, a vicious squandering of true identity’. See also Gerald Newman’s The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp. 63–122. 4 Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 67. 5 Ibid., p. 67. 6 Colley, Britons, p. 91. 7 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 202. 8 Ibid., p. 202. 9 Cit. P. M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976), rev. edn (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 98. In 1756, Austria and France coalesced against the powers of Prussia and Britain, signing the first Treaty of Versailles between Bourbons and Habsburgs on 1 May 1756, and the second on 1 May 1757. Britain and Prussia signed a Convention of Westminster in January 1756. The war began in the Ohio Valley in May 1754, when George Washington murdered a party of peaceful French emissaries, but swiftly became a dispute over territories and the superior strength of French and British naval and military power. One of the most suppressed and brutal aspects of this war, as Robert 153

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and Isabelle Tombs chart, was the wholesale deportation of seven to eight thousand inhabitants of Acadia (renamed Nova Scotia) by the British. According to their account, this brutal resettlement ‘helped to make the Seven Years war a struggle not simply of monarchs but of nations’. Robert and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London: William Heinemann, 2006), pp. 122–3; for further exploration of this see also pp. 123–30, and H. V. Bowen, War and British Society 1688–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 7–11. 10 See Robert Gibson, Best of Enemies, 2nd edn (Exeter: Impress Books, 2004), p. 5. In the opening pages of his study, Gibson charts the impact of the Norman Conquest, discussing the Norman superimposition of a French dynasty, nobility, Church and language upon England. Gibson further discusses the range of historical perspectives upon this conquest, some arguing that the impact was positive, and some negative. This is something that Sir Walter Scott develops in Ivanhoe, which I discuss briefly in the conclusion to the book. Both Gibson and Robert and Isabelle Tombs in That Sweet Enemy trace the animosity to the present day, with the latter discussing the now infamous exchanges between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President François Mitterrand and both studies going up to and including the invasion of Iraq in the Blair years. 11 Hogarth’s ‘The Invasion’ was an extension of earlier work that he had carried out on this theme. His 1748 oil painting O, the Roast Beef of Old England depicted a scene at Calais Gate where a gluttonous French monk and a half-starved soldier prepare to consume a haunch of roast beef – ‘Roast Beef ’ being a pejorative name for the English in France. This suggests the voracious appetite of the French as they prepare to invade England. (William Hogarth, O, the Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais), 1748, Tate, London. The oil painting The March to Finchley, similar to the later ‘England’ engraving of The Invasion, depicted a group of drunken, lecherous guardsmen who have been tasked with defending London during the Invasion of Bonny Prince Charlie’s Jacobite troops. Their lack of alertness suggests England’s lack of preparation for any such invasion by France (The March to Finchley, 1749–50, The Foundling Museum, London). 12 James Gillray, A Phantasmagoria  – Scene, Conjuring up an Armed Skeleton, London, 1803. 13 William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was a long-standing Member of Parliament, philanthropist and slavery abolitionist. The context for Gillray’s simian version of Wilberforce has to do with his role in the long-standing and oft-frustrated abolition bill. As John Wolffe records of Wilberforce’s frustrated attempts to pass the anti-slavery bill in the 1790s, ‘The closing years of the eighteenth century were unpropitious for the anti-slave-trade cause. Not only did a sense of national crisis engender a political atmosphere unreceptive to reform and innovation, but the passing in 1797 of a measure that referred the matter to the colonial legislatures further frustrated Wilberforce’s efforts. Hence his annual motions in 1798 and 1799 were defeated by narrow majorities. In 1799,

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however, an act was passed that further restricted overcrowding on slave ships. In 1800 and 1801 Wilberforce refrained from proposing his normal motion, a change of tactics arising initially from hopes for an agreed suspension of the trade and then for an international agreement on abolition as part of a peace settlement. But such expectations proved unfulfilled, and Pitt’s resignation in 1801 and replacement as prime minister by the less sympathetic Henry Addington was a further discouragement. In 1802 Wilberforce’s readiness to defer to a motion by George Canning against the settlement of slaves in Trinidad meant that his own motion became a mere token gesture at the end of the session’ (John Wolffe, ‘Wilberforce, William (1759–1833)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online edn, May 2009, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29386 (accessed 27 June 2012). In Gillray’s A Phantasmagoria, Wilberforce crouches apart from other politicians Addington, Hawkesbury and Fox, but Gillray implies that all four politicians (with Addington as prime minister) were responsible for the loss of British imperial territory in maintaining peace with France. 14 Robert and Isabelle Tombs trace the term to the eighteenth century: ‘The idea that perfidiousness – at first meaning religious waywardness and later duplicity and hypocrisy – is a characteristic trait of the English remains part of the popular French stereotype, though now semi-jocular. The phrase was coined by Louis XIV’s apologist Bishop Bossuet. The beginnings of the Seven Years’ War gave it new force.’ 15 Robert-Martin Lesuire, Les sauvages de l’Europe (Berlin, 1760; repr. Paris, 1780). For further analysis of this, see also David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 43. 16 In Chapter 1, I examine two texts from earlier in the eighteenth century, by Béat de Muralt and Voltaire, which explore the differences between the French and English from the perspective of a traveller in England. The genre of the foreign traveller was even more pervasive than this, however, with Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) and Madame de Graffigny’s Les Lettres d’une Péruvienne consolidating its popularity with their best-selling epistolary tales. See chapter 2 of Julia Douthwaite’s Exotic Women for background on these tales and their relationship to the ‘Turkish spy’ tradition. Douthwaite situates Lettres persanes ‘as a classic text of French anthropology’ which shifts the travellers’ perspective to that of an exotic Other who tries to ‘decipher the rules of a foreign world’ (Europe). While none of the texts that I cite contain that ‘exotic’ perspective, they nonetheless adopt the position of the cultural outsider who can critique and comment upon English life fully. (Douthwaite, Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 75.) 17 Anon. trans., Robert Lesuire, The Savages of Europe. From the French (1764), pp. 14 and 15. 18 Colley, Britons, p. 4. Drawing upon Benedict Anderson’s idea of nations as imagined communities, Colley here argues that ‘men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what they are not. Once confronted with

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an obviously alien “Them”, an otherwise diverse community can become a reassuring or merely desperate “Us”. This was how it was with the British after 1707. They came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.’ If Colley, and indeed my Introduction, suggests an interchangeability between Britain and England, with Hogarth referring to ‘The Invasion of “England”’, and France decrying ‘perfidious Albion’, this is because they were virtually inseparable in the late eighteenth century. In addition to Colley, see also Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. xi. 19 See Bell, The Cult of The Nation in France, p. 85, and Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 123. 20 Anon. (Edmund Burke), ‘The humble remonstrance of the Mob of Great Britain, against the Importation of French Words, etc.’, London Magazine, 27, September 1758, pp. 456–7. 21 Ibid., p. 457. 22 Ibid. 23 Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 2–3. 24 Ibid., p. 3. Although Leask’s comments are specifically about imperialism, the same argument on anxiety can be made, I think, for nationalism during the eighteenth century, but with this difference: namely, that some authors, such as Walpole and many later Gothic novelists, tend to lend less support to the hegemonic programme of nationalism by sporting the sign of the English self through using Shakespeare, Thomson, Warton, and so forth in epigraphs. 25 W. S. Lewis, Horace Walpole (London: Hart-Davis, 1961), p. 70. 26 Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 20 April 1756, The Yale Edition of Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. 9, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), pp. 183–7. 27 Horace Walpole to William Cole, 9 March 1765, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 88–91; p. 88. 28 Horace Walpole to Madame du Deffand, 13 March 1767, vol. 3, pp. 260–2; p. 260. The original French, in which Walpole composed the letter, reads: ‘je ne l’ai point écrit pour ce siècle-ci, qui ne veut que la raison froide’. 29 Horace Walpole to Hannah More, 13 November 1784, vol. 31, pp. 219–23, p. 221. 30 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 186–7. Wilson further charts that ‘effeminacy’ was connected with the ‘effeteness and selfishness of Britain’s ruling classes’ that ‘had seeped down and corroded the polity, sapping patriotic fervor and leaving weakness, ineffectuality and supineness in its place’ (p. 186). For further explorations of these connections, see also Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), and Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2002). 31 Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, p. 5.

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32 Viscount Henry St John Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England (1743), p. 43. Philip Connell also notes the nationalistic note of these reconstructions, observing that the ‘recovery of England’s deep literary past also had a rather different, and more politicized, significance’ (Philip Connell, ‘British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, 49(1), 2006, pp. 161–192; p. 165). For further readings of this, see also Dale Townshend, ‘Improvement and Repair: Architecture, Romance and the Politics of Gothic, 1790–1817’, Literature Compass, 8(712–38), 2011, doi: 10.1111/j.1741–4113.2011.00815.x. 33 Horace Walpole to William Mason, 7 April 1774, vol. 28, pp. 143–7, p. 143. 34 Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, p. 7. 35 See also Linda Colley’s argument about the formation of Britain in Britons (Colley, Britons, p. 4). 36 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 99. This admiration is something that Robin Eagles also foregrounded in his study Francophilia in English Society, 1748–1815 (London: Macmillan, 2000). Eagles argues here that ‘aristocratic Francophilia and cosmpolitanism’ were just as influential as the Protestant, commercially motivated patriotism that Linda Colley argues for in Britons (Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, pp. 3–4). 37 David Hume, for example, spent several periods of his life in France. Returning to work in diplomacy in Paris in 1763, just as the Seven Years War ended, Hume commented upon the ‘excessive civilities’ that he encountered from the French. He went on to observe: ‘There is, however, a real satisfaction in living at Paris from the great number of sensible, knowing and polite company with which that city abounds above all places in the universe. I thought once of settling there for life.’ David Hume, ‘My Life’, in The History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, to which is prefixed a short accountof his life written by himself, 8 vols. (Edinburgh, 1805). See Chapter 1 for further discussion of Voltaire and Walpole. 38 ‘Gothique’ is labelled by many French critics as a peculiarly English product, while its French equivalent ‘roman noir’ only came to be recognised as a specific literary tradition in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. The precise chronological moment of emergence of the ‘roman noir’ is hotly debated between French and English critics. In France, Jean Fabre and Béatrice Didier maintain that it was already detectable as a definable literary genre in the 1780s, while in Britain, honouring the early arguments of Alice M. Killen, Terry Hale specifically links the rise of the ‘roman noir’ ‘with the so-called “réaction thermidorienne”, commencing with the restoration of freedom of the press by the constitution of 1795 and the paralysis of the British war effort thereafter’. See, for example, Maurice Lévy, Le Roman gothique anglais, 1764–1824 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995); Jean Fabre, Idées sur le roman de Madame de Lafayette au Marquis de Sade (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), p. 167; Alice M. Killen, Le Roman terrifiant ou roman noir de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe et son influence sur la littérature française jusqu’en 1840 (1920; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1984); Terry Hale, ‘French and German Gothic: the Beginnings’,

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in Jerry Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 71. In the second of these, Jean Fabre delivers a strong corrective to the thesis produced by Alice M. Killen which argued that the ‘roman noir’ only evolved in the 1790s. 39 John Colin Dunlop, The History of Fiction (1814), ed. Henry Wilson, 2 vols. (London: Bell, 1888). 40 James R. Foster, ‘The Abbé Prévost and the English Novel’, PMLA, 42 (1927), 443–64, and History of the Pre-romantic Novel in England (London: Oxford University Press, 1949). 41 Of these diverse authors’ works, those that provide the most obvious links to the English Gothic tradition are Madame de Tencin’s 1735 Mémoires du comte de Comminge and the lugubrious graveyard settings (in part inspired by Tencin) that Baculard d’Arnaud later adapted in his drama Les Amans malheureux, ou le comte de Comminge (London: 1765). On the ‘sentimental’, Diane Long Hoeveler has recently noted that ‘the gothic bears strong affinities with the discourse of the Sentimental as it operated in the mid to late eighteenth century, and certainly both genres relied on a fairly limited number of historical, mythic, ballad and even biblical plots’. Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), p. 14. 42 See, for example, the case of Charlotte Smith’s inspiration for The Romance of Real Life which I discuss in Chapter 2. Smith claimed to have picked up a worn and neglected copy to divert herself while living in a remote house in France under difficult circumstances. As William St Clair reminds us, for the readership of the Romantic period, ‘chronological linearity was not the norm’. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 3. 43 Michael Gamer argues in ‘Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain’: ‘While “Gothic” may be a notoriously shifting and complex object of study for any literary historian interested in genre, its rapid changes and instabilities at the end of the eighteenth century, rather than frustrating us, should form part of our definition of the term.’ The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 86. 44 Critics such as James Watt, E. J. Clery and Robert Miles have also argued for the very instability of the term ‘Gothic’. James Watt, for example, argues that the ‘categorization of the Gothic as a continuous tradition, with a generic significance, is unable to do justice to the diversity of the romances which are now accommodated under the “Gothic” label’, and both Watt and E. J. Clery acknowledge that the ascription of ‘Gothic’ to the genre of fiction addressed by this book is by and large ‘a twentieth-century coinage’ (Watt, Contesting the Gothic Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1; Clery, ‘The Genesis of Gothic Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Robert Miles, ‘Eighteenth-century Gothic’, in The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 10–18.

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45 See Madeleine Dobie, ‘The Enlightenment at War’, in the special issue War of PMLA, 124(5), October 2009, pp. 1851–4. Dobie states: ‘While I would hesitate to qualify the body of writing relating to the Seven Years’ War as a war literature … I think it can be said that the combination of patriotic feeling and critical distance that coalesced in response to this conflict laid the foundations for modern war literature.’ Dobie further argues for Voltaire as being the most ‘influential Enlightenment commentator on both the Seven Years’ War and the question of war in general’ (p. 1853). 46 Terry Hale, ‘Translation in Distress: Cultural Misappropriation and the Construction of the Gothic’, in European Gothic, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 23. Hale’s landmark essay here posited the Gothic as a ‘product’ of the ‘process’ of translation, and examined examples of both English translations of French texts, and the traffic in the opposite direction from England to France (p. 17). 47 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (London: Vintage, 2001). 48 Michael Gamer and Peter Mortensen, for example, have argued for a particularly European tradition of Romanticism that connects the Gothic more closely with the poetry of high Romanticism. See Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). More specifically, on the Gothic novel Terry Hale has argued for the Gothic as a ‘widely European phenomenon from its very beginnings’, and Daniel Hall, Maria Purves and Diane Long Hoeveler have examined the particular relationship between Gothic texts in France, Germany and England. See Terry Hale, ‘French and German Gothic: the Beginnings’, p. 64; Daniel Hall, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); and Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). 49 Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs, p. 10. 50 See Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, p. 44. There, he also argues that France did not define itself by ‘othering’ foreigners. 51 See Watt, Contesting the Gothic. 1  The mysterious author Horace Walpole 1 As S. E. Fryer notes in the entry upon Rae in the DNB, Rae, of a liberal disposition, ‘was particularly interested in eighteenth-century political history’. S. E. Fryer, ‘Rae, William Fraser (1835–1905)’, rev. Joseph Coohill, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/35648 (accessed 4 July 2012).

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2 The Oxford English Dictionary offers definitions of absolution up until 1900 that only connote spiritual transgression; but it is clear that there can be an ethical dimension to ‘absolution’. I am grateful to the novelist Patrick Flanery, author of Absolution (2012), for a very useful and illuminating conversation upon the word; ‘absolution, n.’, OED Online, June 2012. Oxford University Press, www.oed.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk/view/Entry/682?redirectedFrom=ab solution (accessed 10 July 2012). 3 W. Fraser Rae, ‘Horace Walpole’s Letters’, Temple Bar, 88(351), February 1890, p. 188. 4 Referred to in the narrative as the ‘French-English Bellarmine’, Fielding’s character exemplifies the links between effeminacy and France. Bellarmine’s seduction of Leonora consists of demonstrating to her the French superiority in fashion: ‘Yes, Madam,’ Bellarmine boasts, ‘this Coat I assure you was made at Paris, and I defy the best English Taylor even to imitate it. There is not one of them can cut, Madam, they can’t cut. If you observe how this Skirt is turned, and this Sleeve, a clumsy English Rascal can do nothing like it’ (Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams, 2 vols. (London: A. Millar), vol. i, p. 175). 5 Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 39. 6 Reverend John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 2 vols. (London: 1757), vol. ii, p. 40. Both Kathleen Wilson and Susan Wolfson discuss the connections that Brown’s work draws between the strength of the British nation, and the masculinity of its male citizens. Wilson rightly observes that not everyone subscribed to Brown’s provocative vision, but that its significance lies in its systematisation of ‘ideas that were percolating through heated political and cultural debates of the mid-1750s’. (Wilson, The Sense of the People, p. 187, and Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 3 and 136.) 7 In ‘Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare’, for example, Anne Williams connects accusations of Walpole’s effeminacy directly to homosexuality, asserting that ‘Horace Walpole was what we would now call gay’. She does assemble a number of sources which may hint at this, and qualifies her reading by questioning biographer Timothy Mowl’s recent unhistoricised assumptions about Walpole’s homosexuality by foregrounding ‘the dangers of imposing our own assumptions about sexual behaviour on historical periods so different from our own’ (Anne Williams, ‘Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare’, in Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 18–19). 8 Manfred, for example, is not as pantomimic a villain as one may expect. Instead, he is a curious compound of good and bad, being on the one hand ‘ashamed’ of his inhumane treatment of his wife, and on the other obsessively focused in his pursuit of procreation with Isabella. Theodore too seems a shadowy embodiment of the role of chivalric hero, allowing the two heroines to quarrel over him, and proving himself unable to save Mathilda from Manfred.

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9 Horace Walpole to Jean-Baptiste-Jacques Élie de Beaumont, Monday 18 March 1765, vol. 40, pp. 378–80, p. 380. 10 Horace Walpole (1765), Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, ed. E. J. Clery (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 9. 11 See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 186. 12 For further information on this, see for example Jeffrey Hopes, ‘Staging National Identities: The English Theater Viewed from France in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, in ‘Better in France?’: The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Frederic Ogée (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005), pp. 203–30, p. 205. 13 Cleveland Bruce Chase noted in 1926 that for ‘keenness of observation and originality of material’, Muralt’s Letters form one of the most important eighteenth-century works on Anglo-French relations, but since Chase’s passing observation, little further work has been done on them. (Chase, The Young Voltaire (North Stratford: Ayer Publishing, 1926)). Since then, only one further essay fully examines them: Claude Brunetau, ‘Béat-Louis de Muralt (1665–1742) et l’Angleterre’, Bulletin de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, vol. 16 (June 1983), pp. 35–52. In a broader examination of French cultural criticism of the early eighteenth century, Jeffrey Hopes also discusses Muralt briefly. See Hopes, ‘Staging National Identities’, pp. 203–30. 14 Translator’s Preface to Béat-Louis de Muralt, Letters describing the character and customs of the English and French nations. With a curious essay on travelling; and a criticism on Boileau’s description of Paris. Translated from the French (London, 1726), vi. 15 Muralt was imprisoned by the French government for debt. For futher information on this, see Brunetau, ‘Béat-Louis de Muralt (1665–1742) et l’Angleterre’. 16 Muralt, Letters, Letter I, p. 2. 17 Ibid., p. 4. 18 Ibid., p. 14. 19 See Chapter 3 for further details on the English’s characterisation of the French nation as superstitious in the 1790s. 20 Muralt, Letters, 1726, Letter ii, pp. 29–30. 21 Ibid., p. 30. 22 Ibid. 23 For further information on this, see Chase, The Young Voltaire. 24 Although Voltaire’s Letters were never described as a translation, J. Patrick Lee’s research has discovered that the work was translated anonymously by John Lockman (Lee, ‘The Unexamined Premise: Voltaire, John Lockman, and the Myth of the English Letters’, SVEC, 2001/10, pp. 240–70). 25 Voltaire, Letter viii, ‘On the Parliament’, in Letters concerning the English Nation (London: 1733), pp. 53, 55. 26 Ibid., Letter xx, ‘On such of the Nobility as cultivate the belles lettres’, p. 193.

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27 Ibid., Letter xviii, ‘On Tragedy’, p. 166. 28 Ibid., p. 179. 29 Ibid., p. 167. 30 Ibid., p. 177. 31 Ibid., p. 170. 32 Ibid. 33 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 108. 34 Voltaire, to Lord Lyttelton (1750). 35 Voltaire, ‘Of the three unities’, in his Preface to his version of Oedipus, from The Works of M. de Voltaire. Translated from the French. With notes, historical, critical and explanatory, ed. and trans. T. Francklin and T. Smollett (London, 1761–81), vol. 25, p. 10. 36 As Dale Townshend observes, ‘La Place’s endeavours were not without echoes of Voltaire’s criticisms’, but his work ‘nonetheless betrayed a sympathy for the English playwright’ (Dale Townshend, ‘Gothic and the Ghost of Hamlet’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 60–97, p. 64). 37 In ‘The Enlightenment at War’, Dobie explores Voltaire’s sustained engagement with the Seven Years War both in his entry devoted to war in the Dictionnaire philosophique and in his most famous fictional work, Candide. The opening chapters of Candide satirise martial patriotism in their evocation of the conflict between the Abares (French) and the Bulgares (Prussians). See Madeleine Dobie, ‘The Enlightenment at War’, in War, special issue of PMLA, 124(5), October 2009. 38 As René Wellek has noted, this particular appeal was composed in the form of an anonymous letter to the French Academy which was read at the Festival of St Louis by D’Alembert on 25 August 1776 (Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, vol. i, The Later Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 37). It is also interesting to note the editorial rebuttals that feature heavily when Smollett and Francklin, in their collected edition cited above, reprint Voltaire’s literal translations of Shakespeare. Volume 35, which reprints some of Voltaire’s most contentious views upon Shakespeare, is crowded with footnotes such as ‘A mistranslation’; ‘This passage is manifestly translated wrong’; ‘This circumstance is entirely of the invention of Mons. De Voltaire; not contented with depreciating Shakespeare, he even misrepresents him.’ (From The Works of M. de Voltaire. Translated from the French. With notes, historical, critical and explanatory, ed. and trans. T. Francklin and T. Smollett (London, 1761–81), vol. 35, pp. 136–7.) 39 Dale Townshend makes a similar point, observing that the transformation in tone of Voltaire’s Shakespeare criticism was ‘engaged cultural warfare, an aesthetic equivalent to the Seven Years’ War’ (Townshend, ‘Gothic and the Ghost of Hamlet’, p. 65). 40 Cleveland Bruce Chase notes Walpole’s frequent attendance at the Parisian Club de l’Entresol. This was a club of long standing that was first formed in 1724 by the Abbé Alary. Its purpose was the discussion and debate of the ideas

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and institutions of a variety of foreign nations but, as Chase notes, the topic of debate was frequently England. Walpole no doubt participated in the promotion of England’s liberal constitution, but his very attendance at the club suggests a level of openness to the ideas of other nations, and a willingness to debate with his French counterparts. (Chase, The Young Voltaire, 1926, p. 7.) 41 Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 26 May 1765, vol. 10, pp. 152–5, p. 154. 42 Walpole to George Montagu, 22 September 1765, vol. 10, p. 176. 43 Horace Walpole, Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764) (London: 1765), p. 5. 44 George Vertue, 1648–1756, was an engraver and historian. As Martin Myrone records, upon his death, Vertue’s forty-odd volume of notes on the history of art were published by Horace Walpole, who worked them into what was published as his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–71). The edition which I quote from (1763) is the one in which William Marshal is introduced. See Martin Myrone, ‘Vertue, George (1684–1756)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008, www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/28252 (accessed 17 July 2012). 45 For further discussion of the disagreement between Milton and Marshal, see Elizabeth Penley Skerpan, ‘Authorship and Authority: John Milton, William Marshall, and the Two Frontispieces of Poems 1645’, Milton Quarterly, 33(4), 1999, pp. 105–14, p. 109. 46 John Milton, cit. Elizabeth Penley Skerpan, ‘Authorship and Authority’, p. 107. 47 Horace Walpole, Continuation of Anecdotes of painting in England, with some account of the principal artists; and incidentale notes on other arts; collected by the late Mr George Vertue; and now digested and published from his original MSS. (Strawberry-Hill, Twickenham, 1763), p. 38. 48 Skerpan, ‘Authorship and Authority’, p. 107. 49 For Sue Chaplin, Walpole’s closely guarded copies of the Magna Carta and the execution warrant of Charles I represented his own ‘ideological insecurities’ that were ‘bound up with wider cultural narratives of authority and origin’. (See Sue Chaplin, The Gothic and the Rule of the Law, 1764–1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 56.) 50 Horace Walpole, Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764) (London: 1765), p. 9. 51 Walpole was himself culpable of this very contamination in his own polyglot letter-writing tendencies, frequently interspersing snatches of French into his English prose. His correspondence is a perfect exemplar of the lack of purity in written English. Frequently, he lapses into French with his correspondents, demonstrating both his facility with that language and, more controversially, the deficiencies of the English language. 52 Translator’s Preface to Béat Louis de Muralt, Letters describing the character and customs of the English and French nations. With a curious essay on travelling; and a criticism on Boileau’s description of Paris. Translated from the French (London, 1726), pp. vi and vii. 53 Preface, Muralt, Letters, p. vii.

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54 Horace Walpole, Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764), ed. E. J. Clery (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 7. 55 E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 62. 56 See Chapter 3 of this work for further detail about the debate, and its significance to the Gothic. 57 For further readings and interpretations of these counterfeits, see Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, pp. 60–7; Robert Miles, ‘Europhobia: the Catholic Other in Horace Walpole and Charles Maturin’, in European Gothic, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester University Press), pp. 84–103 (particularly pp. 89–95), and my own discussion of this in Angela Wright, Gothic Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 7–12. 58 John Langhorne (anon.), Monthly Review (January 1765), pp. 77–9. 59 John Langhorne (anon.), Monthly Review (May 1765), p. 394. 60 Horace Walpole, Second Preface to The Castle of Otranto (1764/5), ed. E. J. Clery (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996), p. 14. 61 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 1996, p. 11. 62 E. J. Clery, ‘The Genesis of Gothic Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 30–1. 63 Horace Walpole to Madame du Deffand, 13 March 1767, vol. 3, pp. 260–2, p. 261. The original French reads: ‘Je ne cherche pas querelle avec Voltaire, mais je dirai jusqu’à la mort, que notre Shakespeare est mille piques au-dessus.’ 64 Walpole, Second Preface to The Castle of Otranto, p. 12. 65 Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 16 October 1769, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, gen. ed. W. S. Lewis, vol. 10 (ii) (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). In this extract, Walpole quotes from Act v scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part i. Walpole’s Shakespearean quotation here is interesting owing to this scene’s demonstration of Shakespeare’s wider antipathy to bloodshed for military glory, with Hotspur reproaching Henry thus: O Harry, thou has robbed me of my youth. I better brook the loss of brittle life Than those proud titles thou hast won of me. They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh. But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool, And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy, But that the earthly and cold hand of death Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust And food for – [He dies.] prince For worms, brave Percy. (ll. 76–85)

Given Hotspur’s reproach of his Prince, Walpole’s allusion to this is further evidence of his own antipathy to the ongoing Anglo-French conflicts in the 1760s. For further discussion of Shakespeare’s suspicion of bloodshed, see

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W. Gordon Zeeveld, ‘“Food for Powder” – “Food for Worms”’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 3(3), July 1952, pp. 249–53. 66 In ‘Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare’, Anne Williams notes that the setting of The Mysterious Mother (Narbonne) is also the setting of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, a play, she observes, ‘that turns on the bed-trick’ (Williams, ‘Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare’, p. 31). 67 E. J. Clery, ‘Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire’, in The Gothic: Essays and Studies, ed. Fred Botting (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 24–6. 68 The Reverend William Mason himself summarised his disappointment at Walpole’s reluctance to change the deliberate nature of the Countess’s incestuous act. Commenting on the play’s unpermitted distribution, he wrote: ‘I am sorry, because I really think that on account of one defect, which might easily have been rectified, you will find it not only criticized but censured … And this I fear will be the case. For could the story in general be proved true, the invented circumstance which you have introduced to palliate the Countess’s guilt will make the reader recoil more than even the fact itself. I frankly own to you that it had this effect upon me, and therefore it was that I presumed many years ago to send you my sketch of an alteration. You liked it at first, and was afterwards led to reject it by the opinion of a friend … I own I was sorry for this, at the time, and I am more sorry now …’ (Mason to Walpole, 15 May 1781, vol. 29, pp. 141–2). 69 The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, ed. R. Walpole and M. Berry, 5 vols. (1798). 70 Count Anthony (Antoine) Hamilton, Mémoires du comte de Grammont, par Monsieur le Comte Antoine Hamilton. Nouvelle edition, augmentée de notes et d’éclaircissemens necessaires, par M. Horace Walpole ([Twickenham], 1772). 71 See Walpole’s observation to Mason that he keeps a print of Hamilton’s Mémoires in Strawberry Hill’s Blue Room, in 29(i) of Correspondence, p. 39. Elsewhere, he describes it to Mason as his ‘favourite book’, 29(I), p. 57. 72 See, for example, my argument in Chapter 3 concerning how the Reverend T. J. Mathias pointed the finger at Walpole for his disinterested ‘Gothic’ meddling. 2  The transl ator cloak’d 1 Anon. (William Kenrick), ‘Preface by the Translator to Eloisa: or, a series of original letters collected and published by J. J. Rousseau. Translated from the French. 4 vols. (London: Griffiths, Becket and De Hondt), 1761. 2 In an essay on professional translators, however, Margaret Lesser acknowledges: ‘Even the jobbing translators of the earlier years were not necessarily uncommitted to the texts they handled.’ She further demonstrates that very few writers ‘placed their major ambitions in translation: they often saw themselves as novelists, poets or dramatists who translated to supplement their incomes’

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(Lesser, ‘Professionals’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4, ed. Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (Oxford University Press) p. 85). 3 For further information on Kenrick, see Richard B. Sewall, ‘William Kenrick as Translator and Critic of Rousseau’, Philological Quarterly, 20 (1941), 58. 4 These commissions were in no way a testament to the low opinion that many of his contemporaries entertained of him. Richard B. Sewell records, for example, that James Boswell wrote of him: ‘Though he certainly was not without considerable merit, he wrote with so little regard to decency and principles, and decorum, and in so hasty a manner, that his reputation was neither extensive or lasting’; and that Dr Johnson spoke of him as ‘one of the many who have made themselves publick, without making themselves known’ (cit. Sewall, ‘William Kenrick as Translator and Critic of Rousseau’, p. 58, note 1). 5 For further information on this, see James H. Warner, ‘Eighteenth-century Reactions to La Nouvelle Héloïse’, PMLA, lii (1937), 803–19. Despite such a speedy dissemination in the 1760s, however, the debate over this, and much of Rousseau’s other writing, continued well into the 1790s. 6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1762), trans. William Kenrick, Emilius and Sophia: or, a new system of education. Translated from the French of J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva (London: Griffiths, Becket and De Hondt), 1762. 7 Anon. (William Kenrick), ‘Preface by the Translator’ to Eloisa: or, a series of original letters collected and published by J. J. Rousseau, p. xiii. 8 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan, 1755), vol. i, p. 2. 9 Anon. (Kenrick), ‘Preface by the Translator’ to Eloisa, p. xiv. 10 Monthly Review, 25 (October 1761), p. 260. 11 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 203. 12 I refer here to Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), from Image-Music-Text, trans. Geoff Bennington, in Untying the Text: A Post-structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge, 1981). 13 Walter Benjamin (1923), ‘Die Aufgabe der Übersetzung’, trans. Harry Zohn (1968) as ‘The Task of the Translator’, repr. in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 15–25, p. 19. 14 Interestingly, Benjamin’s version of translation as a ‘royal robe’ borrows its terminology from the seventeenth-century French critic Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Traité de l’origine des romans (1670). Huet accounted for the transmission of romance by explaining the practice of lords giving their royal robes to troubadours who recounted tales which pleased them. Huet consolidated the theory that the origins of romance in France commenced in the seventeenth century. As Joan DeJean charts in Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), however, Huet tantalisingly suggested that the French ‘royal robes’ could be traced back to the Saracens before dismissing his own hypothesis. Huet’s analogy of royal robes is possibly an interesting forerunner of Walter Benjamin’s twentieth-century clothing metaphor for the work of translation.

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15 Jennifer Birkett argues that between 1740 and 1790, ‘Translators now no longer produced the extremely free adaptations of [Eliza] Haywood’s day. However, increasingly conscious of the different expectations of their national target audience, they still allowed themselves some freedom to comment on or modify the source text, to conform to their notion of English taste.’ There is, however, evidence from the three women authors that I study in this chapter that the ‘freedom’ which they permitted their translations (sometimes not even acknowledging them as such) went beyond the parameters defined here by Birkett. (Jennifer Birkett, ‘Prose Fiction: Courtly and Popular Romance’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3, 1660–1790, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 346.) 16 For a recent and much needed in-depth account of the consequences of the Gordon Riots, see Ian Haywood and John Seed, eds., The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 17 Robert J. Frail, A Singular Duality: Literary Relations Between France and England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 2007). 18 See ibid., p. 49. 19 In his recent study Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1770–1835, Robert W. Jones notes the ‘eccentric developments’ of the years of American crisis and the American War of Independence. In relation to anxieties about masculinity, he notes that the ‘fops and macaroni’ populating London ‘did not seem to be the men to fight a war’. In consequence of this, masculinity became revalorised at the expense of excluding women from the public sphere. (Robert W. Jones, Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1770–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 1–2.) 20 Wilson, The Sense of the People, p. 253. See also Marilyn Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 3, and Marilyn Michaud, Republicanism and the American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 18–19. Analysing the discourse of republicanism specifically in relation to the Gothic, Michaud notes: ‘Variously conceived of as democracy, liberty or equality, republicanism constituted an alternative world view that looked to the classical past for lessons on political theory and national identity. In the Old Whig view, there exists an overt pessimism and fear surrounding the ability of civilization to uphold the tenets of republicanism. Republicanism, therefore, is also a panic-ridden ideology animated by fears of tyranny, decay, conspiracy and corruption and it is with these ideological fears that the Gothic is deeply entangled’ (p. 19). 21 Wilson, The Sense of the People, p. 254. 22 Piers Mackesy, The War for America (London, 1964), p. xiv, also cit. Wilson, The Sense of the People, p. 269. 23 See Wilson, The Sense of the People, p. 252. 24 Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), and Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry (1774–81).

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25 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 11. Margaret Anne Doody further posits ‘an almost exact date signalling the new Realism’s usurpation of the major realms of prose fiction’ with the advent of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). (Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 288.) 26 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols. (London: 1785), vol. i, p. 13. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 29 See DeJean, Tender Geographies, pp. 174–5. 30 Reeve, The Progress of Romance, vol. ii, p. 6. 31 Ibid., p. 17. 32 Ibid., p. 18. 33 Ibid. 34 Clara Reeve, The Exiles; or, Memoirs of the Count de Cronstadt (London: T. Hookham, 1788), vol. i, pp. 142–3. 35 Monthly Review, 80 (January 1789), p. 88. 36 Ibid. 37 Critical Review, 67 (January 1789), p. 75. 38 D’Almanzi was in fact part of the sequel to d’Arnaud’s earlier collection Les Épreuves du Sentiment (1773), and was published in 1776 in vol. 4 of Suite des épreuves du sentiment (Paris, 1776). 39 See Michel Delon, ed., Histoires anglaises: Baculard d’Arnaud, Florian, Sade (Zulma, 1993), p. 14. 40 Clara Reeve, Preface, The Exiles; or, Memoirs of the Count de Cronstadt (London: T. Hookham, 1788), vol. i, xix. Of the fate of Reeve’s lost ghost story Castle Connor, James R. Foster records: ‘It did appear, it seems, but not until she had been dead a dozen years. The title was changed to Fatherless Fanny (1819), and the original story was somewhat altered. But she was named as the author, and a preface made up of odds and ends from the preface of the Old English Baron provided’. (Foster, History of the Pre-romantic Novel in England (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 204.) 41 Reeve, Preface, The Exiles, vol. i, xxii–xxiii. 42 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols. (London: 1785), vol. ii, p. 19. 43 Foster, History of the Pre-romantic Novel in England p. 200. 44 Indeed, this was something that Reeve acknowledged quite explicitly in her dedication of The Exiles to ‘Peter-Pertinaux Puff, Esq.’ from whom ‘all the wits, poets, and politicians of this age, are obliged to solicit [] patronage and protection, in order to obtain the favour of the public’ (Reeve, Preface, The Exiles, vol. i, p. v). 45 E. J. Clery, Women’s Gothic (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), p. 50. 46 Terry Hale, ‘Readers and Publishers of Translations in Britain’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4, 1790–1900, ed. Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 36.

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47 Clara Reeve, Plans of education; with remarks on the systems of other writers; in a series of letters between Mrs Darnford and her friends (London, 1792), p. 214. 48 Sophia Lee, The Recess, or a tale of other times, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1785), vol. i, p. 242. 49 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 50 Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 103. Dobson and Watson chart a thorough and insightful course through the fluctuating literary portrayals of Queen Elizabeth I in this work, and observe that whereas earlier portrayals of Elizabeth represented her more sympathetically as being caught between the demands of state and her innate femininity, later eighteenth-century versions of her portray her in more villainous terms. 51 Lee, The Recess, vol. i, p. 242. 52 Critical Review, 55 (March 1783), pp. 233–4; [Samuel Badcock], Monthly Review, 68 (May 1783), pp. 455–6. 53 The Recess has since been viewed in terms of its innovation by critical assessments of female Gothic plots. In an analysis of the development of the Gothic genre, for example, Margaret Anne Doody praises The Recess as both ‘the first fully developed English Gothic novel’ and one of the first ‘recognizable historical novels in English’ (Doody, ‘Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel’, Genre, 10 (1977), p. 559). Jane Spencer goes further in describing The Recess as ‘romance’s revenge on recorded history’ (Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 195–201). Fiona Robertson argues that ‘it develops its own ways of negotiating a complex symbolic relationship between the present and the dead or absent past’ (Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 74). More recently, E. J. Clery has argued that Lee’s innovation lies in her method of showcasing tragedy as memoir in order to mediate passion (Clery, Women’s Gothic, p. 44). 54 For further analysis of this burgeoning tradition, see Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 121. 55 Own translation from the original: ‘Hélas! Que je lui portai d’envie, en lui voyant prendre possession de la paix éternelle dans l’asile du tombeau!’ (Prévost, Le Philosophe anglais ou histoire de M. Cleveland (fils naturel de Cromwell, écrite par lui-même, et traduit de l’anglais par l’auteur des Mémoires d’un homme de qualité in Oeuvres de Prévost), ed. Jean Sgard (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1978), vol. 2, p. 276). 56 Lee, The Recess, vol. i, p. 7. 57 Robertson, Legitimate Histories, p. 74. 58 It is difficult to agree with James R. Foster’s early (and hitherto unchallenged) assessment of the connections between Lee and Prévost that ‘[t]he substance and manner of Cleveland is here reproduced so unchanged that a detailed

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description of the Recess is unnecessary’ (James R. Foster, ‘The Abbé Prévost and the English Novel’, PMLA, 42 (1927), pp. 443–64, p. 456). 59 William Robertson, The history of Scotland, during the reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI. till his accession to the crown of England. With a review of the Scotch history previous to that period; and an appendix containing Original Papers, 2 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1759). 60 Rosetta Ballin, The Statue Room; an historical tale. By Miss Ballin. 2 vols. (London: Symonds, 1790), vol. i, p. 10. 61 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 62 Ibid., Preface, p. vi. 63 Dobson and Watson, England’s Elizabeth, p. 106. 64 Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs, p. 85. 65 Rev. John Whitehouse, ‘Sonnet viii. “To a Lady, with The Recess, or a Tale of Other Times” ’, in Poems: consisting chiefly of original pieces (London, 1787), p. 88. 66 Anna Maria Mackenzie, Calista; a novel (London: William Lane, 1789), vol. i, pp. 141–2. Mackenzie here publishes under the more proper title of Mrs Johnson. 67 Ibid., p. 142. 68 Anna Maria Mackenzie, Mysteries Elucidated. A Novel, 3 vols. (London: William Lane, 1795), vol. i, pp. xiv–xv. 69 Ibid., p. x. Mackenzie’s Preface can be read as an exercise in extreme pragmatism. Addressed to ‘The readers of modern romance’, it criticises the tendency of that genre which has brought ‘ancient romance’ into such disrepute. Untalented copyists of Richardson and Fielding attract the most opprobrium, but Mackenzie also appears to criticise the ‘modern genius’ of Ann Radcliffe for ‘spurning the trammels of sober reason’ (p. x). The graveyard illustration at the opening of the first volume, however, which is no doubt an indication of Lane’s strategic placement of Mackenzie’s work within the marketplace of the tale of terror, appears to undermine the Preface’s criticisms of terror. 70 In fact, despite the widespread rumours in the eighteenth century, Mary, Queen of Scots was never held at Hardwick Hall. I am grateful to the National Trust curator of Hardwick Hall, Nigel Wright, for conversations upon this. 71 Ann Radcliffe, A journey made in the summer of 1794, through Holland and the western frontier of Germany, with a return down the Rhine (London: 1795), p. 373. 72 Ibid., p. 375. 73 Sophia Lee, Preface to Warbeck: A Pathetic Tale, 2 vols. (London: William Lane, 1786), p. 3. 74 Ibid., pp. 3–4. 75 Lee, Warbeck, vol. i, p. 1. 76 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 77 Lee, Preface to Warbeck, vol. i, p. 4. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., p. 74.

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80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., pp. 82 and 84. 82 Critical Review, 60(395), November 1786. 83 More famously, as late as 1830 Mary Shelley reprised Lee’s tale in The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, reinventing the tale of chivalry towards the close of the Romantic period. 84 Also known as the Abbé Prévost, Prévost changed his name to Prévost d’Exiles in 1728 after he left his Benedictine order and became an exile. It was during this period that he composed the two novels discussed in this chapter. For further information, see Jean Sgard, Prévost Romancier (Paris: José Cortier, 1968). 85 See Catherine Anne Dorset, ‘Charlotte Smith’, in Walter Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834), pp. 20–58. Dorset discusses the outcry against Smith’s Manon L’Escaut in detail, and transcribes the letters from Steevens. 86 See Lorraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), Terry Hale, ‘Translation in Distress: Cultural Misappropriation and the Construction of the Gothic’, in European Gothic, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester University Press, 2002), Michael Gamer, Introduction to vol. i of The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, vol. i: Manon L’Escaut: or, The Fatal Attachment (1786) and The Romance of Real Life (1787), ed. Michael Gamer, with assistance from Karla M. Taylor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). 87 Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 83. 88 Hale, ‘Translation in Distress’, p. 19. 89 As both Hale and Fletcher have argued, Smith’s increasing sentimentalisation of Prévost’s more economic portrayal of Manon was problematic due to the sympathy that it conferred upon Prévost’s scheming seductress. See Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 73, and Hale, ‘French and German Gothic: the Beginnings’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 19–20. 90 James R. Forster, ‘Charlotte Smith, Pre-Romantic Novelist’, PMLA, 43(2), June 1928, pp. 463–75. 91 [Own translation from original]: ‘Les faits estranges [sic] et surprenantes qui frappent dans des Histoires agréables qui font l’ouvrage de l’imagination, causent un plaisir empoissoné, disons-le, par la fausseté des évenemens [sic].’ François Gayot de Pitaval, Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes, avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées.Receuillies par Mr Gayot de Pitaval, Avocat au Parlement de Paris (La Haye, Chez Jean Neaulme, 1735), vol. i, p. i. 92 Charlotte Smith, The Romance of Real Life (London: Cadell, 1787), vol. i, p. vi. 93 Gamer, Introduction to vol. I of The Works of Charlotte Smith, and The Romance of Real Life (1787), ed. Gamer, p. xxxiv. 94 Smith, The Romance of Real Life, vol. i, p. vi. 95 Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 86.

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96 Smith, The Romance of Real Life, vol. i, p. vi. 97 Anon. (William Kenrick), ‘Preface by the Translator’ to Eloisa: or, a series of original letters collected and published by J. J. Rousseau, p. xiii. 98 Smith, The Romance of Real Life, vol. i, p. vii. 99 Her complaint is later supported by Catherine Dorset, Smith’s sister and biographer, whose only observation on The Romance of Real Life in her memoir of Smith was that ‘the great difficulty attending [the translation], helped to complete [Smith’s] disgust, and determined her to rely in future on her own resources, and to employ herself in original composition’ (Catherine Dorset, ‘Charlotte Smith’, in Walter Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834), pp. 20–58). 100 [Own translation from original] ‘La Mère de retour apprend l’évasion de ses enfans, elle se livre aux transports de la douleur qui la saisit, elle demande vainement ses enfants a tout le monde, elle promenait partout son affliction.’ François Gayot de Pitaval, Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes, avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées.Receuillies par Mr Gayot de Pitaval, Avocat au Parlement de Paris, vol. i, p. 49. 101 Smith, The Romance of Real Life, vol. i, p. 183. 102 Another notorious rendition of this tale, which did precisely the opposite, was by the Marquis de Sade, whose ‘La Marquise de Gange’ is by contrast told from the perspective of the male villains. See ‘The Marchioness of Gange’, in The Gothic Tales of the Marquis de Sade, trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Peter Owen, 2010). 103 Smith, ‘The Marchioness of Gange’, in The Romance of Real Life, vol. i, p. 39. 104 Ibid., p. 67. 105 This further endowment of the female protagonist with such visual sensibility is similar to the transformations that Hale noticed Smith had made in Manon L’Escaut (Hale, ‘Translation in Distress’, pp. 19–20). Here, as in Manon, Smith focalises upon the physical symbols of the Marchioness’s distress, but the lament that the Marchioness’s charms are lost due to her ‘sinking into an early grave’ discharge this description of any sexual tension. 106 Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 86. 107 Smith, The Romance of Real Life, vol. i, p. 85. 108 ‘A contest now arose between those two jurisdictions, the parliaments of Paris and of Normandy; which obliged the parties to have recourse to the source of power, and to carry the cause before the privy council.’ (Ibid., p. 189). 109 Mary Wollstonecraft, Review of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde, Analytical Review, 5 (1789), p. 485. 110 Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 39. 111 Charlotte Smith, Preface to volume i of The Banished Man, 4 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1794), p. vi. 112 Smith, ‘Avis au lecteur’, preface to volume ii of The Banished Man, p. iv. Smith here lists Mowbray Castle (from The Banished Man itself (1794)),

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Grasmere Abbey (from Ethelinde, or the recluse of the lake (1789)), the castle of Rock-March (again from The Banished Man), the castle of Hauteville (from Desmond (1792)) and Rayland Hall (from The Old Manor House (1793)). All of these are taken from fictions which differently engage with tropes of terror: one from Ethelinde, two from her current work The Banished Man (which undermines her claims for being imitated), and one from Desmond. 113 Amy Garnai, Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 36. 114 Smith, The Banished Man, vol. i, p. xi; see also Garnai, Revolutionary Imaginings, p. 36. 115 Critical Review, October 1787, p. 309. 116 As I go on to indicate in Chapter 4, for example, Ann Radcliffe refers directly to Smith’s adaptation of Gayot’s tales in the opening page of The Romance of the Forest. She further portrays the French legal system, embodied by the Advocate Nemours, as being moral and fair. The law restores illegally lost territories to Radcliffe’s heroine Adeline, and metes out justice where appropriate. As Adriana Craciun has argued, many women writers in Britain, such as Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams, subscribed to the principles of the French Revolution, cultivating a ‘radicalized cosmopolitanism through their engagement with French revolutionary politics.’ (Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 1). While, for temporal reasons, Sophia Lee’s work and Smith’s earlier translations do not form part of Craciun’s study, I would argue for the presence of this cosmopolitanism in the 1780s, and its covert renegotiation in the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s. 117 Review of The Shepherdess of Aranville: A Romance. Translated from the French of M. Liomin by S. Beckwith (London: Owen, Marlow and Parsons, 1794) in Critical Review, 13 (April 1795), p. 468. The original French work was entitled La bergère d’Aranville by Louis-Augustin Liomin (Neuchatel: L. Fauche-Borel, 1792). For a rare discussion of this, see Malcolm Cook, Fictional France: Social Reality (London: Berg, 1993). 3  Versions of gothic and terror 1 Alexander Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation (London: T. Cadell, Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1791), p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 77. 3 Ibid., p. 123. 4 Ibid., p. 8. For further discussion of this, see also Matthew Reynolds’s essay ‘Principles and Norms of Translation’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 1790–1900, vol. 4, ed. Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 61–82. Here, Reynolds rightly connects Tytler’s renewed emphasis upon the significance of the original text’s author with Dryden’s much earlier privileging of this, but he argues that Tytler’s ‘wish

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to clarify the terms of the translator’s power of authorial representation’ comes from his background in the law (p. 64). 5 For an astute analysis of the consequences of the ban upon the importation of fiction in 1793, see Jonathan Topham’s essay ‘Science, Print, and Crossing Borders: Importing French Science Books into Britain, 1789–1815’, in Geographies of Nineteenth Century Science, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles Withers (Illinois: Chicago University Press, 2011). 6 David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1996), p. 54. 7 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 1. 8 Abbé Barruel, The History of the Clergy during the French Revolution. A Work dedicated to the English Nation (London: J. P. Coghlan, 1794). 9 Ibid., p. iv. 10 Critical Review, 16, 1796, pp. 60–1. The Monthly Review was equally scathing of Barruel’s History, calling it a ‘violent declamation against the constitutional clergy of France’ (Monthly Review, 17(1795), p. 218). 11 Helen Maria Williams, Letters From France, eight volumes in two, ed. Janet Todd (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 4–5. 12 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805) Book Tenth, ll. 693–6, and in the 1850 edition, Book Eleventh, ll. 109–12, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 396–7. 13 Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in NineteenthCentury British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 51. 14 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 8 and 41. 15 ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’, Monthly Magazine, August 1797, and ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, in Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797, vol. 1 (London, 1798), pp. 223–5, cit. Gothic Documents, ed. E. J. Clery and R. Miles (Manchester University Press, 2000). 16 ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’, in Walker’s Hibernian Magazine for 1798, January, part 1. 17 Colley, Britons, p. 5. 18 Gentleman’s Magazine, 63 (1793), p. iii, cit. Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 51. The illusion in the Gentleman’s to the covert use of venom was compounded elsewhere in the British entrenchment against French intellectual influence. Thomas James Mathias invoked the same metaphor in the Preface to the Fourth Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature when, worrying about the corrupting influence of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, he pleaded, ‘Is this a time to poison the waters of our land in their springs and fountains?’ The ‘springs’ and ‘fountains’, of course, alluded to the youth of Britain, who, if ‘poisoned’ by the perusal of The Monk, would spread its effects all over Britain. 19 Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 102.

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20 Gentleman’s Magazine, 64 (January 1794). 21 In the Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 22, Klancher discusses the history of possibly faked ‘letters to the editor’ pages. Singling out the Gentleman’s, the Universal and the Monthly Magazine, he argues that we must ‘constantly test’ these apparent exchanges of role between readers and writers. 22 ‘To Sylvanus Urban, esq. On completing the sixty-fourth volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 64 (January 1794). 23 Ibid. Marilyn Butler has noted that the naming of the author in the Gentleman’s as ‘Sylvanus Urban, Gent.’ implied a specific set of interests in the magazine: ‘these straddled town and country, and were unmistakably bound up in serious money-making, not the feminine sphere of leisure’. Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: the Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 124. As Kevin Gilmartin also observes of the periodical’s longevity, ‘With an uninterrupted history stretching back to 1731, [it] could itself be construed as a reassuring counterpoint to revolutionary upheaval’. Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 24 The Oxford English Dictionary records that the use of the word ‘rage’ in the sense ‘As complement: a widespread, temporary fashion or enthusiasm’ was certainly current in the 1790s. Definition 5 g) ‘rage, n.’, OED Online, June 2012, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/Entry/ (accessed 25 July 2012). 25 Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, p. 124. 26 As Michael Gamer also argues in ‘Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain’, ‘While “Gothic” may be a notoriously shifting and complex object of study for any literary historian interested in genre, its rapid changes and instabilities at the end of the eighteenth century, rather than frustrating us, should form part of our definition of the term.’ From The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 86. Cf. also E. J. Clery’s essay ‘The Genesis of “Gothic” Fiction’ in the same collection (pp. 21–39). This also explores the application of the word ‘Gothic’ to this body of fiction. However, while Clery views the retrospective application of the term ‘Gothic’ as ‘essentially a red herring’, I would in fact argue that the use in the Gentleman’s of ‘Gothic’ in this particular poem is an interesting exception. 27 Joel Barlow, Advice to the privileged orders in the several states of Europe (London, 1792). Amy Garnai discusses Charlotte Smith’s correspondence with Joel Barlow, where she praises him for his publication of this work. As Garnai also notes, the ‘dangerous radicalism’ exhibited in this work and Barlow’s similarly radical Letter to the National Convention (1792) led to them being ‘singled out for particular attention at the 1794 Treason trials’. She further notes that ‘passages from Advice were read aloud by the prosecution at the end of the trial of John Thelwall in order to link him together with

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Barlow as members of a radical conspiracy’ (Garnai, Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 24). 28 Watkin Tench, 1 May 1795, Letters from Revolutionary France, ed. Gavin Edwards (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), p. 123. I am grateful to Professor Gavin Edwards of the University of Glamorgan for alerting me to Tench’s usage of the word ‘Gothicism’. 29 For another analysis of Mathias’s Pursuits in relation to the Gothic, see also Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 80. 30 T. J. Mathias, Preface to the First Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature. A Satirical poem in four dialogues, 8th edn (London: T. Becket, 1798), p. 42. 31 Mathias, footnote to the First Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature, p. 56. As I argue in Chapter 4, though, Mathias’s exemption of Ann Radcliffe from this charge-list of female subversives was notable. 32 Mathias, Preface to the Fourth Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature, p. 238. 33 Mary Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1796). In vol. ii of Robinson’s novel, for example, the narrator reflects upon the shifting opinions of Sabina de Sevrac: ‘Mademoiselle de Sevrac, having always lived in a circle, where, to seem, and not to be, was the task of universal labour, fancied that the art of pleasing was more useful than the toil of thinking; and the smile of an approving multitude more gratifying, than the sober commendation of conscious integrity! But when the tongue of flattery was silenced by her change of situation, the voice of Truth began to fascinate her ear, and as the colour of her fortune assumed a darker shade, the light of intellect expanded! Till her senses, no longer dazzled by false splendour, received impressions, less gaudy, but more distinct and lasting’ (Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac, vol. ii, p. 142). It is as a consequence of her family’s changing fortunes (aristocratic exiles from the revolutionary terror in Paris) that Sabina de Sevrac is seen to learn about the wishes of many, as opposed to the frivolous desires of a few. 34 Mathias, Third Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature, p. 193. The particular anti-clericalism of this section attracted strong approval, with it being extracted and published alone as Extract concerning the emigrant Romish priests, maintained by the English government. From ‘The pursuits of literature, a satirical poem in dialogue, with notes’, Part the third, v.71, &c. Selected by a Protestant (1796). 35 Mathias, Preface to the Third Dialogue, The Pursuits of Literature, p. 161. 36 In The Crisis of Literature, Paul Keen notes the similarities in aim between Mathias and William Godwin: ‘For radical and conservative authors such as William Godwin and T. J. Mathias, who none the less agreed in their description of literature as a powerful “engine”, political differences were formed within a shared assumption about the importance of authors as the professional group who – for better or for worse – were in charge of this machine’ (Keen, The Crisis of Literature, p. 78). 37 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1936), rev. edn. (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 180.

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38 Robert Miles, ‘The 1790s: the Effulgence of Gothic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 51–2. 39 Samuel Johnson, Preface to A Dictionary of the English language; in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, to which are prefixed, a history of the English language, and an English grammar (London: W. Strahan, 1755), p. 5. Johnson further argued that the English language had ‘been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character’ and that it ‘ought to be our endeavour to recal it, by making our ancient volumes the ground-work of stile’ (ibid.). 40 Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, Fourth Dialogue, ll. 406–10, p. 355. Mathias footnoted his allusion to Diderot’s novels with a satirical aside under the guise of information which read, ‘The names of his posthumous novels, translated for the benefit of Great Britain’. 41 Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, p. 7. The ‘Introductory Letter to a Friend’ was first prefixed to the 5th edn. Mathias went on to demonstrate his point to the letter, here speaking in the same couplet of translation and treason, elsewhere moving effortlessly from the mention of Voltaire, d’Alembert and Condorcet to the contemplation of the pestilential effects of Catholicism, or ‘that superstitious corruption of Christianity’. For a reading of Thomas Holcroft’s melodrama in relation to continental sources, see Diego Saglia, ‘“I almost dread to tell you”: Gothic Melodrama and the Aesthetic of Silence in Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery’, in ‘Eighteenth-century Gothic’, ed. Angela Wright, Gothic Studies, 14(1), May 2012. 42 Anon., Monthly Magazine, December 1797, p. 518. 43 See also Robert Frail’s arguments upon the significance of the Parisian setting in his chapter ‘Diderot’s La Religieuse’, in A Singular Duality: Literary Relations Between France and England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 2007), pp. 77–87. 44 Review of Durval and Adelaide, by Catherine Lara, Critical Review, 18 (December 1796), pp. 474–5. Lara published two translated novels in 1796, the above and Louis de Boncoeur. A Domestick Tale (London: Ridgway, 1796). Although Arthur Aikin in the Monthly Review praised the latter for the ‘considerable merit’ of its translation, the Critical concentrated on the extravagance of French sentiment in both translations, noting of the latter: ‘The language of genuine sensibility and affection is very distinct from this extravagance, which may produce affectation or provoke disgust, but will never touch the heart’ (Critical Review, 18 December 1796, p. 474). 45 Monthly Review, 3 (1790), p. 321. 46 Anon., ‘Academicus’, ‘On the absurdities of the Modern Stage’ (1800), Monthly Mirror, vol. 10 (1800), pp. 180–2. 47 Mathias, Fourth Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature, p. 325. 48 Ibid., p. 404. 49 Cf. chapter 3 of E. J. Clery’s The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) for a detailed analysis of the ‘illegitimacy’

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issue in Walpole’s two Prefaces, pp. 60–7. In ‘Ideal Presence and Gothic Romance’, in Gothic Studies, 1/1, Robert Miles also provides a detailed analysis of the implications of Walpole’s two Prefaces in relation to Kames’s theory of ‘ideal presence’ (pp. 21–3).This Fourth Dialogue was first published in July 1797, four months after Walpole’s death in March of the same year. It is impossible to speculate, therefore, whether Mathias wrote this prior to Walpole’s death, or whether there is any causal connection between Mathias’s finger-pointing and the decision to publish Walpole’s strongly anti-French Prologue to The Mysterious Mother (which I discussed in the Introduction) in the Collected Works of Walpole in 1798. 50 The links between the political revolution and the reading revolution are also emphasised in the satirical articles that I will discuss below. 51 Cf. also Paul Keen’s The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 1999) for a full analysis of the mounting concern of the demise of the republic of letters in Britain. 52 Mathias, Fourth Dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature, p. 405. 53 Ibid., pp. 279–80). 54 Ibid., p. 280, footnote. See also David Simpson’s argument ‘System and Sensibility: Rousseau’, in Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1993). There, Simpson argues that for the British nationalist presses Rousseau was invoked as the ‘apologist’ for ‘natural virtue and spontaneous emotionalism’, becoming synonymous with ‘an equally excessive celebration of sensibility’ (Simpson, p. 76). 55 Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution, p. 131. 56 Rousseau, chased into exile like Voltaire and Muralt before him, was persuaded by the Scottish philosopher David Hume to accompany him on a trip to England in 1766. This began very badly when Horace Walpole, as a joke, circulated a spoof letter supposedly from Frederick the Great, ‘My dear Jean-Jacques … the French have issued a warrant for your arrest; so come to me … Your good friend Frederick.’ Differences in national temperament, coupled with Rousseau’s extreme paranoia, led to a persistent suspicion on the part of Rousseau that Hume and his circle were conspiring to discredit him. The legacy of this awkward beginning remained throughout his stay in England. Walpole, never one to reserve his opinions in his correspondence, wrote voluminously upon Rousseau’s lack of grace. To Sir Horace Mann, for example, he wrote of this particular incident that ‘It was made up, but I believe not at all forgiven, for it is unpardonable to be too quick-sighted, and to detect anybody’s idol. Rousseau has answered all I thought and said of him, by a most weak and passionate answer to my letter, which showed I had touched his true sore; and since, by the most abominable and ungrateful abuse of Mr Hume’ (Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 11th July 1766, Correspondence, vol. 22, p. 434). Nonetheless, Walpole read all of Rousseau’s works, but did not admire them. For further details of the reception of Rousseau’s works in England, see my essay ‘“How do we ape thee, France!”

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The Cult of Rousseau in Women’s Gothic Writing of the 1790s’, in Le Gothic, ed. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008) pp. 67–82. 57 George Canning, ‘New Morality’, The Anti-Jacobin Review, xxxvi, 9 July 1798, in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin with explanatory notes by Charles Edmonds (London: G. Willis, 1854), p. 229. 58 Its Gothic narrative, as I shall explore further in Chapter 5, has uncanny parallels with Matthew Lewis’s later novel The Monk (1796). 59 See also chapter 1 of Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), for further details of the range of these adaptations of Rousseau. 60 Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) (New York: Garland, 1970), p. 34. 61 Canning, ‘New Morality’, p. 235. 62 Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825, p. 5. 63 Canning, ‘Brissot’s Ghost’, The Anti-Jacobin, xxv, 30 April 1798, reprinted in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 196. 64 Ibid. 65 Sue Chaplin, ‘Romance and Sedition in the 1790s: Radcliffe’s The Italian and the Terrorist Text’, in Romanticism, 7(2), 2001, pp. 177–90. Here, Chaplin also usefully explores the proliferation of the 1790s Gothic romance in relation to legal arguments on ‘seditious texts’. 66 Monthly Review 17, (1791), p. 121. 67 Anon., ‘On the Evil Tendency of Novels’, signed by T.H., in European Magazine for March 1806, pp. 188–9. 68 Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution, p. 131. 69 Ibid., p. 126. 70 Richard Phillips and Joseph Johnson published the first Monthly Magazine in February 1796. 71 Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s, p. 8. 72 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ repr. in David Lodge, ed., Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), p. 206. Despite Radcliffe’s undisputed leadership in the genre of romance in the 1790s, however, as this chapter argues, her literary forebears Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee were also of great significance in the formation of the Gothic genre. 73 Nathan Drake, Literary Hours or sketches critical and narrative (Sudbury, 1798), p. 249. 74 New London Review, 2 (October 1799), pp. 388–9. Review of Anne Ker, The Heiress di Montalde; or, the Castle of Bezanto: A Novel (London, 1799). 75 Review of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Critical Review, 2(23), 1798, pp. 166–9, esp. 166. 76 The Oxford English Dictionary records the first definition of ‘constitution’ as ‘The action of constituting, making, establishing, etc.’. 77 Paine, Rights of Man (London, 1790).

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78 Cf. Robert Miles’s ‘The 1790s: the Effulgence of Gothic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, for a good exploration of the proliferation of the genre in the 1790s and the critical unrest this caused (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 41–62. 79 ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’, Monthly Magazine, ‘Letter to the Editor’, August 1797, p. 102; ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, in Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797, vol. 1 (London, 1798), pp. 223–5, cit. Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, p. 184; ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’, signed by ‘Anti-Ghost’ for Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, January 1798. 80 On the imitative trend that gave rise to such satirical articles as the ones I am about to discuss, E. J. Clery correctly argues: ‘The hothouse productivity of the 1790s meant that the initial reading of a Gothic novel was not unlikely to be the equivalent of reading half a dozen others’ (The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, p. 142). Cf. also Edward Jacobs’s Accidental Migrations which discusses the Gothic’s reproduction of an ‘unusally stable set of conventions in an unprecedented number of texts’ (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000, p. 198). Jacobs also cites Mary Alcock’s ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’, in Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford University Press, 1990). 81 ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, p. 102, cit. Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, p. 184. Cf. also Sue Chaplin’s ‘Romance and Sedition in the 1790s: Radcliffe’s The Italian and the Terrorist Text’, in Romanticism, 7(2), 2001, pp. 177–90. This article also addresses ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ in relation to the law and unregulated consumption. 82 ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, pp. 223–5, cit. Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, p. 184. 83 ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’, p. 11. 84 ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’, p. 102. 85 Ibid., pp. 102–3. 86 Ibid., p. 102. 87 Ibid., p. 104. 88 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 41. 89 As Robert Miles has noted, the trials were a consequence of the government’s alarm at the rise of British ‘Jacobinism’ in the form of political rallies and protests. See Robert Miles, Introduction to Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (1797) (London: Penguin, 2000), p. xxi. 90 Morning Chronicle, September 1795. 91 Morning Chronicle, 29 October 1795. 92 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit – and the Closet – in The Monk’, Romanticism on the Net, 8 (November 1997) [13 March 2009]. www. erudit.org/revue/ron/1997/v/n8/005770ar.html 93 Critical Review, 16 (February 1796).

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94 Fred Botting, ‘Power in the Darkness: Heterotopias, Literature and Gothic Labyrinths’, in Genre, xxvi (2–3), Summer/Fall 1993, p. 280. 95 The Ghost, by Felix Phantom (Edinburgh: G. Mudie and Son). Issue no. 1 appeared on 25 April 1796. 96 Critical Review, 18 (December 1796). 97 The Ghost, xxxiv (August 1796), p. 33. 98 Ibid. 99 The career of Eliza Parsons, a prolific author of Gothic romance and novels of conduct, is an example of this type of prefatorial pleading. In a ‘Card’ which precedes The Mysterious Warning of 1796, for example, Parsons apologises for ‘the too frequent demands she makes on [the] indulgence’ of her ‘numerous Friends’, and further excuses the ‘scenes of horror, and melancholy events’ which form the subject of her fiction, suggesting that ‘her writings take their colouring from her mind’ (Parsons, ‘A Card’, The Mysterious Warning: a German tale, 4 vols. (London: William Lane, 1796). Elsewhere in prefaces to her novels, Parsons famously elaborated upon the sources of her melancholic cast of mind, dwelling on the financial demands of her large and unfortunate family. For further information on this, see Karen Morton’s A Life Marketed as Fiction: An Analysis of the Works of Eliza Parsons (Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2011). 100 The Ghost, xxxiv (August 1796), pp. 33–4. 101 Ibid., p. 33. 4   The castle under threat 1 Anon., The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797. Being an impartial selection of the most exquisite essays and jeux d’esprits … With explanatory notes and anecdotes … (London: Richardsons, Symonds, Clarke, Harding, 1798). Although the title of the publication in which this article appears suggests that it comes from an earlier publication, there is no attribution within The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797. The precise dating of it is rendered confusing by the footnote’s reference to William Radcliffe’s forthcoming excursion into Germany with his wife (which took place in 1794), and only three publications by Radcliffe, but the charge of ‘covering the kindgdom of Naples in figs’ clearly refers to Radcliffe’s fifth romance, The Italian (1797). 2 James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 112. 3 Raven, Forster and Bending show four editions, and possibly different translations of Paul et Virginie between 1788–9, and ‘17 English forms of this work between 1795, when Helen Maria Williams’s Paul and Viriginia was published, and 1800’. They further note that ‘all but 4 of these are Williams’s translation’ with the others translated by Henry Hunter D.D. in 1796, 1798, 1799 and 1800 (The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, ed. Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling. (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 448.)

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4 Helen Maria Williams, Paul and Virginia. Translated from the French of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. London, 1795, pp. iii–iv. 5 Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 106. 6 See Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester University Press, 1995), Deborah D. Rogers, Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography (London: Greenwood Press, 1996), and Rictor Norton, The Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999). 7 William Radcliffe, trans., A journey through Sweden, containing a detailed account of its population, agriculture, commerce, and finances; to which is added an abridged history of the kingdom, by Henry I. F. Drevon. The title notes that it is ‘Written in French by a Dutch officer, and translated into English by William Radcliffe’, London: printed for G. Kearsley, [1790?]; William Radcliffe, trans., The natural history of East Tartary; traced through the three Kingdoms of nature. Published at Petersburgh by the Academy of Sciences by Karl Ivanovich Hablitz, And rendered into English from the French translation. By William Radcliffe. London: printed by M. Vint; for W. Richardson, 1789. See also the brief and factual entry on William Radcliffe in David Rivers, Literary memoirs of living authors of Great Britain, arranged according to an alphabetical catalogue … and including a list of their works, vol. ii (London, 1798), p. 182. The comparatively low impact of William’s translational career is illustrated by comparing Rivers’s entry on him to the preceding longer entry upon Ann Radcliffe. There, Rivers begins by noting her as ‘A lady of great distinction in the literary world as a novel-writer’ (vol. ii, p. 181). 8 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, p. 62. Norton’s biography of Ann Radcliffe is also very useful in its foregrounding of William Radcliffe’s republican sympathies. It is interesting to note, as Norton does, that William’s editorial predecessor at the Gazeteer was none other than James Perry, sympathiser of Charles James Fox, who then went on to purchase the Morning Chronicle which published the articles entitled ‘The System of Terror’ which I discussed in Chapter 3. 9 John Colin Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction (1814), A new edition revised with notes, appendices and index, by Henry Wilson. 2 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden, 1888), vol. ii, pp. 579, 581. 10 Thomas Noon Talfourd, Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs Radcliffe (1826), prefixed to Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III, and St Alban’s Abbey, 4 vols. (London: Henry Colburne, 1826), p. 12. Talfourd’s posthumous biography of Radcliffe was accompanied by excerpts from her journal. It was commissioned by her husband, William Radcliffe, and as a consequence of William’s supervisory eye, the Memoir and excerpts are, as Robert Miles also notes, ‘rich in ideological nuance, not least because of its managed quality’ (Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress, p. 28). 11 E. J. Clery, Peter Garside and Carolyn Franklin, Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 13.

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12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Critical Review, 2nd ser. ii (August 1794), pp. 361–72. 13 Keats to Reynolds, 14 March 1818, in Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton, The Life and Letters of John Keats (1867; repr. Read Books, 2008), p. 71. 14 Talfourd, Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs Radcliffe, p. 12. 15 Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature. A satirical poem in four dialogues. With notes, 8th edn (1798), footnote to Dialogue the First, p. 58. This eighth edition was published in 1798, and it is here that the footnote accusing Smith, Inchbald and Robinson, and exonerating Ann Radcliffe, first appears. 16 Horace Walpole, Second Preface to The Castle of Otranto (1764/5), ed. E. J. Clery (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996), p. 14. 17 Alison Milbanke, ed., Introduction to Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xiii. 18 E. J. Clery, Women’s Gothic (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), p. 53. 19 With The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), according to my own counts, Radcliffe quotes Shakespeare in twenty-two chapter epigraphs out of a total of fifty-seven chapters. The most prevalent Shakespeare plays to be quoted are Hamlet and Macbeth. With The Italian (1797), Radcliffe quotes Shakespeare for twelve chapters out of a total of thirty-five. Again, Hamlet and Macbeth both feature prominently here, although her overall use of Shakespearen quotation is more diverse, with epigraphs also drawn from Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King John, Richard III, King Lear and As You Like It. See also my essay ‘In Search of Arden: Ann Radcliffe’s William Shakespeare’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 111–30. 20 Nathan Drake, Literary hours or sketches critical and narrative (Sudbury, 1798), p. 249. 21 J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London: Methuen, 1932, 1961, repr. 1969), p. 249. 22 Ibid., p. 250. 23 Ibid., p. 251. 24 David Durant, ‘Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic’, SEL, 22 (1982), p. 520. 25 Ibid., p. 519. 26 Ibid., p. 521. 27 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973). 28 Regina Maria Roche, The Children of the Abbey, A Tale. 4 vols. (London: William Lane, 1796), and Clermont. A Tale, 4 vols. (London: Lane, 1798). 29 See Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné. A tale. In a series of letters. 2 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1777); Eleanor Sleath, The Orphan of the Rhine. A Romance. 4 vols. (London: William Lane, 1798). 30 Anon. Review of The Orphan of the Rhine by Mrs Sleath in the Critical Review, 27 (November 1799), p. 356.

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31 Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 157. 32 Wollstonecraft, letter to William Godwin, 22 September 1798, from Posthumous Works of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (London, 1798), vol. iii, p. 59. 33 The publication in 1760 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse was translated as quickly as possible into English. As James H. Warner documents, the booksellers Becket and De Hondt advertised the translation of it for a full three months before the first volumes of the translation by William Kenrick appeared (Warner, ‘Eighteenth-century Reactions to La Nouvelle Héloïse’, PMLA, lii (1937), pp. 803–19). Despite such a speedy dissemination in the 1760s, however, the debate over this, and much of Rousseau’s other writing, continued well into the 1790s, with an anonymous sequel to La Nouvelle Héloïse appearing as late as 1790 from the Minerva Press. (Anon., Laura; or, original letters. In two volumes. A sequel to the Eloisa of J. J. Roussea, from the French. (London: William Lane, 1790).) 34 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, p. 138. 35 Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791), ed. Chloë Chard (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 1–2. 36 As I indicated in Chapter 2, the French advocate François Gayot de Pitaval lived between 1673 and 1743, and published Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes in eighteen volumes between 1734 and 1741. 37 John Colin Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction (1814), ed. Henry Wilson, 2 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden, 1888), vol. ii, p. 579. The connection that Dunlop makes between Radcliffe and Pitaval’s work is all the more persuasive since Dunlop mentions the specific title of Pitaval’s work, whereas Radcliffe does not. Clara McIntyre first discovered a connection between the story of ‘Mademoiselle de Choiseul’ in Smith’s Romance and in Radcliffe’s story. Chard traces the name of La Motte to the queen’s necklace affair – the Comtesse de la Motte – and her notes on p. 367 of her edition trace the Pitaval reference, observing that Radcliffe uses the same mis-spelling of his name as Smith. Chard, however, finds no direct connection to the tales that Smith uses in The Romance of Real Life. Clara Frances McIntyre, Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time. Yale Studies in English, no. 62 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1920). 38 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest. 39 Norton’s Mistress of Udolpho also notes this, but qualifies it further by noting analogies between La Luc and Radcliffe’s uncle, Bentley, who had a great influence upon her fiction. 40 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, p. 270. 41 Rousseau, Émile (1762). Here, I have used Kenrick’s original eighteenth-century translation, Emilius and Sophia: or, a new system of education (London: Griffiths, Becket and De Hondt, 1762), vol. ii, p. 127. 42 Ibid., p. 128. 43 Ibid., pp. 140, 141.

Notes to pages 99–104

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44 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, p. 221. 45 In ‘Rousseau’s English Daughters: Female Desire and Male Guardianship in British Romantic Fiction’, Peter Mortensen discusses the impact of Rousseau’s 1761 Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse upon three other English authors: Henry Mackenzie, Elizabeth Inchbald and Jane Austen. Their appropriation and transformation of Rousseauvian discourse also leads Mortensen to argue that ‘French sentimental romance-conventions’ were simultaneously ‘recovered, reformulated and contested within British Romantic fiction’. Thus, Radcliffe’s endorsement and correction of Rousseau is not unique within British fiction, but her engagement and correction of Rousseau through close examination of his propositions within The Romance of the Forest is exceptional (Mortensen, ‘Rousseau’s English Daughters: Female Desire and Male Guardianship in British Romantic Fiction’, English Studies, 83(4), August 2002, p. 356). 46 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, p. 82. 47 E. J. Clery, ‘Ann Radcliffe and D. A. F. de Sade: Thoughts on Heroinism’, in ‘Female Gothic’ ed. Robert Miles, Women’s Writing, 1(2), 1994, p. 7. In this important essay, Clery also views The Romance of the Forest as ‘the most philosophical of Radcliffe’s novels’, and examines the tropes shared by Rousseau and D. A. F. de Sade through the problematic of Rousseau’s influence. 48 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, p. 107. 49 In Émile, of course, Rousseau’s educational theories go beyond the issue of self-love and also address the physical and mental development of a child from baby to adolescence. For further analysis of these, and of this work’s connection to Madame de Genlis’s Adelaide et Théodore, see Julia Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster (Chicago Uinversity Press, 2002) and Lesley Walker, A Mother’s Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008). 50 Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress, p. 154. 51 Review of Madame de Genlis, Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education trans. anon. (London: Bathurst and Cadell, 1783), in the Critical Review, 56 (October 1783), p. 301. 52 I am indebted to Dr Gillian Dow, of the University of Southampton, for initial guidance on de Genlis’s work. See her edition of de Genlis’s work: Gillian Dow, ed., Adelaide and Theodore, by Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). 53 Madame de Genlis, Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education. 54 [William Enfield], review of The Romance of the Forest, Monthly Review, n.s.8 (May 1792), p. 82. 55 Review of The Romance of the Forest, Critical Review, n.s.4 (April 1792), p. 458. 56 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, p. 261. 57 Oxford English Dictionary. This particular definition of ‘genius’ reads thus: ‘With reference to a nation, age, etc.: Prevalent feeling, opinion, sentiment, or taste; distinctive character, or spirit’, www.oed.com (accessed 13 March 2009).

186

Notes to pages 105–10

58 When, for example, St Aubert is compelled to seek help from a humble and poor man in France as he becomes ill, the narrator observes that ‘St. Aubert was himself a Frenchman; he therefore was not surprised at French courtesy’ (Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 66). 59 Ibid., p. 419. 60 Ibid., pp. 1 and 4. See also Terry Castle’s excellent argument in her chapter ‘The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho’, in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 7–9. Here she analyses the persistent haunted consciousness that pervades Radcliffe’s fourth romance. This leads her to explore as well the unsatisfactory, illusory ending to the novel which hinge more upon mourning than upon celebration. 61 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 6. 62 Ibid., p. 383. See also my arguments upon this allusion in my essay ‘In Search of Arden: Ann Radcliffe and William Shakespeare’, in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 127. 63 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 383. 64 John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 48. For additional discussions of the LCS, see also Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Jennifer Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997). 65 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 551. 66 Ibid., p. 552. 67 Ibid., p. 557. 68 In Scott’s essay on ‘Ann Radcliffe’, in Lives of the Novelists, he objected to her use of the explained supernatural, stating that it ‘has not been done with uniform success, and … the author has been occasionally more successful in exciting interest and apprehension, than in giving either interest or dignity of explanation to the means she has made use of.’ (Scott, ‘Ann Radcliffe’, Lives of the Novelists, in Miscellaneous Prose Works (1827) in Scott, On Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 115. 69 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 552. 70 Ibid., p. 381. 71 Radcliffe, The Italian (1797), ed. Robert Miles (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 38. 72 Radcliffe’s recuperation of the positive attributes of chivalry was not unique in the 1790s; besides Clara Reeve’s early recuperation of it in The Progress of Romance, the other significant figure who also reclaimed it from Burke was Charlotte Smith. For more discussion of Smith’s recuperation of chivalry, see Essaka Joshua, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Desmond: Romance and the Man of Principle in the Domestic and Public Spheres’, The Eighteenth Century Novel, 5 (2006), pp. 277–319. 73 Radcliffe, The Italian, p. 38. 74 ‘It is an imitation of Mrs Radcliffe’s romances, but without any resemblance that may not be attained by a common pen.’ Review of Mary Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac, Critical Review, August 1798, p. 472.

Notes to pages 110–14

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75 Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac, vol. ii, p. 73. 76 Radcliffe, The Italian, p. 100. 77 See Cannon Smitt’s ‘Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian’, ELH, 61(4), 1994, pp. 853–76. Here, he argues that ‘Ellena is recognizable as English only because she is defined against the foreign. If sentimental novels advanced the cause of England and Englishness by means of opposed characters, presenting in a domestic setting a distinction between English virtue and Francophilic vice, the Gothic at once retains and intensifies this opposition by setting its action in an antination and pitting its protagonists against monstrously “other” antitypes.’ (p. 861). Schmitt’s point partly resides upon the negotiation of the heroine’s proper virtue through the form of the English sentimental novel. This is problematic, however, as the sentimental Richardsonian novel was, as previous chapters of this book have argued, derived from French models of sentimental fiction. Furthermore, given Radcliffe’s tendency to approvingly refer to particular Frenchmen (if not all) in peculiarly benevolent terms, it is also difficult to read her novels in such binaries as representing this opposition between the English and the foreign other. 78 Ann Radcliffe, A Journey made in the summer of 1794 through Holland and the western frontier of Germany (London, 1795), p. 135. 79 Ibid., pp. v–vi. 80 Review in The English Review, 26 (July, August and September 1795), pp. 1–5. 81 Talfourd, Memoir, 1826, p. 20. 82 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, p. 195. Furthermore, Robert Miles’s otherwise excellent study of Radcliffe (1995) remains silent upon Gaston and E. J. Clery calls it a ‘strange contradictory work’ (Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 110). 83 While Talfourd suggests that she wrote it for amusement, Norton suggests that it was withdrawn from publication, or possibly rejected (Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, p. 193). 84 Ibid. 85 Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, pp. 3–4. 86 As Frances Chiu notes, however, in her excellent edition of Gaston de Blondeville (Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2006, p. 3) Willoughton here conflates two lines from Rosalind and Touchstone in As You Like It (Act ii scene 4, ll. 15–16): ros. Well this is the forest of Arden. touch. Ay, now am I in Arden, the more

fool I. (Chiu, Gaston de Blondeville (Valancourt Books, 2006), p. 3)

87 Malone’s note on the location of Arden reads as follows: ‘Ardenne is a forest of considerable extent in French Flanders, lying near the Meuse, and between Charlemont and Rocroy. It is mentioned by Spenser, in his Colin Clout’s come home again, 1595: “Into a forest wide and waste he came, “Where store he heard to be of savage prey; “So wide a forest, and so waste as this, “Not famous Ardeyn, nor foul Arlo is.”’

188

Notes to pages 114–21

Having quoted Spenser’s French location, Malone then carefully distinguishes Shakespeare’s differing location: ‘But our author was furnished with the scene of his play by Lodge’s novel’ (Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakspear (1790), vol. 4, p. 123). Here, he refers to Thomas Lodge’s work Rosalynd (1590). For further discussion of Malone’s political positioning in his scholarly edition of Shakespeare, see my essay ‘In Search of Arden: Ann Radcliffe’s William Shakespeare’, pp. 111–30. 88 Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, pp. 4–5. 89 Ibid., p. 6. 90 Ibid., pp. 5–6. 91 Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16, p. 145. 92 Chiu, Introduction to Gaston de Blondeville, p. xxii. 93 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies relative to that event (London: J. Dodsley), p. 11. 94 Watt, Contesting the Gothic, p. 66, and Sue Chaplin, The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764–1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 120. 95 Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 110, and Chaplin, The Gothic and the Rule of the Law, p. 122. 96 Chiu, Introduction to Gaston de Blondeville, pp. xxv–xxvii. 97 See Charles John Fedorak, Henry Addington, Prime Minister, 1801–1804: Peace, War and Parliamentary Politics (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2002). Discussing the large mobilisation of volunteers to fight the invasion from France between 1801–3 under Prime Minister Henry Addington, in Britons Linda Colley acknowledges that ‘large numbers of Britons were opposed to the political ordering of their state, to its fiscal exactions, to its social and economic inequities, and to its involvement in a protraccted war. There was massive though uneven discontent at this time’ (Colley, Britons, p. 310). 98 Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, p. 7. 99 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), p. 239. 100 Radcliffe, Commonplace book, MSCh.K.1.10 qto, Boston Public Library. 101 Radcliffe, A Journey made in the summer of 1794, p. 33. 5  ‘The order disorder’d’ 1 Robert Miles argues that ‘[i]n male Gothic, the visual is rarely “checked”, Ambrosio’s seduction in The Monk being the locus classicus’ (Miles, Gothic Writing: 1750–1820: A Genealogy, 2nd edn (Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 57). 2 Review of the French original of this tale, Les Aventures d’Edouard Bomson, pour server de suit à la nouvelle Héloïse, 8 vols. (Lausanne), Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, 70 (September 1790), pp. 316–20.

Notes to pages 122–5

189

3 Critical Review, 70 (September 1790), p. 317. The British Library’s catalogue confirms the nationality of the author as German, but does trace an original German edition of the work. Friedrich August Clemens’s original work was Die Begenbenheiten Bomstons in Italien, which, the catalogue notes, is ‘itself translated by Seigneux de Correvon’. 4 James Raven, ‘The Novel Comes of Age’, in The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, ed. Peter Garside, James Raven and Schöwerling, vol. i (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56–8. 5 Ibid., p. 57. 6 Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk (1796), ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario: Broadview, 2004), p. 38. 7 Anon., review of The Monk, Monthly Review, 23 (1797), p. 451. 8 François Pétis de la Croix, Histoire de la sultane de Perse et des visirs (1707), trans. Turkish tales; consisting of several extraordinary adventures: with the history of the sultaness of Persia, and the visiers. Written originally in the Turkish language, by Chec Zade, for the use of Amurath II. And now done into English (London: Jacob Tonson, 1708). 9 The Guardian, Monday, 13 August 1714, no. 148. 10 Jacques Cazotte, Le Diable Amoureux (Naples, 1772) trans. anon. as Alvarez; or, irresistible seduction: A Spanish Tale (London: W. Richardson, 1791), and in 1793 as Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love. Translated from the French. Trans. anon. (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793). A further translation, entitled The Enamoured Spirit, was issued in London in 1798, possibly as a consequence of The Monk. 11 Anon., review of Comtesse de Genlis, The Knights of the Swan; or, the court of Charlemagne: A Historical and Moral Tale: To serve as a continuation to the tales of the castle; and of which all the incidents that bear analogy to the French Revolution are taken from history. Trans. James Beresford (London: J. Johnson, 1796), Monthly Review, n.s. 22(93), January 1797. 12 See in particular chapter 2 of Louis F. Peck’s A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 19–41; Section iii entitled ‘The Controversy’ of André Parreaux, The Publication of The Monk: A Literary Event, 1796–1798 (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1960), pp. 79–144; and Michael Gamer, ‘Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic, PMLA, 114(5), October 1999, pp. 1043–54. Michael Gamer in particular perceptively documents and discusses the anti-Jacobin hysteria that pursued Lewis after he coyly admitted to the authorship of The Monk, and addresses the charges of obscenity and how they point up connections between the libertine enlightenment French pornography and the Gothic. 13 Margaret Baron-Wilson, The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, with many pieces in prose and verse never before published (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), p. i. 14 Ibid., pp. iii–iv.

190

Notes to pages 125–8

15 Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; a satire (London: J. Cawthorn, 1809), ll. 281–2. 16 The separation of the parents of Lewis occurred in 1781, due to marital ­differences. As Peck charts in his biography, Mrs Lewis moved out of the family home, took a lover, gave birth to an illegitimate child and moved around quite frequently. Lewis’s correspondence with his mother is full of concern for her situation, and hope that he can help her to recover reputation and prosperity. (For further details about this, see Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, pp. 6–7.) 17 Matthew Lewis, Letter to his mother, 7 September 1791, Paris, cit. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, pp. 184–6. 18 Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, p. 9. 19 Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796), ed. Howard Anderson (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 96–7. 20 Matthew Lewis, Letter to his mother, Sunday, 25 March 1792, Oxford, cit. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, p. 189. 21 Parreaux, The Publication of The Monk, p. 132. 22 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 218. 23 Fiévée et Berton, Les Rigueurs du cloître, first performed on 23 August 1790; Anon., Encore des Moines, vaudeville first performed 19 November 1792. 24 Matthew Lewis, Letter to his mother, Oxford, Thursday, 8 March 1792, repr. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, p. 187. 25 Benoît Joseph Marsollier, Camille, ou le souterrain, représentée par les Comédiens italiens, le 19 mars 1791, publ. Marseille: Mossy, 1791. Of Camille and Lewis’s observations upon it, Diane Long Hoeveler also notes, ‘Clearly, we have here a miniature re-enactment on the operatic stage of the most gothic of interpolated episodes in Madame de Genlis’s novelistic “letters on education”, Adèle et Théodore (1782; trans. 1783), The affecting history of the Duchess of C**, in which an Italian noblewoman is imprisoned by her husband for nine years before she is released, a motif that would appear fairly quickly in Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and its imitations (Eliza Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach, 1793, is only one of many)’ (Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State Uinversity Press, 2010), pp. 81–2). 26 Peter Mortensen, ‘The Englishness of the English Gothic Novel: Romance-Writing in an Age of Europhobia’, in ‘Better in France?’: The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Frédéric Ogée (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005). 27 [Own translation] Original reads: LE PÈRE LAURENT: L’ordre général, Monsieur le comte ? … lorsque tout est anéanti, quand la majesté des rois, la sainteté des tribunaux, quand le culte même, quand la religion … M. DE FRANCHEVILLE: Rien n’est anéanti, mon père ; tout est respecté, tout subsiste, le roi n’a rien perdu de sa puissance puisqu’il a conservé celle de faire le bien. Des juges nouveaux s’élèvent et leur ministère ne sera plus flétri par ce vile intérêt qui si longtemps en dégrada les fonctions. Le culte est toujours le même, et les abus dont on le dégage ne font pas la religion. (Jacques-Marie Boutet de Monvel, Les Victimes Cloitrées, Act ii scene iv)

Notes to pages 129–34

191

28 Paulson says, ‘I do not mean to suggest that Ann Radcliffe or “Monk” Lewis was producing propaganda either for or against the French Revolution’ (Representations of Revolution, p. 219). This position is no doubt informed by Lewis’s own covert position at the time of the publication of The Monk (1796). 29 M. G. Lewis, ‘France and England in 1793’ (Ms. 114, National Library of Jamaica,) repr. in The Monk, ed. Macdonald and Scherf, pp. 385–7. 30 M. G. Lewis, Letter to his mother from the Hague, 22 November 1794, repr. in Baron-Wilson, The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, vol. i, p. 138. 31 William Pitt, speech to the House of Commons, November 1801, in Orations on the French War, to the Peace of Amiens (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 430. 32 The History of Gothic Fiction, (Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 82). 33 See my essay ‘European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine’, in European Gothic, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 39–54. 34 Béatrice Didier, Sade: Une écriture du désir (Paris: Denoel/Gonthier, 1976), p. 106. Maurice Heine, who first published Sade’s initial version of his tale Les Infortunes de la Vertu in 1930, has also drawn parallels between the trope of the ‘explained supernatural’ in the romances of Ann Radcliffe, and Sade’s frequent and abrupt alternations between Gothic scenarios and their rational explanations. (Heine, ‘Le Marquis de Sade et le roman noir’, in Oeuvres Complètes du Marquis de Sade, ed. A. Le Brun and J-J. Pauvert, 16 vols., Paris: Pauvert, 1973), vol. 3, p. 36.) 35 Thiémet, Les Moines gourmands, Comédie first performed on the 29 June 1791 (unpubl.); Dubois-Fontanelle, Ericie ou La Vestale (1768), perfomed on 19 August 1789; Baculard d’Arnaud, Les Amants Malheureux ou Le Comte de Comminge (1764), performed on 14 May 1790. 36 See in particular R. F. Brissenden’s exploration of this in Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974). 37 Lewis, The Monk (1796), ed. Macdonald and Scherf, p. 64. 38 See George Haggerty, ‘The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction’, in Romanticism on the Net, 36–7, 2004, and Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction. www. erudit.org/revue/ron/1997/v/n8/005770ar. html 39 Lewis, The Monk (1796), ed. Macdonald and Scherf, p. 39. 40 Robert Miles argues that ‘[i]n male Gothic, the visual is rarely “checked”, Ambrosio’s seduction in The Monk being the locus classicus’ (Miles, Gothic Writing: 1750–1820: A Genealogy, 2nd edn (Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 57. 41 D. A. F. de Sade, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu (1791), trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, Three Complete Novels and Other Writings (London: Arrow, 1991), p. 670. 42 David Punter, The Literature of Terror, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London and New York: Longman, 1996), vol. i, p. 79.

192

Notes to pages 135–9

43 Sade, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, p. 720. 44 As Peter France has documented, Diderot in fact wrote La Religieuse in 1760. However, it was only published in the journal Correspondance littéraire in 1780. A teasing set of letters, however, which describe the circumstances of composition, had been made public in 1770 (Peter France, Diderot (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 37). 45 Denis Diderot, La Religieuse (1780) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961). My own translation of this comment from Suzanne is: ‘Perhaps I am slightly flirtatious, who knows? I am a woman.’ 46 William Taylor, Review of The Nun by Diderot. Monthly Review, 23, July 1797, p. 350. 47 Michael Gamer, ‘Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic’, PMLA, 114(5), October 1999, p. 1047. 48 Clara Tuite, ‘Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, the Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk’, in Romanticism on the Net, 8 November 1997. www. erudit.org/revue/ron/1997/v/n8/005770ar.html 49 Coleridge, review of The Monk, Critical Review, 1797, pp. 194–200. 50 Thomas James Mathias, Preface to vol. iv of The Pursuits of Literature, July 1797, 8th rev. edn (London: T. Becket, 1798), p. 239. 51 Ibid., p. 242. 52 See Michael Gamer’s summary of this critical debate in ‘Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic’, p. 1048. 53 Mathias, Preface to vol. iv of The Pursuits of Literature, p. 241. 54 Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance (1796), 2nd edn (London, 1796), vol. iii, pp. 314–15. 55 Cf. again Mortensen, ‘The Englishness of the English Gothic Novel: Romance-Writing in an Age of Europhobia’ (2005). 56 For further insightful discussion of the metaphors of contamination, see Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 57 Mathias, Preface to vol. iv of The Pursuits of Literature, p. 242. 58 Lewis, The Monk, 3rd edn. Copy annotated by Lewis, held in the British Library. BL: C.28. b 4–6: iv. 59 Lewis, Preface to Adelmorn, the outlaw (1801), p. v. 60 Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 88–9. 61 Anon., ‘On Romances and Novels, and the Proper Employment of the Time of the Fair Sex’, Scots Magazine, lix (June 1797), pp. 374–5; Anon., ‘On Novels and Romances’, Scots Magazine, lxiv (June–July 1802), pp. 470–4. The latter article is a specific attack upon Lewis’s The Monk. 62 See André Parreaux, The Publication of The Monk: A Literary Event, 1796–1798 (Paris: Didier, 1960), p. 127. 63 Review of The Castle Spectre. Analytical Review, 28 (August 1798), pp. 179–91, p. 180. 64 Anon., Epistle in Rhyme, to M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P. with other verses by the same hand (London: W. H. Lunn, 1798), p. 1, ll. 5–10.

Notes to pages 140–7

193

65 Ibid. p. 3, ll. 11–26. 66 Ibid., p. 10. 67 Ibid. 68 See the footnote to p. 1 of the Epistle in Rhyme to M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P. where Soame confesses that he is ‘unable to account for the violent outcry’ raised against Lewis’s novel. He does, however, temper this criticism with praise for Thomas Mathias, arguing that he ‘seldom errs’ (p. 2). 69 Matthew Lewis, Preface to Venoni; or, The Novice of St Mark’s, date first ­performed December 1808 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1809), p. v. 70 Lewis, Venoni (1809), Act III, p. 86. 71 See George Haggerty, ‘The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction’, in Romanticism on the Net, 36–7, 2004, and Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction. 72 Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 101. 73 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Modes of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 42. 74 See Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, p. 145. 75 Matthew Lewis, Romantic Tales (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), vol. i, p. vii. 76 Lewis’s version of Les Quatre Facardins was later deemed to be ‘competent and somewhat free’ in the re-edition of his translation of it in Count Anthony Hamilton, Fairy Tales and Romances, translated by M. Lewis, H. T. Ryde, and C. Kenney (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), p. 215. In this particular edition, Lewis also added a sequel to the tale. 77 Critical Review, 15 (December 1808), p. 355. 78 Lewis, Preface, Fairy Tales and Romances (1849), p. 216. 79 Ibid., p. 217. Afterlives 1 Maurice Lévy, ‘Une nouvelle source d’Anne Radcliffe: Les Mémoires du Comte de Comminge, Caliban, 1 (1964), pp. 149–56, p. 149. [Own translation.] Lévy here traces the influence of Madame de Tencin’s 1735 novella Les Mémoires du Comte de Comminge. Because of the length of this passage, I have translated it in the body of the book. The original reads as follows: Ce n’est pas sans quelques scrupules que nous nous proposons d’ajouter à la liste déjà longue des sources auxxquelles il semble établi qu’Anne Radcliffe aît puisé au cours de sa brève mais fructueuse carrière littéraire, le petit roman de Madame de Tencin. La recherche d’antécédents littéraires pour une oeuvre aussi ténue d’intérêt que A Sicilian Romance (1790) peut paraître vaine et dénuée d’intérêt: qui lit encore, de nos jours, l’une ou l’autre de ces pathétiques histories? Par ailleurs, la propriété littéraire n’ayant pas été, au dix-huitième siècle, ce qu’elle est aujourd’hui, le jeu n’est pas près de sa fin, qui consisterait à dépister souvenirs et emprunts.

194

Notes to pages 147–9 I am indebted to my colleague Dr David McCallam, in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Sheffield, for looking over my translation and suggesting some improvements to the second paragraph of it. The influences that Lévy traces are persuasive, and indeed render it all the more surprising that, when publishing his monograph of 1968 and a further essay in 1984, Lévy insisted upon the Gothic as an English product.

2 Nathan Drake, Literary Hours or Sketches Critical and Narrative (Sudbury, 1798), p. 249. Lévy contributed to this critical tendency himself with his valuable foundational work Le Roman gothique anglais which insisted upon abjecting the Gothic from France and insisting upon its English origins. While there is clear evidence in France of a Gothic tradition that was not merely nurtured by the countless translations of popular English Gothic novels that propagated in the 1800s, the contemporaneous critical tendency has tethered the Gothic quite specifically to an English type of fiction. See Maurice Lévy, Le Roman gothique anglais, 1764–1824 (Toulouse: Gallimard, 1968). See also his arguments in the essay ‘Le Roman gothique: genre anglais’, Europe, 659 (March 1984), pp. 5–13, where, as the title suggests, Lévy ascribes the origins of the tradition specifically to England. Béatrice Didier and Jean Roudaut choose the more neutral ‘le roman noir’ to describe the self-same product (Jean Roudaut, ‘Les demeures dans le roman noir’, Critique, August 1959). 3 André Gide, ‘De l’influence en littérature’, trans. Blanche A. Price, ‘Concerning Influence in Literature’, in André Gide, Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, ed. and introd. Justin O’Brien (London: Secker and Warburg, 1959), pp. 22–39; p. 38. 4 William Wordsworth, Preface to 2nd edn of Lyrical Ballads (London: 1800), p. vi. 5 John Colin Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction (1814), 2 vols., ed. Henry Wilson (London: Bell, 1888), vol. ii, p. 468. 6 ‘Why this performance is termed a novel, we are at a loss to determine: certainly not because it possesses any novelty; neither does the general acceptation of the word warrant its adoption in the present instance. According to the modern school, it falls under the denomination of ROMANCE; for, if improbability and absurdity constitute that species of writing, Adeline St Julian is sufficiently romantic. The story is made up from that sublime production, the Castle Spectre, and from Mr Whaley’s tragedy of the Castle of Montval, with several incidents freely borrowed from Cervantes; or, perhaps, at second-hand, from his Shakespearean dramatiser, the author of the Mountaineers. Had we any influence with Mr Astley, the Amphi-theatrical manager; we would recommend Mrs K to his employment, as a kind of journeywoman manufacturer of ghosts, secret doors, &c. &c.’ (Anti-Jacobin Review, 7 (1800), pp. 201–2.) 7 Anne Ker, Preface to Emmeline; or, the happy discovery (London: Kerby, 1801), p. vi. 8 For further discussions of this, see, for example, E. J. Clery’s section on ‘Imitation, Plagiarism and Misattribution’, in The Rise of the Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (1995), pp. 142–3; and Fred Botting’s essay ‘Reading

Notes to pages 149–51

195

Machines’, in Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era, ed. Robert Miles, Romantic Circles Praxis (December 2005), www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ gothic/botting/botting.html. Botting’s recent monograph Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (London: Routledge, 2008) also explores the continuing mechanisation of contemporaneous Gothic fictions. 9 Ann Radcliffe’s heroine Adeline in The Romance of the Forest (1791) is a clear influence; Charlotte Smith’s 1788 novel Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle is a further direct source for the naming of Ker’s fictional heroines. 10 David H. Richter, The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996). 11 Charlotte Dacre’s dedication of her libertine Gothic romance Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer to ‘M. G. Lewis, Esq.’ is a further example of female authors in particular becoming more defiant, and less concerned about critics lambasting their literary influences. (Charlotte Dacre, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (London: J. F. Hughes, 1805).) 12 For more information on this, see Alice M. Killen, Le roman ‘terrifiant’ ou roman ‘noir’ de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe et son influence sur la literature française jusqu’en 1840, 2nd edn (Paris: Champion, 1923), Maurice Lévy, ‘English Gothic and the French Imagination: A Calendar of Translations 1767–1828’, in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974), pp. 150–76, and Daniel Hall, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). 13 Sarah Green, Romance Readers and Romance Writers, 3 vols. (London: T. Hookham, 1810). 14 Although this novel is widely cited as having been composed by Mrs E. M. Foster, Raven, Garside and Schöwerling note that it has been variously attributed to Mrs E. G. Bayfield, J. H. James and Mrs E. M. Foster. (The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, ed. Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling (Oxford University Press, 2000).) 15 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (1985), pbk repr. (University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. xii. 16 See in particular Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) and Duncan’s and David Punter’s excellent Introductions to the editions of The Antiquary and Ivanhoe used here. 17 Walter Scott, The Antiquary (1816), ed. David Hewitt, introd. David Punter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 349. 18 See chapter 3, Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (1958) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997), pp. 46–111.

196

Notes to pages 151–2

19 Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. and introd. Ian Duncan (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 32. 20 Ibid., p. 278. 21 Ibid., p. 498. 22 Ibid., p. 169.

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Index

Addington, Henry, 5, 117, 155 American War of Independence, 34, 36–7, 52 Analytical, 59 Anglo-French conflict, 1, 10, 14, 112, 150 anglomania, 13, 40 Anti-Jacobin Review, 148 aristocracy, 2 Baculard d’Arnaud, 11, 40, 41, 42, 50, 52, 62, 132, 158, 168, 191, 205 Ballin, Rosetta, 46 Barlow, Joel, 69 Baron-Wilson, Margaret, 125 Barrell, John, 186 Barrett, Eaton Stannard, 150 Barruel, Abbé Augustin de, 65, 71, 136 Beckford, William, 14 Bell, David A., 9 Benjamin, Walter, 35 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, 9 Boutet de Monvel, Jacques-Marie, 127, 144 Brantlinger, Patrick, 66 Burke, Edmund, 66, 129 Anon. ‘The humble REMONSTRANCE of the MOB of Great Britain’, 6–7 Butler, Marilyn, 69, 96 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 125 Canning, George, 75–8, 155 Cazotte, Jacques, 124, 189 Chaplin, Sue, 78, 117, 163 Chiu, Frances, 117 chivalry, 18, 109 Clery, E. J., 42, 93, 117, 180 Cohen, Michèle, 17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 92, 136 Colley, Linda, 2, 5, 65, 67, 149, 188 The Corinna of England, 150 Critical Review, 1, 40, 44, 61, 64, 66, 67, 73, 80, 84, 85, 96, 102, 103, 121, 136, 144, 153, 168,

169, 171, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 192, 193, 197 Curran, Stuart, 61 Diderot, Denis, 11, 135 Didier, Beatrice, 132, 157, 189, 191, 192, 194, 205, 209 Dobie, Madeleine, 12 Dorset, Catherine, 172 Drake, Nathan, 94 Dubois-Fontanelle, Jean-Gaspard, 132 Duncan, Ian, 195 Dunlop, John Colin, 11, 91, 97, 98, 118, 148, 158, 182, 184, 194, 199 Durant, David, 95 effeminacy, 8 Ellis, Markman, 131 England, 10 Anglo-French conflict, see Nationalism European Magazine, 78 Fabre, Jean, 11, 157 Fielding, Henry, 17, 160 Fletcher, Lorraine, 52 foppery, 16–17 Foster, James R., 11, 42, 53 Fox, Charles James, 5, 77, 92, 155, 182 France, 10, see England, Anglo-French conflict anglomania, 13 imitation of, 2, 6–7, 8 September Massacres of 1792, 127 francophilia, 8, 10, 105 Gamer, Michael, 11, 54, 139, 158, 159, 175, 189 Garnai, Amy, 60, 175 Genlis, Stéphanie, Comtesse de, 11, 90, 102, 124 Gentleman’s Magazine, 67–9 The Ghost, 87 Gibson, Robert, 154

212

Index Gide, André, 147 Gillray, James, 5 Gilmartin, Kevin, 75, 79 Godwin, William, 96 Gordon, Lord George Gordon Riots, 36 Gothic, 65, 66, 68, 80 ancient British lineage, 10 French interpretations of Gothique, 157 literary genre, 10 shifting understandings of, 11, 15 Green, Sarah, 150 The Guardian, 123 habeas corpus, 82 suspension of, 71, 78, 107 Hale, Terry, 11, 12, 43, 52, 159 Hall, Daniel, 159 Hamilton, Anthony, 32, 144 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 11, 12, 40, 47, 158, 159, 170, 190, 207 Hogarth, William, x, 3, 4, 5, 69, 154, 156 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 166 Hume, David, 10, 157 Hurd, Bishop Richard, 9, 37 Hutcheon, Linda, 150 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 70 Johnson, Samuel, 177 Keats, John, 92 Keen, Paul, 79, 176 Kenrick, William, 33–4 Ker, Anne, 79, 148–9 Klancher, John, 68 Lara, Catherine, 73, 177 Laura; or, Original Letters, 76, 123 Leask, Nigel, 7, 10 Lee, Sophia, 36 The Recess, 43–6 Warbeck, 51, 54 Lesuire, Robert Martin, 5 Lévy, Maurice, 147, 193 Lewis, Matthew Gregory Adelmorn, the outlaw, 138 The Castle Spectre, 139 The Four Facardins, 144 ‘France and England in 1793’, 131 The Monk, 127, 138 Venoni, 144 Liomin, Louis-Augustin, 62 London Magazine, 6

213

Mackenzie, Anna Maria, 48, 170 Malone, Edmond, 188 Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of, 118 Marshal, William, 25 engraver, 25 fictional translator, 24 Marsollier, Benoît Joseph, 127, 190 Mary, Queen of Scots, 44, 49 Mason, Reverend William, 165 Mathias, Thomas James, 75, 92–3, 138, 174 Miles, Robert, 90, 188 Milton, John disagreement with William Marshal, 25 Monthly Review, 44, 78, 103, 123 More, Hannah, 76 Mortensen, Peter, 89, 159, 185 Muralt, Béat Louis de, 18–21 Nationalism, 5, 9 New London Review, 79 Newman, Gerald, 2, 149 Norman Conquest, 3, 117 Norton, Rictor, 90, 96, 113 ‘On the New Method of Inculcating Morality’, 80 Parsons, Eliza, 181 patriotism, 9, 52 Paulson, Ronald, 127 Peck, Louis F., 144 Pétis de la Croix, François Santon Barsisa, 123 Pitaval, François Marie Gayot de, 53 Pitt, William, 65, 78, 83, 84, 89, 107, 110, 131, 155, 186, 191, 208 Pope, Alexander, 41 Prévost d’Exiles, 11, 45, 52, 61, 148, 149, 171, 201 Punter, David, 65, 82 Radcliffe, Ann, 49, 79 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 93 commonplace book, 118 Gaston de Blondeville, 118 The Italian, 109, 110 Journey, 112, 119 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 59, 96, 103, 110 The Romance of the Forest, 93, 96, 103, 104–5 A Sicilian Romance, 93, 96 Radcliffe, William, 90, 182 Rae, W. Fraser, 16–17 Reeve, Clara, 36 The Exiles, 39–42 The Progress of Romance, 39

214 Reign of Terror in France, 15 Richardson, Samuel, 18 Richter, David, 149 Robertson, Fiona, 46, 195 Robinson, Mary, 70, 110 Hubert de Sevrac, 176 Roche, Regina Maria, 90, 95 Rogers, Deborah D., 90 romance, 80 versus history, 46 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11, 35, 75, 90, 102, 178–9 Sade, D. A. F. de, 132 Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de, 88, 90, 122, 202 Schmitt, Cannon, 187 Scott, Walter, 91, 109, 154, 186 The Antiquary, 151 Ivanhoe, 147, 152 Waverley, 150 Seven Years War, i, 1, 6, 8, 12, 18, 22, 26, 34, 36, 37, 50, 51, 110, 153–4, 155, 159, 162, 203 Shakespeare, William, 164 quotation of, 93 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 92 Sleath, Eleanor, 90, 95 Smith, Charlotte, 36, 60, 70, 106 The Banished Man, 59 Desmond, 59 Emmeline, 58 Ethelinde, 58 The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, 59 Manon L’Escaut, 52–3 The Old Manor House, 59 The Romance of Real Life, 58, 61 Soame, Henry An Epistle in Rhyme, to M. G. Lewis, Esq., 141 Steevens, George, 52 ‘The System of Terror’, 83 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 91, 92, 112, 182 Tench, Watkin, 69 Tencin, Madame de, 11, 147, 158, 193, 203

Index terror importation of, 67 literature of, 67 Reign of Terror in France, 15 system of, 89 ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, 80, 88 ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’, 80, 81–4 Thiémet, 191 Tombs, Robert and Isabelle, 10, 22, 154, 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 210 Tompkins, J. M. S evaluation of Radcliffe, 94 translation, 1, 12, 35–6, 42–3, 61–3, 65 treason trials, 14, 60, 78, 83, 84, 110, 175 Treaty of Amiens, 149, see England, Anglo-French conflict Tytler, Alexander, 64 Vertue, George, 24, 25, 163, 203, 209 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 10, 21–3, 28–30, 118 Walpole, Horace, 10 The Castle of Otranto, 9, 18, 30 to de Beaumont, 18 to William Cole, 8 to Madame du Deffand, 8, 29 disagreement with Voltaire, 28–30 to William Mason, 9 to George Montagu, 8, 16, 23 to Hannah More, 8 The Mysterious Mother, 32 War of Spanish Succession, 118, 124 War of the First Coalition, 131 Warton, Thomas, 9, 37 Watson, Nicola, 59 Watt, James, 13, 42, 88 Whitehouse, Reverend John, 47 Wilberforce, William, 5, 154 Williams, Anne, 160 Williams, Helen Maria, 66, 89 Williams, Raymond, 95 Wilson, Kathleen, 3, 8–9, 34 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 66, 83, 96 Wordsworth, William, 66, 148

C A MB R I DGE STU DI ES I N ROMA N TICISM general editor JAMES CHANDLER, University of Chicago 1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters MARY A. FAVRET 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire NIGEL LEASK 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 PETER MURPHY 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution TOM FURNISS 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women JULIE A. CARLSON 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience ANDREW BENNET T 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre DAVID DUFF 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 AL AN RICHARDSON 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 EDWARD COPEL AND 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World TIMOTHY MORTON 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style LEONORA NAT TRASS 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 E. J. CLERY 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 ELIZ ABETH A. BOHLS

14. Napoleon and English Romanticism SIMON BAINBRIDGE 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom CELESTE L ANGAN 16. Wordsworth and the Geologists JOHN WYAT T 17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography ROBERT J. GRIFFIN 18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel MARKMAN ELLIS 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth CAROLINE GONDA 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 ANDREA K. HENDERSON 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England KEVIN GILMARTIN 22. Reinventing Allegory THERESA M. KELLEY 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 GARY DYER 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 ROBERT M. RYAN 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission MARGARET RUSSET T 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination JENNIFER FORD 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity SAREE MAKDISI 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake NICHOL AS M. WILLIAMS

29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author SONIA HOFKOSH 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition ANNE JANOW ITZ 31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle JEFFREY N. COX 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism GREGORY DART 33. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 JAMES WAT T 34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism DAVID ARAM KAISER 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity ANDREW BENNET T 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere PAUL KEEN 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 MARTIN PRIESTMAN 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies HELEN THOMAS 39. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility JOHN WHALE 40. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790–1820 MICHAEL GAMER 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species MAUREEN N. McL ANE 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic TIMOTHY MORTON 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 MIRANDA J. BURGESS 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s ANGEL A KEANE

45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism MARK PARKER 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 BETSY BOLTON 47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind AL AN RICHARDSON 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution M. O. GRENBY 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon CL ARA TUI TE 50. Byron and Romanticism JEROME MCGANN AND JAMES SODERHOLM 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland INA FERRIS 52. Byron, Poetics and History JANE STABLER 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 MARK CANUEL 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism ADRIANA CRACIUN 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose TIM MILNES 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination BARBARA TAYLOR 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic JULIE KIPP 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights DAVID PERKINS 59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History KEVIS GOODMAN 60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge TIMOTHY FULFORD, DEBBIE LEE, AND PETER J. KITSON

61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery DEIRDRE COLEMAN 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism ANDREW M. STAUFFER 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime CIAN DUFFY 64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 MARGARET RUSSET T 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent DANIEL E. WHITE 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry CHRISTOPHER R. MILLER 67. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song SIMON JARVI S 68. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public ANDREW FRANTA 69. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 KEVIN GILMARTIN 70. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London GILLIAN RUSSELL 71. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity BRIAN GOLDBERG 72. Wordsworth Writing ANDREW BENNET T 73. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry NOEL JACKSON 74. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period JOHN STRACHAN 75. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life ANDREA K. HENDERSON 76. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry MAUREEN N. McL ANE 77. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 ANGEL A ESTERHAMMER

78. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 PENNY FIELDING 79. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity DAVID SIMPSON 80. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 MIKE GOODE 81. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism ALEXANDER REGIER 82. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD 83. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge TIM MILNES 84. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange SARAH HAGGART Y 85. Real Money and Romanticism MAT THEW ROWLINSON 86. Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 JULIET SHIELDS 87. Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley REEVE PARKER 88. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness SUSAN MAT THEWS 89. Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic RICHARD ADELMAN 90. Shelley’s Visual Imagination NANCY MOORE GOSLEE 91. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 CL AIRE CONNOLLY 92. Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 PAUL KEEN 93. Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture ANN WEIRDA ROWL AND

94. Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures GREGORY DART 95. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure ROWAN BOYSON 96. John Clare and Community JOHN GOODRIDGE 97. The Romantic Crowd MARY FAIRCLOUGH 98. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy ORIANNE SMITH 99. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 ANGEL A WRIGHT 100. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences JON KL ANCHER